*B li)l fli44 
 
 FEUERBA 
 
 THE ROOTS OF THE 
 SOCIA LIST PHILOS OPHY 
 
 FREDERICK EN6ELS 
 


 
 ^yW^S' 
 
fiDSSELL L'MOORE. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 Microsoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/feuerbachrootsofOOengerich 
 
FEUERBACH 
 
 THE ROOTS OF THE 
 SOCIALIST PHILOSOPHY 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERICK ENGELS 
 
 TRANSLATED WITH CRITICAL INTRODUCTION 
 BY 
 
 AUSTIN LEWIS 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 
 
 1003 
 
10AN STACK 
 
 Copyright, 1903 
 By Charles H. Kerr & Company 
 
INTRODUCTION. £ 5 
 
 This work takes us back nearly sixty 
 years, to a time when what is now a move- 
 ment of universal significance was in its 
 infancy. Hegel and the Revolution of 1848 ; 
 these are the points of departure. To the 
 former, we owe the philosophic form of the 
 socialist doctrine, to the latter, its practical 
 activity as a movement. 
 
 In the midst of the turmoil and strife and 
 apparent defeat of those days two men, 
 Marx and Engels, exiled and without influ- 
 ence, betook themselves to their books and 
 began laboriously to fashion the form and 
 doctrine of the most powerful intellectual 
 and political movement of all time. To the 
 task they brought genius, scholarship, and 
 a capacity for hard work and patient re- 
 search. In each of these qualities they were 
 supreme. Marx possessed a colossal mind ; 
 no thinker upon social subjects, not even 
 Herbert Spencer, has been his superior, for 
 the lonely socialist could claim a compre- 
 hensiveness, a grasp of relations and a 
 
4 INTRODUCTION 
 
 power of generalization, together with a 
 boldness of conception, which place him in 
 a class by himself. Engels was the able co- 
 adjutor and co-worker with Marx. He was 
 a deep and acute thinker, a most patient in- 
 vestigator, a careful writer. More practical 
 than his friend, he was better able to cope 
 with material problems, and his advice and 
 his purse were always at the disposal of 
 Marx. 
 
 The latter could hardly have worked un- 
 der more discouraging conditions. Poverty, 
 inadequate opportunities, lack of stimulat- 
 ing companionship, and the complete ab- 
 sence of any kind of encouragement and 
 such sympathy as a man of his affectionate 
 temperament craved fell to his lot. His 
 most learned works were written for groups 
 of workingmen, his most laborious efforts 
 were made without the slightest hope of rec- 
 ognition from the learned and the powerful. 
 
 All through these years Engels remained 
 his faithful friend, and helped him over 
 many hard places when family troubles and 
 straitened circumstances pressed upon the 
 old revolutionist. 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 This work is Engels' testimony with re- 
 gard to the method employed by them in 
 arriving at their philosophical conclusions. 
 It is the statement of the philosophical foun- 
 dations of modern socialism by one who 
 helped to lay them ; it is an old man 's ac- 
 count of the case upon the preparation of 
 which he has spent his entire life, for, this 
 work, short as it is, represents the results of 
 forty years of toil and persevering effort. 
 
 As the "Communist Manifesto" was a 
 gage flung with all the impetuosity of 
 youthful impatience into the face of consti- 
 tuted authority, so this is the deliberate 
 statement of the veteran, who has learned 
 the game too well to leave any openings, 
 and proceeds to the demolition of pet opin- 
 ions in a quiet, deadly and deliberate fash- 
 ion. 
 
 Step by step, the argument is built up. 
 The ghosts of old controversies long since 
 buried are raised, to show how the doctrine 
 imperishably associated with the names of 
 Marx and Engels came into existence; the 
 "Young Hegelians," the "Tuebingen 
 School, [ 9 and finally Feuerbach himself are 
 
6 INTRODUCTION 
 
 summoned from the grave to which the Rev* 
 olution of 1848 had consigned them. Still, 
 ancient history as these controversies are 
 from the German standpoint, such is the 
 backwardness of philosophy among Eng- 
 lish-speaking peoples, that we find Engels 
 exposing again and again fallacies which 
 persist even in our time, and ridiculing sen- 
 timents which we receive with approbation 
 in our political assemblies, and with mute 
 approval in our churches and conventicles. 
 
 The anti-religious note is noticeable 
 throughout, in itself an echo of controver- 
 sies long past, when the arguments of the 
 critics of the Bible were creating now fury, 
 now dismay, throughout Christendom, be- 
 fore the Higher Criticism had become re- 
 spected, and before soi-disant sceptics could 
 continue to go solemnly to church. 
 
 Moreover, the work was written in Ger- 
 man for German workmen for whom re- 
 ligion has not the same significance as it 
 apparently still continues to possess for the 
 English-speaking people, whose sensitive- 
 ness upon the subject appears to have out- 
 lived their faith. However that may be, 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 religious bodies possess a curious and per- 
 haps satisfactory faculty of absorbing the 
 truths of science, and still continuing to ex- 
 ist, and even to thrive, upon what the inex- 
 perienced might easily mistake for a deadly 
 diet. 
 
 Under the circumstances there is no rea- 
 son why Engels ' remarks should affect even 
 the timorous, although it must be remem- 
 bered that a very able English socialist phi- 
 losopher is reputed to have damaged his 
 chances irretrievably by an ill-judged quo- 
 tation from Mr. Swinburne. 
 
 It must be confessed that the occasional 
 bitterness in which Engels indulges is to 
 be deplored, in a work of so essentially in- 
 tellectual a character, but it is little to be 
 wondered at. His contempt for univer- 
 sity professors and the pretentious culti- 
 vated classes, who claim so much upon such 
 slight grounds, is not strange, when we con- 
 sider the honest labors of himself and his 
 colleagues and the superficial place-hunt- 
 ing of the recognized savants. He loves 
 learning for its own sake, for the sake of 
 truth and scientific accuracy, and he cannot 
 
8 INTRODUCTION 
 
 feel anything but scorn for those who use 
 it as a means to lull the consciences of the 
 rich, and to gain place and power for them- 
 selves. The degradation of German philos- 
 ophy affects him with a real sorrow; the 
 scholar is outraged at the mockery. * ' Ster- 
 ility, " ' * eclecticism, ' ' these are the terms 
 in which he sums up the teachings of the 
 official professors, and they are almost too 
 gentle to be applied to the dispiriting and 
 disheartening doctrines which are taught 
 to the English-speaking student of to-day 
 under the name of economics or philosophy. 
 
 In the first part of his pamphlet, for it is 
 little more in size, Engels gives a short and 
 concise account of the work of Hegel and 
 the later Hegelian School. He shows how 
 the philosophy of Hegel has both a con- 
 servative and a radical side and how con- 
 servatives and radicals alike might, (as a 
 matter of fact they did), each derive sup- 
 port from his teachings, according to the 
 amount of stress laid respectively upon the 
 great divisions of his work, the "System" 
 and the "Dialectic." 
 
INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 The Extreme Left developed through the 
 application of the dialectic, and applied the. 
 philosophic doctrine thus derived to the 
 criticism of existing political and religious 
 institutions. This resulted in the gradual 
 throwing away of the abstract part of the 
 Hegelian philosophy, and in the study of 
 facts and phenomena to an ever-increasing 
 degree. 
 
 Marx had, in his youth, allied himself 
 with the ' ' Young Hegelians, ' ' as this school 
 was called, and this fact had no slight in- 
 fluence upon his subsequent career. His 
 critics lay the blame for much of the ob- 
 scurity of language from which ' ' Capital ' ' 
 in particular suffers, at the door of this 
 training. His painful elaboration of thesis, 
 antithesis, and synthesis, his insistence 
 upon the dialectic, and his continual use of 
 the Hegelian philosophical expressions are 
 due to his earlier controversial experiences. 
 Still, on the other hand, *his patient inves- 
 tigation of actual facts, his insistence on 
 the value of positive knowledge as com- 
 pared with abstract theory, and his diligent 
 and persistent use of blue-books and statis- 
 
10 INTRODUCTION 
 
 tics, were in a great measure results of the 
 same training. 
 
 Now and again, we find Engels in this 
 work displaying remarkable controversial 
 acumen, as in his discussion of the phrase, 
 "All that is real is reasonable, and all that 
 is reasonable is real" (Alles was wirklich 
 1st, ist vernuenftig, und alles was vernuenf- 
 tig ist, ist wirklich). From this expression, 
 by the development of the Hegelian argu- 
 ment, he arrives at the conclusion involved 
 in the statement that the value of a social 
 or political phenomenon is its transitori- 
 ness, the necessity of its disappearance. 
 Hence the abolition of dogmatic statement 
 and mere subjective reasoning in the realm 
 of philosophy, the destruction of the old 
 school of which Kant was the chief expo- 
 nent, and the creation of a new school the 
 most advanced teachers of which were, as 
 they still are, the materialistic socialists, of 
 whom Engels and Marx are the chief. 
 
 The object of this historical sketch is to 
 show the origin of Feuerbach's philosophy 
 as well as of that of Marx and Engels. As 
 the fight between the Young Hegelians and 
 
INTRODUCTION 11 
 
 the conservatives grew hotter, the radicals 
 were driven back upon the English-French 
 materialism of the preceding century. This 
 was embarrassing for followers of Hegel, 
 who had been taught to regard the material 
 as the mere expression of the Idea. Feuer- 
 bach relieved them from the contradiction. 
 He grasped the question boldly and threw 
 the Hegelian abstraction completely to one 
 side. His book, "Wesen des Christen- 
 thums, ,, in which his ideas were set forth, 
 became immediately popular, and an Eng- 
 lish translation, which was widely read, 
 was made of it by George Eliot under the 
 title of "Essence of Christianity. ' } 
 
 Engels is by no means grudging of ex- 
 pressions of appreciation with regard to 
 this work, and its effects both upon himself 
 and the educated world in general. This 
 " unendurable debt of honor' ' paid, how- 
 ever, he proceeds to attack the idealistic hu- 
 manitarianism which Feuerbach had made 
 the basis and sanction of his ethical theo- 
 ries. 
 
 Although Feuerbach had arrived at the 
 materialistic conclusion, he expressed him- 
 
12 INTRODUCTION 
 
 self as unable to accept materialism as a 
 doctrine. He says that as far as the past 
 is concerned he is a materialist, but, for the 
 future, he is not so— "Backward I am in 
 agreement with the materialists, forward 
 not"— a statement which impels Engels to 
 examine' the materialism of the eighteenth 
 century, which he finds purely mechanical, 
 without any conception of the universe as a 
 process, and therefore utterly inadequate 
 for the philosophic needs of the period at 
 which Feuerbach wrote; for by that time 
 the advance of science, and the greater pow- 
 ers of generalization, arising from patient 
 experimentation, and the development of 
 the evolutionary theory, had rendered the 
 eighteenth century views evidently absurd. 
 The "vulgarising peddlers (vulgarisiren- 
 den Hausirer) come in for a great deal of 
 contempt at the hands of Engels. These 
 were the popular materialists— "the blatant 
 atheists, ' 9 who, without scientific knowledge 
 and gifted with mere oratory or a popular 
 style of writing, used every advance of 
 science as a weapon of attack upon the Cre- 
 ator and popular religion. Engels sneers 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 at these as not being scientists at all, but 
 mere tradesmen dealing in pseudo-scientific 
 wares. He calls their occupation a trade, a 
 business (Geschaeft). Of the same class was 
 that host of secularist lecturers who at one 
 time thronged the lecture platforms of the 
 English-speaking countries and of whom 
 Bradlaugh and Ingersoll were in every way 
 the best representatives. These secularists 
 have now ceased to exercise any influence, 
 and the Freethought societies, at one time 
 so numerous, have now practically disap- 
 peared. In accordance with the theories as 
 set forth by Engels they were bound to dis- 
 appear; their teachings had no real bear- 
 ing upon social progress, they contributed 
 nothing of any scientific value to modern 
 thought, and as Engels carefully shows, the 
 reading of history by these lecturers was 
 vitiated by a lack of scientific grasp, and 
 inability to take a rational view of the great 
 principles of historical development. 
 
 In the third part of this little book Engels 
 deals with a very interesting question which 
 still disturbs the minds of philosophers, 
 and concerning which much discussion goes 
 
14 INTRODUCTION 
 
 on even among the materialists ; that is the 
 question as to the effect of religion upon 
 social progress. Feuerbach had made the 
 statement that periods of social progress 
 are marked by religious changes. He uses 
 religion as a synonym for human love, forc- 
 ing the meaning of the word religion from 
 the Latin i ' religare, ' ' "to tie," in order to 
 give it an etymological and derivative mean- 
 ing in support of his statement, a contro- 
 versial trick for which he is rebuked by 
 Engels. The declaration that great histor- 
 ical revolutions are accompanied by reli- 
 gious changes is declared by Engels not to 
 be true, except in a limited degree as re- 
 gards the three great world-religions— 
 Christianity, Mahommedanism and Bud- 
 dhism. 
 
 Engels declared that the change in reli- 
 gion simultaneous with economic and polit- 
 ical revolution stopped short with the bour- 
 geois revolt which was made without any 
 appeal to religion whatsoever. It is evident 
 that this is not entirely true, for in the 
 English-speaking countries, at all events, 
 not only the bourgeois but frequently also 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 the proletarian movements attempt to jus- 
 tify themselves from Scripture. The teach- 
 ings of the Bible and the Sermon on the 
 Mount are frequently called to the aid of the 
 revolutionary party; Christian Socialists, 
 in the English and American, not the conti- 
 nental sense of the term, as such are ad- 
 mitted to the International Congresses ; and 
 other evidences of the compatibility of reli- 
 gion with the proletarian movement can be 
 traced. 
 
 But in the broader sense of his statement 
 Engels is undoubtedly correct. The prole- 
 tarian movement, unlike that of the bour- 
 geois, has produced no definite religious 
 school, it has not claimed any particular set 
 of religious doctrines as its own. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, there appears to be an ever-wid- 
 ening chasm between the Church and the la- 
 borer, a condition of affairs which is fre- 
 qently deplored in religious papers. The 
 famous Papal Encyclical on Labor was cer- 
 tainly intended to retain the masses in the 
 Church, and the formation of trades unions 
 under the influence of the priests was a log- 
 ical conclusion from the teachings of the 
 
16 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Papal Encyclical. But such religious move- 
 ments are in no sense representative of the 
 working-class movement; in fact they are 
 resented and antagonized by the regular 
 proletarian movement which proceeds un- 
 der the leadership of the Socialists. 
 
 Feuerbach's exaltation of humanitarian- 
 ism, as a religion, is derided by Engels in 
 a semi-jocular, semi-serious manner, for his 
 statement that Feuerbach's ideals can be 
 completely realized on the Bourse, cannot 
 be taken seriously. Engels ' clear-sighted- 
 ness with regard to the ineffectiveness of a 
 purely humanitarian religion is very re- 
 markable, although the forty years ' addi- 
 tional experience which he had over Feuer- 
 bach was a great advantage to him in esti- 
 mating the actual value of humanitarian re- 
 ligion as an influence in human affairs. 
 Since the time of Feuerbach various expe- 
 riments in the direction of a religion based 
 entirely on Love have been tried, and none 
 of them has succeeded. Positivism or its 
 religious side has been a failure. It has 
 appealed to a small set of men, some of 
 whom are possessed of great ability and 
 
INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 have accomplished much, but as a religion 
 in any adequate sense of the word positiv- 
 ism will be admitted a failure by its most 
 sincere adherents. Brotherhood Churches, 
 the Church of Humanity, the People's 
 Church, and other like organizations have 
 been formed having the same humanitarian 
 basis, professing to cultivate a maximum of 
 love with a minimum of faith, and have 
 failed to impress ordinary men and women. 
 [Theosophy, a system of oriental mysticism 
 based on an abstract conception of the 
 brotherhood of man, has also put forth its 
 claims to notice, on the grounds of its broad 
 humanitarianism. None of these humani- 
 tarian religions, however, appear to satisfy 
 the needs of the times, which do not seem 
 to demand any humanitarian teachings. The 
 only religions which evidently persist are 
 the dogmatic, those appealing undisguised- 
 ly to faith, and even these do not maintain 
 their proletarian following. 
 
 Engels ' remarks appear to be more than 
 justified by the facts of to-day, for so far 
 from the proletarian forming a new religion 
 representing his needs on the ideological" 
 
18 INTRODUCTION 
 
 field, he appears to be increasingly desir- 
 ous of releasing himself from the bands of 
 any religion whatever, and substituting in 
 place of it practical ethics and the teachings 
 of science. Thus we are informed that five 
 out of six of the working classes of Berlin, 
 who attend any Sunday meetings whatever, 
 are to be found in the halls of the Social 
 Democratic Party, listening to the lectures 
 provided by that organization. 
 
 The revolutionary character of Feuer- 
 bach 's philosophy is not maintained in his 
 ethic, which Engels declares with much 
 truth to be no better than that of his prede- 
 cessors, as the basis on which it stands is 
 no more substantial. Feuerbach fails as a 
 teacher of practical ethics ; he is smothered 
 in abstraction and cannot attain to any 
 reality. 
 
 "With the last part of the work Engels 
 abandons the task of criticising Feuerbach, 
 and proceeds to expound his own philos- 
 ophy. 
 
 With absolute candor and modesty he 
 gives Marx credit for the theory of the ma- 
 terialistic conception of history, upon the 
 
INTRODUCTION 19 
 
 enunciation and proof of which he had him- 
 self worked almost incessantly ever since 
 the first idea of the theory had occurred to 
 them, forty years prior to the time when he 
 wrote this work. The footnote to the first 
 page of the fourth part is the testimony of 
 a collaborator to the genius of his fellow- 
 workman, an example of appreciation and 
 modest self-effacement which it would not 
 be easy to match, and to which literary men 
 who work together are not over-prone. 
 Nothing else could bear more eloquent testi- 
 mony to the loftiness of character and sin- 
 cerity of purpose of these two exiles. 
 
 The Marxian philosophy of history is 
 clearly stated, and so fully explained by 
 Engels that there is no need to go over the 
 ground again, and there only remains to 
 call attention to some of the modern devel- 
 opments in the direction of rigidity of inter- 
 pretation, and to the exaggeration of the 
 broad theory of the predominance of the 
 economic factor into a hard and fast doc- 
 trine of economic determinism. 
 
 When we examine the claims of Engels 
 on behalf of the materialistic doctrine it 
 
20 INTRODUCTION 
 
 will be found that they are not by any 
 means of such a nature as to warrant the 
 extreme conclusions of subsequent socialist 
 publicists and leaders. It must be remem- 
 bered that the subject of the influence of 
 economic conditions on religious and polit- 
 ical phenomena has been closely examined 
 of late years and continual and accumulat- 
 ing evidence has been forthcoming respect- 
 ing the remarkable influence of economic 
 facts upon all other manifestations of social 
 activity. It is very probable that the suc- 
 cessful investigations in this new field have 
 led, temporarily, to the formation of exag- 
 gerated ideas as to the actual value of the 
 economic factor. 
 
 Marx, in one of his short critical notes on 
 Feuerbach, says: "The materialistic doc- 
 trine that men are products of conditions 
 and education, different men therefore 
 products of other conditions, and a different 
 kind of education, forgets that circum- 
 stances may be altered by man and that the 
 educator has himself to be educated.' ' In 
 other words, the problem, like all problems, 
 possesses at least two quantities ; it is not a 
 question solely of conditions, economic or 
 otherwise ; it is a question of man and con- 
 
INTRODUCTION 21 
 
 ditions, for the man is never dissolved in 
 the conditions, but exists as a separate en- 
 tity, and these two elements, man and con- 
 ditions, act and react the one upon the 
 other. 
 
 This is quite a different position from 
 that taken by Lafargue in his fight with 
 Jaures. Lafargue there argued that eco- 
 nomic development is the sole determinant 
 of progress, and pronounces in favor of eco- 
 nomic determinism, thus reducing the whole 
 of history and, consequently, the dominat- 
 ing human motives to but one elementary 
 motive. Belfort Bax, the well-known Eng- 
 lish socialist writer, makes a very clever 
 argument against the determinist position 
 by comparing it with the attempts of the 
 pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to reduce 
 nature to one element. His remarks are so 
 pertinent that a brief abstract of his argu- 
 ment is here quoted in his own language. 
 He says in "Outlooks from a New Stand- 
 point": 
 
 "The endeavor to reduce the whole of 
 Human life to one element alone, to recon- 
 struct all history on the basis of Economics, 
 
22 INTRODUCTION 
 
 as already said, ignores the fact that every 
 concrete reality must have a material and 
 a formal side,— that is, it must have at least 
 two ultimate elements— all reality as op- 
 posed to abstraction consisting in a syn- 
 thesis. The attempt to evolve the many- 
 sidedness of Human life out of one of its 
 factors, no matter how important that factor 
 may be, reminds one of the attempts of the 
 early pre-Socratic Greeks to reduce nature 
 to one element, such as water, air, fire, etc." 
 
 And again: 
 
 * ' The precise form a movement takes, be 
 it intellectual, ethical or artistic, I fully ad- 
 mit, is determined by the material circum- 
 stances of the society in which it acquires 
 form and shape, but it is also determined 
 by those fundamental psychological tenden- 
 cies which have given it birth." 
 
 Enrico Ferri, the famous Italian mem- 
 ber of the Chamber of Deputies and crimi- 
 nologist, appears to be at one with Bax 
 in this matter. He says, quoting from a 
 recent translation of his "Socialism and 
 Modern Science": "It is perfectly true 
 that every phenomenon as well as every in- 
 
INTRODUCTION 23 
 
 stitution— moral, juridicial or political— is 
 simply the result of the economic phenom- 
 ena and the conditions of the transitory, 
 physical and historical environments. But 
 as a consequence of that law of natural caus- 
 ality which tells us that every effect is al- 
 ways the resultant of numerous concurrent 
 causes, and not of one cause alone, and that 
 every effect becomes in its turn a cause ol 
 other phenomena, it is necessary to amend 
 and complete the too rigid form that has 
 been given to this true idea. 
 
 " Just as all psychical manifestations of 
 the individual are the result of the organic 
 conditions (temperament) and of the envi- 
 ronment in which he lives, in the same way, 
 all the social manifestations of a people are 
 the resultant of their organic conditions 
 (race) and of the environment, as these are 
 the determining causes of the given eco- 
 nomic organization which is the physical 
 basis of life. * ■ 
 
 These may be said to be fairly represen- 
 tative of the views of the opposition to the 
 extreme of economic determinism. 
 
 The whole controversy has spread over a 
 
24 INTRODUCTION 
 
 tremendous amount of ground and involves 
 much reading. Some of the chief results 
 have lately been summarized by Professor 
 Seligman in his "Economic Interpretation 
 of History." (Macmillan, 1902.) His writ- 
 ten views show a closer approximation to 
 and understanding of the teachings of the 
 socialist philosophy on this subject than 
 we have been accustomed to receive at 
 the hands of official savants, so that it would 
 seem as if the value of Marx 's work was at 
 last beginning to be appreciated even in the 
 foggy studies of the professors. Two ex- 
 tracts from the writings of Engels are 
 quoted by Professor Seligman. These ex- 
 tracts apparently go to prove that Engels 
 by no means contemplated the extreme con- 
 struction which has been placed upon the 
 doctrine, and that he would find such a con- 
 struction inconsistent with his general 
 views. 
 
 These extracts are quoted here for the 
 purpose of further elucidating the views of 
 Engels and as further explanatory of the 
 position assumed by him in the last part of 
 the work under consideration. 
 
INTRODUCTION 25 
 
 They form part of a series of articles 
 writen for the ' 6 Sozialistische Akademiker ,, 
 in 1890, and are as follows: 
 
 "Marx and I are partly responsible for 
 the fact that the younger men have some- 
 times laid more stress on the economic side 
 than it deserves. In meeting the attacks of 
 our opponents it was necessary for us to em- 
 phasize the dominant principle denied by 
 them, and we did not always have the time, 
 place, or opportunity to let the other factors 
 which were concerned in the mutual action 
 and reaction get their deserts.' 9 
 
 And in another letter to the same maga- 
 zine he says: "According to the material- 
 istic view of history, the factor which is, in 
 last instance, decisive in history is the pro- 
 duction and reproduction of actual life. 
 More than this neither Marx nor I have 
 ever asserted. But when anyone distorts 
 this so as to read that the economic factor 
 is the sole element he converts the state- 
 ment into a meaningless, abstract, absurd 
 phrase. The economic condition is the ba- 
 sis, but the various elements of the super- 
 structure—the political forms of the class- 
 
26 INTRODUCTION 
 
 contests, and their results, the constitutions 
 —the legal forms and also all the reflexes 
 of these actual contests in the brains of the 
 participants, the political, legal, philosoph- 
 ical theories, the religious views— all these 
 exert an influence on the development of the 
 historical struggles, and in many instances 
 determine their form." 
 
 Here we may leave this much disputed 
 matter for the present, as any involved dis- 
 cussion of controversial questions would be 
 out of place here. The question in its ulti- 
 mate form is merely scholastic, for not even 
 the most extreme determiniftt would hold 
 that only the economic argument must be 
 relied upon by the orators and the press of 
 the proletarian movement. Any one, how- 
 ever, who wishes to pursue the subject 
 farther can find abundant material in tho 
 already great and growing amount of liter- 
 ature in connection with it. 
 
 There is no doubt that the ideas of Marx 
 respecting the basis of historical progress 
 have already revolutionized the teaching of 
 history in the universities, although but few 
 professors have been honest enough to give 
 
INTRODUCTION 27 
 
 him credit for it. The economic factor con- 
 tinually acquires greater importance in the 
 eyes of the student of history, but the prac- 
 tical discoverer of this factor is still slighted 
 and the results of his labors are assimilated 
 with a self-satisfied hypocrisy which is, un- 
 fortunately, characteristic of the colleges of 
 the English-speaking countries. 
 
 The bourgeois writers upon socialism 
 generally content themselves with the bold 
 statement that Marx employs the dialectic 
 method of investigation and statement. This 
 is so much Greek to the ordinary reader, 
 and the subject of the dialectic as used by 
 socialist writers requires a few words of 
 explanation. 
 
 The first part of this work is very val- 
 uable, therefore, as showing what Marx and 
 Engels meant when they used the expres- 
 sion, and as declaring their estimation of 
 that method compared with that in general 
 use in their day, and always, prior to their 
 time, employed in philosophy, history and 
 economics. 
 
 A fuller and more detailed definition of 
 the dialectic as applied by Engels is given 
 
28 INTRODUCTION 
 
 by that philosopher in his famous reply to 
 Eugene Duhring known as the "Umwael- 
 zung der Wissenschaf t. ' ' In that work a 
 more thorough and patient investigation is 
 made into the sources of materialistic philos- 
 ophy of the socialist movement, for the repu- 
 tation of his antagonist appears to have act- 
 ed as a spur to Engels' faculties which cer- 
 tainly never showed to better advantage 
 than in that work. A portion of the argu- 
 ment, in fact an abstract of the general train 
 of reasoning, with the omission of the more 
 obviously controversial parts, has been re- 
 printed under the title of i ' Socialism from 
 Utopia to Science." The following quota- 
 tion is taken from the translation prepared 
 for the "People" in 1892: 
 
 "We also find, upon a closer enquiry, that 
 the two poles of an antithesis, such as posi- 
 tive and negative, are as inseparable from 
 as they are opposed to each other, and that, 
 despite their antagonism, they mutually 
 pervade each other ; and in the same way 
 we find cause and effect to be conceptions 
 whose force exists only when applied to a 
 single instance, but which, soon as we con- 
 
INTRODUCTION 29 
 
 sider that instance in its connection with 
 the cosmos, run into each other and dissolve 
 in the contemplation of that universal ac- 
 tion and reaction where cause and effect 
 constantly change places— that which is ef- 
 fect, now and here, becoming, then and 
 yonder, cause, and vice versa. 
 
 1 ' None of these processes and methods of 
 reasoning fits in the metaphysical frame^ 
 work of thought To dialectics, however, 
 which takes in the objects and their con- 
 ceivable images above all in their connec- 
 tions, their sequence, their motion, their rise 
 and decline, processes like the above are so 
 many attestations of its own method of pro- 
 cedure. Nature furnishes the test to dialec- 
 tics, and this much we must say for modern 
 natural science, that it has contributed to- 
 wards this test an extremely rich and daily 
 increasing material, whereby it has demon- 
 strated that, in the last instance, nature pro- 
 ceeds upon dialectical, not upon metaphy- 
 sical methods, that it does not move upon 
 the eternal sameness of a perpetually re- 
 curring circle, but that it goes through an 
 actual historic evolution. 
 
30 INTRODUCTION 
 
 "This new German philosophy culmi- 
 nated in the system of Hegel. There for 
 the first time— and herein consists its merit 
 —the whole natural, historic, and intellect- 
 ual world was presented as a process, i. e., 
 engaged in perpetual motion, change, trans- 
 formation and development. Viewed from 
 this standpoint, the history of mankind no 
 longer appeared as a wild tangle of sense- 
 less deeds of violence, all equally to be re- 
 jected by a ripened philosophic judgment, 
 and which it were best to forget as soon as 
 possible, but as the process of the develop- 
 ment of mankind itself— a development 
 whose gradual march, through all its stray 
 paths, and its eternal law, through all 
 its seeming fortuitousness, it now became 
 the task of the intellect to trace and to dis^ 
 cover.' ' 
 
 Kirkup, in his "History of Socialism,' ' 
 has this to say upon the dialectic method 
 of investigation as used by Marx: "In the 
 system of Marx, it means that the business 
 of enquiry is to trace the connection and 
 concatenation in the links that make up the 
 process of historic evolution, to investigate 
 
INTRODUCTION 31 
 
 now one stage succeeds another in the devel- 
 opment of society, the facts and forms of 
 human life and history not being stable and 
 stereotyped things, but the ever-changing 
 manifestations of the fluent and unresting 
 real, the course of which it is the duty of 
 science to reveal." 
 
 The translator has endeavored to render 
 the meaning of the original in as simple an 
 English form as possible, and to, generally 
 speaking, avoid technical terms. 
 
 Austin Lewis. 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 In the preface of the ' ' Critique of Polit- 
 ical Economy," published at Berlin, in 
 1859, Marx explained how we two, in 1845, 
 in Brussels, intended to work out together 
 the antagonism of our views— that is, the 
 materialistic philosophy of history, as de- 
 veloped by Marx— to the ideological Ger- 
 man philosophy, and, in fact, to compare it 
 with our present philosophic knowledge. 
 The design was carried out in the form of 
 a criticism of post-Hegelian philosophy. 
 The manuscript, two big octavo volumes, 
 had long been at its intended place of pub- 
 lication in Westphalia, when we received 
 the news that altered circumstances did not 
 permit of its being printed. We postponed 
 the publication of the manuscript indefinite- 
 ly, all the more willingly, as we had attained 
 our main object, an understanding of our 
 own position. 
 
34 AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 Since then more than forty years have 
 elapsed, and Marx has died without either 
 of us having had an opportunity of coming 
 back to the antithesis. As regards our po- 
 sition with reference to Hegel, we have ex- 
 plained that, as occasion has arisen, but, 
 nowhere, as a whole. We never came back 
 to Feuerbach, who occupies an intermediate 
 position between the philosophy of Hegel 
 and our own. 
 
 In the meantime the Marxian philosophy 
 has found champions beyond the bounda- 
 ries of Germany and of Europe, and in all 
 the languages of the civilized world. On 
 the other hand, the classic German philos- 
 ophy has had a sort of new-birth abroad, 
 particularly in England and Scandinavia, 
 and even in Germany they appear to be 
 substituting the thin soup of eclecticism 
 which seems to flow from the universities 
 under the name of philosophy. 
 
 Under these circumstances a short, com- 
 pact explanation of our relations to the 
 Hegelian philosophy, of our going forth 
 and departure from it, appears to me to be 
 more and more required. And just in the 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 35 
 
 same way a full recognition of the influence 
 which Feuerbach, more than all the other 
 post-Hegelian philosophers, had over us, 
 during the period of our youthful enthu- 
 siasm, presents itself to me as an unen- 
 durable debt of honor. I also seize the op- 
 portunity the more readily since the editor 
 of the "Neue Zeit" has asked me for a crit- 
 ical discussion of Starcke's book on Feuer- 
 bach. My work was published in the fourth 
 and fifth volumes of 1886 of that publica- 
 tion and here appears in a revised special 
 edition. 
 
 Before sending this manuscript to press 
 I once again hunted up and examined the 
 old manuscript of 1845-6. The part of it 
 dealing with Feuerbach is not complete. 
 The portion completed consists in an exposi- 
 tion of the materialistic view of history and 
 only proves how incomplete at that time 
 was our knowledge of economic history. 
 The criticism of Feuerbach 's doctrine is 
 not given in it. It was therefore unsuitable 
 for our purpose. On the other hand, I have 
 found in an old volume of Marx the eleven 
 essays on Feuerbach printed here as an ap- 
 
36 AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 pendix. These are notes hurriedly scrib- 
 bled in for later elaboration, not in the least 
 degree prepared for the press, but inval- 
 uable, as the first written form, in which is 
 planted the genial germ of the new phi- 
 losophy. Friedkich Engels. 
 
 London, 21 February, 1888. 
 
FEUERBACH 
 
 I. 
 
 The volume before us brings us at once 
 to a period which, in the matter of time, 
 lies a full generation behind us, but which 
 is as foreign to the present generation in 
 Germany as if it were quite a century old. 
 And, still, it was the period of the prepara- 
 tion of Germany for the revolution of 1848, 
 and all that has happened to us since is only 
 a continuation of 1848, only a carrying out 
 of the last will and testament of the revo- 
 lution. 
 
 Just as in France in the eighteenth, so in 
 Germany in the nineteenth century, revolu- 
 tionary philosophic conceptions introduced 
 a breaking up of existing political condi- 
 tions. But how different the two appear! 
 The French were engaged in open fight with 
 all recognized science, with the Church, fre- 
 quently also with the State, their writings 
 
38 FEUERBACH 
 
 were published beyond the frontiers in Hol- 
 land or in England, and they themselves 
 were frequently imprisoned in the Bastile. 
 The Germans, on the contrary, were profes- 
 sors, appointed instructors of youth by the 
 State, their writings, recognized text-books, 
 and their definite system of universal prog- 
 ress, the Hegelian, raised, as it were, to the 
 rank of a royal Prussian philosophy of 
 government. And behind these professors, 
 behind their pedantically obscure utter- 
 ances, in their heavy wearisome periods, 
 was it possible that the revolution could 
 conceal itself? Were not just the peo- 
 ple who were looked upon at that time 
 as the leaders of the revolution, the Lib- 
 erals, the bitterest opponents of the 
 brain-turning philosophy? But what neith- 
 er the Governmentalists nor the Liberals 
 saw, that saw, at least one man, and that 
 man was Heinrich Heine. 
 
 Let us take an example. No philosophic 
 statement has so invited the thanks of nar- 
 row-minded governments and the anger of 
 the equally narrow Liberals as the famous 
 statement of Hegel : " All that is real is rea- 
 sonable, and all that is reasonable is real." 
 
FEUERBACH 39 
 
 This was essentially the blessing of all that 
 is, the philosophical benediction of despot- 
 ism, police-government, star-chamber jus- 
 tice and the censorship. So Frederick "Wil- 
 liam III and his subjects understood it ; but, 
 according to Hegel, not everything which 
 exists is, without exception, real. The at- 
 tribute of reality belongs only to that which 
 is at the same time necessary. Reality 
 proves itself in the course of its develop- 
 ment as necessity. Any governmental act 
 —Hegel himself instances the example 
 of a certain "tax law"— by no means 
 strikes him as real in the absence of other 
 qualities. But what is necessary proves 
 itself in the last instance as reasonable also, 
 and applied to the Prussian government, 
 the Hegel doctrine, therefore, only means, 
 this state is reasonable, corresponding with 
 reason, as long as it is necessary, and if it 
 appear to us an evil, but in spite of the 
 evil still continues to exist, the evil of the 
 government finds its justification and its 
 explanation in the corresponding evil of the 
 subjects. The Prussians of that day had 
 the government which they deserved. 
 But reality, according to Hegel, is by no 
 
40 FEUERBACH 
 
 means an attribute which belongs to a given 
 social or political condition, under all cir- 
 cumstances and at all times. Quite the 
 contrary. The Roman Republic was real, 
 but the Roman Empire which replaced it 
 was also real. The French Monarchy had 
 become unreal in 1789, that is, it had lost 
 all the quality of necessity, and was so con- 
 trary to reason that it had to be destroyed 
 by the Great Revolution, of which Hegel 
 always speaks with the greatest enthusiasm. 
 Here, therefore, the monarchy was the un- 
 real, the revolution the real. So in the 
 course of progress all earlier reality be- 
 eomes unreality, loses its necessity, its 
 right of existence, its rationality; in place 
 of the dying reality comes a new vital real- 
 ity, peaceable when the old is sufficiently 
 sensible to go to its death without a strug- 
 gle, forcible when it strives against this 
 necessity. And so the Hegelian statement 
 through the Hegelian dialectic turns to its 
 opposite —all that is real in the course 
 of human history becomes in the process 
 of time irrational and is, therefore, ac- 
 cording to its destiny, irrational, and has 
 from the beginning inherited want of 
 
FEUERBACH 41 
 
 rationality, and everything which is rea- 
 sonable in the minds of men is destined to 
 become real, however much it may contra- 
 dict the apparent reality of existing condi- 
 tions. The statement of the rationality of 
 everything real dissolves itself, according 
 to the Hegelian mode of thought, in the 
 other, "All that stands has ultimately only 
 so much worth that it must fall." 
 
 But just there lay the true significance 
 and the revolutionary character of the 
 Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the con- 
 clusion of all progress since Kant, we must 
 here limit ourselves) in that it, once and for 
 all, gave the coup de grace to finiteness of 
 results of human thought and action. 
 Truth, which it is the province of philos- 
 ophy to recognize, was no longer, according 
 to Hegel, a collection of ready-made dog- 
 matic statements, which once discovered 
 must only be thoroughly learned ; truth lay 
 now in the process of knowledge itself, in 
 the long historical development of learning, 
 which climbs from lower to ever higher 
 heights of knowledge, without ever reach- 
 ing the point of so-called absolute truth, 
 where it can go no further, where it has 
 
42 FEUEKBACH 
 
 nothing more to look forward to, except tc 
 fold its hands in its lap and contemplate the 
 absolute truth already gained. And just 
 as it is in the realm of philosophic knowl- 
 edge, so is it with every other kind of 
 knowledge, even with that of practical com- 
 merce. And just as little as knowledge can 
 history find a conclusion, complete in one 
 completed ideal condition of humanity, a 
 completed society, a perfect state, are 
 things which can only exist as phantasies, 
 on the contrary, all successive historical 
 conditions are only places of pilgrimage in 
 the endless evolutionary progress of human 
 society from the lower to the higher. Every 
 step is necessary and useful for the time 
 and circumstances to which it owes its ori- 
 gin, but it becomes weak and without justi- 
 fication under the newer and higher condi- 
 tions which develop little by little in its 
 own womb, it must give way to the higher 
 form, which in turn comes to decay and 
 defeat. As the bourgeoisie through the 
 greater industry, competition, and the 
 world market destroyed the practical value 
 of all stable and anciently honored institu- 
 tions, so this dialectic philosophy destroyed 
 
FEUERBACH 43 
 
 all theories of absolute truth, and of an ab- 
 solute state of humanity corresponding with 
 them. In face of it nothing final, absolute 
 or sacred exists, it assigns mortality indis- 
 criminately, and nothing can exist before it 
 save the unbroken process of coming into 
 existence and passing away, the endless 
 passing from the lower to the higher, the 
 mere reflection of which in the brain of the 
 thinker it is itself. It has indeed also a 
 conservative side, it recognizes the suitabil- 
 ity of a given condition of knowledge and 
 society for its time and conditions, but only 
 so far. This conservatism of this philo- 
 sophical view is relative, its revolutionary 
 character is absolute, the only absolute 
 which it allows to exist. 
 
 We do not, at this point, need to go into 
 the question whether this philosophy is 
 consistent throughout with the present posi- 
 tion of natural science which predicts for 
 the earth a possible end and for its inhabit- 
 ability, a fairly certain one; which, there- 
 fore, also recognizes that in human history 
 there is not only an upshooting but also a 
 down-growing branch. We find ourseKs, 
 at any rate, still a considerable distance 
 
44 FEUERBACH 
 
 from the turning point, where the history 
 of society begins to descend, and we cannot 
 expect the Hegelian philosophy to meddle 
 with a subject which at that time science 
 had not yet placed upon the order of the 
 day. 
 
 What must, indeed, be said is this, that 
 the Hegelian development does not, accord- 
 ing to Hegel, show itself so clearly. It is a 
 necessary consequence of his method which 
 he himself has never drawn with this ex- 
 plicitness. And for this simple reason, be- 
 cause he was compelled to make a system, 
 and a system of philosophy must, in accord- 
 ance with all its understood pretensions, 
 (close somewhere with a definition of abso- 
 lute truth. So Hegel, therefore, in his logic, 
 urged that this eternal truth is nothing else 
 but the logical, that is, the historical pro- 
 cess itself ; yet in spite of this he finds him- 
 self compelled to place an end to this proc- 
 ess, since he must come to an end with his 
 system somewhere or other. He can make 
 this end a beginning again in logic, since 
 here the point of conclusion— -the absolute 
 idea, which is only absolute in so far as he 
 has nothing clear to say about it— divests it- 
 
FEUERBACH 45 
 
 self in nature, that is, becomes transformed, 
 and later on, in spirit, that is, in thought 
 and in history, comes to itself again. But 
 in the last philosophical analysis, a return 
 to the beginning is only possible in one 
 way, namely, if one place the end of history 
 in this fact, that mankind comes to a knowl- 
 edge of the absolute idea, and explain that 
 this knowledge of the absolute idea is ob- 
 tained in the Hegelian philosophy. But in 
 this way the whole dogmatic content of the 
 Hegelian philosophy in the matter of abso- 
 lute truth is explained in contradiction to 
 his dialectic, the cutting loose from all dog- 
 matic methods, and thereby the revolution- 
 ary side becomes smothered under the dom- 
 inating conservative. And what can be 
 said of philosophical knowledge can also 
 be said of historical practice. Mankind/ 
 that is, in the person of Hegel, has arrived 
 at the point of working out the absolute 
 idea, and must also practically have arrived 
 so far as to make the absolute idea a real- 
 ity. The practical political demands of the 
 abstract idea upon his contemporaries can- 
 not, therefore, be stretched too far. And so 
 we find as the conclusion of the philosophy 
 
46 FEUEBBACH 
 
 of Eights that the absolute idea shall re- 
 alize itself in that limited monarchy which 
 William III. so persistently, vainly prom- 
 ised to his subjects ; therefore, in a limited, 
 moderate, indirect control of the possessing 
 classes, suitable to the dominating small 
 bourgeois class in Germany whereby, in ad- 
 dition, the necessity to us of the existence 
 of the nobility is shown in a speculative 
 fashion. 
 
 The essential usefulness of the system is 
 sufficient to explain the manufacture of a 
 very tame political conclusion by means of 
 a thoroughly revolutionary method of rea- 
 soning. The special form of this conclu- 
 sion springs from this, as a matter of fact, 
 that Hegel was a German, and, as in the 
 case of his contemporary Goethe, he was 
 somewhat of a philistine. Goethe and 
 Hegel, each of them was an Olympian Zeus 
 in his own sphere, but they were neither of 
 them quite free from German philistinism. 
 
 But all this does not hinder the Hegelian 
 system from playing an incomparably 
 greater role than any earlier system and by 
 virtue of this role developing riches of 
 thought which are astounding even to-day. 
 
FEUEBBACH 47 
 
 Phemonology of the mind (which one may 
 parallel with embryology and palaeontol- 
 ogy of the mind), an evolution of the indi- 
 vidual consciousness, through its different 
 steps, expressed as a brief reproduction of 
 the steps through which the consciousness 
 of man has historically passed, logic, nat- 
 ural philosophy, mental philosophy, and 
 the latter worked out separately in its de- 
 tailed historical subdivisions, philosophy 
 of history, of jurisprudence, of religion, 
 history of philosophy, esthetics, etc. Hegel 
 labored in all these different historical fields 
 to discover and prove the thread of evolu- 
 tion, and as he was not only a creative 
 genius, but also a man of encyclopedic 
 learning, he was thus, from every point of 
 view, the maker of an epoch. It is self-evi- 
 dent that by virtue of the necessities of the 
 " System' ' he must very often take refuge 
 in certain forced constructions, about which 
 his pigmy opponents make such an ado 
 even at the present time. But these con- 
 structions are only the frames and scaffold- 
 ings of his work ; if one does not stop un- 
 necessarily at these but presses on further 
 into the building one will find uncounted 
 
48 FEUEEBACH 
 
 treasures which hold their full value to-day. 
 As regards all philosophers, their system is 
 doomed to perish and for this reason, be- 
 cause it emanates from an imperishable de- 
 sire of the human soul, the desire to abolish 
 all contradictions. But if all contradictions 
 are once and for all disposed of, » we have 
 arrived at the so-called absolute truth, his- 
 tory is at an end, and yet it will continue to 
 go on, although there is nothing further left 
 for it to do— thus a newer and more insolu- 
 ble contradiction. So soon as we have once 
 perceived— and to this perception no one 
 has helped us more than Hegel himself— 
 that the task thus imposed upon philosophy 
 signifies nothing different than the task that 
 a single philosopher shall accomplish what 
 it is only possible for the entire human 
 race to accomplish, in the course of its pro- 
 gressive development— as soon as we un- 
 derstand that, it is all over with philosophy 
 in the present sense of the word. In this 
 way one discards the absolute truth, unat- 
 tainable for the individual, and follows in- 
 stead the relative truths attainable by way 
 of the positive sciences, and the collection of 
 their results by means of the dialectic mode 
 
FEUEBBACH 49 
 
 of thought. With Hegel universal philoso- 
 phy comes to an end, on the one hand, be- 
 cause he comprehended in his system its 
 entire development on the greatest possible 
 scale ; on the other hand, becaxtae he showed 
 us the way, even if he did not know it him- 
 self, out of this labyrinth of systems, to a 
 real positive knowledge of the world. 
 
 One may imagine what an immense effect 
 the Hegelian philosophy produced in the 
 philosophy-dyed atmosphere of Germany. 
 The triumph lasted for ten years and by no 
 means subsided with the death of Hegel. 
 On the contrary, from 1830 to 1840 Hegel- 
 ianismi was exclusively supreme and had 
 fastened itself upon its opponents to a 
 greater or less degree. During this period 
 Hegel's* views, consciously or unconscious- 
 ly, penetrated the different sciences, and 
 saturated popular literature and the daily 
 press from which the ordinary so-called cul- 
 tured classes derive their mental pabulum* 
 But this victory down the whole line was 
 only preliminary to a conflict within its own 
 ranks. 
 
 The entire doctrine of Hegel left, as we 
 have seen, plenty of room for the bringing 
 
50 FEUERBACH 
 
 under it the most diverse practical opinions, 
 and the practical, in the then theoretic Ger- 
 many, consisted in only two things — reli- 
 gion and politics. He who laid the greatest 
 stress upon the Hegelian system, might be 
 moderately conservative in both these re- 
 spects, while he who considered the dialec- 
 tic method of the greatest importance could 
 belong to the extreme left in religions and 
 political affairs. Hegel himself, in spite of 
 the frequent outbursts of revolutionary 
 wrath in his books, was inclined, on the 
 whole, to the conservative side. His system, 
 rather than his method, had cost him the 
 hard thinking. At the end of the thirties, 
 the division in the school grew greater and 
 greater. The left wing, the so-called Young 
 Hegelians, in their fight with the pious orth- 
 odox, abandoned little by little, that marked 
 philosophical reserve regarding the burn- 
 ing questions of the day, which had up to 
 that time secured for their teachings State 
 toleration and even protection, and as in 
 1840 orthodox pietism and absolutist feudal 
 reaction ascended the throne with Frederick 
 William IV., open partisanship became una- 
 voidable. The fight was still maintained 
 
FEUERBACH 51 
 
 with philosophical weapons, but no longer 
 along abstract philosophical lines; they 
 went straight to deny the dominant religion 
 and the existing state, and although in the 
 1 ' Deutschen Jahrbuechern " the practical 
 aims were still put forward clothed in phi- 
 losophical phraseology, the younger Hege- 
 lian school threw off disguise in the"Rhein- 
 ische Zeitung, ' ' as the exponents of the phi- 
 losophy of the struggling radicals, and used 
 the cloak of philosophy only to deceive the 
 censorship. 
 
 But politics were at that time a very 
 thorny field, and so the main fight was di- 
 rected against religion. But this was also, 
 particularly since 1840, indirectly a politi- 
 cal fight. Strauss' "Leben Jesu," pub- 
 lished in 1835, had given the first cause of 
 offense. The theory therein developed re- 
 garding the origin of the gospel myths 
 Bruno Bauer later dealt with, adding the 
 additional proof that a whole series of 
 evangelical stories had been invented by 
 their authors. The fight between these two 
 was carried on under a philosophical dis- 
 guise, as a battle of mind with matter; 
 the question whether the marvellous stories 
 
52 FEUERBACH 
 
 of the gospel came into being through an 
 unconscious myth-creation in the womb of 
 society, or whether they were individually 
 invented by the evangelists broadened into 
 the question whether in the history of the 
 race, mind or matter carried the real 
 weight, and lastly came Stirner, the 
 prophet of modern anarchism— Bakunine 
 has taken very much from him— and 
 overtopped the sovereign power of con- 
 sciousness with his sovereign power of the 
 individual. 
 
 We do not follow the decomposition of the 
 Hegelian school on this side any further. 
 What is more important for us is this : The 
 fmass of the most decided young Hegelians 
 were driven back upon English-French ma- 
 terialism through the necessities of their 
 \ fight against positive religion. Here they 
 \came into conflict with their school system. 
 According to materialism, nature exists as 
 the sole reality, it exists in the Hegelian 
 system only as the alienation of the abso- 
 lute Idea, as it were a degradation of the 
 Idea ; under all circumstances, thought, and 
 its thought-product, the Idea, according to 
 this view, appears as the original, nature, 
 
FEUERBACH 53 
 
 which only exists through the condescension 
 of the Idea as the derived, and in this con- 
 tradiction they got along as well or as ill as 
 they might. 
 
 Then came Feuerbach's "Wesen des 
 Christenthums. ' ' With one blow it cut the 
 contradiction, in that it placed materialism 
 on the throne again without any circumlocu- 
 tion. Nature exists independently of all 
 philosophies. It is the foundation upon 
 which we, ourselves products of nature, are 
 built. Outside man and nature nothing ex- 
 ists, and the higher beings which our reli- 
 gious phantasies have created are only the 
 fantastic reflections of our individuality. 
 The cord was broken, the system was scat- 
 tered and destroyed, the contradiction, since 
 it only existed in the imagination, was 
 solved. One must himself have experienced 
 the delivering power of this book to get a 
 clear idea of it. The enthusiasm was univer- 
 sal, we were all for the moment followers of j 
 Feuerbaeh. How enthusiastically Marx j 
 greeted the new idea and how much he was 
 influenced by it, in spite of all his critical 
 reservations, one may read in the "Holy 
 Family." 
 
54 , FEUERBACH 
 
 The very faults of the book contributed 
 to its momentary effect. The literary, im- 
 pressive, even bombastic style secured for 
 it a very large public and was a constant 
 relief after the long years of abstract and 
 abstruse Hegelianism. The same result also 
 proceeded from the extravagant glorifica- 
 tion of love, which in comparison with the 
 insufferable sovereignty of pure reason, 
 found an excuse, if not a justification. What 
 we must not forget is, that just on these 
 two weaknesses of Feuerbach "true Social- 
 ism' ' in educated Germany fastened itself 
 like a spreading plague since 1844, and 
 set literary phrases in the place of scientific 
 knowledge, the freeing of mankind by 
 means of love in place of the emancipation 
 of the proletariat, through the economic 
 transformation of production, in short lost 
 itself in nauseous fine writing and in sickly 
 sentimentality, of the type of which class of 
 writers was Herr Karl Gruen. 
 
 We must furthermore not forget that 
 though the Hegelian school was destroyed 
 the Hegelian philosophy was not critically 
 vanquished. Strauss and Bauer took each a 
 side and engaged in polemics. Feuerbach 
 
FEUEEBACH 55 
 
 broke through the system and threw it as a 
 whole aside. But one has not finished with 
 a philosophy by simply declaring it to be 
 false, and so enormous a work as the Hegel- 
 ian philosophy which has had so tremen- 
 dous an influence upon the mental develop- 
 ment of the nation did not allow itself to 
 be put aside peremptorily. It had to be 
 destroyed in its own way, which means in 
 the way that critically destroys its form but 
 saves the new acquisitions to knowledge won 
 by it. How this was brought about we shall 
 see below. 
 
 But for the moment, the Revolution of 
 1848 put aside all philosophical discussion 
 just as unceremoniously as Feuerbach laid 
 aside Hegel. And then Feuerbach was him- 
 self crowded out. 
 
56 FEUERBACH 
 
 II. 
 
 The great foundation question of all, es- 
 pecially new, philosophies is connected with 
 the relation between thinking and being. 
 Since very early times when men, being in 
 complete ignorance respecting their own 
 bodies, and stirred by apparitions,* arrived 
 at the idea that thought and sensation were 
 not acts of their own bodies, but of a special 
 soul dwelling in the body and deserting it 
 as death, ever since then they have been 
 obliged to give thought to the relations of 
 this soul to the outside world. If it betook 
 itself from the body and lived on, there 
 was no reason to invent another death for it; 
 thus arose the conception of their immor- 
 tality, which, at that evolutionary stage, did 
 not appear as a consolation, but as fate, 
 against which a man cannot strive, and 
 often enough, as among the Greeks, as a 
 positive misfortune. Not religious desire 
 
 ♦To this very day the idea is prevalent among savages 
 and barbarians that the human forms appearing in our 
 dreams are souls which temporarily leave the body, and 
 that, therefore, the real man becomes liable for the deeds 
 done to the dreamer by his dream appearance. So Im- 
 thurm, for example, found it in 1884 among the Indians 
 in Guiana. 
 
FEUEEBACH 57 
 
 for consolation but uncertainty arising 
 from a similar universal ignorance of what 
 to associate with the soul when once it was 
 acknowledged, after the death of the body, 
 led universally to the tedious idea of per- 
 sonal immortality. Just in a similar fash- 
 ion the first gods arose, through the person- 
 ification of the forces of nature, and these 
 in the further development of the religions 
 acquired greater and greater supernatural 
 force, until by a natural process of abstrac- 
 tion, I might say of distillation, from the 
 many more or less limited and mutually lim- 
 iting gods, in the course of spiritual devel- 
 opment, at last the idea of the one all em- 
 bracing god of the monotheistic religions 
 took its place in the minds of men. 
 
 The question of the relation of thinking 
 to being, of the relation of the spirit to na- 
 ture, the highest question of universal phil- 
 osophy, has therefore, no less than all re- 
 ligion, its roots in the limited and ignor- 
 ant ideas of the condition of savagery. It 
 could first be understood, and its full sig- 
 nificance could first be grasped, when man- 
 kind awoke from the long winter sleep of 
 Christian Middle Ages. The question of the 
 
58 FEUERBACH 
 
 relation of thought to existence, a question 
 which had also played a great role in the 
 scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the ques- 
 tion what is at the beginning spirit or na- 
 ture, this question was in spite of the church 
 now cut down to this : ' ' Has God made 
 the world or is the world from eternity? 
 
 As this question was answered this way 
 or that the philosophers were divided into 
 ftwo great camps. The one party which 
 placed the origin of the spirit before that of 
 nature, and therefore in the last instance 
 acepted creation, in some form or other— 
 and this creation, is often according to the 
 philosophers, according to Hegel for ex- 
 ample, still more odd and impossible than 
 in Christianity— made the camp of idealism. 
 The others, who recognized nature as the 
 source, belong to the various schools of ma- 
 terialism. 
 
 The two expressions signify something 
 different from this. Idealism and materi- 
 alism, originally not used in any other sense, 
 are not here employed in any other sense. 
 We shall see what confusion arises when 
 one tries to force another signification into 
 them. 
 
FEUERBACH 59 
 
 The question of the relationship of think- 1 
 ing and being has another side ; in what re- 
 lation do our thoughts with regard to the 
 world surrounding us stand to this world 
 itself? Ifcjcfur thought in a position to rec- 
 ognize the real world I Can we, in our ideas 
 and notion of the real world, produce a cor- 
 rect reflection of the reality ! This question 
 is called in philosophical language the ques- 
 tion of the identity of thinking and being, 
 and is affirmed by the great majority 
 of philosophers. According to Hegel, for 
 example, its affirmation is self-evident, for 
 that which we know in the actual world is 
 its content, according to our thought, that 
 which compels the world to a progressive 
 realization as it were of the absolute Idea, 
 which absolute idea has existed somewhere, 
 unattached from the world and before the 
 world; and that thought can recognize a 
 content which is already a thought content 
 herein, from the beginning, appears self- 
 evident. It is also evident that what is hero 
 to be proved is already hidden in the hy- 
 pothesis. But that does not hinder Hegel, 
 by any means, from drawing the further 
 onclusion from his proof of the identity of 
 
 cc 
 
60 FEUERBACH 
 
 thought and existence that his philosophy, 
 because correct for his thought, is, there- 
 fore, the only correct one, and that the iden- 
 tity of thought and existence must show it- 
 self in this, that mankind should forthwith 
 translate his philosophy from theory to 
 practice and the whole world shift itself to 
 a Hegelian base. This is an illusion which 
 he shares alike with all philosophers. 
 
 In addition there is still another class of 
 philosophers, those who dispute the possi- 
 bility of a perception of the universe or at 
 least of an exhaustive perception. To them 
 belong, among the moderns, Hume and 
 Kant, and they have played a very distin- 
 guished role in the evolution of philosophy. 
 This point of view has been now refuted by 
 Hegel, as far as possible, from the idealistic 
 standpoint. The materialistic additions 
 made by Feuerbach are more ingenious than 
 deep. The most destructive refutation of 
 this as of all other fixed philosophic ideas 
 is actual result, namely experiment and in- 
 dustry. If we can prove the correctness of 
 our idea of an actual occurrence by experi- 
 encing it ourselves and producing it from 
 its constituent elements, and using it for our 
 
FEUERBACH 61 
 
 own purposes into the bargain, the Kant- 
 ian phrase "Ding an Sich" (thing in it- 
 self) ceases to have any meaning. The 
 chemical substances which go to form the 
 bodies of plants and animals remained just 
 such "Dinge an Sich" until organic chem- 
 istry undertook to show them one after the 
 other, whereupon the thing in itself became 
 a thing for us, as the coloring matter in the 
 roots of madder, alizarin, which we no 
 longer allow to grow in the roots of the mad- 
 der in the field, but make much more cheap- 
 ly and simply from coal tar. The Coperni- 
 can system was for three hundred years a 
 hypothesis, with a hundred, a thousand, or 
 ten thousand chances in its favor, but still 
 a hypothesis. But when Leverrier by means 
 of the data of this system not only discov- 
 ered the existence of a certain unknown 
 planet, but even calculated the position in 
 the heavens which this planet must neces- 
 sarily occupy, and when Galles really found 
 this planet, then the Copernican system was 
 proved. If, nevertheless, the resurrection 
 of the Kantian idea in Germany is being 
 tried by the Neo-Kantians, and of that of 
 Hume in England (where they never died), 
 
62 FEUERBACH 
 
 by the agnostics, that is, in the face of the 
 long past theoretical and practical refuta- 
 tion of these doctrines, scientifically, a step 
 backwards, and practically, merely the ac- 
 ceptance of materialism in a shame-faced 
 way, clandestinely, and the denial of it be- 
 fore the world. 
 
 But the philosophers were during this 
 long period from Descartes to Hegel and 
 from Hobbes to Feuerbach by no means, as 
 they thought, impelled solely by the force of 
 pure reason. On the contrary, what really 
 impelled them was, in particular, the strong 
 and ever quicker conquering step of natural 
 science and industry. Among the material- 
 ists this very quickly showed itself on the 
 surface, but the idealistic systems filled 
 themselves more and more with materialis- 
 tic content and bought to reconcile the an- 
 tagonism between spirit and matter by 
 means of pantheism, so that finally the 
 Hegelian system represented merely a ma- 
 terialism turned upside down, according to 
 idealistic method and content. 
 
 Of course Starcke in his ' i Characteristics 
 of Feuerbach" enquired into the funda- 
 mental question of the relations of thinking 
 
FEUERBACH 63 
 
 and being. After a short introduction in 
 which the ideas of preceding philosophers, 
 particularly since Kant, are portrayed in 
 unnecessarily heavy philosophical language 
 and in which Hegel, owing to a too formal 
 insistence on certain parts of his work does 
 not receive due credit, there follows a co- 
 pious description of the development of the 
 metaphysics of Feuerbach, as shown in the 
 course of the recognized writings of this 
 •philosopher. This description is indus- 
 triously and carefully elaborated, and, like 
 the whole book, is overballasted with, not 
 always unavoidable, philosophical expres- 
 sions, which is all the more annoying in that 
 the writer does not hold to the vocabulary of 
 one and the same school nor even of Feuer- 
 bach himself, but mixes up expressions of 
 very different schools, and especially of the 
 present epidemic of schools calling them- 
 selves philosophical. 
 
 The evolution of Feuerbach is that of a 
 Hegelian to materialism— not of an ortho- 
 dox Hegelian, indeed— an evolution which 
 from a definite point makes a complete 
 breach with the idealistic system of his pre- 
 decessor. With irresistible iforce he brings 
 
64 FEUERBACH 
 
 himself to the view that the Hegelian idea of 
 the existence of the absolute idea before the 
 world, the pre-existence of the logical cate- 
 gories before the universe came into being, 
 is nothing else than the fantastical survival 
 of the belief in the existence of an extra- 
 mundane creator; that the material, sensi- 
 ble, actual world, to which we ourselves be- 
 long, is the only reality, and that our con- 
 sciousness and thought, however supernat- 
 ural they may seem, are only evidences of a 
 material bodily organ, the brain. Matter 
 is not a product of mind, but mind it- 
 self is only the highest product of matter. 
 This is, of course, pure materialism. When 
 he reached this point Feuerbach came to a 
 standstill. He cannot overcome ordinary 
 philosophical prejudice, prejudice not 
 against the thing, but against the name ma- 
 terialism. He says "Materialism is for me 
 the foundation of the building of the being 
 and knowledge of man, but it is not for me 
 what it is for the physiologists in the narrow 
 sense, as Moleschott, for example, since nec- 
 essarily from their standpoint it is the build- 
 ing itself. Backwards, I am in accord with 
 the materialists but not forwards.' ' 
 
FEUERBACH 65 
 
 Feuerbach here confuses materialism, 
 which is a philosophy of the universe de- 
 pendent upon a certain comprehension of the 
 relations between matter and spirit, with the 
 special forms in which this philosophy ap- 
 peared at a certain historical stage— namely 
 in the eighteenth century. More than that 
 he confuses it with the shallow and vul- 
 garized form in which the materialism of 
 the eighteenth century exists today, in the 
 minds of naturalists and physicians, and 
 was popularized during a period of fifty 
 years in the writings of Buechner, Vogt and 
 Moleschott. But as idealism has passed 
 through a series of evolutionary develop- 
 ments, so also has materialism— with each 
 epoch-making discovery in the department 
 of natural science it has been obliged to 
 change its form ; since then, history also, be- 
 ing subjected to the materialistic method 
 of treatment, shows itself as a new road of 
 progres s. 
 
 The materialism of the preceding century 
 was overwhelmingly mechanical, because at 
 that time of all the natural sciences, mechan- 
 ics, and indeed, only the mechanics of the 
 celestial and terrestrial fixed bodies, the 
 
) 
 
 GG FEUERBACH 
 
 mechanics of gravity, in short, had reached 
 any definite conclusions. Chemistry existed 
 at first only in a childish, phlogistic form. 
 Biology still lay in swaddling clothes; the 
 organism of plants and animals was ex- 
 amined only in a very cursory manner, and 
 was explained upon purely mechanical 
 grounds ; just as an animal was to Descartes 
 nothing but a machine, so was man to the 
 materialists of the eighteenth century. The 
 exclusive application of the measure of me- 
 chanics to processes which are of chemical 
 and organic nature and by which, it is true, 
 the laws of mechanics are also manifested, 
 but are pushed into the background by other 
 higher laws, this application is the cause of 
 the peculiar, but, considering the times, un- 
 avoidable, narrowmindedness of the French 
 materialism. 
 
 The second special limitation of this ma- 
 terialism lies in its incapacity to represent 
 the universe as a process, as one form of 
 matter assumed in the course of evolution- 
 ary development. This limitation corre- 
 sponded with the natural science of the time 
 and the metaphysic coincident therewith, 
 that is the anti-dialectic methods of the phil- 
 
FEUERBACH 67 
 
 osophers. Nature, as was known, was in 
 constant motion, but this motion, according 
 to the universally accepted ideas, turned 
 eternally in a circle, and therefore— nexer 
 moved from the spot, and produced the same 
 results over and over again. This idea was 
 at that time inevitable. The Kantian theory 
 of the origin of the solar system was at first 
 exhibited and considered as a mere curiosity. 
 The history of the development of the earth- 
 geology was still unknown, and the idea that 
 the living natural objects of to-day are the 
 result of a long process of development from 
 the simple to the complex could not be 
 scientifically established at that time. This 
 anti-historical comprehension of nature was, 
 therefore, inevitable. We cannot reproach 
 the philosophers of the eighteenth century 
 with this, as the same thing is also found 
 in Hegel. According to him, nature is the 
 mere outward form of the Idea, capable of 
 no progress as regards time, but merely of 
 an extension of its manifoldness in 
 space, so that it displays all the stages of 
 development comprised in it at one and the 
 same time together, and is condemned to a 
 repetition of the same processes. And this 
 
68 FEUERBACH 
 
 absurdity of a progress in space but outside 
 of time— the fundamental condition of all 
 progress— Hegel loads upon nature, just at 
 the very time when geology, embryology, 
 the physiology of plants and animals, and 
 inorganic chemistry, were being built up, 
 and when above all genial prophecies of the 
 later evolution theory appeared at the very 
 threshold of these new sciences (e. g., Goethe 
 and Lamark), but the system so required it, 
 and the method, for love of the system, 
 had to prove untrue to itself. 
 
 This unhistoric conception had its effects 
 also in the domain of history. Here the 
 fight against the remnants of the Middle 
 Ages kept the outlook limited. The Middle 
 Ages were reckoned as a mere interruption 
 of history by a thousand years of barbarism. 
 The great advances of the Middle Ages— the 
 broadening of European learning, the bring- 
 ing into existence of great nations, which 
 arose, one after the other, and finally the 
 enormous technical advances of the four- 
 teenth and fifteenth centuries— all this no 
 one saw. Consequently a rational view of 
 the great historic development was ren- 
 dered impossible, and history served prin- 
 
FEUERBACH 69 
 
 cipally as a collection of examples and illus- 
 trations for the use of philosophers. 
 
 The vulgarizing peddlers who during the 
 fifties occupied themselves with materialism 
 in Germany did not by any means escape 
 the limitations of their doctrine. All the 
 advances made in science served them only 
 as new grounds of proof against the exist- 
 ence of the Creator, and indeed it was far 
 beyond their trade to develop the theory any 
 further. Idealism was at the end of its 
 tether and was smitten with death by the 
 Revolution of 1848. Yet it had the satisfac- 
 tion that materialism sank still lower. Feu- 
 erbach was decidedly right when he refused 
 to take the responsibility of this material- 
 ism, only he had no business to confound 
 the teachings of the itinerant spouters with 
 materialism in general. 
 
 However, we must here remark two differ- 
 ent things. During the life of Feuerbach 
 science was still in that state of violent fer- 
 mentation which has only comparatively 
 cleared during the last fifteen years; new 
 material of knowledge was furnished in a 
 hitherto unheard of measure but the fixing 
 of interrelations, and therewith of order, in 
 
70 FEUERBACH 
 
 the chaos of overwhelming discoveries was 
 rendered possible quite lately for the first 
 time. True, Feuerbach had lived to see the 
 three distinctive discoveries — that of the 
 cell, the transformation of energy and the 
 evolution 3 theory acknowledged since the 
 time of Darwin. But how could the solitary 
 country-dwelling philosopher appreciate at 
 their full value discoveries which natural- 
 ists themselves at that time in part contest- 
 ed and partly did not understand how to 
 avail themselves of sufficiently? The dis- 
 grace falls solely upon the miserable condi- 
 tions in Germany owing to which the 
 chairs of philosophy were filled by pettifog- 
 ging eclectic pedants, while Feuerbach, who 
 towered high above them all, had to rusti- 
 cate and grow sour in a little village. It is 
 therefore no shame to Feuerbach that he 
 never grasped the natural evolutionary 
 philosophy which became possible with the 
 passing away of the partial views of 
 French materialism. 
 
 In the second place, Feuerbach held quite 
 correctly that scientific materialism is the 
 foundation of the building of human knowl- 
 edge but it is not the building itself. For 
 
FEUERBACH 71 
 
 we live not only in nature but in human so- | 
 ciety, and this has its theory of development 
 and its science no less than nature. It was 
 necessary, therefore, to bring the science of j 
 society, that is the so-called historical and 
 philosophical sciences, into harmony with 
 the materialistic foundations and to rebuild 
 upon them. But this was not granted to 
 Feuerbach. Here he stuck, in spite of the 
 "foundations," held in the confining bonds 
 of idealism, and to this he testified in the 
 words ' ' Backwards I am with the material- 
 ists, but not forwards. ' ' But Feuerbach him- 
 self did not go forward in his views of hu- 
 man society from his standpoint of 1840 and 
 1844, chiefly owing to that loneliness 
 which compelled him to think everything 
 out by himself, instead of in friendly 
 and hostile conflict with other men 
 of his calibre, although of all philosophers 
 he was the fondest of intercourse with his 
 fellows. We shall see later on how he 
 thusi remained an idealist. Here we 
 can only call attention to the fact that 
 Starcke sought the idealism of Feuerbach in 
 the wrong place. "Feuerbach is an idealist; 
 he believes in the advance of mankind' ' (p. 
 
72 FEUERBACH 
 
 19). " The foundations, the underpinning 
 of the whole, is therefore nothing less than 
 idealism. Realism is for us nothing more 
 than a protection against error while we 
 follow our own idealistic tendencies. Are not 
 compassion, love and enthusiasm for truth 
 and justice ideal forces V 
 
 In the first place, idealism is here defined 
 as nothing but the following of ideal aims. 
 But these have necessarily to do principally 
 with the idealism of Kant and his "Cate- 
 gorical Imperative." But Kant himself 
 called his philosophy ' 6 transcendental ideal- 
 ism," by no means, because he deals therein 
 with moral ideals, but on quite other 
 grounds, as Starcke will remember. 
 
 The superstition that philosophical ideal- 
 ism pivots around a belief in moral, that is 
 in social ideals, arose with the German non- 
 philosophical Philistine, who commits to 
 memory the few philosophical morsels 
 which he finds in Schiller's poems. No- 
 body has criticised more severely the feeble 
 Categorical Imperative of Kant— feeble be- 
 cause it demands the impossible and there- 
 fore never attains to any reality— nobody 
 has ridiculed more cruelly the Philistine 
 
FEUERBACH 73 
 
 sentimentality imparted by Schiller, because 
 of its unrealizable ideals, than just the ideal- 
 ist par excellence, Hegel. (See e. g. Phe- 
 nomenology.) 
 
 In the second place, it cannot be avoided 
 that all human sensations pass through the 
 brain— even eating and drinking which are 
 commenced consequent upon hunger and 
 thirst felt by the brain and ended in con- 
 sequence of sensations of satisfaction simi- 
 larly experienced by the brain. The reali- 
 ties of the outer world impress themselves 
 upon the brain of man, reflect themselves 
 there, as feelings, thoughts, impulses, voli- 
 tions, in short, as ideal tendencies, and in 
 this form become ideal forces. If the cir- 
 cumstance that this man follows ideal ten- 
 dencies at all, and admits that ideal forces 
 exercise an influence over him, if this makes 
 an idealist of him, every normally develop- 
 ed man is in some sense a born idealist, and 
 under such circumstances how can mate- 
 rialists exist? 
 
 In the third place, the conviction that hu- 
 manity, at least at present, as a whole, pro- 
 gresses, has absolutely nothing to do with 
 the antagonism between materialism and 
 
74 FEUERBACH 
 
 idealism. The French materialists had this 
 conviction, to a fanatical degree, no less than 
 the deists, Voltaire and Rousseau, and made 
 the greatest personal sacrifices for it. If 
 anybody ever concentrated his whole life to 
 the enthusiasm for truth and justice, taking 
 the words in a moral sense, it was Diderot, 
 for example. Therefore, since Starcke has 
 explained all this as idealism, it simply 
 proves that the word materialism has lost 
 all significance for him, as has also the an- 
 tagonism between the aims of the two. 
 
 The fact is that Starcke here makes an un- 
 pardonable concession to the prejudices of 
 the Philistines caused by the long contin- 
 ued slanders of the clergy against the word 
 materialism, even if without consciously do- 
 ing so. The Philistine understands by the 
 word materialism, gluttony, drunkenness, 
 carnal lust, and fraudulent speculation, in 
 short all the enormous vices to which he 
 himself is secretly addicted, and by the word 
 idealism he understands the belief in virtue, 
 universal humanitarianism, and a better 
 world as a whole, of which he boasts before 
 others, and in which he himself at the very 
 most believes, only as long as he must endure 
 
FEUERBACH 75 
 
 the blues which follow necessarily from his 
 customary "materialistic" excesses, and so 
 sings his favorite song— "What is man?— 
 Half beast, half angel. ' \ 
 
 As for the rest, Starcke takes great pains 
 to defend Feuerbach against the attacks and 
 doctrines of those collegians who plume 
 themselves in Germany as philosophers now- 
 a-days. It is true that this is a matter of im- 
 portance to those people who take an inter- 
 est in the afterbirth of the German classic 
 philosophy, to Starcke himself this might 
 appear necessary. We spare the reader this, 
 however. 
 
76 FEUERBACH 
 
 III. 
 
 The distinct idealism of Feuerbach is evi- 
 dent directly we come to his philosophy of 
 ; religion and ethics. He does not wish to 
 j abolish religion by any means ; he wants to 
 perfect it. Philosophy itself will be ab- 
 sorbed in religion. ' i The periods of human 
 progress are only distinguishable by relig- 
 ious changes. There is only a real historical 
 progress where it enters the hearts of men. 
 The heart is not a place for religion, so that 
 it should be in the heart, it is the very be- 
 ang of religion.' ' Religion is, according to 
 f Feuerbach, a matter of the feelings— the 
 j feelings of love between man and man which 
 up to now sought its realization in the fan- 
 tastic reflected image of the reality— in the 
 interposition through one or more gods of 
 the fantastic reflections of human qualities 
 —but now by means of love between "ego" 
 1 and "tu" finds itself directly and without 
 any intermediary. According to Feuerbach 
 love between the sexes is, if not the highest 
 form, at least one of the highest forms, of 
 the practice of his new religion. 
 
FEUEEBACH 77 
 
 Now, feelings of affection between man 
 and man, and particularly between members 
 of the two sexes, have existed as long as 
 mankind has. Love between the sexes has 
 been cultivated especially during the last 
 eighteen hundred years and has won a 
 place which has made it, in this period, a 
 compulsory motive for all poetry. The ex- 
 isting positive religions have limited them- 
 selves in this matter to the bestowal of com- 
 plete consecration upon the State regulation 
 of sexual love, and might completely disap- 
 pear tomorrow without the least difference 
 taking place in the matter of love and 
 friendship. Thus the Christian religion in 
 France was, as a matter of fact, so com- 
 pletely overthrown between the years 1793 
 and 1798, that Napoleon himself could not 
 re-introduce it without opposition and diffi- 
 culty, without, in the interval, any desire for 
 a substitute, in Feuerbaeh's sense, making 
 itself felt. 
 
 Feuerbach 's idealism consists in this, that 
 he does not simply take for granted the mu- 
 tual and reciprocal feelings of men for one 
 another such as sexual love, friendship, com- 
 passion, self-sacrifice, etc., but declares that 
 
78 FEUERBACH 
 
 they would come to their full realization for 
 the first time as soon as they were conse- 
 crated under the name of religion. The main 
 fact for him is not that these purely human 
 relations exist, but that they will be conceiv- 
 ed of as the new true religion. They will 
 be fully realized for the first time if they 
 are stamped as religions. Religion is de- 
 rived from "religare" and means originally 
 
 i i l fastening. ' ' Therefore, every bond be- 
 tween men is religion. Such etymological 
 artifices are the last resort of the idealistic 
 philosophy. Not what the word means ac- 
 cording to the historical development of its 
 true significance, but what it should mean 
 according to its derivation is what counts, 
 and so sex-love and the intercourse between 
 
 ithe sexes is consecrated as a " religion' ' 
 only so that the word religion, which is dear 
 
 \ to the mind of the idealist, shall not vanish 
 
 ' from the language. The Parisian reformer 
 of the stripe of Louis Blanc used to speak 
 just in the same way in the forties, for they 
 could only conceive of a man without relig- 
 ion as a monster, and used to say to us 
 "Atheism, then, is your religion.' ' 
 If Feuerbach wants to place true religion 
 
FEUEEBACH 79 
 
 upon the basis of real materialistic philos- 
 ophy, that would be just the same as con- 
 ceiving of modern chemistry as true al- 
 chemy. If religion can exist without its 
 God then alchemy can exist without its phi- 
 losopher 's stone. There exists, by the way, a 
 very close connection between alchemy and 
 religion. The philosopher's stone has many 
 properties of the old gods, and the Egyp- 
 tian-Greek alchemists of the first two cen- 
 turies of our era have had their hands in the 
 development of Christian doctrines, as 
 Kopp and Berthelot prove. 
 
 Feuerbach's declaration that the periods 
 of man's development are only differen- 
 tiated through changes in religion is false. 
 Great historical points of departure are co- 
 incident with religious changes only as far 
 as the three world-religions which exist up 
 to the present are concerned— Buddhism, 
 Christianity and Islam. The old tribal and 
 national religions originating in nature 
 were not propagandist and lost all power of 
 resistance as soon as the independence of 
 the tribe and people was destroyed. Among 
 the Germans simple contact with the decay- 
 ing Roman Empire and the Christian world- 
 
80 FEUERBACH 
 
 religion springing from it and suitable to 
 its economic, political and ideal circum- 
 stances, was sufficient. In the first place, 
 as regards these more or less artificial 
 world-religions, particularly in the cases of 
 Christianity and Mohammedanism, we find 
 that the more universal historical move- 
 ments will take on a religious stamp, and as 
 'far as concerns Christianity in particular, 
 the stamp of the religion affecting revolu- 
 tionary movements of universal significance 
 stopped short at the commencement of the 
 fight of the bourgeois for emancipation 
 from the thirteenth to the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, and showed itself not as Feuerbaeh 
 declares in the hearts of men and the thirst 
 for religion, but in the entire earlier history 
 of the Middle Ages which knew no other 
 form of idealism than religion and theology. 
 But as the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury was sufficiently strong to have its own 
 ideology suitable to its own standpoint, it 
 forthwith made its great and final revolu- 
 tion, the French, by means of an appeal ex- 
 clusively to juristic and political ideals, and 
 troubled itself with religion only so far as 
 it stood in its way. It never occurred to it 
 
FEUERBACH 81 
 
 to establish a new religion in place of the 
 old one; everybody knows what a mess 
 Robespierre made of the attempt. 
 
 The possibility of a purely humane sen- 
 timent in intercourse with other men is with 
 us today exceedingly impeded through the 
 society founded on class antagonism and 
 class supremacy in which we must move. 
 We have no need to trouble ourselves about 
 sanctifying these sentiments by means of a 
 new religion. And just as the circumstances 
 of the great historical class-fight have been 
 obscured by the current historians, partic- 
 ularly in Germany, so in the same way the 
 understanding of the great historical class- 
 conflicts is sufficiently obscured by the pres- 
 ent-day manner of writing history, without 
 our needing to change these conflicts into 
 a mere appendix of ecclesiastical history. 
 Here it is evident how far we in our day are 
 away from Feuerbach. His most beautiful 
 passages in praise of the new religion of 
 love are today unreadable. 
 
 The only religion which Feuerbach exam- 
 ined closely is Christianity, the universal 
 religion of the western world which is 
 founded upon monotheism. He proves that 
 
82 FEUERBACH 
 
 the Christian God is only the fantastic re- 
 flection, the reflected image of man. But 
 that God is himself the product of a lengthy 
 process of abstraction, the concentrated 
 quintessence of the earlier tribal and na- 
 tional gods. [And man also whose reflection jy£ 
 that God is, is not a real man, but is like- 
 wise the quintessence of many real men, the 
 abstract human, and therefore himself again 
 the creature of thought] The same Feuer- 
 bach who on each page preaches sensation, 
 diving into the concrete, the real, becomes 
 thoroughly abstract as soon as he begins to 
 talk of more than mere sensual intercourse 
 between human beings. 
 
 Of this relationship only one side appeals 
 to him, the moral, and Feuerbach's aston- 
 ishing lack of resources as compared with 
 Hegel is striking. The ethic or rather moral 
 doctrine of the latter, is the Philosophy of 
 Right and embraces: 1, Abstract Right; 2, 
 Morality; 3, Moral Conduct, under which 
 are again comprised : the family, bourgeois, 
 society, and the State. As the form is here 
 idealistic, the content is realistic. The en- 
 tire scope of law, economy, politics, is there- 
 in, besides ethics. With Feuerbach, it is just 
 
FEUERBACH 83 
 
 the reverse. He is realistic in form ;he begins 
 with man, but the discussion has absolutely 
 nothing to do with the world in which this 
 man lives, and so, instead of the man, stands 
 an abstract man, who preaches -sermons con- 
 cerning the philosophy of religion. This 
 man is not even the son of a mothe r ; he has 
 developed from the God of the monotheistic 
 religions. He does not live in real historic 
 conditions and the world of history. He 
 comes into relationship with other men, but 
 each of the others is just as much an abstrac- 
 tion as he himself is. In the " philosophy of 
 religion ' f we had still men and women, but 
 in the i ' ethic ■ ' this final distinction vanishes. 
 At long intervals Feuerbach makes such 
 statements as : " A man thinks differently in j 
 a palace than in a hut. " " When you have i 
 nothing in your body to ward off hunger and 
 misery, you have nothing in your head, 
 mind and heart for morality." "Politics 
 must be our religion, ' ' etc. But Feuerbach 
 was absolutely incapable of extracting any 
 meaning from these remarks; they remain 
 purely literary expressions, and Starcke 
 himself is obliged to admit that the science 
 of politics was an insuperable obstacle to 
 
84 FEUERBACH 
 
 Feuerbach and the science of society, soci- 
 ology, for him ajterra incognita. 
 
 He appears just as uninspired in com- 
 parison with Hegel in his treatment of the 
 antithesis of good and evil. "One thinks 
 he is saying something great," Hegel re- 
 marks "if one says that mankind is by na- 
 ture good, but it is forgotten that one says 
 something far greater in the words "man is 
 by nature evil." According to Hegel, evil 
 (is the form in which the mechanical power 
 of evolution shows itself, and indeed in this 
 lies the double idea that each new step for- 
 ward appears as an outrage against a sacred 
 thing, as rebellion against the old, dying, 
 but through custom, sanctified, circum- 
 stances, and on the other hand that since 
 the rising of class antagonism, the evil pas- 
 sions of men, greed and imperiousness 
 serve as the levers of historical progress, 
 of which, for example, the history of feud- 
 alism and the bourgeoisie affords a conspic- 
 uous proof. But Feuerbach does not trou- 
 ble himself to examine the role of moral evil. 
 History is to him a particularly barren and 
 unwonted field. Even his statement, "Man 
 as he sprang from nature originally was 
 
FEUERBACH 85 
 
 only a mere creature, not a man. M " Man is 
 a product of human society, of education, 
 and of history." Even this statement re- 
 mains from his standpoint absolutely un- 
 productive. 
 
 What Feuerbach communicates to us re- 
 specting morals must therefore be exceed- 
 ingly narrow. The desire for happiness is 
 born within man and must hence be the 
 foundation of all morality. But the desire 
 for happiness is limited in two ways ; first, 
 through the natural results of our acts ; af- 
 ter the dissipation comes the headache, as a 
 result of habitual excess, sickness; in the 
 second place, through its results upon soci- 
 ety, if we do not respect the similar desire 
 for happiness on the part of other people, 
 they resist us and spoil our pursuit of hap- 
 piness. It follows, therefore, that in order 
 to enjoy our pursuit of happiness, the re- 
 sult of our acts must be rightly appreciated, 
 and, on the other hand, must allow of the 
 carrying out of the same acts on the part of 
 others. Practical self-control with regar<T 
 to ourselves and love, always love, in our 
 intercourse with others are therefore the 
 foundation rules of Feuerbach 's morality, j 
 
86 FEUERBACH 
 
 from which all others lead, and neither the 
 enthusiastic periods of Feuerbach nor the 
 loud praises of Starcke can set off the thin- 
 ness and flatness of this pair of utterances. 
 
 The desire for happiness contents itself 
 only very exceptionally, and by no means 
 to the profit of one's self or other people 
 with self. But it requires the outside world— 
 means of satisfying itself —therefore means 
 of subsistence, an individual of the other 
 sex, books, convention, argument, activity, 
 these means and matters of satisfaction are 
 matters of utility and labor. Feuerbach 's 
 system of morality either predicates that 
 these means and matters of satisfaction are 
 given to every man per $e, or, since it gives 
 him only unpractical advice, is not worth a 
 jot to the people who are without these 
 means. And this Feuerbach himself shows 
 clearly in forcible words, "One thinks dif- 
 ferently in a palace than in a hut." "Where 
 owing to misery and hunger you have no 
 material in your body, you have also no ma- 
 terial in your head, mind and heart for mor- 
 als. 
 
 Are matters any better with the equal 
 right of another to the pursut of happiness ? 
 
FEUERBACH 87 
 
 Feuerbach set this statement out as abso- 
 lute, as applicable to all times and circum- 
 stances. But since when has it been true? 
 Was there in the olden time between slave 
 and master or in the Middle Ages between 
 serf and baron any talk about equal rights 
 to the pursuit of happiness? Was not the 
 right to the pursuit of happiness of the 
 subject class sacrificed to the dominant 
 class regardlessly and by means of law?— 
 nay, that was immoral, but still equality of 
 rights is recognized no w-a-clays— recogniz- 
 ed in words merely since the bourgeoisie in 
 its fight against feudalism and in the insti- 
 tution of capitalistic production, was com- 
 pelled to abolish all existing exclusive, that 
 is, personal, privileges, and for the first 
 time to introduce the right of the private in- 
 dividual, then also gradually the right of the 
 State, and equality before law. But the 
 pursuit of happiness consists for the least 
 part only in ideal rights, and lies, for the 
 most part, in means of material satisfac- 
 tion takes care that only enough for bare 
 subsistence falls to the great majority of 
 those persons with equal rights, and there- 
 
 M 
 
88 FEUERBACH 
 
 fore regards the equality of right to the pur- 
 suit of happiness hardly better than slavery 
 or serfdom did. And are we better off as 
 regards mental means of happiness— means 
 of education? Is not the schoolmaster of 
 Sadowa a mythical person? 
 f Further, according to the ethical theory 
 \ of Feuerbach, the Bourse is the highest tem- 
 ple of morality, only provided that one spec- 
 ulate rightly. If my pursuit of happiness 
 leads me to the Bourse, and I, in following 
 my business, manage so well that only what 
 is agreeable and nothing detrimental comes 
 to me, that is that I win steadily, Feuer- 
 bach 's precept is carried out. In this way 
 I do not interfere with the similar pursuit 
 of happiness of anyone else, since the other 
 man goes on the Bourse just as voluntarily 
 as I do, and at the conclusion of his affairs 
 a sentimental expression, for each finds in 
 the other the satisfaction of his pursuit of 
 happiness which it is just the business of 
 love to bring about, and which it here prac- 
 tically accomplishes. And since I carry on 
 my operations with more exact prudence 
 and therefore with greater success I fulfill 
 the strongest maxims of the Feuerbach mor- 
 
FEUERBACH 89 
 
 al philosophy and become a rich man into 
 the bargain. In other words, Feuerbach's 
 morality is hewn out of the capitalistic sys- 
 tem of today, little as he might wish or think 
 it to be. 
 
 But love, yes love, is particularly and 
 eternally the magical god who, according to 
 Feuerbach, surmounts all the difficulties of 
 practical life and that in a society which is 
 divided into classes with diametrically op- 
 posing interests. The last remnant of its 
 revolutionary character is thus taken from 
 his philosophy, and there remains the old 
 cant— " love one another"— fall into each 
 other's arms without regard to any impedi- 
 ment of sex or position— universal intoxi- 
 cation of reconciliation. 
 
 In a word, the moral theories of Feuer- 
 bach turn out to be the same as those of all 
 of his predecessors.. It is a hodge-podge of 
 all times, all people, and all conditions, and 
 for this occasion is applicable to no time and 
 place, and as regards the actual world is as 
 powerless as Kant's "Categorical Impera- 
 tive." As a matter of fact, every class, as 
 well as every profession, has its own sys- 
 tem of morals and breaks even this when it 
 
90 FEUERBACH 
 
 can do it without punishment, and love, 
 which is4o unite all, appears today in wars, 
 controversies, lawsuits, domestic broils and 
 as far as possible mutual plunder. 
 
 But how was it possible that the powerful 
 impetus given by Feuerbach turned out so 
 unprofitable to Feuerbach himself. ( Simply 
 in this way, because Feuerbach could not 
 find his way out of the abstraction, which he, 
 hated with a deadly hatred, to living realityj 
 He clutches hard at Nature and Humanity, 
 but "Nature" and "Humanity" remain 
 empty words with him. He does not know 
 how to tell us anything positive about real 
 nature and real men. We can only reach liv- 
 ing men from the abstract men of Feuer- 
 bach if we regard them as active historical 
 agents. Feuerbach strove against that, 
 hence the year 1848, which he did not un- 
 derstand, signified for him merely the final 
 break with the real world, retirement into 
 solitude. German conditions must for the 
 most part bear the guilt of allowing him to 
 starve miserably. 
 
 But the step which Feuerbach did not 
 make had not yet been made. The cultus of 
 man in the abstract which was the kernel of 
 
FEUERBACH 91 
 
 Feuerbach's religion must be replaced by 
 the knowledge of real men and their histor- 
 ical development. This advance of Feuer- 
 bach's view beyond Feuerbach himself was 
 published in 1845 by Marx in the "Holy 
 Family." 
 
92 FEUERBACH 
 
 * 
 
 IV. 
 
 Strauss, Bauer, Stirner, Feuerbach, these 
 were the minor representatives of the Heg- 
 elian philosophy, so far as they did not 
 abandon the field of philosophy. Strauss 
 has, in addition to the ' ' Life of Jesus ' ' and 
 ' \ Dogmatics, ' ' only produced philosophical 
 and ecclesiastical historical work of a lit- 
 erary character, after the fashion of Eenan ; 
 Bauer has merely done something in the de- 
 partment of primitive Christianity, but that 
 significant; Stirner remained a " freak" 
 even after Bakunine had mixed him with 
 Proudhon and designated his amalgama- 
 tion "Anarchism." Feuerbach alone posses- 
 ed any significance as a philosopher ; but not 
 only did philosophy remain for him the 
 vaunted superior of all other sciences, the 
 quintessence of all science, an impassable 
 limitation, the untouchable holy thing, he 
 \ stood as a composite philosopher ; the under 
 \ half of him was materialist, the upper half 
 I idealist. He was not an apt critic of Hegel 
 
FEUERBACH 93 
 
 but simply put him aside as of no account, 
 while he himself, in comparison with the 
 •encyclopedic wealth of the Hegelian system, 
 contributed nothing of any positive value, 
 except a bombastic religion of love and a 
 thin, impotent system of ethics. 
 
 But from the breaking up of the Hegelian 
 school there proceeded another, the only one 
 which has borne real fruit, and this tendency 
 is coupled with the name of Marx.* 
 
 In this case the separation from the Heg- 
 elian philosophy occurred by means of a 
 return to the materialistic standpoint, that 
 is to say, a determination to comprehend the 
 actual world — nature and history — as it 
 presents itself to each one of us, without any 
 
 ♦It is incumbent upon me to make a personal explanation 
 at this place. People have lately referred to my share 
 in this theory, and so I can hardly refrain from saying 
 a few words here in settlement of that particular matter. 
 I cannot deny that I had before and during my forty 
 years' collaboration with Marx a certain independent 
 share not only in laying out the foundations, but more 
 particularly in working out the theory. But the great- 
 est part of the leading essential thinking, particularly in 
 the realm of economics, and especially its final sharp 
 statement, belongs to Marx alone. What I contributed 
 Marx could quite readily have carried out without me 
 with the exception of a pair of special applications. What 
 Marx supplied, I could not have readily brought. Marx 
 stood higher, saw further, took a wider, clearer, quicker 
 survey than all of us. Marx was a genius, we others, at 
 the best, talented. Without him the theory would not be 
 what it is today, by a long way. It therefore rightly 
 bears his name. 
 
94 FEUERBACH 
 
 preconceived idealistic balderdash interfer- 
 ing; it was resolved to pitilessly sacrifice 
 any idealistic preconceived notion which 
 could not be brought into harmony with 
 facts actually discovered in their mu- 
 tual relations, and without any visionary 
 notions. And materialism in general claims 
 no more. Only here, for the first time in 
 the history of the materialistic philosophy, 
 was an earnest endeavor made to carry its 
 results to all questions arising in the realm 
 of knowledge, at least in its characteristic 
 features. 
 
 Hegel was not merely put on one side, the 
 school attached itself on the contrary to his 
 openly revolutionary side, the dialectic 
 method. But this method was of no service 
 in its Hegelian form. According to Hegel 
 /the dialectic is the self-development of the 
 [idea. The Absolute Idea does not only ex- 
 list from eternity, but it is also the actual 
 living soul of the whole existing world. It 
 develops from itself to itself through all 
 the preliminary stages which are treated of 
 at large in i { Logic, 9 \ and which are all in- 
 j eluded in it. Then it steps outside of itself, 
 I changing with nature itself, where it, with- 
 
FEUERBACH 95 
 
 out self-consciousness, is disguised as a ne- 
 cessity of nature, goes through a new devel- 
 opment, and, finally, in man himself, be- 
 comes self-consciousness. This self-con- 
 sciousness now works itself out into the 
 higher stages from the lower forms of mat- 
 ter, until finally the Absolute Idea is again 
 realized in the Hegelian philosophy. 
 According to Hegel, the dialectic devel- 
 opment apparent in nature and his- 
 tory, that is a causative, connected 
 progression from the lower to the higher, in 
 spite of all zig-zag movements and momen- 
 tary setbacks, is only the stereotype of the 
 self-progression of the Idea from eternity, 
 whither one does not know, but independent 
 at all events of the thought of any human 
 brain. This topsy-turvy ideology had to 
 be put aside. We conceived of ideas as ma- 
 terialistic, as pictures of real things, instead 
 of real things as pictures of this or that 
 stage of the Absolute Idea. Thereupon, the 
 dialectic became reduced to knowledge of 
 the universal laws of motion— as well of 
 the outer world as of the thought of man— 
 two sets of laws which are identical as far as 
 matter is concerned but which differ as re- 
 
96 FEUERBACH 
 
 gards expression, in so far as the mind of 
 man can employ them consciously, while, 
 in nature, and up to now, in human his- 
 tory, for the most part they accomplish 
 themselves, unconsciously in the form of 
 external necessity, through an endless suc- 
 cession of apparent accidents. Hereupon 
 the dialectic of the Idea became itself mere- 
 ly the conscious reflex of the dialectic 
 revolution of the real world, and therefore, 
 I the dialectic of Hegel was turned upside 
 : down or rather it was placed upon its feet 
 • instead of on its head, where it was stand- 
 ing before. And this materialistic dialectic 
 
 X' 
 
 which since that time has been our best tool 
 and our sharpest weapon was discovered, 
 not by us alone, but by a German workman, 
 Joseph Dietzgen, in a remarkable manner 
 and utterly independent of us. 
 
 But just here the revolutionary side of 
 , Hegel's philosophy was again taken up, and 
 at the same time freed from the idealistic 
 frippery which had in Hegel 's hands inter- 
 fered with its necessary conclusions. The 
 great fundamental thought, namely, that, 
 the world is not to be considered as a com- 
 plexity of ready-made things, but as a com- 
 
FEUERBACH 97 
 
 plexity made up of processes in which the 
 apparently stable things, no less than the 
 thought pictures in the brain— the idea, 
 cause an unbroken chain of coming into be- 
 ing and passing away, in which, by means 
 of all sorts of seeming accidents, and in 
 spite of all momentary setbacks, there is 
 carried out in the end a progressive develop- . 
 meat— this great foundation thought has, 
 particularly since the time of Hegel, so 
 dominated the thoughts of the mass 
 of men that, generally speaking, it is 
 now hardly denied. But to acknowl- 
 edge it in phrases, and to apply it in 
 reality to each particular set of condi- 
 tions which come up for examination, are 
 two different matters. But if one proceeds 
 steadily in his investigations from this his- 
 toric point, then a stop is put, once and for 
 all, to the demand for final solutions and for 
 eternal truths ; one is firmly conscious of the 
 necessary limitations of all acquired knowl- 
 edge, of its hypothetical nature, owing to the 
 circumstances under which it has been 
 gained. One cannot be imposed upon any 
 longer by the inflated insubstantial anti- 
 theses of the older metaphysics of true and 
 
98 FEUERBACH 
 
 false, good and evil, identical and differ- 
 entiated, necessary and accidental; one 
 knows that these antitheses have only a rel- 
 ative significance, that that which is recog- 
 nized as true now, has its concealed and 
 later-developing false side, justas that which 
 is recognized as false, its true side, by vir- 
 tue of which it can later on prevail as the 
 truth; that so-called necessity is made 
 up of the merely accidental, and that the ac- 
 knowledged accidental is the form behind 
 which necessity conceals itself and so on. 
 
 The old methods of enquiry and thought 
 which Hegel terms metaphysics, which by 
 preference busied themselves by enquiring 
 into things as given and established quanti- 
 ties, and the vestiges of which still buzz in 
 the heads of people, had at that time great 
 historical justification. Things had first to be 
 examined, before it was possible to examine 
 processes ; man must first know what a thing 
 was before he could examine the preceding 
 I changes in it. And so it was with natural 
 science. The old metaphysic which compre- 
 hended things as stable came from a philos- 
 ophy which enquired into dead and living 
 things as things comprehended as stable. 
 
FEUERBACH 99 
 
 But when this enquiry had so far progressed 
 that the decisive step was possible, namely, 
 the systematic examination of the preceding 
 changes in those things going on in nature 
 itself, then occurred the death-blow of the 
 old metaphysics in the realm of philosophy. 
 And, in fact, if science to the end of the last 
 century was chiefly a collecting of knowl- 
 edge, the science of actual things, so is 
 science in our day pre-eminently an arrang- 
 ing of knowledge, the science of changes, 
 of the origin and progress of things, and the 
 mutual connection which binds these 
 changes in nature into one great whole. 
 Physiology, which examines the earlier 
 forms of plant and animal organisms ; em- 
 bryology, which deals with the development 
 of the elementary organism from germ to 
 maturity; geology, which investigates the 
 gradual formation of the earth's crust, are 
 all the products of our century. 
 
 But, first of all, there are three great dis- 
 coveries which have caused our knowledge 
 of the interdependence of the processes of 
 nature to progress by leaps and bounds. In 
 the first place, the discovery of the cell, as 
 the unit, from the multiplication and differ- 
 
100 FEUERBACH 
 
 entiation of which, the whole of plant and 
 animal substance develop so that not only 
 the growth and development of all higher 
 classes of all higher organisms is 
 recognized as following a universal law, 
 but the very path is shown in the 
 capacity for differentiation in the cell, 
 by which organisms are enabled to 
 change their forms and make thereby a more 
 individual development. Secondly, the met- 
 amorphosis of energy which has shown us 
 that all the so-called real forces in inorganic 
 nature, the mechanical forces and their com- 
 plements, the so-called potential energies, 
 heat, radiation (light, radiating heat), elec- 
 tricity, magnetism, chemical energy, are dif- 
 ferent forms of universal motion, which 
 pass, under certain conditions, the one into 
 the other, so that in place of those of the one 
 which disappear, a certain number of the 
 other appear, so that the whole movement 
 of nature is reduced to this perpetual pro- 
 cess of transformation from one into the 
 other. Finally, the proof first developed 
 logically by Darwin, that the organic pro- 
 ducts of nature about us, including man, are 
 the result of a long process of evolution, 
 
FEUERBACH 101 
 
 from a few original single cells, and these 
 again, by virtue of chemical processes, have 
 proceeded from protoplasm or white of egg. 
 Thanks to these three great discoveries 
 and the resultant powerful advance of sci- 
 ence, we have now arrived at a point where 
 we can show the connection between changes 
 in nature, not only in specific cases, but also 
 in the relation of the specific cases to the 
 whole and so give a bird's eye view of the 
 interrelation of nature in an approximately 
 scientific form by means of the facts shown 
 by empirical science itself. To furnish this 
 complete picture was formerly the task of 
 the so-called philosophy of nature. It could 
 then only do this by substituting ideal and 
 imaginary hypotheses for the unknown real 
 interconnection, by filling out the missing 
 facte with mind-pictures and by bridging 
 the chasms by empty imaginings. It had 
 many happy thoughts in these transports 
 (of imagination), it anticipated many later 
 discoveries, but it also caused the survival 
 of considerable nonsense up to the present 
 time which could not otherwise have been 
 possible. At present, when the results of 
 the investigation of nature need only be con- 
 
102 FEUERBACH 
 
 conceived of dialectically, that is in the 
 sense of their mutual interconnection, to 
 arrive at. a system of nature sufficient for 
 our time, when the dialectical charac- 
 ter of this interconnection forces itself into 
 the metaphysically trained minds of expe- 
 rimental scientists, against their will, today 
 a philosophy of nature is finally disposed 
 of, every attempt at its resurrection would 
 not only be superfluous, it would even be a 
 step backwards. 
 
 But what is true of nature, which is here- 
 by recognized as an historical process, is 
 true also of the history of society in all its 
 branches, and of the totality of all sciences 
 which occupy themselves with things hu- 
 man and divine. Here also the philosophy 
 of jurisprudence, of history, of religion, 
 etc., consisted in this, that in place of the 
 true interconnection of events, one originat- 
 ing in the mind of the philosopher was sub- 
 stituted; that history, in its totality as in 
 its parts, was comprehended as the gradual 
 realization of ideas, but, of course, always 
 of the pet idea of the philosopher himself. 
 
 History worked up to now, unconsciously 
 but necessarily, towards a certain prede- 
 
FEUERBACH 103 
 
 termined, fixed, ideal goal, as for example 
 in the case of Hegel, towards the realization 
 of his Absolute Idea> and the unalterable 
 trend towards this Absolute Idea constituted 
 the inward connection of historic facts. In 
 the place of the real, and up to this time un- 
 known, interrelation, man set a new myste- 
 rious destiny, unconscious or gradually com- 
 ing into consciousness. It was necessary 
 in this case, therefore, just as in the 
 realm of nature, to set aside these artificial 
 interrelations by the discovery of the real, 
 a task which finally culminated in the dis- 
 covery of the universal laws of progress, 
 which established themselves as the domi- 
 nating ones in the history of human society. 
 The history of the growth of society ap- 
 pears, however, in one respect entirely differ- 
 ent from that of nature. In nature are to be 
 found as far as we leave the reaction of man 
 upon nature out of sight— mere unconscious 
 blind agents which act one upon another, 
 and in their interplay the universal law re- 
 alizes itself. From all that happens, whether 
 from the innumerable apparent accidents 
 which appear upon the surface, or from the 
 final results flowing from these accidental 
 
104 FEUERBACH 
 
 occurrences, nothing occurs as a desired 
 conscious end. On the contrary, in the 
 | history of society the mere actors are all en- 
 idowed with consciousness; they are agents 
 imbued with deliberation or passion, men 
 working towards an appointed end ; nothing 
 appears without an intentional purpose, 
 without an end desired. But this distinc- 
 tion, important as it is for historical exam- 
 ination, particularly of single epochs and 
 events, can make no difference to the fact 
 that the course of history is governed by 
 inner universal laws. Here also, in spite 
 of the wished for aims of all the separate 
 individuals, accident for the most part is 
 apparent on the surface. That which is 
 willed but rarely happens. In the majority 
 of instances the numerous desired ends 
 cross and interfere with each other, and 
 either these ends are utterly incapable of 
 realization, or the means are ineffectual. 
 So, the innumerable conflicts of individual 
 wills and individual agents in the realm of 
 history reach a conclusion which is on the 
 whole analogous to that in the realm of na- 
 ture, which is without definite purpose. The\ 
 ends of the actions are intended, but the re-i 
 
FEUERBACH 105 
 
 suits which follow from the actions are not 
 intended, or in so far as they appear to cor- 
 respond with the end desired, in their final 
 results are quite different from the conclu- 
 sion wished. Historical events in their en- 
 tirety therefore appear to be likewise con- 
 trolled by chance. But even where according! 
 to superficial observation, accident plays a! 
 part, it is, as a matter of fact, consistently) 
 governed by unseen, internal laws, and the 
 only qestion remaining, therefore, is to dis- 
 cover these laws. 
 
 Men make their own history in that each 
 follows his own desired ends independent 
 of results, and the results of these many 
 wills acting in different directions and their 
 manifold effects upon the world constitute 
 history. It depends, therefore, upon what 
 the great majority of individuals intend. 
 The will is determined by passion or reflec- 
 tion, but the levers which passion or reflec- 
 tion immediately apply are of very different 
 kinds. (Sometimes it may be external cir- 
 cumstances, sometimes ideal motives, zeal 
 for honor, enthusiasm for truth and justice, 
 personal hate, or even purely individual pe- 
 culiar ideas of all kinds. But on the one 
 
106 FEUEKBACH 
 
 hand, we have seen in history that the re- 
 sults of many individual wills produce ef- 
 fects, for the most part quite other than 
 what is wished— often, in fact, the very op- 
 posite—their motives of action, likewise, are 
 only of subordinate significance with re- 
 gard to the universal result. On the other 
 hand, the question arises: What driving 
 forces stand in turn behind these motives of 
 action; what are the historical causes which 
 transform themselves into motives of action 
 in the brains of the agents ? 
 
 The old materialism never set this ques- 
 tion before itself. Its philosophy of history, 
 as far as it ever had one in particular, is 
 hence essentially pragmatic; it judges ev- 
 erything from the standpoint of the immedi- 
 ate motive ; it divides historical agents into 
 good and bad and finds as a whole that the 
 good are defrauded and the bad are victo- 
 rious, whence it follows that, as far as the 
 old materialism is concerned, there is noth- 
 ing edifying that can be obtained from a 
 study of history, and for us, that in the 
 realm of history tiie old materialism is 
 proved to be false, since it fixes active ideal 
 impulses as final causes instead of seeking 
 
FEUERBACH 107 
 
 th at which lies behind them , that which is 
 the impulse of these impulses. The lack of 
 logical conclusion does not lie in the fact 
 that ideal impulses are recognized, but in 
 this, that there is no further examination 
 into the more remote causes of their activ- 
 ity. The philosophy of history, on the con- 
 trary, particularly as it was treated by 
 Hegel, recognizes that the ostensible and 
 even the real motives of the men who figure 
 in history, are by no means the final causes 
 of historical events,- that behind these events 
 stand other moving forces which must be 
 discovered ; but it seeks^ these forces not in 
 history itself, it imports them mostly from 
 the outside, from philosophical ideology, 
 into history. Instead of explaining the his- 
 tory of ancient Greece from its own inner 
 connection, Hegel, for example, explains it 
 solely as if it were nothing but the working 
 out of a beautiful individuality, the realiza- 
 tion of art, as such. He says much about 
 the old Greeks that is fine and profound, 
 but this does not prevent our dissatisfaction, 
 now-a-days, with such an explanation, 
 which is mere phraseology. 
 
 If, therefore, we set out to discover the 
 
108 FEUERBACH 
 
 impelling forces, which, acknowledged, or 
 unacknowledged, and for the most part un- 
 acknowledged, stand behind historical fig- 
 ures, and constitute the true final impulses 
 of history, we cannot consider so much the; 
 motives of single iMividuals, however pre- 
 eminent, as those which set in motion great 
 masses, entire nations, and again, whole 
 classes of people in each nation, and this, 
 too, not in a momentarily flaring and quick* 
 ly dying flame, but to enduring action cul- 
 minating in a great historical change. To 
 establish the great impelling forces which 
 play upon the brains of the acting masses 
 and their leaders, the so-called great men, as 
 conscious motives, clear or unclear, directly 
 or ideologically or even in a supernatural 
 form, that is the only method which can 
 place us on the track of the law controlling 
 history as a whole, as well as at particlar pe- 
 riods and in individual lands. All that sets) 
 men in motion must act upon their minds,; 
 I but the force which acts upon the brain 
 depends very largely upon circumstances. 
 The workers have by no means become rec- j 
 onciled to the machine power of the capi- 
 talists although they no longer break the 
 
FEUERBACH 109 
 
 machines to pieces as they did on the Rhine 
 in 1848. j 
 
 But while the discovery of these impel- 
 ling forces of history was entirely impossi- 
 ble in all other periods, on account of the 
 complicated and hidden interrelations with 
 their effects, our present period has so far 
 simplified these relations that the problem 
 can be solved. Since the establishment of 
 the great industry, at least since the peace of 
 Europe in 1815, it has been no longer a se- 
 cret to anyone in England that the whole 
 political fight has been for supremacy be- 
 tween two classes, the landed aristocracy 
 and the middle-class. In France, with the 
 return of the Bourbons, the same fact was 
 perceived; the writers of history, from 
 Thierry to Guizot, Mignet, and Thiers in 
 particular, pronounce it as a key to an un- 
 derstanding of French history, especially 
 since the Middle Ages. And since 1830 the 
 working class, the proletariat, has beenrecog- 
 nized as the third competitor for mastery 
 in both countries. Circumstances had be- 
 come so simplified that one would have had 
 to close his eyes not to see in the fight of 
 these three classes and in the conflict of 
 
110 FEUERBACH 
 
 their interests, the moving forces of modern 
 history, at least in the two most advanced 
 countries. 
 
 But how came these classes into existence ! 
 If the great feudal ancient property in land 
 can have its origin ascribed to political 
 causes through forcible seizure of territo- 
 ries, this could not be done as regards the 
 bourgeoisie and the proletariat. There are 
 in this case clearly exposed the origin and 
 progress of two great economic classes from 
 plain and evident economic causes. And it 
 was just as clear that in the fight between 
 the landholding class and the bourgeoisie, 
 no less than in that between the bourgeoisie 
 and the proletariat, economic interests were 
 the most important, and that political force 
 served only as a mere means of furthering 
 these. 
 
 The bourgeoisie and the proletariat both 
 arose as results of a change in economic 
 conditions, or, strictly speaking, in methods 
 N of production. The transition, first from 
 hand labor, controlled by the gilds, to man- 
 ufacture and thence from manufacture to 
 the greater industry, with steam and ma- 
 chine force, has developed these two classes. 
 
FEUERBACH 111 
 
 At a certain stage new forces of production 
 were set in motion by the bourgeoisie, fol- 
 lowing upon the division of labor and the 
 union of many different kinds of labor in 
 one united manufacture, and the methods 
 of exchange and requirements of exchange 
 developed by their means, were incompati- 
 ble with the existing historical surviving 
 methods of production consecrated by the 
 law, that is to say the gilds and the innumer- 
 able personal and other privileges (which 
 for the unprivileged were only so many fet- 
 ters) of the feudal social organization. The 
 forces of production brought into being by 
 the bourgeoisie rebelled against the methods 
 of production originated by the gildmasters 
 and the feudal landlords; the result igj 
 known; the feudal fetters were struck off, \ 
 in England gradually, in France at one 
 blow; in Germany the process is not yet 
 quite complete. As manufacture came into 
 conflict at a certain stage of progress with 
 feudal methods of production, so has the 
 greater industry now joined battle with the 
 bourgeois organization of industry estab- 
 lished in their place. Bound by this sys- 
 tem, owing to the narrow limits of the capi- 
 
112 FEUERBACH 
 
 talistic methods of production, there occurs 
 on the one hand an ever increasing conver- 
 sion of the mass of the people into proleta- 
 rians, and on the other hand an ever increas- 
 ing amount of products which cannot be dis- 
 posed of. Over-production, and suffering 
 on the part of the masses, the one the cause 
 of the other, that is the absurd contradic- 
 tion in which it runs its course, and which 
 of necessity requires a control of the 
 forces of production, through a change in 
 the methods of production. 
 
 In modern history, at least, it is therefore 
 j proved that all political contests are class 
 contests and that all fights of classes for 
 emancipation, in spite of their necessarily 
 ; political form (for every class struggle is 
 I a political struggle) , finally, are directed 
 towards economic emancipation. Here, at 
 least, therefore, the State, the political ar- 
 rangement is the subordinate, bourgeois so- 
 ciety, the rule of economic relations, the 
 Redding element. The old fashioned phi- 
 losophy which even Hegel respected saw in 
 the State the determining element and in 
 bourgeois society the element determined 
 by it. Appearances corresponded with this 
 
FEUERBACH 113 
 
 idea- As all the impulses of each single 
 agent pass through his individual brain 
 and must transform themselves into 
 motives of his will in order to set him 
 to work, so must also the desires of bour- 
 geois society, no matter which class hap- 
 pens to be dominant, penetrate the will of 
 the state in order to secure universal valid- 
 ity in the form of laws. That is the formal 
 side of the matter which is self evident, the 
 question only is what content has this mere- 
 ly formal will— of the individual as well as 
 of the State— and whence comes this con^ 
 tent— why is just this desired and nothing 
 else? And if we enquire into this we dis 
 cover that in modern history the will of the 
 State, as a whole, is declared through the 
 changing needs of bourgeois society, 
 through the domination of this or that class, 
 in the last instance through the development 
 of the forces of production and the condi- 
 tions of exchange. 
 
 But if in our modern times, with their 
 gigantic methods of production and com- 
 merce, the State is not an independent affair 
 with an independent development, but its 
 existence as well as its evolution is to be ex- 
 
114 FEUEKBACH 
 
 plained in the last resort from the economic 
 conditions of the life of society, so much the 
 more must the same thing be true of all 
 earlier times when the production of the 
 necessities of existence was not furthered by 
 these extensive aids, where, therefore, the 
 necessities of this production must ex- 
 ercise a greater control over men. If 
 the State is today, at the time of the 
 great industries and steam railways, 
 merely, as a whole, the summarized, 
 reflected form of the economic desires 
 of the class which controls production, it 
 must, therefore, have been still more so at 
 a period when a generation of men must 
 spend the greater portion of their united 
 life-time in the satisfaction of their material 
 needs, and man was, therefore, much more 
 dependent on them than we are today. The 
 examination of the earlier epochs of history, 
 as far as it is earnestly conducted in this 
 direction, establishes this abundantly, but 
 manifestly this cannot here be taken in hand. 
 If the State and public law are the crea- 
 tures of economic conditions, so, obviously, 
 is private law, which only sanctions rela- 
 tions between individuals under given nor- 
 
FEUERBACH 115 
 
 mal economic circumstances. The form in 
 which this appears may, however, vary con- 
 siderably. One can, as happened in Eng- 
 land in accordance with the whole national 
 development, retain, for the most part, the 
 forms of the old feudal law, and give them 
 a middle-class content, even read a middle- 
 class meaning into the feudal names, but 
 one may also, as in the western part of the 
 European continent, use as a foundation the 
 first general law of a society producing com- 
 modities, the Roman, with its unsurpassa- 
 bly keen elaboration, of all the legal rela- 
 tions of possessions of commodities (sellers 
 and buyers, creditors and debtors, contracts, 
 obligations, etc.), by which we can bring it 
 down as common-law to the use and benefit 
 of a still small bourgeois and half feudal 
 society; or, with the help of pseudo-en- 
 lightened and moralizing jurists, a code 
 (which is bad from a legal point of view) 
 can be worked out suitable to the conditions 
 of the particular society (as the Prussian 
 land law). And, still again^ after a great 
 bourgeois revolution, a classical code for 
 bourgeois society, such as the French "Code 
 Civil," may be worked out. If, therefore, 
 
116 FEUERBACH 
 
 the bourgeois laws only declare the econom- 
 ic circumstances of society, these may be 
 good or bad according to conditions. 
 
 In the State appears the first ideological 
 force over men. Society shapes for itself 
 an organ for the protection of its general 
 interests against attack from the outside or 
 inside. This organ is the force of the State. 
 Hardly did it come into being before this 
 organ dominated society, and as a matter 
 of fact, in proportion as it becomes the or- 
 gan of a particular class, it brings into ex- 
 istence the supremacy of that class. The 
 fight of the subject against the dominant 
 class becomes of necessity political, a fight 
 in the next place against the political control 
 f of this latter class. This consciousness of 
 the connection of the political fight with its 
 underlying economic causes becomes more 
 and more obscure and may be altogether 
 lost. Where this is not altogether the case 
 with the combatants it becomes nearly al- 
 together so with the historians. Of the an- 
 cient sources of history with regard to the 
 contest within the Roman Republic, Appian 
 alone gives us plain and clear information 
 respecting its final cause, which was prop- 
 
FEUERBACH 117 
 
 erty in land. But the State, once become an 
 independent power over society, forthwith 
 displayed a further ideology. Among the 
 practical politicians and the theorists in ju- 
 risprudence, and among the jurists in par- 
 ticular, this fact is first completely lost sight 
 of. Since in each single instance the eco- 
 nomic facts must take the form of juristic 
 motives so as to be sanctioned in the form 
 of law, and since, therefore, a backward 
 view must be taken over the whole existing 
 system of law, it follows therefrom that the 
 juristic form appears to be the whole and 
 the economic ^content nothing at all. Public 
 and private law are considered as indepen- 
 dent realms which have their own indepen- 
 dent historic evolution, which are consider- 
 ed capable of a systematic representation, 
 and stand in need of it through persistent 
 elimination of all inner contradictions. 
 
 Still higher ideological conceptions, i. e., 
 still further removed from the economic 
 foundations, take the form of philosophy 
 and religion. Here, the connection of the 
 ideas with the material conditions of exist- 
 ence become more and more complicated and 
 obscured by reason of the increasing num- 
 
118 FEUERBACH 
 
 ber of links betwen them, but it exists. As 
 the whole Rennaissance from the middle of 
 the fifteenth century was an actual product 
 of the city, and therefore of the bourgeois 
 domination, so was also the philosophy, 
 since that time newly awakened. Its con- 
 tent was actually only the philosophical ex- 
 pression of the thoughts corresponding with 
 the development of the small and middle 
 bourgeois into the great bourgeois. Among 
 the English and French of the preceding 
 century, who were for the most part as gjod 
 political economists as they were philoso- 
 phers, this is quite evident, and we have 
 proofs on its very face, as regards the 
 Hegelian school. 
 
 Let us now give a slight glance at relig- 
 ion since it appears to stand furthest away 
 from and to be most foreign to material life. 
 
 I Religion arose at a very remote period of 
 human development, in the savage state, 
 from certain erroneous and barbaric concep- 
 tions of men with regard to themselves and 
 the outside world of nature around them. 
 
 f Every ideological notion develops, however, 
 when once it has arisen ; it grows by addi- 
 tions to the given idea, and develops it fur- 
 
FEUERBACH 119 
 
 ther, otherwise there would be no ideology, 
 that is, no occupation with thoughts as with 
 independent thought-existence, developing 
 independently and subject only to its own 
 laws. That the material conditions of life 
 of the men within whose heads this thought 
 force is at work finally determine the course 
 of this thought-process necessarily remains 
 still unknown to these men, otherwise there 
 would be an entire end of the ideology. 
 These original religious notions, therefore, 
 which are for the most part common to each 
 kindred group of peoples, develop after the 
 separation of the group in a special manner 
 peculiar to each tribe, according to its par- 
 ticular conditions of existence, and this 
 process is for a class of groups of people, 
 and particularly for the Aryans (Indo- 
 Europeans) shown individually by 
 comparative mythology. The gods de- 
 veloped by each tribe were national 
 gods, whose power extended no fur- 
 ther than to protect the national terri- 
 tory; beyond the frontier other gods held 
 undisputed sway. They could only be con-. 
 ceived of as existing as long as the nation ex- 
 isted. They fell with its decline. This doctrine , 
 
120 FEUERBACH 
 
 of the old nationalities brought about the 
 Roman Empire, whose economic conditions 
 we do not need to examine just now. The old 
 national gods fell, as those of the Romans 
 did also, which were only attached to the 
 narrow limits of the city of Rome. The de- 
 sire to make the empire a world-empire, by 
 means of a world-wide religion, is clearly 
 shown in the attempts to provide recogni- 
 tion and altars in Rome for all the respect- 
 able foreign gods, next to the indigenous 
 ones. But a new world-religion was not to 
 be made in this fashion by imperial de- 
 crees. The new world-religion, Christian- 
 ity, had already arisen in secret by a 
 mixture of combined oriental religions, 
 Jewish theology and popularized Greek 
 philosophy and particularly Stoic philos- 
 ophy. We must first be at the pains to dis- 
 cover how it originally made its appearance, 
 since its official form as it has come to us is 
 merely that of a State religion, and this end 
 was achieved through the Council of Nice. 
 ) Enough, the fact that after two hundred and 
 fifty years it was a state religion shows that 
 it was a religion answering to the circum- 
 | stances of the times. In the Middle Ages it 
 
FEUERBACH 121 
 
 showed itself clearly. In proportion as feu- 
 dalism developed it grew into a religion 
 corresponding with it, with a hierarchy cor- 
 responding to the feudal. And when the 
 rule of the bourgeois came in, it developed 
 into Protestant heresy in antagonism to 
 feudal Catholicism, at first in the South of 
 France, among the Albigenses at the time 
 of the highest growth of the free cities. The 
 Middle Ages had annexed all the surviving 
 forms of ideology, philosophy, politics and 
 jurisprudence, to theology as subordinate 
 parts of theology. It constrained, there- 
 fore, all social and political movement to as- 
 sume a theological form; finally, to the 
 minds of the masses stuffed with religion it 
 was necessary to show their interests in re- 
 ligious guise, in order to raise a tremendous 
 storm. And as the rule of the bourgeois from 
 the beginning brought into being an append- 
 age of propertyless plebeians, with day la- 
 borers and servants of all sorts, without any 
 recognized position in their cities, the fore- 
 runners of the later proletarians, so the here- 
 sy was very early subdivided intoamoderate 
 one, on the part of the citizens, and a plebe- 
 ian revolutionary one, which was an abom- 
 
122 FEUERBACH 
 
 ination to the bourgeois heretics. 
 
 The failure to exterminate the protestant 
 heresy corresponded with the invincibility 
 of the rising power of the bourgeois of that 
 time ; as this power grew, the fight with the 
 feudal nobles, at first pre-eminently local, 
 began to assume national proportions. The 
 first great conflict occurred in Germany, the 
 so-called Reformation, The power of the 
 bourgeois was neither sufficiently strong 
 nor sufficiently developed for an open rebel- 
 lious stand, by uniting under the standard 
 of revolt the city plebeians, the smaller no- 
 bility, and the peasants of the country dis- 
 tricts. The nobility was struck first, the 
 peasants took up a position which was the 
 high-water mark of the entire revolution, 
 the cities left them in the lurch, and so the 
 revolution was left to the leaders of the coun- 
 try gentry who gathered the whole victory 
 to themselves. Thenceforth for three hun- 
 dred years Germany disappeared from the 
 ranks of independent, energetic progressive 
 countries. But after the German Luther, 
 arose the French Calvin. With natural 
 French acuteness he showed the bourgeois 
 character of the revolution in the Church, 
 
FEUERBACH 123 
 
 republicanised and democratised. While 
 the Lutheran Reformation fell in Germany 
 and Germany declined, the Calvinistic 
 served as a standard to the republicanis in 
 Geneva, in Holland, in Scotland, freed Hol- 
 land from German and Spanish domination, 
 and gave an ideological dress to the second 
 act of the bourgeois revolution which pro- 
 ceeded in England. Here Calvinism proved 
 itself to be the natural religious garb of the 
 interests of the existing rule of the bourgeois 
 and was not realised any further than that 
 the revolution of 1689 was completed by a 
 compromise between a portion of the no- 
 bility and the middle-class. The English 
 Established Church was restored, but not 
 in its earlier form with the king for Pope, 
 but was strongly infused with Calvinism. 
 The old-established Church had kept up the 
 merry Catholic Sunday and fought against 
 the tedious Calvinistic one, the new bour- 
 geois Church introduced the latter and 
 added thereby to the charms of England. 
 
 In France the Calvinistic minority was 
 subdued in 1685, either made Catholic or 
 hunted out of the country. But what was 
 the good? Directly after that the free think- 
 
124 FE'UERBACH 
 
 er Pierre Bayle was at work, and in 1694 
 Voltaire was born. The tyrannical rule of 
 Louis XIV. only made it easier for the 
 French bourgeoisie to be able to make its 
 revolution in the political form finally suit- 
 able to the progressive atheistic bourgeoisie. 
 Instead of Protestants, free-thinkers took 
 their seats in the National Assembly. There- 
 by Christianity entered upon the last lap of 
 the race. It had become incapable of serv- 
 ing a progressive class any further as the 
 ideological clothing of its efforts, it became 
 more and more the exclusive possession of 
 the dominant classes, and these used it 
 merely as a simple means of government to 
 keep the lower classes in subjection. So 
 then each one of the different classes em- 
 ployed its own suitable religion, the land- 
 holding squires catholic Jesuitism or prot- 
 estant orthodoxy, the liberal and radical 
 bourgeois rationalism, and it makes no dif- 
 ference therefore whether people them- 
 selves believe in their respective religions or 
 not. 
 
 Thus we see religion once arisen contains 
 material of tradition, hence in all ideolog- 
 ical matters religion is a great conservative 
 
FEUERBACH 125 
 
 force. But the changes which take place in 
 this material spring from class-conditions, 
 that is from the economic circumstances of 
 the men who take these changes in hand. 
 And that is enough on this part of the sub- 
 ject. 
 
 It is only possible at this time to give a 
 general sketch of the Marxian philosophy 
 of history, and particularly as regards il- 
 lustrations of it. The proof is to be dis- 
 covered in history itself, and in this regard 
 I may say plainly that it has been suffi- 
 ciently furnished in other writings. This"? 
 philosophy, however, makes an end of phi- 
 losophy in the realm of history, just as the 
 dialectic philosophy of nature renders every 
 philosophy of nature useless or impossible. 
 Practically there is no further need to de- 
 vise interrelations but to discover them in 
 facts rather. Instead of a philosophy forced 
 from nature and history there remains then 
 only the realm of pure thought— as far as 
 any is left— the teaching of the laws of 
 the thinking process itself, logic and the 
 dialectic. 
 
 With the Revolution of 1848 "educated' ! 
 Germany delivered the challenge to theory 
 
126 FEUERBACH 
 
 and proceeded to action. Hand-labor de- 
 pendent upon small production and manu- 
 facture was done away with by the great 
 industry— Germany again appeared in the 
 world-market. The new particularistic 
 Germany, at all events did away with the 
 most crying anomalies, which the rule of the 
 petty states, the remnants of feudalism and 
 the bureaucratic economy, had placed in the 
 way of their development, but just in pro- 
 portion as speculation abandoned the stud- 
 ies of philosophers to attain its temple in 
 the Bourse, that great theoretic thought 
 which had been the glory of Germany in 
 the period of its deepest political humilia- 
 tion, the zeal for pure scientific progress, 
 irrespective of practical, profitable results, 
 and of the disapproval of the police, became 
 lost in educated Germany. It is true that 
 the German official natural science main- 
 tained its position, particularly in the field 
 of individual discovery, at the head of its 
 time, but now the American journal 
 "Science" justly remarks that the decisive 
 advances in the matter of the broadest in- 
 clusive statement of the relations between 
 single facts, and the harmonising of them 
 
FEUEKBACH 127 
 
 with law, are making the greater headway 
 in England, instead of, as earlier, in Ger- 
 many. And with regard to the sciences of 
 history, philosophy included, with the class- 
 ical philosophy, the old theoretical spirit, 
 with its carelessness of personal results, 
 first completely disappeared. Thoughtless 
 eclecticism, eager backward glances at a 
 career, and income down to the meanest 
 sycophancy occupy their places. The official 
 representatives of this sort of science have 
 become the ojten ideologists of the bour- 
 geoisie and the existing state, but at a time 
 when they both stand in open antagonism 
 to the working classes. 
 
 Only among the working classes does the 
 German devotion to abstract thought stead- 
 ily continue to exist. Here it cannot be got 
 rid of. Here we find no backward glances 
 at a career, at profit making, at kindly pro- 
 tection from the upper classes, but on the 
 contrary the more independent and unre- 
 stricted the path of science, just so much 
 the more does it find itself in accord 
 with the interests and endeavors of the 
 working class. The new tendency, which j 
 in the history of the development of 
 
128 FEUERBACH 
 
 labor made known the key to the 
 understanding of the universal history of 
 society addressed itself in the first place to 
 the working class and found in them the 
 ready acceptance which it neither sought 
 nor expected from official science. The 
 German working-class movement is the heir 
 of the German classical philosphy. 
 
FEUERBACH 129 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 MARX ON FEUERBACH. 
 
 (Jotted down in Brussels in the spring of 
 1845.) 
 The chief lack of all materialistic phi- 
 losophy up to the present, including that of 
 Feuerbach, is that the thing, the reality, 
 sensation is only conceived of under the 
 form of the object which is presented to the 
 eye, but not as human sense— activity, 
 "praxis," not subjectively. It therefore 
 came about that the active side in opposi- 
 tion to materialism was developed from 
 idealism, but only abstractly ; this was nat- 
 ural, since idealism does not recognize 
 real tangible facts as such. Feuerbach is( 
 willing, it is true, to distinguish objects of 
 sensation from objects existing in thought, 
 but he conceives of human activity itself 
 not as objective activity. He, therefore, in 
 the "Wesen des Christenthums, " regards 
 only theoretical activity as generally hu- 
 man, while the "praxis" is conceived and 
 fixed only in its disgusting form. 
 
130 FEUERBACH 
 
 II. 
 
 The question if objective truth is possible 
 to human thought is not a theoretical but a 
 practical question. In practice man must 
 prove the truth, that is the reality and force 
 in his actual thoughts. The dispute as to 
 the reality or non-reality of thought which 
 separates itself, "the praxis,' ' is a purely 
 scholastic question. 
 
 III. 
 
 The materialistic doctrine that men are 
 the products of conditions and education, 
 different men therefore the products of 
 other conditions and changed education, 
 forgets that circumstances may be altered 
 by men and that the educator has himself 
 to be educated. It necessarily happens 
 therefore that society is divided into two 
 parts, of which one is elevated above so- 
 ciety (Robert Owen for example). 
 
 The occurrence simultaneously of a 1 
 change in conditions and human activity can 
 only be comprehended and rationally un- 
 derstood as a revolutionary fact. 
 
FEUERBACH 131 
 
 IV. 
 
 Feuerbach proceeds from a religious self- 
 alienation, the duplication of the world into 
 a religious, imaginary, and a real world. 
 His work consists in the discovery of the 
 jnaterial foundations of the religious world. 
 He overlooked the fact that after carrying 
 this to completion the important matter 
 still remains unaccomplished. The fact 
 that the material foundation annuls itself 
 and establishes for itself a realm in the 
 clouds can only be explained from the heter- 
 ogeneity and self-contradiction of the mate- 
 rial foundation. This itself must first become 
 understood in its contradictions and so be- 
 come thoroughly revolutionized by the elim- 
 ination of the contradiction. After the earth- 
 ly family has been discovered as the secret 
 of the Holy Family, one must have theoret- 
 ically criticised and theoretically revolu- 
 tionised it beforehand. 
 
 V. 
 
 Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract 
 thought, invokes impressions produced by 
 the senses, but does not comprehend sensa- 
 tion as practical sensory activities. 
 
132 FEUEEBACH 
 
 VI. 
 
 Feuerbach dissolves religion in human- 
 ity. But humanity is not an abstraction 
 dwelling in each individual. In its reality 
 it is the ensemble of the conditions of so- 
 ciety. 
 
 Feuerbach, who does not enquire into this 
 fact, is therefore compelled: 
 
 1. To abstract religious sentiment from 
 the course of history, to place it by itself, 
 and to pre-suppose an abstract, isolated, hu- 
 man individual. 
 
 2. Humanity is therefore only compre- 
 hended by him as a species, as a hidden sort 
 of merely natural identity of qualities in 
 which many individuals are embraced. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Therefore Feuerbach does not see that re- 
 ligious feeling is itself a product of society, 
 and that the abstract individual which he 
 analyses belongs in reality to a certain form 
 of society. 
 
 The life of society is essentially practical. 
 All the mysteries which seduce speculative 
 thought into mysticism find their solution in 
 
FEUERBACH 133 
 
 human practice and in concepts of this prac- 
 tice. 
 
 IX, 
 
 The highest point to which materialism 
 attains, that is the materialism which com- 
 prehends sensation, not as a practical fact, 
 is the point of view of the single individual 
 in bourgeois society. 
 
 X. 
 
 The standpoint of the old materialism is 
 
 J^ y i bourgeois ' ' society ; the standpoint of the 
 
 new, human society, or associated humanity. 
 
 i>0 oM^* ^ 
 
 XI. 
 
 Philosophers have only interpreted the 
 world differently, but the point is to 
 change it. 
 
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