[581] devaluation, from the point of view of higher or lower art^a, but from the point of view of good art in all of them, which shows a tremendous transformation of the interpretation of the human countenance in relationship to the development of the economic^b realm. Therefore, if you, write a story of portrait painting and leave out the economic foundation, then you do something which cannot be justified and which makes the whole story a matter of living in thin air. The same is true of the history^c of religion, the history of the Church. You canNOT DERIVE the Reformation^d (as has often been done by Marxist writers) from the fights between the upper classes in the south German^e cities and the lower classes in the guilds, the dissolution of the guilds, and all this. This has been done, and there is some truth in it. I think the best way in which it has been done is Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom. But there also, the limits become visible. In the moment in which you DERIVE the contents of the Reformation from these structural changes in the trading cities in Germany and northern Italy, in the moment in which you do this you never reach the reality of the Reformation, although you make understandable special trends in the development. All this could be carried through almost indefinitely, but I want to stop it and want to sum it up in the concept^f of society^g creating culturally as a living Gestalt^h--you know that word from Gestalt psychology,ⁱ and it has also been used in sociology^j, and even in physics^k. It can be translated not so easily, and therefore it has been introduced by the psychologists into the English^l language--if a translation were possible, we would need two words, namely ''living structure^m.''