Page:The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.djvu/27

 be assigned to the former. It is arguable, at least, that, instead of Calvinism producing the spirit of Capitalism, both would with equal plausibility be regarded as different effects of changes in economic organisation and social structure.

It is the temptation of one who expounds a new and fruitful idea to use it as a key to unlock all doors, and to explain by reference to a single principle phenomena which are, in reality, the result of several converging causes. Weber's essay is not altogether free, perhaps, from the defects of its qualities. It appears occasionally to be somewhat over-subtle in ascribing to intellectual and moral influences developments which were the result of more prosaic and mundane forces, and which appeared, irrespective of the character of religious creeds, wherever external conditions offered them a congenial environment. "Capitalism" itself is an ambiguous, if indispensable, word, and Weber's interpretation of it seems sometimes to be open to the criticism of Professor Sée, that he simplifies and limits its meaning to suit the exigencies of his argument. There was no lack of the "capitalist spirit" in the Venice and Florence of the fourteenth century, or in the Antwerp of the fifteenth. Its development in Holland and England, it might not unreasonably be argued, had less to do with the fact that they, or certain social strata in them, accepted the Calvinist version of the Reformation, than with large economic movements and the social changes produced by them.