e action, to the causes and the
motives of the will and the action, in order to find thereupon the
co-ordination of these causes and of these motives in the pre-elementary
_processus_ of the production of the immediate means of existence.

Now this term "naturalizing" has led more than one mind into confusing
this order of problems with another order of problems, that is to say,
into extending to history the laws and the manners of thinking which
have already appeared suitable to the study and explanation of the
material world in general and of the animal world in particular. And
because Darwinism succeeded in carrying, thanks to the principle of the
transformation of species, the last citadel of the metaphysical fixity
of things, and in discerning, in the organisms, phases, as it were, and
moments of a real and proper natural history, it has been imagined that
it was a commonplace and simple enterprise to borrow for an explanation
of the future and the history of human life the concepts, the principles
and the methods of examination to which that animal life is subjected
which in consequence of the immediate conditions of the struggle for
existence is unfolding to topographical environments not modified by the
action of labor. Darwinism, political and social, has, like an epidemic,
for many years invaded the mind of more than one thinker, and many more
of the advocates and declaimers of sociology, and it has been reflected
as a fashionable habit and a phraseological current even in the daily
language of the politicians.

It seems at first sight that there is something immediately evident and
instinctively plausible in this fashion of reasoning, which it may be
said is principally distinguished by its abuse of analogy and by its
haste in drawing conclusions. Man is without doubt an animal, and he is
linked by connections of descent and affinity to other animals. He has
no privileges of origin or of elementary structure, and his organism is
merely one particular case of general physiology. His first immediate
field was that of simple nature not modified by work, and from thence
are derived the imperious and inevitable conditions of the struggle for
existence, with the consequent forms of adaptation. Thence are born
races in the true and authentic sense of the word; that is to say, in so
far as they are immediate determinations of black, white, yellow,
woolly-haired, straight-haired, etc., and not secondary historico-soci