s production the
mediation from the conditions to the products is very complicated, and
again that men, while living in society, do not thereby cease to live
alone by themselves in nature, and to receive from it occasion and
material for curiosity and for imagination.

After all, this is all reduced to a more general formula; man does not
make several histories at the same time, but all these alleged different
histories (art, religion, etc.) make up one alone. And it is not
possible to take account of that clearly except at the characteristic
and significant moment of the production of new things, that is to say
in the periods which I will call revolutionary. Later, the acceptance of
the things that have been produced, and the traditional repetition of a
definite type, obliterated the sense of the origins of things.

Try, if you will, to detach the ideology of the _fables_ which are at
the foundation of the Homeric poems, from that moment of historic
evolution where we find the dawn of Aryan civilization in the basin of
the Mediterranean, that is to say, from that phase of the higher
barbarism in which arises, in Greece and elsewhere, the epic. Or try to
imagine the birth and the development of Christianity elsewhere than in
Roman cosmopolitanism, and otherwise than by the work of those
proletarians, those slaves, those unfortunates, those desperate ones,
who had need of the redemption of the Apocalypse and of the promise of
the Kingdom of God. Find, if you will, the ground for supposing that in
the beautiful environment of the Renaissance the romanticism should
begin to appear, which scarcely appeared in the decadent Torquato Tasso;
or that one might attribute to Richardson or to Diderot the novels of
Balzac, in whom appears, as a contemporary of the first generation of
socialism and sociology, the _psychology of classes_. Far back, farther,
farther, at the first origins of the mythical conceptions, it is evident
that Zeus did not assume the characters of father of gods and men until
the power of the _patria potestas_ was already established, and that
series of _processus_ began which culminated in the State. Zeus thus
ceases to be what was at first the simple _divus_ (brilliant) or the
Thunderer. And it is to be observed that at an opposite point of
historic evolution, a great number of thinkers of the past century
reduced to a single abstract God, who is a simple regent of the world,
all that variegated image of the