curve. Historic time has not marched
uniformly for all men. The simple succession of generations has never
been the index of the constancy and intensity of the _processus_. Time
as an abstract measure of chronology and the generations which succeed
one another in approximate periods give no criterion and furnish no
indication of law or of process. The developments thus far have been
varied because the things accomplished in one and the same unit of time
were varied. Between these varied forms of development there is an
affinity or rather a similarity of movements, that is, an analogy of
type, or again an identity of form; thus the advance forms may by simple
contact or by violence accelerate the development of backward forms. But
the important thing is to comprehend that progress, our notion of which
is not merely empirical, but always circumstanced and thus limited, is
not suspended over the course of human events like a destiny or a fate,
nor like a commandment. And for this reason our doctrine cannot serve to
represent the whole history of the human race in a unified perspective
which repeats, _mutatis mutandis_, the historic philosophy from thesis
to conclusion, from St. Augustine to Hegel, or, better, from the prophet
Daniel to M. De Rougemont.

Our doctrine does not pretend to be the intellectual vision of a great
plan or of a design, but it is merely a method of research and of
conception. It is not by accident that Marx spoke of his discovery as a
guiding thread, and it is precisely for this reason that it is analogous
to Darwinism, which also is a method, and is not and cannot be a modern
repetition of the constructed or constructive natural philosophy as
used by Shelling and his school.

The first to discover in the notion of progress an indication of
something circumstantial and relative was the genial Saint Simon, who
opposed his way of seeing to the doctrine of the eighteenth century
represented by the party of Condorcet. To that doctrine, which may be
called unitary, equalitarian, formal, because it regards the human race
as developing upon one line of process, Saint Simon opposes the
conception of the faculties and of the aptitudes which substitute
themselves and compensate for each other, and thus he remains an
ideologist.

To penetrate the true reasons for the relativity of progress another
thing was necessary. It was necessary, first of all, to renounce those
prejudices which are involved in the b