f economic interests are shown strikingly in the struggle
against Spain; very clearly again in England, where the religious
renovation realized, thanks to political violence, placed in full light
the passage to those conditions which are for our modern bourgeoisie the
forerunners of capitalism. _Post factum_, and after the tardy
realization of unforeseen consequences, the history of the real
movements which were the inner causes of the Reformation, in great part
unknown to the actors themselves, will appear in full light. But that
the fact came about precisely as it did come about, that it took on
certain determined forms, that it clothed itself in certain vestments,
that it painted itself in certain colors, that it put in movement
certain passions, that it displayed a special degree of fanaticism,--in
these consist its specific character, which no analytic ability can make
otherwise than as it was. Only the love of paradox inseparable from the
zeal of the passionate popularizers of a new doctrine can have brought
some to believe that to write history it was sufficient to put on record
merely the _economic moment_ (often still unknown and often unknowable),
and thereupon to cast to the earth all the rest as a useless burden with
which men had capriciously loaded themselves, as a superfluity, a mere
trifle, or even, as it were, something not existent.

From the fact that history must be taken in its entirety and that in it
the kernel and the husk are but one, as Goethe said of all things, three
consequences follow:--

First, it is evident that in the domain of historico-social determinism,
the linking of causes to effects, of conditions to the things
conditioned, of antecedents to consequents, is never evident at first
sight in the subjective determinism of individual psychology. In this
last domain it was a relatively easy thing for abstract and formal
philosophy to discover, passing above all the baubles of fatalism and
free will, the evidence of the motive in every volition, because, in
fine, there is no wish without its determining motive. But beneath the
motives and the wish there is the genesis of both, and to reconstruct
this genesis we must leave the closed field of consciousness to arrive
at the analysis of the simple necessities, which, on the one side, are
derived from social conditions, and on the other side are lost in the
obscure background of organic dispositions, in ancestry and in atavism.
It is not o