But the sequence of causes and effects is in principle fully compatible with change. Stars die that once shone; the earth that was calm suddenly opens up; hills that used to be part of the landscape collapse in an earthquake – and are no longer there. None of this, which can only be called ‘change’, is an exception to the laws of determinism, or requires the disruptive intervention of a freedom (but perhaps the defenders of novelty intend to appeal to the will of God). The same is true in the historical and social world, whose phenomena of both reproduction and transformation are likewise produced, namely, determined to occur by some or other causal sequence, even though, unlike dying stars and sliding hills, these sequences are the product of human action. For these actions are no less caused. And these causal sequences have no other motors than the conative energies and passions that steer them. Collective human life reproduces itself, or begins to change, solely as a consequence of the interplay of people’s inter-affections, or, to say this in the simplest way possible, out of the effect they have on one another, but always through the mediation of institutions and social relations.