cy of the _processus_
in historic facts, and the materialist doctrine, which is at bottom the
objective theory of social revolutions.

It is beyond doubt that to reascend through the centuries and
reconstruct in our thought the development of social ideas to the extent
that we find their documents in writers, is something always very
instructive, and serving especially to add to our critical knowledge of
our concepts as of our ways of thinking. Such a return of the mind over
its historic premises, when it does not lead us astray into the
empiricism of a boundless erudition, and does not lead us to set up
hastily vain analogies, serves without any doubt to give suppleness and
a persuasive force to the forms of our scientific activity. In the sum
of our science we find again, in fact and through the approximative
continuity of tradition, the excellence of all that has been found,
conceived and proved, not only in modern times but even in ancient
Greece, where first begins precisely and in a definite fashion for the
human race the orderly development of conscious, reflective and
methodical thought. It would be impossible to take a single step in
scientific research without employing means long ago found and tried,
such for example as logic and mathematics. To think otherwise would be
to assume that each generation must begin over again all the work done
since the childhood of humanity.

But it was not given either to the ancient authors in the limited circle
of their urban republics, nor to the writers of the Renaissance, always
drifting between an imaginary return to antiquity and the need of
grasping intellectually the new world in process of birth, to arrive at
the precise analysis of the last elements from which society results,
and which the incomparable genius of Aristotle did not see, and did not
understand beyond the limits within which passes the life of the typical
citizen.

The investigation of the social structure, considered in its manners of
origin and _processus_, became active and penetrating and took on
multiform aspects in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when
economics took shape and when under the different names of "Natural
Rights," "The Spirit of the Laws," or "The Social Contract," it was
attempted to resolve into causes, into factors and into logical and
psychological data, the multiform and often obscure spectacle of a life
in which was preparing the greatest revolution ever known. Thes