Ethics then reduces itself for us to the historical study of the subjective and objective conditions of how morality develops or meets obstacles to its development. In this only, that is to say, within these limits, we can recognize some value in the affirmation that morality corresponds to the social situations, and, _in the last analysis_, to the economic conditions. Only an idiot could believe that the individual morality of each one is proportionate to his individual economic situation. That is not only empirically false, but intrinsically irrational. Granted the natural elasticity of the psychic mechanism, and also the fact that no one lives so shut up in his own class that he does not undergo the influence of other classes, of the common environment and of the interlacing traditions, it is never possible to reduce the development of each individual to the abstract and generic type of his class and his social status. We are dealing there with the phenomena of the mass, of those phenomena which form, or should form, the objects of _moral statistics_: the discipline which has thus far remained incomplete, because it has taken for the objects of its combinations groups which it creates of itself by the addition of numbers of cases (for example, adulteries, thefts, homicides) and not the groups which, as classes, conditions, or situations exist really, that is to say, socially. To recommend morality to men while assuming or ignoring their conditions, this was hitherto the object and the class of argument of all the catechists. To recognize that these are given by the social environment, that is what the communists oppose to the utopia and the hypocrisy of the preachers of morality. And as they see in morality not a privilege of the elect, nor a gift of nature, but a result of experience and education, they admit human perfectibility through reasons and arguments which are, in my opinion, more moral and more ideal than those which have been given by the ideologists. In other words, man develops, or produces himself, not as an entity generically provided with certain attributes, which repeat themselves, or develop themselves, according to a rational rhythm, but he produces and develops himself as at once cause and effect, as author and consequence, of certain definite conditions, in which are engendered also definite currents of ideas, of opinions, of beliefs, of imaginations, of expectations, of maxims. Thence arise ideologies of every sort, as also the generalization of morality in catechisms, in canons and in systems. We must not be surprised if these ideologies, once arisen, are afterwards cultivated alone by themselves, if they finally appear, as it were, detached from the living field whence they took their birth, nor if they hold themselves above man as imperative rules and models.