Friedrich Engels

“ Feuerbach alone possessed 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 idealist. ”

“ 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 knowledge, the science of actual things, so is science in our day pre-eminently an arranging 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 reality. 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 living men from the abstract men of Feuerbach if we regard them as active historical agents. ”

“ 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 forward appears as an outrage against a sacred thing, as rebellion against the old, dying, but through custom, sanctified, circumstances, and on the other hand that since the rising of class antagonism, the evil passions of men, greed and imperiousness serve as the levers of historical progress, of which, for example, the history of feudalism and the bourgeoisie affords a conspicuous proof. ”

“ The distinct idealism of Feuerbach is evident directly we come to his philosophy of religion and ethics. He does not wish to abolish religion by any means; he wants to perfect it. Philosophy itself will be absorbed in religion. "The periods of human progress are only distinguishable by religious 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 being of religion." ”

“ 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 opposing 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 impediment of sex or position—universal intoxication of reconciliation. ”

“ 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 circumlocution. Nature exists independently of all philosophies. It is the foundation upon which we, ourselves products of nature, are built. Outside man and nature nothing exists, and the higher beings which our religious phantasies have created are only the fantastic reflections of our individuality. ”

“ 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 progressive development—as soon as we understand that, it is all over with philosophy in the present sense of the word. ”

“ As regards all philosophers, their system is doomed to perish and for this reason, because it emanates from an imperishable desire 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, history 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 insoluble contradiction. ”

“ The question of the relation of thinking to being, of the relation of the spirit to nature, the highest question of universal philosophy, has therefore, no less than all religion, its roots in the limited and ignorant ideas of the condition of savagery. It could first be understood, and its full significance could first be grasped, when mankind awoke from the long winter sleep of Christian Middle Ages. ”

“ And this Feuerbach himself shows clearly in forcible words, "One thinks differently in a palace than in a hut." "Where owing to misery and hunger you have no material in your body, you have also no material in your head, mind and heart for morals." ”

“ What we must not forget is, that just on these two weaknesses of Feuerbach "true Socialism" 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. ”

“ 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 materialism. 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 necessarily from their standpoint it is the building itself. Backwards, I am in accord with the materialists but not forwards." ”

“ 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 philosophy of history, on the contrary, 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. ”

“ The same Feuerbach 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 31] how one stage succeeds another in the development 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 bourgeois society, no matter which class happens to be dominant, penetrate the will of the state in order to secure universal validity in the form of laws. ”

“ Religion arose at a very remote period of human development, in the savage state, from certain erroneous and barbaric conceptions of men with regard to themselves and the outside world of nature around them. Every ideological notion develops, however, when once it has arisen; it grows by additions to the given idea, and develops it [Pg 119] further, 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. ”

“ So in the course of progress all earlier reality becomes unreality, loses its necessity, its right of existence, its rationality; in place of the dying reality comes a new vital reality, peaceable when the old is sufficiently sensible to go to its death without a struggle, forcible when it strives against this necessity. ”

“ And with regard to the sciences of history, philosophy included, with the classical 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 open ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the existing state, but at a time when they both stand in open antagonism to the working classes. ”

“ The precise form a movement takes, be it intellectual, ethical or artistic, I fully admit, is determined by the material circumstances of the society in which it acquires form and shape, but it is also determined by those fundamental psychological tendencies which have given it birth. ”

“ In modern history, at least, it is therefore 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 a political struggle) , finally, are directed towards economic emancipation. Here, at least, therefore, the State, the political arrangement is the subordinate, bourgeois society, the rule of economic relations, the deciding element. ”

“ 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 particular periods and in individual lands. All that sets men in motion must act upon their minds, but the force which acts upon the brain depends very largely upon circumstances. ”

“ But to acknowledge it in phrases, and to apply it in reality to each particular set of conditions which come up for examination, are two different matters. But if one proceeds steadily in his investigations from this historic 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 knowledge, of its hypothetical nature, owing to the circumstances under which it has been gained. ”

“ The only religion which Feuerbach examined closely is Christianity, the universal religion of the western world which is founded upon monotheism. He proves that [Pg 82] the Christian God is only the fantastic reflection, 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 national gods. And man also whose reflection that God is, is not a real man, but is likewise the quintessence of many real men, the abstract human, and therefore himself again the creature of thought. ”

“ Hardly did it come into being before this organ dominated society, and as a matter of fact, in proportion as it becomes the organ of a particular class, it brings into existence 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 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. ”

“ The one party which placed the origin of the spirit before that of nature, and therefore in the last instance accepted creation, in some form or other—and this creation, is often according to the philosophers, according to Hegel for example, 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 materialism. ”

“ This self-consciousness now works itself out into the higher stages from the lower forms of matter, until finally the Absolute Idea is again realized in the Hegelian philosophy. According to Hegel, the dialectic development apparent in nature and history, that is a causative, connected progression from the lower to the higher, in spite of all zig-zag movements and momentary 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But if in our modern times, with their gigantic methods of production and commerce, the State is not an independent affair with an independent development, but its existence as well as its evolution is to be [Pg 114] explained 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 exercise a greater control over men. ”

“ Nature furnishes the test to dialectics, and this much we must say for modern natural science, that it has contributed towards this test an extremely rich and daily increasing material, whereby it has demonstrated that, in the last instance, nature proceeds upon dialectical, not upon metaphysical methods, that it does not move upon the eternal sameness of a perpetually recurring circle, but that it goes through an actual historic evolution. ”

“ Here we find no backward glances at a career, at profit making, at kindly protection from the upper classes, but on the contrary the more independent and unrestricted the path of science, just so much the more does it find itself in accord with the interests and endeavors of the working class. ”