The second special limitation of this materialism lies in its incapacity to represent the universe as a process, as one form of matter assumed in the course of evolutionary development. This limitation corresponded with the natural science of the time and the metaphysic coincident therewith, that is the anti-dialectic methods of thephilosophers. Nature, as was known, was in constant motion, but this motion, according to the universally accepted ideas, turned eternally in a circle, and therefore never 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 thisabsurdity 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 bringing into existence of great nations, which arose, one after the other, and finally the enormous technical advances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—all this no one saw. Consequently a rational view of the great historic development was rendered impossible, and history servedprincipally as a collection of examples and illustrations 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 existence 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 satisfaction that materialism sank still lower. Feuerbach was decidedly right when he refused to take the responsibility of this materialism, only he had no business to confound the teachings of the itinerant spouters with materialism in general.
However, we must here remark two different things. During the life of Feuerbach science was still in that state of violent fermentation 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, inthe 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 theory acknowledged since the time of Darwin. But how could the solitary country-dwelling philosopher appreciate at their full value discoveries which naturalists themselves at that time in part contested and partly did not understand how to avail themselves of sufficiently? The disgrace falls solely upon the miserable conditions in Germany owing to which the chairs of philosophy were filled by pettifogging eclectic pedants, while Feuerbach, who towered high above them all, had to rusticate 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 knowledge but it is not the building itself. Forwe live not only in nature but in human society, and this has its theory of development and its science no less than nature. It was necessary, therefore, to bring the science of 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 materialists, but not forwards." But Feuerbach himself did not go forward in his views of human 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 thus 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.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?"
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 "Categorical Imperative." But Kant himself called his philosophy "transcendental idealism," by no means because he deals therein with moral ideals, but on quite other grounds, as Starcke will remember.
The superstition that philosophical idealism 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. Nobody has criticised more severely the feeble Categorical Imperative of Kant—feeble because it demands the impossible and therefore never attains to any reality—nobody has ridiculed more cruelly the Philistinesentimentality imparted by Schiller, because of its unrealizable ideals, than just the idealist par excellence, Hegel. (See e. g. Phenomenology.)
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 consequence of sensations of satisfaction similarly experienced by the brain. The realities of the outer world impress themselves upon the brain of man, reflect themselves there, as feelings, thoughts, impulses, volitions, in short, as ideal tendencies, and in this form become ideal forces. If the circumstance that this man follows ideal tendencies at all, and admits that ideal forces exercise an influence over him, if this makes an idealist of him, every normally developed man is in some sense a born idealist, and under such circumstances how can materialists exist?
In the third place, the conviction that humanity, at least at present, as a whole, progresses, has absolutely nothing to do with the antagonism between materialism andidealism. 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 antagonism between the aims of the two.
The fact is that Starcke here makes an unpardonable concession to the prejudices of the Philistines caused by the long continued slanders of the clergy against the word materialism, even if without consciously doing 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 endurethe 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 importance to those people who take an interest in the afterbirth of the German classic philosophy, to Starcke himself this might appear necessary. We spare the reader this, however.
FOOTNOTE:[1]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 Imthurm, for example, found it in 1884 among the Indians in Guiana.
[1]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 Imthurm, for example, found it in 1884 among the Indians in Guiana.
[1]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 Imthurm, for example, found it in 1884 among the Indians in Guiana.
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." Religion is, according to Feuerbach, a matter of the feelings—the feelings of love between man and man which up to now sought its realization in the fantastic 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" 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.
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 existing positive religions have limited themselves in this matter to the bestowal of complete consecration upon the State regulation of sexual love, and might completely disappear 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 completely overthrown between the years 1793 and 1798, that Napoleon himself could not re-introduce it without opposition and difficulty, without, in the interval, any desire for a substitute, in Feuerbach's sense, making itself felt.
Feuerbach's idealism consists in this, that he does not simply take for granted the mutual and reciprocal feelings of men for one another such as sexual love, friendship, compassion, self-sacrifice, etc., but declares thatthey would come to their full realization for the first time as soon as they were consecrated under the name of religion. The main fact for him is not that these purely human relations exist, but that they will be conceived of as the new true religion. They will be fully realized for the first time if they are stamped as religions. Religion is derived from "religare" and means originally "fastening." Therefore, every bond between men is religion. Such etymological artifices are the last resort of the idealistic philosophy. Not what the word means according 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 the 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 religion as a monster, and used to say to us "Atheism, then, is your religion."
If Feuerbach wants to place true religionupon the basis of real materialistic philosophy, that would be just the same as conceiving of modern chemistry as true alchemy. If religion can exist without its God then alchemy can exist without its philosopher'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 Egyptian-Greek alchemists of the first two centuries 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 differentiated through changes in religion is false. Great historical points of departure are coincident 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 decaying Roman Empire and the Christianworld-religion springing from it and suitable to its economic, political and ideal circumstances, 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 movements will take on a religious stamp, and as far as concerns Christianity in particular, the stamp of the religion affecting revolutionary movements of universal significance stopped short at the commencement of the fight of the bourgeois for emancipation from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, and showed itself not as Feuerbach 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 century was sufficiently strong to have its own ideology suitable to its own standpoint, it forthwith made its great and final revolution, the French, by means of an appeal exclusively to juristic and political ideals, and troubled itself with religion only so far as it stood in its way. It never occurred to itto 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 sentiment 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, particularly in Germany, so in the same way the understanding of the great historical class-conflicts is sufficiently obscured by the present-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 examined closely is Christianity, the universal religion of the western world which is founded upon monotheism. He proves thatthe 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. 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.
Of this relationship only one side appeals to him, the moral, and Feuerbach's astonishing 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 entire scope of law, economy, politics, is therein, besides ethics. With Feuerbach, it is justthe 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 concerning the philosophy of religion. This man is not even the son of a mother; 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 abstraction as he himself is. In the "philosophy of religion" we had still men and women, but in the "ethic" this final distinction vanishes. At long intervals Feuerbach makes such statements as: "A man thinks differently in a palace than in a hut." "When you have 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 toFeuerbach and the science of society, sociology, for him a terra incognita.
He appears just as uninspired in comparison with Hegel in his treatment of the antithesis of good and evil. "One thinks he is saying something great," Hegel remarks "if one says that mankind is by nature 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 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. But Feuerbach does not trouble 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 wasonly a mere creature, not a man." "Man is a product of human society, of education, and of history." Even this statement remains from his standpoint absolutely unproductive.
What Feuerbach communicates to us respecting morals must therefore be exceedingly 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; after the dissipation comes the headache, as a result of habitual excess, sickness; in the second place, through its results upon society, if we do not respect the similar desire for happiness on the part of other people, they resist us and spoil our pursuit of happiness. It follows, therefore, that in order to enjoy our pursuit of happiness, the result 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 regard to ourselves and love, always love, in our intercourse with others are therefore the foundation rules of Feuerbach's morality,from which all others lead, and neither the enthusiastic periods of Feuerbach nor the loud praises of Starcke can set off the thinness 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 manper se, 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 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."
Are matters any better with the equal right of another to the pursuit of happiness?Feuerbach set this statement out as absolute, as applicable to all times and circumstances. 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 now-a-days—recognized in words merely since the bourgeoisie in its fight against feudalism and in the institution of capitalistic production, was compelled to abolish all existing exclusive, that is, personal, privileges, and for the first time to introduce the right of the private individual, 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 satisfaction takes care that only enough for bare subsistence falls to the great majority of those persons with equal rights, andtherefore regards the equality of right to the pursuit 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?
Further, according to the ethical theory of Feuerbach, the Bourse is the highest temple of morality, only provided that one speculate 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, Feuerbach'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 practically accomplishes. And since I carry on my operations with more exact prudence and therefore with greater success I fulfill the strongest maxims of the Feuerbachmoral philosophy and become a rich man into the bargain. In other words, Feuerbach's morality is hewn out of the capitalistic system 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 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.
In a word, the moral theories of Feuerbach 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 Imperative." As a matter of fact, every class, as well as every profession, has its own system of morals and breaks even this when itcan do it without punishment, and love, which is to 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 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. Feuerbach strove against that, hence the year 1848, which, he did not understand, 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 ofFeuerbach's religion must be replaced by the knowledge of real men and their historical development. This advance of Feuerbach's view beyond Feuerbach himself was published in 1845 by Marx in the "Holy Family."
Strauss, Bauer, Stirner, Feuerbach, these were the minor representatives of the Hegelian 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 literary character, after the fashion of Renan; Bauer has merely done something in the department of primitive Christianity, but that significant; Stirner remained a "freak" even after Bakunine had mixed him with Proudhon and designated his amalgamation "Anarchism." 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. He was not an apt critic of Hegelbut 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.[2]
In this case the separation from the Hegelian 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 anypreconceived idealistic balderdash interfering; it was resolved to pitilessly sacrifice any idealistic preconceived notion which could not be brought into harmony with facts actually discovered in their mutual 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 exist 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 "Logic," and which are all included in it. Then it steps outside of itself, changing with nature itself, where it,without self-consciousness, is disguised as a necessity of nature, goes through a new development, and, finally, in man himself, becomes self-consciousness. 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. This topsy-turvy ideology had to be put aside. We conceived of ideas as materialistic, 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 asregards expression, in so far as the mind of man can employ them consciously, while, in nature, and up to now, in human history, for the most part they accomplish themselves, unconsciously in the form of external necessity, through an endless succession of apparent accidents. Hereupon the dialectic of the Idea became itself merely the conscious reflex of the dialectic evolution of the real world, and therefore, the dialectic of Hegel was turned upside down or rather it was placed upon its feet instead of on its head, where it was standing before. And this materialistic dialectic 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 interfered with its necessary conclusions. The great fundamental thought, namely, that the world is not to be considered as a complexity of ready-made things, but as acomplexity 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 being 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 development—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 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. One cannot be imposed upon any longer by the inflated insubstantial antitheses of the older metaphysics of true andfalse, good and evil, identical and differentiated, necessary and accidental; one knows that these antitheses have only a relative significance, that that which is recognized as true now, has its concealed and later-developing false side, just as that which is recognized as false, its true side, by virtue of which it can later on prevail as the truth; that so-called necessity is made up of the merely accidental, and that the acknowledged 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 quantities, 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 changes in it. And so it was with natural science. The old metaphysic which comprehended things as stable came from a philosophy which enquired into dead and living things as things comprehended as stable.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. Physiology, which examines the earlier forms of plant and animal organisms; embryology, 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 discoveries 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 anddifferentiation 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 metamorphosis of energy which has shown us that all the so-called real forces in inorganic nature, the mechanical forces and their complements, the so-called potential energies, heat, radiation (light, radiating heat), electricity, magnetism, chemical energy, are different 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 process of transformation from one into the other. Finally, the proof first developed logically by Darwin, that the organic products of nature about us, including man, are the result of a long process of evolution,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 science, 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 facts 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 beconceived 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 character of this interconnection forces itself into the metaphysically trained minds of experimental 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 hereby 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 human 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 originating in the mind of the philosopher was substituted; 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 certainpredetermined, 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 unknown, interrelation, man set a new mysterious destiny, unconscious or gradually coming 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 discovery of the universal laws of progress, which established themselves as the dominating ones in the history of human society.
The history of the growth of society appears, however, in one respect entirely different 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 realizes itself. From all that happens, whether from the innumerable apparent accidents which appear upon the surface, or from the final results flowing from these accidentaloccurrences, nothing occurs as a desired conscious end. On the contrary, in the history of society the mere actors are all endowed 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 distinction, important as it is for historical examination, 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 nature, which is without definite purpose. The ends of the actions are intended, but theresults which follow from the actions are not intended, or in so far as they appear to correspond with the end desired, in their final results are quite different from the conclusion wished. Historical events in their entirety therefore appear to be likewise controlled 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 question remaining, therefore, is to discover 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 reflection, but the levers which passion or reflection immediately apply are of very different kinds. Sometimes it may be external circumstances, sometimes ideal motives, zeal for honor, enthusiasm for truth and justice, personal hate, or even purely individual peculiar ideas of all kinds. But on the onehand, we have seen in history that the results of many individual wills produce effects, for the most part quite other than what is wished—often, in fact, the very opposite—their motives of action, likewise, are only of subordinate significance with regard 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 question before itself. Its philosophy of history, as far as it ever had one in particular, is hence essentially pragmatic; it judges everything from the standpoint of the immediate motive; it divides historical agents into good and bad and finds as a whole that the good are defrauded and the bad are victorious, whence it follows that, as far as the old materialism is concerned, there is nothing edifying that can be obtained from a study of history, and for us, that in the realm of history the old materialism is proved to be false, since it fixes active ideal impulses as final causes instead of seekingthat 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 activity. 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. Instead of explaining the history 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 realization 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 theimpelling forces, which, acknowledged, or unacknowledged, and for the most part unacknowledged, stand behind historical figures, and constitute the true final impulses of history, we cannot consider so much the motives of single individuals, 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 quickly dying flame, but to enduring action culminating 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 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. The workers have by no means become reconciled to the machine power of the capitalists although they no longer break themachines to pieces as they did on the Rhine in 1848.
But while the discovery of these impelling forces of history was entirely impossible 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 secret to anyone in England that the whole political fight has been for supremacy between 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 understanding of French history, especially since the Middle Ages. And since 1830 the working class, the proletariat, has been recognized as the third competitor for mastery in both countries. Circumstances had become 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 oftheir 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 territories, 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 of production. The transition, first from hand labor, controlled by the gilds, to manufacture and thence from manufacture to the greater industry, with steam and machine force, has developed these two classes.At a certain stage new forces of production were set in motion by the bourgeoisie, following 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 incompatible with the existing historical surviving methods of production consecrated by the law, that is to say the gilds and the innumerable personal and other privileges (which for the unprivileged were only so many fetters) 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 is 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 established in their place. Bound by this system, owing to the narrow limits of thecapitalistic methods of production, there occurs on the one hand an ever increasing conversion of the mass of the people into proletarians, and on the other hand an ever increasing amount of products which cannot be disposed of. Over-production, and suffering on the part of the masses, the one the cause of the other, that is the absurd contradiction 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 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. The old fashioned philosophy which even Hegel respected saw in the State the determining element and in bourgeois society the element determined by it. Appearances corresponded with thisidea. 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. That is the formal side of the matter which is self evident, the question only is what content has this merely formal will—of the individual as well as of the State—and whence comes this content—why is just this desired and nothing else? And if we enquire into this we discover 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 conditions of exchange.
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 beexplained 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. 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 creatures of economic conditions, so, obviously, is private law, which only sanctions relations between individuals under givennormal economic circumstances. The form in which this appears may, however, vary considerably. One can, as happened in England 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 commodities, the Roman, with its unsurpassably keen elaboration, of all the legal relations 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-enlightened 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,the bourgeois laws only declare the economic 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 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. Where this is not altogether the case with the combatants it becomes nearly altogether so with the historians. Of the ancient 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 wasproperty 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 jurisprudence, and among the jurists in particular, this fact is first completely lost sight of. Since in each single instance the economic 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 independent realms which have their own independent historic evolution, which are considered 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 existence become more and more complicated and obscured by reason of the increasingnumber of links between 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 content was actually only the philosophical expression 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 good political economists as they were philosophers, 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 religion since it appears to stand furthest away from and to be most foreign to material life. 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 itfurther, 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 particular 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 developed by each tribe were national gods, whose power extended no further than to protect the national territory; beyond the frontier other gods held undisputed sway. They could only be conceived of as existing as long as the nation existed. They fell with its decline. This doctrineof 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 desire to make the empire a world-empire, by means of a world-wide religion, is clearly shown in the attempts to provide recognition and altars in Rome for all the respectable foreign gods, next to the indigenous ones. But a new world-religion was not to be made in this fashion by imperial decrees. The new world-religion, Christianity, had already arisen in secret by a mixture of combined oriental religions, Jewish theology and popularized Greek philosophy and particularly Stoic philosophy. We must first be at the pains to discover 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 circumstances of the times. In the Middle Ages itshowed itself clearly. In proportion as feudalism developed it grew into a religion corresponding with it, with a hierarchy corresponding 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, therefore, all social and political movement to assume a theological form; finally, to the minds of the masses stuffed with religion it was necessary to show their interests in religious guise, in order to raise a tremendous storm. And as the rule of the bourgeois from the beginning brought into being an appendage of propertyless plebeians, with day laborers and servants of all sorts, without any recognized position in their cities, the forerunners of the later proletarians, so the heresy was very early subdivided into a moderate one, on the part of the citizens, and a plebeian revolutionary one, which was anabomination 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 rebellious stand, by uniting under the standard of revolt the city plebeians, the smaller nobility, and the peasants of the country districts. 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 country gentry who gathered the whole victory to themselves. Thenceforth for three hundred 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,republicanised and democratised. While the Lutheran Reformation fell in Germany and Germany declined, the Calvinistic served as a standard to the republicans in Geneva, in Holland, in Scotland, freed Holland from German and Spanish domination, and gave an ideological dress to the second act of the bourgeois revolution which proceeded 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 nobility 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 bourgeois 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 freethinker 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 suitable to the progressive atheistic bourgeoisie. Instead of Protestants, free-thinkers took their seats in the National Assembly. Thereby Christianity entered upon the last lap of the race. It had become incapable of serving 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 employed its own suitable religion, the landholding squires catholic jesuitism or protestant orthodoxy, the liberal and radical bourgeois rationalism, and it makes no difference therefore whether people themselves believe in their respective religions or not.
Thus we see religion once arisen contains material of tradition, hence in all ideological matters religion is a great conservativeforce. 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 subject.
It is only possible at this time to give a general sketch of the Marxian philosophy of history, and particularly as regards illustrations of it. The proof is to be discovered in history itself, and in this regard I may say plainly that it has been sufficiently furnished in other writings. This philosophy, however, makes an end of philosophy 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 devise 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 theoryand proceeded to action. Hand-labor dependent upon small production and manufacture 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 proportion as speculation abandoned the studies 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 humiliation, 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 maintained 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 inclusive statement of the relations between single facts, and the harmonising of themwith law, are making the greater headway in England, instead of, as earlier, in Germany. 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.
Only among the working classes does the German devotion to abstract thought steadily continue to exist. Here it cannot be got rid of. 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. The new tendency, which in the history of the development oflabor 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 philosophy.