value for all past history,
by discovering in every form of social organization, antithetical in its
origin and organization, as they have all been up to this time, the
innate incapacity for producing the conditions of a universal and
uniform human progress, that is to say, by discovering the fetters which
turn each benefit into an injury.

VI.

There is one question which we cannot evade: What has given birth to the
belief in _historic factors_?

That is an expression familiar to many and often found in the writings
of many scholars, scientists and philosophers, and of those commentators
who, by their reasonings or by their combinations, add a little to
simple historic narration and utilize this opinion as an hypothesis to
find a starting point in the immense mass of human facts, which, at
first sight and after first examination, appear so confused and
irreducible. This belief, this current opinion, has become for reasoning
historians, or even for rationalists, a semi-doctrine, which has
recently been urged several times, as a decisive argument, against the
unitary theory of the materialistic conception. And indeed, this belief
is so deeply rooted and this opinion so widespread, of history being
only intelligible as the juncture and the meeting of various factors,
that, in consequence, many of those who speak of social materialism,
whether they be its partisans or adversaries, believe that they save
themselves from embarrassment by affirming that this whole doctrine
consists in the fact that it attributes the preponderance or the
decisive action to the _economic factor_.

It is very important to take account of the fashion in which this
belief, this opinion, or this semi-doctrine takes its rise, because
real and fruitful criticism consists principally in knowing and
understanding the motive of what we declare an error. It does not
suffice to reject an opinion by characterizing it as false doctrine.
Error always arises from some ill-understood side of an incomplete
experience, or from some subjective imperfection. It does not suffice to
reject the error; we must overcome it, explain it and outgrow it.

Every historian, at the beginning of his work, performs, so to speak, an
act of elimination. First, he makes erasures, as it were, in a
continuous series of events; then he dispenses with numerous and varied
suppositions and precedents; more than this, he tears up and decomposes
a complicated tissue. Thus, to begi