Comment on Professor Kolb's Reply

Abstract

dered in terms of Marxian images of men, Freudian images, and other purely deterministic images. The question of the adequacy of such a comparative sociology of religion remains to be determined by empirical investigation. Finally, I have difficulty in understanding what Professor Parsons means when he says that There must be a more generalized nonpositivistic image of man which can also be Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu in the sense of comprising them all. If he means that a sociological frame of reference must be capable of comprehending the behavior of members of all these faiths, I agree, and would only say that every frame of reference, Marxian, Freudian, or what not, has made this claim. If he means that Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu conceptions of man must be built into the image of man (frame of reference) as heuristic presuppositions, in the way in which I have argued for the inclusion of the JudaicChristian image, then I cannot imagine what such a frame of reference would be like. One cannot postulate simultaneously, for example, man as an entity whose reality resides in his natural and historical existence, even given an eschatological dimension to that existence, and man as an entity whose natural and historical existence is illusion and whose reality resides in the ultimate dissolution of self. The data will be ordered in a different way, if one believes that man's central empirical problem is the threat of meaninglessness to the ego and the resultant egocentricity, than if one believes that the empirical is not to be taken seriously, that man's central problem is that he is an ego and that the solution is to escape from the self rather than from selfcenteredness.