developing from the
present society and from its very contrasts by the laws inherent in its
historic development, will end in an association without class
antagonisms; which will have for its consequence that regulated
production will eliminate from life the element of chance which, thus
far, has been revealed in history as a multiform cause of accidents and
incidents. But that is the future, and it is neither the present nor the
past. If we propose to ourselves, on the contrary, to penetrate into the
historic events which have developed up to our own times, by taking, as
we do, for a guiding thread the variations of the forms of the
underlying economic structure up to the simplest datum in the variations
of the tool of production, we must become fully conscious of the
difficulty of the problem which we are setting ourselves: because here
we have not merely to open our eyes and behold, but to make a supreme
effort of thought, with the aim of triumphing over the multiform
spectacle of immediate experience to reduce its elements into a genetic
series. That is why I said that, in particular investigations, we must
ourselves start from those groups of apparently isolated facts, and
from this heterogeneous mass, in a word, from that empirical study,
whence arose the belief in factors, which afterwards became a
semi-doctrine.

It is useless to attempt at counterbalancing these essential
difficulties by the metaphorical hypothesis, often equivocal, and after
all of a purely analogical value, of the so-called social organism. It
was necessary too that the mind should pass through even this
hypothesis, which so shortly became phraseology pure and simple. It
indeed prepares the way for the comprehension of the historic movement
as springing from the laws immanent in society itself, and thereby
excludes the arbitrary, the transcendental and the irrational. But the
metaphor has no further application; and the particular, critical and
circumstantial research into historic facts is the sole source of that
concrete and positive knowledge which is necessary to the complete
development of economic materialism.

VII.

Ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing comes to us in a dream. The
change in the ways of thinking, lately produced by the historic doctrine
which we are here examining and commenting upon, takes place at first
slowly and afterwards with an increasing rapidity, precisely in that
period of human development, in whi