THE PRESENT STATUS OF SOCIOLOGY IN GERMANY 583
research to abandon its objective character any more than the Kantian principle eliminates objectivity from natural science. Reality is no less real from the fact that we grasp it and organ- ize it into unity with our powers of comprehension. Both nature and history are to us actual, and they stand over against ns as objective existences, because we recognize them as actual and objective.
Historical materialism will be least of all able to withstand the criticism of knowledge which Simmel proposes. Its fate will be like that of metaphysical materialism under the bludgeon blows of the Kantian criticism. That materialism which in history derives men from conditions, and conditions from con- ditions, is least of all competent to comprehend history, because it does not approach the investigation of history with the whole equipment of psychology. Let us cite for example the point of view of Marx. With him, as we remarked above, consciousness does not determine our being (das Sein), but our being deter- mines consciousness. Very slight reflection will show that upon this assumption historical investigation must become a mere chimera. With our consciousness we must comprehend the consciousness of factors that have manifested themselves in history. That is the task of historical research. Now it is incomprehensible that we, with our consciousness produced by our own present "being," which is different from the "being" of the earlier time in question, can understand the conscious- ness of historical persons and groups.
The history of humanity must be humanly explained ; that is psychologically. The only tool which we possess for this explanation is our "psyche," and it is an absolutely essential presumption that in this explanatory instrument we have the same categories, fundamental forces, and impulses, which existed in historical people. If we repudiate this presumption, however, our own soul is no longer the mirror in which the psychical con- ditions of historical people are reflected, and history conse- quently ceases to have for us interest and life.
In the second chapter of the above mentioned book, entitled
