There is a certain affinity, apparently at least, between that formal vice of verbalism and another defect of the mind, whose origins may, however, be varied. In consideration of some of its most common and popular effects I will call it _phraseology_, although this word is not an exact expression of the thing and does not set forth its origin.
For long centuries men have written on history, have explained it, have illustrated it. The most varied interests, from the interests more immediately practical to the interests purely æsthetic, have moved different writers to conceive and to execute this type of composition. These different types have always taken birth in different countries long after the origins of civilization, of the development of the state and of the passage from the primitive communist society to the society which rests upon class differences and class antagonisms. The historians, even if they have been as artless as Herodotus, were always born and formed in a society having nothing ingenuous in it, but very complicated and complex, and at a time when the reasons for this complication and complexity were unknown and their origins forgotten. This complexity, with all the contrasts which it bears within itself and which it reveals later and makes burst forth in its various vicissitudes, stood forth before the narrators as something mysterious and calling for an explanation, and if the historian wished to give some sequence and a certain connection to the things narrated, he was obliged to add certain general views to the simple narration. From the jealousy of the gods of Father Herodotus to the environment of M. Tame, an infinite number of concepts serving as means of explanation and as complements to the things related have been imposed upon the narrators by the natural voices of their immediate thought. Class tendencies, religious ideas, popular prejudices, influences or imitations of a current philosophy, excursions of imagination and a desire to give an artistic appearance to facts known only in a fragmentary fashion, all these causes and other analogous causes have contributed to form the substratum of the more or less artless theory of events which is implicitly at the bottom of the narration, or which serves at least to flavor and adorn it. Whether men speak of chance or of destiny, whether they appeal to the providential direction of human events, or adhere to the word and concept of chance, the only divinity left in the rigid and often coarse conception of Machiavelli, or whether they speak, as is frequent enough at the present time, of the logic of events, all these conceptions were and are effects and results of ingenuous thought, of immediate thought, of thought which cannot justify to itself its course, and its products, either by the paths of criticism or by the methods of experience. To fill up with conventional causes (e. g., _chance_) or with a statement of theoretical plausibility (e. g., the _inevitable course of events_ which sometimes is confused in the mind with the notion of progress) the gaps of our knowledge as to the fashion in which things have been actually produced by their own necessity without care for our free will and our consent, that is the motive and the result of this popular philosophy, latent or explicit, in the chroniclers, which by reason of its superficial character dissolves as soon as scientific criticism appears.