The most potent cause is that of physical environment, change of climate. Next comes the crossing of one race with another, and it is to this we owe in great part the marvellous productions of Greek art that arose in Magna Grecia. Then, often, the influence of climate is active, to which is owing the transformation of the Jew; so persecutions, and the great calamities which races experience and which determine the selection of the strongest. And to this result contribute above all the impulses impressed by geniuses and by mattoids, who, as I have already pointed out in my work on "Genius" alone possess an intense love for the new, for the very reason that their organisation is different from that of other people. The intensity of individual violence and power here unbalances the tendency to immobility; but almost always—and I show it in the work referred to—when that intensity is not favored by circumstances, when it does not arise as the final synthesis of a general desire, a latent and universal necessity, but simply as a pathological phenomenon, it becomes again valueless, for the very reason that it is individual. It is owing to this that the efforts of a madman like Cola de Rienzi, and of such geniuses as Alexander, Napoleon, Pombal, and Peter the Great, result in nothing. To beneficent geniuses, as Bolivar, the Gracchi, etc., are attributed all the merit of revolutions which triumph because they were prepared long before by history and by circumstances, and which were only precipitated by them and summed up in them. It suffices to note that the genius of Garibaldi, of Cavour, and of Mazzini, has been able to give us nothing more than Italy as it now is, in order to comprehend that in spite of geniuses and, up to a certain point, in spite of circumstances the work of revolution is durable only when the circumstances that have commenced it persist, and men are profoundly modified by it.
However, the law of inertia always prevailing, (since primitive tendencies always concern it,) these changes are but very slow and, as we have seen, give place to easy relapses; they become fixed and swell to new movements only when the causes which provoke them continue and become more intense.
In fine, philoneism, progress, also sometimes triumphs—at least with the white race and frequently with the yellow races; but it is not the result of a sudden movement or of a natural human tendency, but the effect of external physical forces, whether social, historical or the like, which have caused the law of inertia to change its direction. It is therefore the slow result, we might say, of the small and sensible variations peculiar to men according to their condition, added to grander movements, as well as momentarily barren ones, of geniuses and forces, and to those more powerful ones of the physical and historical environment. Of the resulting product we see only the effects, because without the telescope of history and of sociology we do not perceive the slowness with which they have reached us, and the smallness of the efforts which contribute to it. It is thus that we do not imagine that the great Coral Islands can be the work of billions of small zo-ophytes accumulated the one on the other during thousands of years. The organic kingdom, like the social, is made up of the sum total of slow and small efforts.
The idea of the Christ and that of Buddha, the way for which had been prepared for several centuries by other geniuses less fortunate than they, miscarries among the people in which it was conceived, and becomes fruitful elsewhere. But dating from the epoch in which its votaries, nihilists of the reverse type, began to multiply and spread, in the lowest and least intelligent strata of society, employing as arms not violence but gentleness, more than three centuries elapsed before it was tolerated and officially recognised. For two hundred and fifty years the plebeians fought at Rome for their liberty. Yet they always heard the Senators say, "Your propositions are too novel." And liberty was granted by the one, and acquired by the others, only soon to be lost, first, in anarchy, then under the dictatorship, and then under the empire.
It is in this sense, that revolutions at the start can be the work of a small number, but they represent, they are the sign of a latent universal sentiment; this is why they grow in direct proportion to time (and time is very long) and gain partisans among their own adversaries. The apostles of Christ numbered only twelve, but a hundred and fifty years later, at Rome alone, there were in the catacombs 737 tombs of Christians; and Renan calculates that at the time of Commodus 35,000 Christians existed. We know that Saint Paul himself was one of the bitterest adversaries of the Christians.
The English revolution, up to the time Charles I. sought to cause the arrest of the four parliamentarians, was anti-republican, and strictly royalist even; but ultimately revolutionary ideas spread throughout all England, and the zealous but not blind partisans of the king were the first to turn against him after his excesses and his treasons.
In the revolution of Flanders, the chief citizens and a great part of the nobility, held aloof from the movement for a long period; but all possessed in embryo the feeling uttered by the first apostles and pioneers of the movement. Time, in its slow development, gives rise to the complete expansion of the latent sentiments expressed by misoneism.
For example let us now transfer ourselves to another field; I wish to speak of the abolition of classical studies. There are perhaps actually five or six of us in Italy who proclaim without fear its absolute necessity; as we were only three when we proclaimed the necessity of changing the penal laws and of bringing them to examine the criminal rather than the crime.
The first statesman who should attempt to carry out our ideas would fall amid universal scandal; and yet these very ideas are entertained by all who are not blinded by archæological and academic misoneism. But they have not the courage to avow them and still less to realise them. In a few years these ideas will no longer admit even of discussion.
That is revolution. Let us look, on the other hand, at the ideas of the anarchists; they are in the heads, and unfortunately in the hands of certain diseased persons, but they are not in the thought of the majority; consequently all their agitation will be in vain, and result only in isolated commotions and frays.