href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@39653@[email protected]#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[4] The author, designing to study historical materialism, thinks it needful to go back to Holbach and Helvetius. And he waxes indignant at metaphysical dualism and pluralism, declaring that 'the most important philosophical systems were always monistic, that is they interpreted matter and spirit as merely two classes of phenomena having a single and indivisible cause.' And in reference to those who maintain the distinction between the factors in history, he exclaims: 'We see here the old story, always recurring, of the struggle between eclecticism and monism, the story of the dividing walls; here nature, there spirit, etc.' Many will be amazed at this unexpected leap from the materialistic study of history into the arms of monism, in which they were unaware that they ought to have such confidence.

Labriola is most careful to avoid this confusion: 'Society is a datum,' he says, 'history is nothing more than the history of society.' And he controverts with equal energy and success the naturalists, who wish to reduce the history of man to the history of nature, and the verbalists, who claim to deduce from the name materialism the real nature of the new view of history. But it must appear, even to him, that the name might have been more happily chosen, and that the confusion lies, so to speak, inherent in it. It is true that old words can be bent to new meanings, but within limits and after due consideration.

In regard to the tendency to reconstruct a materialistic philosophy of history, substituting an omnipresent Matter for an omnipresent Idea, it suffices to re-assert the impossibility of any such construction, which must become merely superfluous and tautologous unless it abandoned itself to dogmatism. But there is another error, which is remarked among the followers of the materialistic school of history, and which is connected with the former, viz., to anticipate harm not only in the interpretation of history but also in the guidance of practical activities. I refer to the teleological tendencies (abstract teleology), which also Labriola opposes with a cutting attack. The very idea of progress, which has seemed to many the only law of history worth saving out of the many devised by philosophical and non-philosophical thinkers, is by him deprived of the dignity of a law, and reduced to a sufficiently narrow significance. The idea of it, says Labriola, is 'not only empirical, but always incidental and hence limited': progress 'does not influence the sequence of human affairs like destiny or fate, nor like the command of a law.' History teaches us that man is capable of progress; and we can look at all the different series of events from this point of view: that is all. No less incidental and empirical is the idea of historical necessity, which must be freed from all remnants of rationalism and of transcendentalism, so that we see in it the mere recognition of the very small share left in the sequence of events, to individuals and personal free will.

It must be admitted that a little of the blame for the teleological and fatalistic misunderstandings fall on Marx himself. Marx, as he once had to explain, liked to 'coquette' with the Hegelian terminology: a dangerous weapon, with which it would have been better not to trifle. Hence it is now thought necessary to give to several of his statements a somewhat broad interpretation in agreement with the general trend of his theories.[5] Another excuse lies in the impetuous confidence which, as in the case of any practical work, accompanies the practical activities of socialism, and engenders beliefs and expectations which do not always agree with prudent critical and scientific thought. It is strange to see how the positivists, newly converted to socialism, exceed all the others (see the effect of a good school!) in their teleological beliefs, and their facile predeterminations. They swallow again what is worst in Hegelianism, which they once so violently opposed without recognising it. Labriola has finely said that the very forecasts of socialism are merely morphological in nature; and, in fact, neither Marx nor Engels would ever have asserted in the abstract that communism must come about by an unavoidable necessity, in the manner in which they foresaw it. If history is always accidental, why in this western Europe of ours, might not a new barbarism arise owing to the effect of incalculable circumstances? Why should not the coming of communism be either rendered superfluous or hastened by some of those technical discoveries, which, as Marx himself has proved, have hitherto produced the greatest revolutions in the course of history?

I think then that better homage would be rendered to the materialistic view of history, not by calling it the final and definite philosophy of history but rather by declaring that properly speaking it is not a philosophy of history. This intrinsic nature which is evident to those who understand it properly, explains the difficulty which exists in finding for it a satisfactory theoretical statement; and why to Labriola it appears to be only in its beginnings and yet to need much development. It explains too why Engels said (and Labriola accepts the remark), that it is nothing more than a new method; which means a denial that it is a new theory. But is it indeed a new method? I must acknowledge that this name method does not seem to me altogether accurate. When the philosophical idealists tried to arrive at the facts of history by inference, this was truly a new method; and there may still exist some fossil of those blessed times, who makes such attempts at history. But the historians of the materialistic school employ the same intellectual weapons and follow the same paths as, let us say, the philological historians. They only introduce into their work some new data, some new experiences. The content is different, not the nature of the method.

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