Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/592

 578 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

tion between the Osmanlis and the Maygars, says : "Christian- ity, attributing higher value to spiritual forces, spurred the Mag- yars to higher intellectual development, while Islam, having a smaller spiritual content, made the Osmanlis incapable of com- petition with Christian people" (p. 57). This assertion is his- torically incorrect and methodologically false. It is in the first place untrue that Christianity attributes higher value than Islam to spiritual forces. With quite as much authority we might assert the contrary. More than that, it is a decided mistake to attempt to explain the entire complexity of the history involved by the one factor of religion. We may easily name numerous Christian peoples who have been under the same religious influ- ence and have still not succeeded in reaching any remarkable degree of culture, either in material or in spiritual respects. That the spiritual content of Christianity promotes and encour- ages material culture is by no means an impregnable fact as Earth seems to assume. Spanish Catholicism with its highly spiritual content, for example, the Inquisition and the auto da ft, may be mentioned in qualification. Earth here employs an hypothesis quite as unfounded and unscientific as that of Mehr- ing and Kautsky, when they declare that the rise and progress of Christianity was determined only by the devastating and pauperizing latifundia in ancient Rome. This is leaning alto- gether too much to one side. Such hypotheses, in attempting to explain everything finally, as a rule explain nothing.

According to the foregoing explanation historical material- ism reduces to a mere method of investigation, but even in this relation it is far from being all that is necessary ; we can by no means allow that it is a comprehensive, well-grounded philosophy of history. A philosophy of history in a comprehensive sense is still in Germany, and elsewhere as well, a demand upon thinkers. A very important attempt to lay the basis of such a a philosophy has been made by Georg Simmel. 1 The thing which has been most evidently lacking in the philosophy of his- tory and in thought upon social problems in general is a turn-

1 Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, Berlin, 1892.