mong the disillusioned, which, notwithstanding, gave
rise to the desire and the need of new investigations. We know that
Saint Simon and Fourier, in whom operated precisely at the beginning of
the century, in the exclusive forms of the ideas of premature genius,
the reaction against the immediate results of the politico-economic
revolution, arose resolutely, the first against the jurists, and the
second against the economists.

In fact, when once the obstacles to liberty, which had been
characteristic of other times, had been suppressed, new obstacles,
graver and more painful, had replaced them, and, as equal happiness for
all was not realized, society remained in its political form as it had
been before, an organization of inequalities. It must be, then, that
society is something autonomous, innate, a complex automaton of
relations and conditions, which defies the subjective good intentions of
each of the members who compose it, and which escapes from the illusions
and the designs of the idealists. It thus follows a course of its own
from which we may infer certain laws of process and development, but
does not suffer us to impose laws upon it. By this transformation in the
minds of men, the nineteenth century heralded itself as the century of
historic science and of sociology.

The principle of development has, indeed, since then, invaded all
domains of thought. In this century, the grammar of history has been
discovered, and thus the key has been found to explore the genesis of
myths. The embryonic traces of pre-history have been sought out, and,
for the first time, the processes of political and legal forms have been
arranged into a series. The nineteenth century heralded itself as the
century of sociology in the person of Saint Simon, in whom, as happens
with the self-taught precursors of genius, we find confused together the
germs of so many contradictory tendencies. In this aspect the
materialistic conception is a result; but it is a result which is the
complement of the whole process of formation; and as a result and a
complement it is also the simplification of all historic science and of
all sociology, because it takes us back from things derived and from
complex conditions to elemental functions. And that is brought about by
the direct suggestion of new dynamic experience.

The laws of economics, such as they are of themselves and their own
inherent force, have triumphed over all illusions and have shown
th