us as moments of a constant evolution, with minute variations; but
considered in themselves, they are definite and precise catastrophes,
and it is only as catastrophes that they are historic events.

X.

Ethics, art, religion, science, are they then but products of economic
conditions?--expositions of the categories of these very
conditions?--effluvia, ornaments, emanations and mirages of material
interests?

Affirmations of this sort, announced with this nudity and crudity, have
already for some time passed from mouth to mouth, and they are a
convenient assistance to the adversaries of materialism, who use them as
a bugbear. The slothful, whose number is great even among the
intellectuals, willingly fit themselves to this clumsy acceptance of
such declarations. What a delight for all careless persons to possess,
once for all, summed up in a few propositions, the whole of knowledge,
and to be able with one single key to penetrate all the secrets of life!
All the problems of ethics, aesthetics, philology, critical history and
philosophy reduced to one single problem and freed thus from all
difficulties!

In this way the simpletons might reduce the whole of history to
commercial arithmetic; and finally a new and authentic interpretation of
Dante might give us the Divine Comedy illustrated with the process of
manufacturing pieces of cloth which the wily Florentine merchants sold
for their greater profit!

The truth is that the declarations which involve problems are converted
very easily into vulgar paradoxes in the heads of those who are not
accustomed to triumph over the difficulties of thought by the methodical
use of appropriate means. I shall speak here, in general terms, of these
problems, but, as it were, by aphorisms; and certainly I do not propose
to write an encyclopedia in this short essay.

And first of all, ethics.

I do not mean systems and catechisms, religious or philosophic. Both of
these have been and are above the ordinary and profane course of human
events in most cases, as Utopias are above things. Neither do I speak of
those formal analyses of ethical relations, which have been elaborated
from the Sophists down to Herbart. This is science and not life. And it
is formal science, like logic, geometry and grammar. The one who latest
and with so much profundity defined these ethical relations (Herbart),
knew well that ideas, that is to say, the formal points of view of the
moral judgment, ar