is the explicit negation of every form of
rationalism, understanding by this word this concept, that things in
their existence and their development answer to a norm, an ideal, a
measure, an end, in an implicit or explicit fashion. The whole course of
human events is a sum, a succession of series of conditions which men
have made and laid down for themselves through the experience
accumulated in their changing social life, but it represents neither the
tendency to realize a predetermined end nor the deviation of a first
principle from perfection and felicity. Progress itself implies merely
that empirical and circumstantial notion of a thing which is at present
defined in our mind, because, thanks to the development thus far
realized, we are in a position to estimate the past and to foresee, at
least in a certain sense and in a certain measure, the future.

V.

In this fashion a serious ambiguity is dissolved and the errors carried
with it are removed. Reasonable and well founded is the tendency of
those who aim to subordinate the sum total of human events in their
course to the rigorous conception of determinism. There is, on the
contrary, no reason for confusing this derived, reflex and complex
determinism with the determinism of the immediate struggle for existence
which is produced and developed on a field not modified by the continued
action of labor. Legitimate and well founded, in an absolute fashion, is
the historical explanation which proceeds in its course from the
volitions which have voluntarily regulated the different phases of life,
to the motives and objective causes of every choice, discovered in the
conditions of environment, territory, accessible means of existence and
conditions of experience. But there is, on the contrary, no foundation
for that opinion which tends to the negation of every volition by
consequence of a theoretical view which would substitute automatism for
voluntarism. There is nothing in it, as a matter of fact, but a pure and
simple conceit.

Wherever the means of production have developed, to a certain point,
wherever the artificial foundation has acquired a certain consistency,
and wherever the social differentiations and their resulting antitheses
have created the need, the possibility and the conditions of an
organization more or less stable or unstable, there, always and
necessarily, appear premeditated designs, political views, plans of
conduct, systems of law and finally