THE PRESENT STATUS OF SOCIOLOGY IN GERMANY S77
scientific method of investigating the process of human devel- opment" (p. 450). I am quite ready to let it pass as such. I deny, however, most emphatically that it is entitled to the exclusive character which it claims. It is not the scientific method par excellence, but a scientific method. From the stand- point of the parallelism just referred to, we must hold both materialism and idealism to be one-sided, and thus insufficient. If the history of the process of human development is to be composed into a stereoscopic picture, we must bring both sides into the field of vision and investigate both with equal preci- sion, instead of promoting the one to the rank of cause and degrading the other to the rank of effect.
This, however, is by no means what is done. Thus K. Kaut- sky, in his Entstehung des Christentums? attempts to prove "that the history of classic antiquity is nothing else than the history of the crowding out of communism by private property." Well said, "nothing else!" And in the same spirit Mehring declares, with a definiteness that leaves nothing to be wished : "The human mind is not over but in the historical develop- ment of human society ; it has grown from, upon and with, material production." (Erist aus, an, und mit der materiellen Pro- duktion erwachsen, p. 451). This is more than a mere method of research ; this is a definitive theorem, and more than that, a fundamentally false one. This " grows from" is here simply smuggled into the presumption, as though it were not precisely the thing which remains to be proved.
Whether the so-called ideological motives, to use the awk- ward current terminology, produce the material structure of society or vice versa, is just the question in dispute. As was remarked above, this question cannot be settled by an ex parte answer. But idealism falls into an error precisely identical with that of materialism. Thus Paul Earth, 2 when, in attempting to refute historical materialism, he cites the illustration of the rela-
' Neur /stf. III. II, 12, 1885.
Die Gesekichtsphilosoflkie fftgels ttnJ der He^elianer bis attfAfarx und I/artmanm, Leipzig, 1890.
