A reader who wanted to get to grips with this (not very fruitful) reply would have to be not only ‘thoughtful’, but above all patient enough to refer to my essay on every point to find out what I said and what I omitted to say. He would surely then be astonished at the claim that I had not ‘seen’ the elementary ‘methodological’ principles and problems of historical causation that my critic presents to me above in this patronising way. And he would be astonished that I had therefore ‘offered nothing’ by way of reflection on the decisive causal questions of my study. This claim is all the more astonishing in view of the purely aprioristic way my critic believes he can treat these problems himself, knowing as he does absolutely nothing about the matter in question – not even the most general literary characteristics of the sources. In his supposedly ‘methodological’ remarks, he calls them ‘books of religious devotion’ and then confuses these with ‘dogmatic systems’. Here he lacks knowledge of the subject-matter. He simply does not know that the decisive sources for my account of the influences on conduct of life (alongside other sources which I used only where a concrete question demanded them) arose from collections of responses relating directly to quite concrete practical questions posed to the clergy (at that time the most universal counsellors any epoch has known). These sources had nothing whatever to do with ‘devotional or ‘dogmatic’ purposes but much more with problems of how to organise one's daily life [Problemen der alltäglichen Lebensgestaltung], which they illustrate like few other sources. His ‘methodological’ views on what a literature completely unfamiliar to him can at ‘at most’ prove, and what not, must therefore be of little significance. And if he pronounces as inconsequential on grounds of ‘generality’ my remark about modern people's difficulty imagining themselves dealing with practical questions of life of that time and the way these were influenced by religious motives, I will gladly rephrase my remark: I will state more precisely that he undoubtedly lacks this ability. However, I scarcely still dare hope to win him over to my views. For his question of why, despite plausible reasons, one ought to resist recognising such an influence (in the way I have portrayed it), is, for him personally, very easy to answer.