ation of the
theory to religion is analogous to its application to historical events.
To say that a given religion assumes the form it does as an unconscious
reflex of the environment in which it is produced, is no more a denial
of that religion than to say that the Reformation arose out of economic
and social conditions, and not out of an idea in Luther's mind, is a
denial of the fact that there was a Reformation, or that the
Reformation benefited the people. The value of the theory to the study
of religions and religious movements is not less than to the study of
history. Does anybody pretend that we can understand Christianity
without taking into account the Roman Empire; or that we can understand
Catholicism without knowing something of the economic life of medieval
Europe; or Methodism without knowing the social condition of England in
Wesley's day?[76]

In one of the very earliest of his writings upon the subject, some
comments upon the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, and intended to form
the basis of a separate work, we find Marx insisting that man is not a
mere automaton, driven irresistibly by blind economic forces. He says:
"The materialistic doctrine, that men are the products of conditions and
education, different men, therefore, the products of other conditions
and changed education, _forgets that circumstances may be altered by
men, and that the educator has himself to be educated_."[77] Thus early
we see the master taking a position entirely at variance with those of
his disciples who would claim that the human factor has no influence
upon historical development, that man is without power over his own
destiny. From that position Marx never departed. Both he and Engels
recognized the human character of the problem, and the futility of
attempting to reduce all the processes of history and human progress to
one sole basic cause. And in no case, so far as I am aware, has either
of them attempted to do this.

In another place, Marx contends that "men make their own history, but
they make it not of their own accord or under self-chosen conditions,
but under given and transmitted conditions. The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a mountain upon the brain of the living."[78]
Here, again, the influence of the human will is not denied, though its
limitations are indicated. This is the application to social man of the
theory of limitations of the will commonly accepted as applying to
individuals. Man i