roprietors, or, aspiring to
property, transformed themselves rapidly from victors over the foreigner
into automatic instruments of reaction. This social psychology, which no
one can reduce to abstract canons because, in most cases, it is merely
descriptive, this is what the chroniclers, the orators, the artists, the
romancers and the ideologists of every sort have seen and up to now have
conceived as the exclusive object of their studies. In this, psychology,
which is the specific consciousness of men in given social conditions,
the agitators, orators and propagandists trust to-day, and to it they
appeal. We know that it is the fruit, the outcome, the effect of certain
social conditions actually determined;--this class, in this situation,
determined by the functions which it fulfills, by the subjection in
which it is held, by the dominion which it exercises;--and finally,
these classes, these functions, this subjection and this dominion
involve such and such a determined form of production and distribution
of the immediate means of life, that is to say, a determined economic
structure. This social psychology, by its nature always circumstantial,
is not the expression of the abstract and generic process of the
self-styled human intellect. It is always a specified formation from
specified conditions. We hold this principle to be indisputable, that it
is not the forms of consciousness which determine the human being, but
it is the manner of being which determines the consciousness (Marx).

But these forms of consciousness, even as they are determined by the
conditions of life, constitute in themselves also a part of history.
This does not consist only in the economic anatomy, but in all that
combination which clothes and covers that anatomy even up to the
multicolored reflections of the imagination. In other words, there is no
fact in history which does not recall by its origin the conditions of
the underlying economic structure, but there is no fact in history which
is not preceded, accompanied and followed by determined forms of
consciousness, whether it be superstitious or experimental, ingenuous or
reflective, impulsive or self-controlled, fantastic or reasoning.

IV.

I was saying a moment ago that our doctrine makes history objective and
in a certain sense naturalizes it, going from the explanation of the
data, evident at first sight, of the personalities acting with design,
and of the auxiliary conceptions of th