that in this present time all writing of history tends to become a
science, or, better, a social discipline; and when that movement, now
uncertain and multiform, shall be accomplished, the efforts of the
scholars and inquirers will lead inevitably to the acceptance of
economic materialism. By this incidence of efforts and of scientific
labors, which start from points so opposite, the materialistic
conception of all history will end by penetrating men's minds as a
definite conquest of thought; and this will finally take away from
partisans and adversaries the attempt to speak _pro_ and _con_ as for
partisan theses.

Apart from the direct helps just enumerated, our doctrine has many
indirect helps, so that it can profitably employ the results of many
disciplines, in which by reason of the greater simplicity of the
relations, it has been possible more easily to make the application of
the genetic method. The typical case is furnished by glottology, and in
a more special fashion by the study which has for its object the ancient
languages.

The application of historical materialism is certainly, hitherto, very
far from that evidence and that clearness of _processus_ of analysis and
of reconstruction. It would be consequently a vain attempt to try, at
this moment, to write a summary of universal history, which should
propose to develop all the varied forms of production in order to deduce
from them afterwards all the rest of human activity, in a particular and
circumstantial fashion. In the present state of knowledge, he who should
try to give this _compendium_ of a new _Kulturgeschichte_ would do
nothing but translate into economic phraseology the points of general
orientation which, in other books, for example, in Hellwald, give it in
Darwinian phraseology.

It is a long step from the acceptance of the principle to its complete
and particular application to the whole of a vast province of facts, or
to a great succession of phenomena.

So the application of our doctrine must be kept for a moment to the
exposition and the study of definite parts of history. The modern forms
are clear to all. The economic developments of the bourgeoisie, the
manifest knowledge of the different obstacles which it has had to
overcome in the different countries, and, consequently, the development
of the different revolutions, taking this word in its broadest sense,
contribute to make our understanding of it easy. To our eyes the
pre-history