on and the development of the producing forces. And this is
not all. In the light of this doctrine what is essential in history is
summed up in these critical moments, and it abandons, momentarily at
least, what unites these different moments to the learned ministrations
of the professional narrators. As a revolutionary doctrine it is, before
all else, the intellectual consciousness of the actual proletarian
movement in which, according to our assertion, the future of communism
is preparing long beforehand; so much so that the open adversaries of
socialism reject it as an opinion, which, under a scientific mask, is
only working out another utopia.

Thus it may happen, and that has already resulted, that the imagination
of people unfamiliar with the difficulties of historic research, and the
zeal of fanatics, find a stimulus and an opportunity even in historic
materialism for forming a new ideology and drawing from it a new
philosophy of systematic history, that is to say, history conceived as
schemes or tendencies and designs. And no precaution can suffice. Our
intellect is rarely contented with purely critical research; it is
always attempting to convert into an element of pedantry and into a new
scholasticism every discovery of thought. In a word, even the
materialistic conception of history may be converted into a form of
argumentation for a thesis and serve to make new fashions with the
ancient prejudices like that of a history based on syllogisms,
demonstrations and deductions.

To guard against this, and especially to avoid the reappearance in an
indirect and disguised fashion of any form whatever of finality, it is
necessary to resolve positively upon two things: First, that all known
historic conditions are circumstanced, and, second, that progress has
thus far been circumscribed by various obstacles and that for this
reason it has always been partial and limited.

Only a part, and, until recent times, only a small part of the human
race, has traversed completely all the stages of the _processus_ by the
effect of which the most advanced nations have arrived at modern civil
society, with the advanced technical forms founded upon the discoveries
of science and with all the consequences, political, intellectual,
moral, etc., which correspond to this development. By the side of the
English,--to take the most striking example--who, transporting European
manners with them to New Holland, have created there a cente