[24] Thus there arises notably in France the illusion of a social monarchy which, succeeding the liberal epoch, should solve harmoniously what is called the social question. This absurdity reproduces itself in infinite varieties of socialism of the pulpit and State socialism. To the different forms of ideological and religious utopianism is joined a new form of bureaucratic and fiscal utopianism, the Utopia of the idiots. [25] For example in the essays of Th. Rogers. [26] Who would have thought a few years ago of the discovery and the authentic interpretation of an ancient Babylonian law? [27] Note 189, p. 740, of the 3rd German edition. PART II HISTORICAL MATERIALISM. I. This class of studies, like many others, but this more than any other, is confronted with a great difficulty, indeed an irksome hindrance, in that vice of minds educated by literary methods alone which is ordinarily called _verbalism_. This bad habit creeps into and spreads itself through all domains of knowledge; but in studies which relate to the so-called moral world, that is to say, to the historico-social _complexus_, it very often happens that the cult and the dominion of words succeed in corrupting and blotting out the real and living sense of things. In the field where a long observation, repeated experiences, the certain use of improved instruments, the general or partial application of the calculus have resulted in putting the mind into a constant and methodical relation with things and their variations, as in the natural sciences properly so-called,--there the myth and superstition of words are left behind and vanquished; there the questions of terminology no longer have more than the secondary value of pure convention. In the study of human relations and actions, on the contrary, the passions, the interests, the prejudices of school, sect, class and religion, the literary abuse of the traditional means of representing thought, and scholasticism, ever vanquished and always reborn, conceal the actual things, or transform them involuntarily into terms, into words, into abstract and conventional fashions of speech.