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this law explains in a positive manner all the 

 phenomena, the least as well as the greatest 

 of social life. This law is truly the most 

 positive, the most fruitful, the most brilliant 

 sociological theory, that has ever been dis- 

 covered. It gives, as I have already indicated, 

 a positive, physiological, experimental ex- 

 planation of social history in its grandest 

 actions and of the most insignificant episodes 

 of personal history, in complete accord with 

 the whole trend, which has been called 

 materialist, of modern scientific thought. 



There have been given in the history of 

 mankind, leaving apart the two anti -scientific 

 explanations of free will and Divine Provi- 

 dence, two explanations, one-sided, and in 

 consequence incomplete, although positive 

 and scientific. I mean the physical determinism 

 of Montesquieu, Buckle, and Metschnikoff, and 

 the anthropological determinism of ethnologists 

 who see in the organic and psychical charac- 

 teristics of races the historic reason for events. 



Karl Marx resumes and completes these 

 two theories by his economic determinism. 



The economic conditions which are the 

 resultant of the energies and ethnological apti- 

 tudes acting in a given physical environment 

 are the determinative basis of all moral, 

 juridical, and political manifestations of 

 human, individual, and social life. 



This is the theory which we owe to the 

 genius of Marx, positive and scientific, if any 

 ever was, which dreads no objection, founded 

 as it is on the most exact researches of geology 

 as of biology, of psychology as of sociology. 



