Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/155

Rh Musée Social is considered to be well informed,—"the accumulation (of capital in the hands of a few individuals) is one of the great discoveries of Marx, one of the discoveries of whchwhich [sic] he was most proud. With all due deference to the historical science of this notable university light, this theory was one which was in everybody's mouth long before Marx had ever written a word, and it had become a dogma in the Socialist world at the end of the reign of Louis-Philippe. There are many Marxian theories of the same kind.

A decided step towards reform was made when those Marxians who aspired to think for themselves began to study the syndicalist movement; they discovered that "the genuine trade unionists have more to teach us than they have to learn from us." This was the beginning of wisdom; it was a step towards the realistic method which had led Marx to his real discoveries; in this way a return might be made to those methods which alone merit the name philosophical, "for true and fruitful ideas are so many close contacts with currents of reality," and they "owe most of their clearness to the light which the facts, and the applications to which they led, have by reflection shed on them—the clearness of a concept being scarcely anything more at bottom than the certainty, at last obtained, of manipulating the concept profitably." And yet another profound thought of Bergson may usefully be quoted: "For we do not obtain an intuition from reality—that is, an intellectual sympathy with the most intimate part of it—unless we have won its confidence by a long fellowship with its superficial manifestations. And it is not merely a question of assimilating the most conspicuous facts; so immense a mass of facts must be accumulated and fused together, that in this fusion all