therwise with historical determinism, where, in the same way,
we begin with motives religious, political, aesthetic, passionate, etc.,
but where we must subsequently discover the causes of these motives in
the material conditions underlying them. Now the study of these
conditions should be so specified that we may perceive indubitably not
only what are the causes, but again by what mediations they arrive at
that form which reveals them to the consciousness as motives whose
origin is often obliterated.

And thence follows indubitably this second consequence that in our
doctrine we have not to re-translate into economic categories all the
complex manifestations of history, but only to explain in the _last
analysis_ (Engels) all the historic facts _by means of the underlying
economic structure_ (Marx), which necessitates analysis and reduction
and then interlinking and construction.

It results from this, in the third place, that, passing from the
underlying economic structure to the picturesque whole of a given
history, we need the aid of that complexus of notions and knowledge
which may be called, for lack of a better term, social psychology. I do
not mean by that to allude to the fantastic existence of a social psyche
nor to the concept of an assumed collective spirit which by its own
laws, independent of the consciousness of individuals and of their
material and definable relations, realizes itself and shows itself in
social life. That is pure mysticism. Neither do I wish to allude to
those attempts at generalization which fill up treatises on social
psychology and the general idea of which is to transport and apply to a
subject which is called social consciousness the known categories and
forms of individual psychology. Nor again do I wish to allude to that
mass of semi-organic and semi-psychological denominations by the aid of
which some attribute to the social being, as Schaeffle does, a brain, a
spinal column, sensibility, sentiment, conscience, will, etc. But I
wish to speak of more modest and more prosaic things, that is to say, of
those concrete and precise states of mind which make us know as they
really were the plebeians of Rome at a certain epoch, the artisans of
Florence at the moment when the movement of the Ciompi burst forth, or
those peasants of France within whom was engendered, to follow Taine's
expression, the "spontaneous anarchy" of 1789, those peasants who
finally became free laborers and small p