iterature and the arts form a system in which
each local change involves a general change, so that an experienced
historian, who studies one portion apart from the others, sees
beforehand and partially predicts the characteristics of the rest.
There is nothing vague in this dependence. The regulation of all this
in the living body consists, first, of the tendency to manifest a
certain primordial type, and, next, the necessity of its possessing
organs which can supply its wants and put itself in harmony with
itself in order to live. The regulation in a civilization consists in
the presence in each great human creation of an elementary productor
equally present in other surrounding creations, that is, some faculty
and aptitude, some efficient and marked disposition, which, with its
own peculiar character, introduces this with that into all operations
in which it takes part, and which, according to its variations, causes
variation in all the works in which it cooeperates.

VII

Having reached this point we can obtain a glimpse of the principal
features of human transformations, and can now search for the general
laws which regulate not only events, but classes of events; not only
this religion or that literature, but the whole group of religions or
of literatures. If, for example, it is admitted that a religion is
a metaphysical poem associated with belief; if it is recognized,
besides, that there are certain races and certain environments
in which belief, poetic faculty, and metaphysical faculty display
themselves in common with unwonted vigor; if we consider that
Christianity and Buddhism were developed at periods of grand
systematizations and in the midst of sufferings like the oppression
which stirred up the fanatics of Cevennes; if, on the other hand, it
is recognized that primitive religions are born at the dawn of human
reason, during the richest expansion of human imagination, at times
of the greatest naivete and of the greatest credulity; if we consider,
again, that Mohammedanism appeared along with the advent of poetic
prose and of the conception of material unity, amongst a people
destitute of science and at the moment of a sudden development of the
intellect--we might conclude that religion is born and declines, is
reformed and transformed, according as circumstances fortify and bring
together, with more or less precision and energy, its three generative
instincts; and we would then comprehend why rel