ABSTRACT
When human beings try to understand the world in which they live, they are most often guided by common sense; occasionally they follow theoretically more ambitious inclinations. For the social sciences two of these ways of thought are especially relevant, not only as being an important part of the human reality investigated by the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of religion, but also as ways which they follow in their own attempts to describe and explain human reality. In providing the theoretical foundation of social science they replace the naive realism of common sense as well as the older mythological, religious and metaphysical canopies of common sense. They rest upon what may be called an anthropological and an epistemological axiom.
