reason of the antagonisms which it bears within itself,
renders continuously unstable the organization itself, whence result the
political movements and revolutions, and therefore the reasons for
progress and retrogression:--there is the sum of what is at the bottom
of all history. And there is the victory of realistic prose over all the
fantastic and ideological combinations.

Certainly it requires some resignation to see things as they are,
passing beyond the phantoms which for centuries have prevented right
vision. But this revelation of realistic doctrine was not and is not
designed to be the rebellion of the material man against the ideal man.
It has been and is, on the contrary, the discovery of the principles and
the motives which are real and which belong to all human development,
including all that we call the ideal in positive conditions, determined
by facts which carry in themselves the reasons and the law and the
rhythm of their own development.

III.

But it would be a complete error to believe that the writers who
narrate, explain, or illustrate have themselves invented and given life
to this enormous mass of unripe concepts, imaginings, and explanations
which, thanks to the force of prejudice, concealed for centuries the
real truth. It may happen, and it certainly does happen, that some of
these concepts are the fruit and the product of personal views, or of
literary currents formed in the narrow professional circle of the
universities and academies. The people in this case are absolutely
ignorant of them. But the important fact is that history itself has put
on these veils; that is to say, that the very actors and workers of the
historic events--great masses of people, directing and ordering classes,
masters of state, sects or parties, in the narrowest sense of the word,
if we make exception for an occasional moment of lucid interval--never
had up to the end of the past century a consciousness of their own work,
unless it be through some ideological envelope which prevented any sight
of the real causes. Already at the distant epoch when barbarism was
passing over into civilization, that is to say, when the first
discoveries of agriculture, the stable establishment of a population
upon a definite territory, the first division of labor in society, the
first alliances of different gentes, gave the conditions in which
developed property and the state, or at least the city,--even then, at
the epoch of a