This point is not without interest and may be explained more in detail. If _economic_ be understood in its strict sense, for example, in the sense in which it is employed in pure economics, _i.e._, if by it be meant the axiom according to which all men seek the greatest satisfaction with the least possible effort, it is plain that to say that this _factor_ plays a part (essential, dominant, or equal to that of the others) in social life, would tell us nothing concrete. The economic axiom is a very general and purely a formal principle of conduct. It is inconceivable that anyone should act without applying, well or ill, the very principle of every action, _i.e._, the economic principle. Worse still it _economic_ be taken in the sense which, as we shall see, Professor Stammler gives to it. He understands by this word: 'all concrete social facts'; in which sense it would at once become absurd to assert that the economic factor, _i.e._, _all social facts in the concrete_ dominated, a part of these facts! Thus in order to give a meaning to the word _economic_ in this proposition, it is necessary to leave the abstract and formal; to assign definite ends to human action; to have in mind an 'historical man,' or rather the average man of history, or of a longer or shorter period of history; to think, for example, of the need for _bread_, for _clothes_, for _sexual relations_, for the so-called _moral satisfactions_, esteem, vanity, power and so on. The phrase _economic factor_ now refers to groups of concrete facts, which are built up in common speech, and which have been better defined from the actual application made of the above-mentioned propositions in historical narrative and in the practical programmes of Marx and his followers. In the main, this is recognised by Professor Stammler himself when he gives an admirable explanation of the current meaning of the expressions: _economic facts_ and _political facts_, revolutions _more political than economic_ and vice versa. Such distinctions, he says, can only be understood in the concrete, in reference to the aims pursued by the different sections of society, and to the special problems of social life. According to him, however, Marx's work does not deal with such _trifling matters_: as, for instance, that so-called economic life influences ideas, science, art and so on: old lumber of little consequence. Just as philosophical materialism does not consist in the assertion that bodily facts have an influence over spiritual, but rather in the making of these latter a mere appearance, without reality, of the former: so historical materialism must consist in asserting that economics is the true _reality_ and that law is a fallacious _appearance_.