in its effects a piercing of the
Isthmus of Suez, the Italian navy had found itself in a direct struggle
with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, at the very moment when the
shifting of historical activity from the Mediterranean to the ocean
prepared the decadence of Italy? But enough of fantasy!

A certain historical continuity, in the empirical and circumstantial
sense of the transmission and the successive increase of the means of
civilization, is then an incontestable fact. And, although this fact
excludes all idea of preconceived design, of intentional or hidden
finality, or pre-established harmony, and all the other whimsicalities
in regard to which there has been such a deal of speculation, it does
not exclude, for all that, the _idea of progress_, which we can utilize
as an _estimation_ of the course of human development. It is undeniable
that progress does not embrace _materially_ the succession of
generations, and that its conception implies nothing categorical,
considering that societies have also been in retrogression, but that
does not prevent this idea from serving as a guiding thread and a
_measure_ to give a meaning to the historical _processus_. There is no
common ground for critics who are prudent, in the use of specific
concepts as in the method of their application, and those poor extreme
evolutionists, who are scientists without the grammar and the principle
of science, that is to say, without logic.

As I have said several times, ideas do not fall from heaven, and even
those which, at a given moment arise from definite situations with the
impetuosity of faith and with a metaphysical garb, carry always within
themselves the index of their correspondence with the order of the
facts, of which the explanation is sought or attempted. The idea of
progress, as the unifier of history, appears with violence and becomes a
giant in the eighteenth century, that is to say, in the heroic period of
the intellectual and political life of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
Just as this engendered, in the order of its works, the most intensive
period of history that is known, it also produced its own ideology in
the notion of progress. This ideology in its substance means that
capitalism is the only form of production which is capable of extending
all over the earth and of reducing the whole human race to conditions
which resemble each other everywhere. If modern technique can be
transported everywhere, if all the hu