our doctrine; but to
try to eliminate them, as certain affected objectivists of sociology
would willingly do, is pure capriciousness.

And to conclude, the partisan of historical materialism who sets himself
the task of explaining, or relating, cannot do it through schemes.

History has always received a definite form, with an infinite number of
accidents and variations. It has a certain grouping, it has a certain
perspective.

It is not enough to have eliminated preventively the hypothesis of
factors, because the narrator constantly finds himself in the presence
of things which seem incongruous, independent, and self-directing. To
present the whole as a whole, and to discover in it the continuous
relations of the events which border on each other, there is the
difficulty.

The sum of events narrowly consecutive and precise gives the whole of
history; and this is equivalent to saying that it is all that we know of
our being, in so far as we are social beings and not simply natural
beings.

XII.

In the successive whole, and in the continuous necessity of all
historical events, is there, then, some ask, any meaning, any
significance? This question, whether it comes from the camp of the
idealists, or whether it comes to us from the mouth of the most
circumspect critics, certainly, and in all cases, demands our attention,
and requires an adequate answer.

In fact, if we stop at the premises, intuitive or intellectual, from
which is derived the conception of _progress_ as an idea which incloses
and embraces the total of the human _processus_, it is seen that these
presumptions all rest upon the mental need, which is in us, of
attributing to one or more series of events a certain sense and a
certain signification. The conception of progress, for whoever examines
it carefully in its specific nature, always implies judgments of
estimation, and therefore, there is no one who can confuse it with the
crude and bare notion of simple development, which does not contain that
increment of clue which makes us say of a thing that it is progressing.

I have already said, and, it seems to me, at sufficient length, how it
is that progress does not exist as something imperative or regulative
over the natural and immediate succession of the generations of men.
That is as intuitive as is the actual coexistence of peoples, of nations
and of states, which find themselves, at the same time, in a different
stage of development;