Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/671

Rh the race, we are introducing a subjective idea into reality. Indeed, it will depend altogether on the purely subjective evaluation of a certain idea whether we see progress in history or not. This idea also presupposes the existence of an original force or substance, a unified subject which persists through all the vicissitudes of life and is, as it were, the bearer and the cause of the psychical processes underlying the external facts. Now, though these categories have no worth as principles of knowledge, they still possess a practical value which makes it impossible to discard them. The historian is governed by an idea of value, when he subjects the immense mass of events to the sifting process, selecting some, neglecting others. It is an illusion to suppose that we can altogether dispense with these conditions and restrict ourselves entirely to the facts. The bare facts themselves, unrelated to some idea accounted valuable by us, would carry no interest with them. There is no historical reflection which does not "go behind the returns." Even the materialistic conception of history is not free from these unavoidable prejudices. When it interprets every historical movement as a phenomenon provoked by the conflict of economical interests, it sets up a principle which we cannot read out of the empirical data themselves. It passes from our conscious acts to a substratum of the unconscious. Considered as explanatory principles, all these speculations continue to be worthless, but in so far as they satisfy certain moral, aesthetical, and religious impulses, they are not without their use.

Dr. Simmel's book is a welcome contribution to the Philosophy of History. Notwithstanding the difficult nature of the subject, the author succeeds in stating his conclusions in a manner both lucid and suggestive. Occasional examples drawn from historical and economic literature aid in making clear certain points that might otherwise seem obscure to some. The reader will encounter no difficulties except, perhaps, in the second chapter, the abstruseness of whose subject-matter requires earnest application on the part of the student. One might, therefore, possibly demand a little more clearness and precision in this connection. Thus there can be no doubt that the writer sees no theoretical impossibility in the detection of real historical laws, yet his language is at times not definite enough to satisfy a person reading the book for the first time.

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The question of this pamphlet is between the philosophy which seeks to free epistemology from all dependence on the results of psychology,