nd where they have halted in a form which they have
not been capable of outgrowing, but never have they returned to the
animal life by the complete loss of their artificial foundation.

Historical science has, then, as its first and principal object the
determination and the investigation of this artificial foundation, its
origin, its composition, its changes and its transformations. To say
that all this is only a part and a prolongation of nature, is to say a
thing which by its too abstract and too generic character has no longer
any meaning.

The human race, in fact, lives only in earthly conditions, and we cannot
suppose it to be transplanted elsewhere. Under these conditions it has
found from its very first beginnings down to the present day the
immediate means necessary for the development of labor, that is to say,
for its material progress as for its inner formation. These natural
conditions were and they are always indispensable to the sporadic
agriculture of the nomads, who sometimes cultivated the earth merely for
the pasturage of animals, as well as for the refined products of
intensive modern horticulture. These earthly conditions, precisely as
they have furnished the different sorts of stones suited for the
fabrication of the first weapons, furnish now also, with coal, the
elements of the great industry; precisely as they gave the first
laborers osiers and willows to plait, they give now all the materials
necessary to the complicated technique of electricity.

It is not, however, the natural materials themselves which have
progressed. On the contrary, it is only men who progress, through
discovering little by little in nature the conditions which permit them
to produce in more and more complex forms, thanks to the labor
accumulated in experience. This progress does not consist merely in the
sort of progress with which subjective psychology is concerned that is
to say, the inner modifications which would be the proper and direct
development of the intellect, the reasoning and the thought. Moreover,
this inner progress is but a secondary and derived product, in
proportion as there is already a progress realized in the artificial
foundation which is the sum of the social relations resulting from the
forms and the distributions of labor. It is, then, a meaningless
affirmation to say that all this is but a simple prolongation of nature,
unless one wishes to employ this word in so generic a sense that it no
l