Page:The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.djvu/303

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

Notes

repeating the following remark of J. A. Rowntree (Quakerism, Past and Present, pp. 95-6), to which E. Bernstein has called my attention: "Is it merely a coincidence, or is it a consequence, that the lofty profession of spirituality made by the Friends has gone hand in hand with shrewdness and tact in the transaction of mundane affairs? Real piety favours the success of a trader by insuring his integrity and fostering habits of prudence and forethought, important items in obtaining that standing and credit in the commercial world, which are requisites for the steady accumulation of wealth" (see the following essay). "Honest as a Huguenot" was as proverbial in the seventeenth century as the respect for law of the Dutch which Sir W. Temple admired, and, a century later, that of the English as compared with those Continental peoples that had not been through this ethical schooling.

113. Well analysed in Bielschowsky's Goethe, II, chap. xviii. For the development of the scientific cosmos Windelband, at the end of his Blütezeit der deutschen Philosophie (Vol. II of the Gesch. d. Neueren Philosophie), has expressed a similar idea.

114. Saints' Everlasting Rest, chap. xii.

115. "Couldn't the old man be satisfied with his $75,000 a year and rest? No! The frontage of the store must be widened to 400 feet. Why? That beats everything, he says. In the evening when his wife and daughter read together, he wants to go to bed. Sundays he looks at the clock every five minutes to see when the day will be over—what a futile life!" In these terms the son-in-law (who had emigrated from Germany) of the leading dry-goods man of an Ohio city expressed his judgment of the latter, a judgment which would undoubtedly have seemed simply incomprehensible to the old man. A symptom of German lack of energy.

116. This remark alone (unchanged since his criticism) might have shown Brentano (op. cit.) that I have never doubted its independent significance. That humanism was also not pure rationalism has lately again been strongly emphasized by Borinski in the Abhandl. der Münchener Akad. der Wiss., 1919.

117. The academic oration of v. Below, Die Ursachen der Reformation (Freiburg, 1916), is not concerned with this problem, but with that of the Reformation in general, especially Luther. For the question dealt with here, especially the controversies which have grown out of this study, I may refer finally to the work of Hermelink, Reformation und Gegenreformation, which, however, is also primarily concerned with other problems.

118. For the above sketch has deliberately taken up only the relations in which an influence of religious ideas on the material culture is really beyond doubt. It would have been easy to proceed beyond that to a regular construction which logically deduced everything characteristic of modern culture from Protestant rational-

283