n with, he must fix a point, a line,
a boundary, as he chooses; he must say, for example: I wish to relate
the beginning of the war between the Greeks and the Persians, or to
inquire how Louis XVI. was brought to convene the States General. The
narrator finds himself, in a word, confronted with a _complexus_ of
accomplished facts and of facts on the point of being produced, which in
their totality present a certain aspect. Upon the attitude which he
takes depends the form and the style of every narration, because to
compose it he must take his point of departure from things already
accomplished, in order to see henceforth how they have continued to
develop.

Yet into this _complexus_ he must introduce a certain degree of
analysis, resolving it into groups and into aspects of facts, or into
concurrent elements, which afterwards appear at a certain moment as
independent categories. It is the state in a certain form and with
certain powers; it is the laws, which determine, by what they command or
what they prohibit, certain relations; it is the manners and customs
which reveal to us tendencies, needs, ways of thinking, of believing, of
imagining; altogether it is a multitude of men living and working
together, with a certain distribution of tasks and occupations; he
observes then the thoughts, the ideas, the inclinations, the passions,
the desires, the aspirations which arise and develop from this varied
mode of coexistence and from its frictions. Let a change be produced,
and it will show itself in one of the sides or one of the aspects of the
empirical _complexus_, or in all of these within a longer or a shorter
time; for example, the state extends its boundaries, or changes its
internal limits as regards society by increasing or diminishing its
powers and its attributes, or by changing the mode of action of one or
the other; or, again, the law modifies its dispositions, or it expresses
and affirms itself through new organs; or, again, finally, behind the
change of exterior and daily habits, we discover a change in the
sentiments, the thoughts and the inclinations of the men variously
distributed in the different social classes, who mingle, change, replace
each other, disappear or reappear. All this may be sufficiently
understood, in its exterior forms and outlines, through the usual
endowments of normal intelligence which is not yet aided, corrected or
completed by science strictly so-called. Assembling within precise