ry is but the
unfolding of definite economic conditions, it is equally true that it
develops only in definite forms of human activity,--whether the latter
be passionate or reflective, fortunate or unsuccessful, blindly
instinctive or deliberately heroic.

To understand the interlacings and the _complexus_ in its inner
connection and its outer manifestations; to descend from the surface to
the foundation, and then to return from the foundation to the surface;
to analyze the passions and the intentions, in their motives, from the
closest to the most remote, and then to bring back the data of the
passions and of the intentions and of their causes to the most remote
elements of a definite economic situation; there is the difficult art
which the materialistic conception must realize.

And as we must not imitate that teacher who on the bank taught his
pupils to swim by the definition of swimming, I beg the reader to await
the examples which I shall give in other essays in a real historical
narration, working over into a book which for some time I have already
been doing in my teaching.

In this way certain secondary and derivative questions are once for all
cleared up.

What, for example, is the meaning of the lives of the great men?

In these later times, answers have been given, which, in one sense or
another, have an extreme character. On the one side, there are the
extreme sociologists, on the other side the individualists who, after
the fashion of Carlyle, put the heroes into the first rank of their
history. According to some it is sufficient to show what were the
reasons, for example, of Caesarism, and Caesar matters little. According
to others, there are no objective reasons of classes and social
interests which suffice to explain anything; it is the great minds which
give the impulse to the whole historic movement; and history has, so to
speak, its lords and its monarchs. The empiricists of narration extract
themselves from embarrassment in a very simple fashion, putting together
at hazard men and things, objective necessities of fact and subjective
influences.

Historical materialism goes beyond the antithetical views of the
sociologists and the individualists, and at the same time it eliminates
the eclecticism of the empirical narrators.

First of all the _factum_.

Let this particular Caesar, as Napoleon was, be born in such a year, let
him follow such a career, and find himself ready for the Eighteenth