and accumulating
evidence has been forthcoming respecting the remarkable influence of
economic facts upon all other manifestations of social activity. It is
very probable that the successful investigations in this new field have
led, temporarily, to the formation of exaggerated ideas as to the actual
value of the economic factor.

Marx, in one of his short critical notes on Feuerbach, says: "The
materialistic doctrine that men are products of conditions and
education, different men therefore products of other conditions, and a
different kind of education, forgets that circumstances may be altered
by man and that the educator has himself to be educated." In other
words, the problem, like all problems, possesses at least two
quantities; it is not a question solely of conditions, economic or
otherwise; it is a question of man and conditions, for the man is never
dissolved in the conditions, but exists as a separate entity, and these
two elements, man and conditions, act and react the one upon the other.

This is quite a different position from that taken by Lafargue in his
fight with Jaures. Lafargue there argued that economic development is
the sole determinant of progress, and pronounces in favor of economic
determinism, thus reducing the whole of history and, consequently, the
dominating human motives to but one elementary motive. Belfort Bax, the
well-known English socialist writer, makes a very clever argument
against the determinist position by comparing it with the attempts of
the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to reduce nature to one element. His
remarks are so pertinent that a brief abstract of his argument is here
quoted in his own language. He says in "Outlooks from a New Standpoint":

"The endeavor to reduce the whole of Human life to one element alone, to
reconstruct all history on the basis of Economics, as already said,
ignores the fact that every concrete reality must have a material and a
formal side,--that is, it must have at least two ultimate elements--all
reality as opposed to abstraction consisting in a synthesis. The attempt
to evolve the many-sidedness of Human life out of one of its factors, no
matter how important that factor may be, reminds one of the attempts of
the early pre-Socratic Greeks to reduce nature to one element, such as
water, air, fire, etc."

And again:

"The precise form a movement takes, be it intellectual, ethical or
artistic, I fully admit, is determined by the material