so undeniable is the actual condition of relative
superiority and inferiority of nation as compared with nation; and again
so certain is the partial and relative retrogression which has been
produced several times in history, as Italy has exemplified for
centuries. Still more, if there is a convincing proof of how progress
must be understood in the sense of immediate law, and, to use a strong
expression, of a physical and inevitable law, it is precisely this
fact,--that social development by the very reasons of the _processus_
which are inherent in it, often leads to retrogression. It is evident,
on the other hand, that the faculty of progressing, like the possibility
of retrogressing, does not constitute, to begin with, an immediate
privilege, or an innate defect of a race, nor is either one the direct
consequence of geographical conditions. And, in fact, the primitive
centers of civilization were multiple, those centers have been removed
in the course of centuries, and finally the means, the discoveries, the
results and the impulses of a definite civilization, already developed,
are, within certain limits, communicable to all men indefinitely. In a
word, progress and retrogression are inherent in the conditions and the
rhythm of social development.

Now then, the faith in the universality of progress, which appeared with
so much violence in the eighteenth century, rests upon this first
positive fact, that men, when they do not find obstacles in external
conditions, or do not find them in those which result from their own
work in their social environment, are all capable of progress.

Moreover, at the bottom of this supposed or imagined unity of history,
in consequence of which the _processus_ of the different societies would
form one single series of progress, there is another fact, which has
offered motive and occasion for so many fantastic ideologies. If all
nations have not progressed equally, still more, if some have stopped
and have followed a backward route, if the _processus_ of social
development has not always, in every place and in all times, the same
rhythm and the same intensity, it is nevertheless certain that, with the
passage of the decisive activity from one people to another people in
the course of history, the useful products, already acquired by those
who were in decadence, have been transmitted to those who were growing
and rising. That is not so true of the products of sentiment and
imaginatio