theologians to carry back the course
of human events to a preconceived plan or design, because they passed
directly from the facts of experience to an assumed mind which ruled the
universe. The jurists, who first had occasion to discover in the
institutions which formed the object of their studies a certain guiding
thread through the forms which manifestly succeeded each other, carried
over, as they still carry over as cheerfully, the reasoning faculty
which is their own quality, to serve as an explanation for the whole
vast social fabric, however complicated. The men of politics, who
naturally take their point of departure in this datum of experience,
that the officers of the state, whether by the acquiescence of the
subject masses or profiting by the antitheses of interests of the
different social groups, may set aims for themselves and realize them
voluntarily and in a deliberate fashion,--these men are brought to see
in the succession of human events only a variation of these designs,
these projects and these intentions. Now our conception, while
revolutionizing in their foundations the hypotheses of the theologians,
the jurists and the politicians, terminates in this affirmation, that
human labor and activity in general are not always one and the same
thing in the course of history with the will which acts with design,
with preconceived plans and with its free choice of means; that is to
say, that they are not one and the same thing with the reasoning
faculty. All that has happened in history is the work of man, but it
was not, and is not, with rare exceptions, the result of a critical
choice or of a reasoning desire. Moreover, it was and is through
necessity that, determined by external needs and occasions, this
activity engenders an experience and a development of internal and
external organs. Among these organs we must include intelligence and
reason which also are the result and consequence of repeated and
accumulated experience. The integral formation of man in his historical
development is henceforth no longer a hypothetical datum nor a simple
conjecture. It is an intuitive and palpable truth. The conditions of the
_processus_ which engenders a step of progress are henceforth reducible
into a series of explanations; and up to a certain point we have under
our eyes the schedule of all historical developments, morphologically
conceived. This doctrine is the clear and definite negation of all
ideology, because it