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human mind. In this case he will try to replace the social conditions under which he lives with others and by his action prepare the way for a reshaping of social life.
    However fully man may recognize cosmic laws he will never be able to change them, because they are not his work. But every form of his social existence, every social institution which the past has bestowed on him as a legacy from remote ancestors, is the work of men and can be \ changed by human will and action or made to serve new ends. Only such \ an understanding is truly revolutionary and animated by the spirit of the \ coming ages. Whoever believes in the necessary sequence of all historical events sacrifices theTuture to the past. He explains the phenomena of social life, but he does not change them. In this respect all fatalism is alike, whether of a religious, political or economic nature. Whoever is caught in its snare is robbed thereby of life's most precious possession; the impulse to act according to his own needs. It is especially dangerous when fatalism appears in the gown of science, which nowadays so often replaces the cassock of the theologianj therefore we repeat: The causes which underlie the processes of social life have no t hing in common with the laws of ^physical and mechanical natural event s, for they are purely the results o f hum arTpurpose , which_isjor explicable__b y scientific methods. To misinterpret this fact is a fatal self-deception from which only a confused notion of reality can result.
    This applies to all theories of history based on the necessity of the course of social events. It applies especially to historical material ism, which traces every historical event to the prevailing "conditions of production and tries to explain everything from that. No thinking man in this day can fail to recognize that one cannot properly evaluate an historical period
    without considering economic conditions. But much more one-sided is the view which maintains that all history is merely the result of economic conditions, under whose influence all other life phenomena have received form and imprint.
    There are thousands of events in history which cannot be explained by purely economic reasons, or by them alone. It is quite possible to bring everything within the terms of a definite scheme, but the result is usually not worth the effort. There is scarcely an historical event to whose shaping economic causes have not contributed, but economic forces are not the only motive powers which have set everything else in motion. All social phenomena are the result of a series of various causes, in most cases so inwardly related that it is quite impossible clearly to separate one from the other. We are always dealing with the interplay of various causes which, as a rule, can be clearly recognized but cannot be calculated according to scientific methods.
    There are historical events of the deepest significance for millions of men which cannot be explained by their purely economic aspects. Who would maintain, for instance, that the invasions of Alexander were caused by the conditions of production of his time? The very fact that the enormous empire Alexander cemented together with the blood of hundreds of thousands fell to ruin soon after his death proves that the military and political achievements of the Macedonian world conqueror were not historically determined by economic necessities. Just as little did they in any way advance the conditions of production of the time. When Alexander planned his wars, lust for power played a far more important part than economic necessity. The desire for world conquest had assumed actually pathological forms in the ambitious despot. His mad power obsession was a leading motive in his whole policy, the driving force of his warlike enterprises, which filled a large part of the then known world with murder and rapine. It was this power obsession which made the Caesaro-Papism of the oriental despot appear so admirable