Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/589

 THE PRESENT STATUS OF SOCIOLOGY IN GERMANY 575

easily conceive of the eating of grass or of wild fruits, of the drinking of water and of lodging in caves without thought that is, without processes of reasoning with abstract concep- tions and ideas. For all this animal instinct, unconscious impulse of self-preservation, is abundantly sufficient. If, how- ever, men eat bread, and drink wine, and live in houses, there must surely have preceded an amount of intensive thought, a process of observation and reflection through a long series of generations ; all of which prepared and founded the conditions of complex and purposeful production. Here materialism is of no avail. Thought cannot be eliminated from this process of foundation, any more than it has permitted itself to be sup- planted in psychology by philosophical materialism.

The analogy is not far fetched. It has also been attempted to reduce psychology to physiology. Psychical phenomena have been regarded as physiological manifestations, and it has been attempted to confirm this hypothesis by experiments. Nobody has observed, and nobody will observe "how matter thinks ;" and from the ranks of the physiologists one of the most eminent has proclaimed, with less world-woe ( Weltschmerz) , it must be confessed, than with complacent defiance, ignorabimus!

The "psyche" has not permitted itself to be driven out of psychology, and no human eye has been able to penetrate to the "psyche," no matter how fine the glasses with which it was armed. The same fate awaits also historical materialism the latest messenger of metaphysical materialism. It will go to pieces because it will never succeed in adducing proof of its declaration that material conditions causally determine spiritual conditions.

As though they anticipate this fortune, the historical mate- rialists contend against acknowledging their derivation from the metaphysician. Thus Mehring declares that philosophical mate- rialism regards man merely as an animal ; "Historical material- ism on the contrary starts with the fact of natural science that man is not an animal merely, but a social animal, that he arrives at consciousness only in the community of social combinations