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 574 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the French Revolution and we have it explained why in this period Aristotle was superseded by Plato, why Raphael and Michael Angelo put in their appearance just at this time, why in a word all the countless questions which present them- selves to the historian in connection with this tremendous spiritual revolution resolve themselves into more or less diffi- cult examples in arithmetic, all of which work out without a remainder.

And now comes the application which the moderns, Mehring, for example, have given to this play on words, " It is not con- sciousness that determines the mode of existence, but the mode of existence determines consciousness." In the monograph above cited this latest champion of historical materialism in Germany says : "Precisely the assumption that men are led to eat, drink, and lodge by thought, that by philosophy they are brought to economy, is demonstrably the most arbitrary of premises, and accordingly historical idealism leads to the most miraculous historical combinations" (p. 476). The implication is that the reverse is correct ; namely, that through eating, drinking, and lodging men come to thought, through economy they come to philosophy.

The absurdity of this proposition is too evident too require proof. It rests, however, primarily upon the fact that Mehring and the other materialistic historians do not make perfectly clear the notion with which the proposition is concerned. Most assuredly, if it should be asserted that human beings first think and afterwards eat, the meaning being that systematic thought precedes eating, there would be little need of profound specula- tion to make this view ridiculous. But nobody has ever indulged in such an assertion ; no more has anybody asserted that philosophy precedes economy ; as a department of litera- ture, philosophy is antecedent, to be sure, but not as a historic social fact.

The thing in point therefore, in the first place, is to deter- mine what is here understood by eating, drinking, and lodging on the one hand, and by thinking on the other. We may