as with him,
can be nothing else than the simple brutality of success.

The French Revolution hastened the course of history in a large part of
Europe. To it attaches, on the Continent, all that we call liberalism
and modern democracy, except in the case of the false imitation of
England, and up to the establishment of Italian unity, which was and
will remain perhaps the last act of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. This
revolution was the most vivid and most instructive example of the
fashion in which a society transforms itself and how new economic
conditions develop, and in developing co-ordinate the members of society
into groups and classes. It was the palpable proof of the fashion in
which law is found, when it is necessary for the expression and the
defense of definite relations, and how the state is created, and how
disposal is made of its means, its forces and its organs. Here is seen
how ideas arise from the fields of social institutions, and how
characters, tendencies, sentiments, volitions, that is to say, in a
word, moral forces, are produced and develop into conditions governed by
circumstances. In a word, the data of social science were, so to speak,
prepared by society itself, and it is no wonder if the revolution,
which was preceded ideologically by the most acute form of rationalistic
doctrinairism ever known, ended finally by leaving behind it the
intellectual need of an anti-doctrinaire historical and sociological
science, like that which our own century has attempted to construct.

And here, both by what we have seen and by what is known generally, it
is useless to recall anew, how Owen forms one of the same group with
Saint Simon and Fourier, and to repeat through what ways scientific
socialism took its birth. The important thing is in these two points;
that historical materialism could not arise but from the theoretical
consciousness of socialism; and that it can henceforth explain its own
origin with its own principles, which is the greatest proof of its
maturity.

Thus I have justified the phrase at the beginning of this chapter: ideas
do not descend from heaven.

VIII.

The road traversed thus far has enabled us to take exact account of the
precise and relative value of the so-called doctrine of factors; we know
also how its adherents come to eliminate objectively those provisional
concepts, which were and are a simple expression of a thought not fully
arrived at maturity.

And, nevert