o which returns every practical detail of
discipline, is men grouped in a determined social form by means of
determined connections. The different analytical disciplines, which
illustrate the facts that develop in history, have finally given rise to
the need of a common and general social science, which renders possible
the unification of the historic _processus_, and the materialistic
doctrine marks precisely the final term, the apex of this unification.

But that has not been, nor ever will be, lost time which is expended in
the preliminary and lateral analysis of complex facts. To the methodical
division of labor we owe precise learning, that is to say, the mass of
knowledge passed into the sieve, systematized, without which social
history would always be wandering in a purely abstract domain, in
questions of form and terminology. The separate study of the
historico-social factors has served, like any other empirical study
which does not transcend the apparent movement of things, to improve the
instrument of observation and to permit us to find again in the facts
themselves, which have been artificially abstracted, the keystones which
bind them into the social _complexus_. The different disciplines which
are considered as isolated and independent in the hypotheses of the
concurrent factors in the formation of history, both by reason of the
degree of development which they have reached, the materials which they
have gathered, and the methods which they have elaborated, have to-day
become quite indispensable for us, if one desires to reconstruct any
portion out of past times. Where would our historic science be without
the one-sidedness of philology, which is the fundamental instrument of
all research, and where should we have found the guiding thread of a
history of juridical institutions, which returns again from itself to so
many other facts and to so many other combinations, without the
obstinate faith of the Romanists in the universal excellence of the
Roman law, which engendered with generalized law and with the philosophy
of law so many problems which serve as points of departure for
sociology?

It is thus, after all, that the historic factors, of which so many
speak, and which are mentioned in so many works, indicate something
which is much less than the truth, but much more than simple error, in
the ordinary sense of a blunder, of an illusion. They are the necessary
product of a knowledge which is in the co