Why should the slave have had the ways of seeing and the passions and the sentiments of the master whom he feared? How could the peasant relieve himself of his invincible superstitions, to which he was condemned by his immediate dependence upon nature and his mediate dependence upon a social mechanism unknown to him, and by his blind faith in the priest, who stands to him as a magician and sorcerer. In what fashion could the modern proletarian of the great industrial cities, exposed continuously to the alternatives of misery or subjection, how could he realize that way of living, regulated and monotonous, which was the one suited to the members of the trade guilds, whose existence seemed imbedded in a providential plan? From what intuitive elements of experience could the hog merchant of Chicago, who furnishes Europe with so many products at a cheap rate, extract the conditions of serenity and intellectual elevation which gave to the Athenian the qualities of the noble and good man, and to the Roman citizen, the dignity of heroism? What power of docile Christian persuasion will extract from the souls of the modern proletarians their natural reasons of hate against their determined or undetermined oppressors? If they wish that justice be done, they must appeal to violence; and before the love of one’s neighbor as a universal law can appear possible to them, they must imagine a life very different from the present life, which makes a necessity of hatred. In this society of differentiations, hatred, pride, hypocrisy, falsehood, baseness, injustice and all the catechism of the cardinal vices and their accessories make a sad appendage to the morality, equal for all, upon which they constitute the satire.
Ethics then reduces itself for us to the historical study of the subjective and objective conditions of how morality develops or meets obstacles to its development. In this only, that is to say, within these limits, we can recognize some value in the affirmation that morality corresponds to the social situations, and, in the last analysis, to the economic conditions. Only an idiot could believe that the individual morality of each one is proportionate to his individual economic situation. That is not only empirically false, but intrinsically irrational. Granted the natural elasticity of the psychic mechanism, and also the fact that no one lives so shut up in his own class that he does not undergo the influence of other classes, of the common environment and of the interlacing traditions, it is never possible to reduce the development of each individual to the abstract and generic type of his class and his social status. We are dealing there with the phenomena of the mass, of those phenomena which form, or should form, the objects of moral statistics: the discipline which has thus far remained incomplete, because it has taken for the objects of its combinations groups which it creates of itself by the addition of numbers of cases (for example, adulteries, thefts, homicides) and not the groups which, as classes, conditions, or situations exist really, that is to say, socially.
To recommend morality to men while assuming or ignoring their conditions, this was hitherto the object and the class of argument of all the catechists. To recognize that these are given by the social environment, that is what the communists oppose to the utopia and the hypocrisy of the preachers of morality. And as they see in morality not a privilege of the elect, nor a gift of nature, but a result of experience and education, they admit human perfectibility through reasons and arguments which are, in my opinion, more moral and more ideal than those which have been given by the ideologists.
In other words, man develops, or produces himself, not as an entity generically provided with certain attributes, which repeat themselves, or develop themselves, according to a rational rhythm, but he produces and develops himself as at once cause and effect, as author and consequence, of certain definite conditions, in which are engendered also definite currents of ideas, of opinions, of beliefs, of imaginations, of expectations, of maxims. Thence arise ideologies of every sort, as also the generalization of morality in catechisms, in canons and in systems. We must not be surprised if these ideologies, once arisen, are afterwards cultivated alone by themselves, if they finally appear, as it were, detached from the living field whence they took their birth, nor if they hold themselves above man as imperative rules and models.
The priests and the doctrinaires of every sort have given themselves for centuries to this labor of abstraction, and have forced themselves to maintain the resulting illusions. Now that the positive sources of all ideologies have been found in the mechanism of life itself, we must explain realistically their mode of generation. And as that is true of all ideologies, it is true also and, in particular of those which consist in projecting ethical estimates beyond their natural and direct limits, making of them anticipations of divine announcements or presuppositions of universal suggestions of conscience.
Therein lies the object of the special historic problems. We cannot always find the tie which unites certain ethical ideas to practical definite conditions. The concrete social psychology of past times often remains impenetrable to us. Often the commonest things remain for us unintelligible, for example, the animals considered as unclean, or the origin for the repugnance at marriage between persons of remote degrees of relationship. A prudent course of study leads us to conclude that the motives of many details will remain always concealed. Ignorance, superstition, singular illusions, symbolisms, these with many others are causes of that unconscious element, often found in customs, which now constitutes for us the unknown and the unknowable.
The principal cause of all difficulty is precisely in the tardy appearance of what we call reason, so that the traces of the proximate motives of ideas have been lost or have remained enveloped in the ideas themselves.
On the subject of science we can be much more brief.
For a long time history has been made in an artless fashion. Granted and admitted that the different sciences have their statements in manuals and encyclopedias, it seemed sufficient to work out chronologically the appearance of the different formulas, resolving the total of the systematic summary into the elements which have successively served to compose it. The general presupposition was simple enough; underneath this chronology is the rational conception which develops and progresses.
This method, if so it could be called, had within itself a certain disadvantage; it permitted us at best to understand how, one stage of science being granted, another stage of science may be derived from it by reason, but it did not permit us to discern by what condition of facts men were driven to discover science for the first time, that is to say, to reduce considered experience into a new and definite form. The question was, then, to find why there is an actual history of science, to find the origin of the scientific necessity, and what unites in a genetic fashion that necessity to our necessities in the continuity of the social processus.