s
a struggle of intentions and passions, which unfolds and comes to an end
by the aid of means which are permitted by the political form of the
state and by the use or abuse or the public powers. Here is the
situation: the city ruling in different manners over other cities or
over territories which have lost all character of autonomy; within this
city a very decided differentiation between rich and poor; and facing
the comparatively small group of the oppressors and the all-powerful,
stands the immense mass of the proletarians, who are on the point of
losing or who have already lost the consciousness and the political
strength of a body of citizens, the mass which therefore suffers itself
to be deceived and corrupted, and which will soon decay till it is but a
servile accessory to its aristocratic exploiters. There is the material
of the narrator, and he cannot take account of the fact otherwise than
in the immediate conditions of the fact itself. The complete whole is
directly seen and forms the stage on which the events unfold, but if the
narration is to have solidity, vividness and perspective there must be
points of departure and ways of interpretation.

In this consists the first origin of those abstractions, which little by
little take away from the different parts of a given social _complexus_
their quality of simple sides or aspects of a whole, and it is their
ensuing generalization which little by little leads to the doctrine of
factors.

These factors, to express it in another way, arise in the mind as a
sequence of the abstraction and generalization of the immediate aspects
of the apparent movement, and they have an equal value with that of all
other empirical concepts. Whatever be the domain of knowledge in which
they arise, they persist until they are reduced and eliminated by a new
experience, or until they are absorbed by a conception more general,
genetic, evolutionary or dialectic. Was it not necessary that in the
empirical analysis and in the immediate study of the causes and the
effects of certain definite phenomena, for example the phenomena of
heat, the mind should first stop at this presumption and this
persuasion, that it could and should attribute them to a subject, which
if it was never for any physicist a true and substantial entity, was
certainly considered as a definite and specific force, namely, heat. Now
we see that at a given moment, as a result of new experiences, this heat
is resolv