At two points, the extreme points for us, the human process is palpable. One of these is the origin of the bourgeoisie, so recent and in the full light of the science of economics; the other is the ancient formation of the society divided into classes, which marks the passage from higher barbarism to civilization (the epoch of the State) to use expressions employed by Morgan. All that is found between these two epochs is what has, up to this time, formed the subject matter of the chroniclers, the historians properly so-called, the jurists, the theologians and the philosophers. To traverse and reanimate all this domain with the new historic conception is not an easy thing. We must not be over-hasty in tabulating it. At the very beginning we must understand the economics relative to each epoch,[26] in order to explain specifically the classes which develop in it, avoiding hypothetical and uncertain data and taking care not to carry over our own conditions into each epoch. For that, skilled fingers are needed. Thus, for example, what the Manifesto says of the first origin of the bourgeoisie proceeding from the serfs of the Middle Ages incorporated little by little into the cities is not a general truth. This mode of origin is peculiar to Germany and to the other countries which reproduce its process. It is not the case either in Italy, nor in Southern France, nor in Spain, which were the fields upon which began the first history of the bourgeoisie, that is to say, of modern civilization. In this first phase are found all the premises of the whole capitalist society as Marx informed us in a note to the first volume of Capital.[27] This first phase which reaches its perfect form in the Italian municipalities forms the pre-historic background for that capitalist accumulation which Marx has explained with so many characteristic details in the evolution of England. But I will stop there. The proletarians can have in view nothing but the future. That with which all scientific socialists are primarily concerned is the present in which are spontaneously developed and in which are ripening the conditions of the future. The knowledge of the past is practically of use and of interest only in so far as it throws light upon and explains the present. For the moment it is enough to say that the partisans of critical communism fifty years ago conceived the elements of the new and definite philosophy of history. Soon this fashion of seeing will impose itself because it will be impossible to think the contrary; and this discovery will have the fate of Columbus' egg. And perhaps before an army of scientists has made an application of this conception to the continuous narration of the whole history, the success of the proletariat will have become such that the bourgeois epoch will appear to all as something that must be left behind because it will nearly be so in reality. _To understand is to leave behind_ (Hegel).