ugh the centuries of history properly
so-called, and as a consequence of the heredity of the pre-history of
savagery and of the conditions of subjection and those of inferiority in
which the majority of men were and are placed, resulted acquiescence in
what is traditional, and the ancient tendencies are perpetuated as
obstinate survivals.

In the third place, as I have said, men living socially, do not cease to
live also in nature. They are not, of course, bound to nature as animals
are, because they live on an artificial groundwork. Every one
understands, moreover, that a house is not a cave, that agriculture is
not natural pasturage, and that pharmacy is not exorcism. But nature is
always the immediate subsoil of the artificial groundwork, and it is the
environment which contains us. The industrial arts have put between us
social animals, and nature, certain intermediaries which modify, set
aside or remove the natural influences; but it has not for all that
destroyed the efficacy of these, and we continually feel their effects.
And even as we are born men or women, as we die almost always in spite
of ourselves, and as we are dominated by the instinct of generation, so
we also bear in our temperament certain special conditions which
education in the broad sense of the word, or social compact, can modify,
it is true, within certain limits, but which they can never suppress.
These conditions of temperament, repeated in infinite cases throughout
the centuries, constitute what is called the race. For all these
reasons, our dependence upon nature, although it has diminished since
prehistoric times, continues in our social life, just as the food which
the sight of nature affords to the curiosity and the imagination
continues also in our social life. Now these effects of nature, and the
sentiments immediate or mediate which result from it, although they have
been perceived, since history began, only on the visual angle which is
given us by the conditions of society, never fail to reflect themselves
in the products of art and of religion, and that adds to the
difficulties of a realistic and complete interpretation of both.

XI.

In employing this doctrine as a new principle of research, as a precise
means of defining our position, and as a visual angle, will it really be
possible finally to arrive at a new narrative history? It is not
possible to make an affirmative answer in general to this generic
demand. Because, in fa