e objects of
_moral statistics_: the discipline which has thus far remained
incomplete, because it has taken for the objects of its combinations
groups which it creates of itself by the addition of numbers of cases
(for example, adulteries, thefts, homicides) and not the groups which,
as classes, conditions, or situations exist really, that is to say,
socially.

To recommend morality to men while assuming or ignoring their
conditions, this was hitherto the object and the class of argument of
all the catechists. To recognize that these are given by the social
environment, that is what the communists oppose to the utopia and the
hypocrisy of the preachers of morality. And as they see in morality not
a privilege of the elect, nor a gift of nature, but a result of
experience and education, they admit human perfectibility through
reasons and arguments which are, in my opinion, more moral and more
ideal than those which have been given by the ideologists.

In other words, man develops, or produces himself, not as an entity
generically provided with certain attributes, which repeat themselves,
or develop themselves, according to a rational rhythm, but he produces
and develops himself as at once cause and effect, as author and
consequence, of certain definite conditions, in which are engendered
also definite currents of ideas, of opinions, of beliefs, of
imaginations, of expectations, of maxims. Thence arise ideologies of
every sort, as also the generalization of morality in catechisms, in
canons and in systems. We must not be surprised if these ideologies,
once arisen, are afterwards cultivated alone by themselves, if they
finally appear, as it were, detached from the living field whence they
took their birth, nor if they hold themselves above man as imperative
rules and models.

The priests and the doctrinaires of every sort have given themselves
for centuries to this labor of abstraction, and have forced themselves
to maintain the resulting illusions. Now that the positive sources of
all ideologies have been found in the mechanism of life itself, we must
explain realistically their mode of generation. And as that is true of
all ideologies, it is true also and, in particular of those which
consist in projecting ethical estimates beyond their natural and direct
limits, making of them anticipations of divine announcements or
presuppositions of universal suggestions of conscience.

Therein lies the object of the special h