unknown and transcendental type,
developed in so great a wealth of mythological, Christian or pagan
creations. Man felt himself more at home in nature, thanks to
experience, but felt himself better able to penetrate the gearing of
society, the knowledge of which he possessed in part. The miraculous
dissolved in his mind, to the point where materialism and criticism
could afterwards eliminate that poor remnant of transcendentalism,
without taking up war against the gods.

There is certainly a history of ideas; but this does not consist in the
vicious circle of ideas that explain themselves. It lies in rising from
things to the idea. There is a problem; still more, there is a multitude
of problems, so varied, multiple, multiform and mingled are the
projections which men have made of themselves and of their
economic-social conditions, and thus of their hopes and their fears, of
their desires and their deceptions, in their artistic and religious
concepts. The method is found, but the particular execution is not easy.
We must above all guard against the scholastic temptation of arriving by
deduction at the products of historic activity which are displayed in
art and in religion. We must hope that philosophers like Krug, who
explained the pen with which he wrote by a process of dialectic
deduction, have remained forever buried in the notes of Hegel's logic.

Here I must state certain difficulties.

Before attempting to reduce secondary products (for example, art and
religion) to the social conditions which they idealize, one must first
acquire a long experience of specified social psychology, in which the
transformation is realized. Therein consists the justification of that
sum of relations, which is designated in another form of language, under
the name of Egyptian _world_, Greek _consciousness_, _spirit_ of the
Renaissance, _dominant ideas_, _psychology of nations_, of society or of
classes. When these relations are established, and men have become
accustomed to certain conceptions and certain modes of belief or of
imagination, the ideas transmitted by tradition tend to become
crystallized. Thus they appear as a force which resists new formations;
and as this resistance shows itself through the spoken word, through
writing, through intolerance, through polemics, through persecution, so
the struggle between the new and the old social conditions takes on the
form of a struggle between ideas.

In the second place, thro