As soon as it is seen that the transformation of the economic conditions, of the conditions of life, is the fundamental transformation, that upon which all the others are more or less dependent, it will be recognized that to say that socialism is simply the expression of the contemporaneous phase of economic conditions is not to narrow, in the slightest degree, its field of action, but only to define more accurately its immediate goal. The affirmation that there is in progress an evolution of the economic environment implies necessarily a corresponding evolution of the various branches of human knowledge, which are all influenced by this environment, just as the apple-tree implies the apple without its being necessary to speak of the integral apple-tree.[1] If socialism is contained "in a purely economic formula," it is just as the apple-tree is contained in the seed. Let us be vigilant to see that this "economic formula" and this seed are not thwarted in their normal development, and we shall have all the fruits that may be desired, even if we refrain from heaping qualifying or complemental adjectives upon the apple-tree and socialism. Some have thought that they have discovered an argument against this predominance of the economic environment and of the economic question, in the fact that some events which are not economic in nature--and they cite, most frequently, the invention of gunpowder and the revocation of the edict of Nantes--have had a great influence on human history. They forget that, if such or such an important event was not directly in itself an economic phenomenon, it is chiefly by the consequences that it had from the economic point of view that it became important; like all human discoveries, all historic events, it reached a point where it became a modifying element of the economic environment. To recapitulate, if we insist upon the influence of the surroundings, and, particularly, upon the preponderant influence of the economic environment--the creation of man--this does not justify representing us as attributing an exclusive influence to the economic environment and as holding that this environment itself is created and influenced only by facts properly classed as economic. I return then to my first proposition: socialism must have and has for its foundation the economic environment, the economic facts. What are those facts? FOOTNOTES: