economic history of the past. These Utopias came to nothing; but it may be asked whether the Revolution was not a much more profound transformation than those dreamed of by the people who in the eighteenth century had invented social Utopias. In our own times Mazzini pursued what the wiseacres of his time called a mad chimera; but it can no longer be denied that, without Mazzini, Italy would never have become a great power, and that he did more for Italian unity than Cavour and all the politicians of his school.
A knowledge of what the myths contain in the way of details which will actually form part of the history of the future is then of small importance; they are not astrological almanacs; it is even possible that nothing which they contain will ever come to pass,—as was the case with the catastrophe expected by the first Christians.[1] In our own daily life, are we not familiar with the fact that what actually happens is very different from our preconceived notion of it? And that does not prevent us from continuing to make resolutions. Psychologists say that there is heterogeneity between the ends in view and the ends actually realised: the slightest experience of life reveals this law to us, which Spencer transferred into nature, to extract therefrom his theory of the multiplication of effects.[2]
The myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken
- ↑ I have tried to show elsewhere how this social myth, which has disappeared, was succeeded by a piety which has remained extremely important in Catholic life; this evolution from the social to the individual, seems to me quite natural in a religion (Le Système historique de Renan, pp. 374–382).
- ↑ I believe, moreover, that the whole of Spencer's evolutionism is to be explained as an application of the most commonplace psychology to physics.
is with the difficult researches of the real scientists. These latter are generally as modest as the writers on popular science are vain and boastful.
