onger indicates anything precise and distinct; that which is not
realized by the work of man.

History is the work of man in so far as man can create and improve his
instruments of labor, and with these instruments can create an
artificial environment whose complicated effects react later upon
himself, and which by its present state and its successive modifications
is the occasion and the condition of his development. There are, then,
no reasons for carrying back that work of man which is history to the
simple struggle for existence. If this struggle modifies and improves
the organs of animals, and if in given circumstances and methods it
produces and develops new organs, it still does not produce that
continuous, perfected and traditional movement which is the human
_processus_. Our doctrine must not be confounded with Darwinism, and it
need not invoke anew the conception of a mythical, mystical or
metaphorical form of fatalism. If it is true in effect that history
rests, before all else, upon the development of technique, that is to
say, if it is true that the successive discovery of tools gives rise to
the successive distributions of labor, and therewith to the inequalities
whose sum total, more or less stable, forms the social organism, it is
equally true that the discovery of these instruments is at once the
cause and the effect of these conditions and of those forms of the inner
life to which, isolating them by psychological abstraction, we give the
name of imagination, intellect, reason, thought, etc. By producing
successively the different social environment, that is to say, the
successive artificial foundations, man has produced himself, and in this
consists the serious kernel, the concrete reason, the positive
foundation of that which by various fantastic combinations and by a
varied logical architecture has suggested to the ideologists the notion
of the progress of the human mind.

Nevertheless, this expression of _naturalizing_ history, which,
understood in too broad and too generic a sense, may be the occasion of
the equivocations of which we have spoken, when it is, on the contrary,
employed with proper precaution and in a tentative fashion, sums up
briefly the criticism of all the ideological views which, in the
interpretation of history, start from this hypothesis, that human work
or activity are one and the same with free will, free choice and
voluntary designs.

It was easy and convenient for the