man.' The merchant has family ties just as the clergyman has an appetite. . . .
"In one sense, accordingly, there are as many methods of interpreting history as there are classes of human activities or wants. There is not only an economic interpretation of history, but an ethical, an æsthetic, a political, a jural, a linguistic, a religious and a scientific interpretation of history. Every scholar can thus legitimately regard past events form his own peculiar standpoint."[1]
Has anybody ever been across a greater mix-up of truths, half-truths, untruths, platitudes and meaninglessness? Whatever may be said as to whether or not "the strands of human life are manifold and complex," one thing is quite certain: Human life is too short for one man to attempt to unravel all this nonsense.
If all changes (Changes of what? Of environment or of environment into institutions or ideas?) must go through the human mind but do not originate there, why is all human progress at bottom mental progress? Isn't the thing which changes, and its changes which go through the human mind, at the bottom of human progress, and the mental progress, the result of these changes going through the human mind, only the top of human progress? Is not Marx right when he insists that the changes which go through the human mind are the basis of all social progress?
What does the learned professor mean by "social wants" and "collective wants," and are these terms interchangeable? And why does he slide down from social or collective wants to individual wants? Does he mean to say that the Materialistic Conception of History is incorrect because it does not explain or "take into account" individual wants? What does he mean by "technical" want as an individual want? Does he mean to say that Physical and Technical "wants" (whatever these may mean) are not material wants? Are not technical relations exclusively so-
- ↑ Edwin R. A. Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History. The Columbia University Press, 1903.
