IN the preceding chapters we have set forth the fallacies
and the numerous errors in the Materialist Conception
of History, and we believe we have demonstrated how
utterly inadequate it is to explain historical evolution
and the causal inter-connection of events.

Completely to explain the causal concatenation in
history so as to set the question at rest is impossible.
For, aside from the fact that scientific research did not
seriously begin until a few generations ago and that
every decade lays bare new worlds of the past, it is
evident that our intellect, being unable to overlook and
understand more than an insignificant number of facts
and elements, is in no way equal to the task of really
understanding the world and its history. It must be
a curiously self-satisfied and shallow mind that imagines
itself able to grasp what is impossible of cognisance, at
least in our present state of development.

Faced by an infinity of phenomena of which we have
ourselves witnessed only a very small part, while others
have been transmitted to us, in a more or less truthful
and reliable form, by records from the past, we endeav-
our to find or to construct a certain logical order, a
causal connection in the mass of events, witnessed or

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