no longer by Providence
but by economic categories. These categories have themselves developed
and are developing, like all the rest--because men change as to the
capacity and the art of vanquishing, subduing, transforming and
utilizing natural conditions; because men change in spirit and attitude
through the reaction of their tools upon themselves; because men change
in their respective and co-associated relations; and therefore as
individuals depending in various degrees upon one another. We have, in
fine, to do with history, and not with its skeleton. We are dealing with
narration and not with abstraction, with the explaining and treating of
the whole, and not merely with resolving and analyzing it; we have to
do, in a word, now, as always, with an art.

It may be that the sociologist who follows the principles of economic
materialism proposes to keep himself simply to the analysis, for
example, of what the classes were at the moment when the French
Revolution broke out, and to pass then to the classes that result from
the Revolution and survive it. In that case the titles, the indications
and the classifications of the materials to analyze are definite; they
are, for example, the city and the country, the artisan and the laborer,
the nobles and the serfs, the land which is freed from feudal charges,
and the small proprietors who came into being, commerce which frees
itself from so many restrictions, money which accumulates, industry
which prospers, etc. There is nothing to object to in the choice of this
method, which, because it follows the track of embryonic origins, was
indispensable to the preparation of historical research according to the
direction of the new doctrine.[29]

But we know that the study of embryonic origins does not suffice to
make us understand animal life, which is not a scheme, but is composed
of living beings which struggle, and in their struggle employ forces,
instincts and passions. And it is the same, _mutatis mutandis_, with men
also, in so far as they live historically. These particular men, moved
by certain passions, urged by certain circumstances, with such and such
designs, such intentions, acting in such an attempt with such an
illusion of their own, or with such a deception, of another, who,
martyrs of themselves or of others, enter on harsh contests and
reciprocal suppressions of each other--there is the real history of the
French Revolution. If, however, it is true that all histo