Feuerbach

by Friedrich Engels

As the "Communist Manifesto" was a gage flung with all the impetuosity of youthful impatience into the face of constituted 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 opinions in a quiet, deadly and deliberate fashion.

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," and finally Feuerbach himself are summoned from the grave to which the Revolution of 1848 had consigned them. Still, ancient history as these controversies are from the German standpoint, such is the backwardness of philosophy among English-speaking peoples, that we find Engels exposing again and again fallacies which persist even in our time, and ridiculing sentiments 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 controversies long past, when the arguments of the critics of the Bible were creating now fury, now dismay, throughout Christendom, before the Higher Criticism had become respected, and before soi-disant sceptics could continue to go solemnly to church.

Moreover, the work was written in German for German workmen for whom religion has not the same significance as it apparently still continues to possess for the English-speaking people, whose sensitiveness upon the subject appears to have outlived their faith. However that may be, religious bodies possess a curious and perhaps satisfactory faculty of absorbing the truths of science, and still continuing to exist, and even to thrive, upon what the inexperienced might easily mistake for a deadly diet.

Under the circumstances there is no reason why Engels' remarks should affect even the timorous, although it must be remembered that a very able English socialist philosopher is reputed to have damaged his chances irretrievably by an ill-judged quotation 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 intellectual a character, but it is little to be wondered at. His contempt for university professors and the pretentious cultivated classes, who claim so much upon such slight grounds, is not strange, when we consider the honest labors of himself and his colleagues and the superficial place-hunting of the recognized savants. He loves learning for its own sake, for the sake of truth and scientific accuracy, and he cannot 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 themselves. The degradation of German philosophy affects him with a real sorrow; the scholar is outraged at the mockery. "Sterility," "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 conservative and a radical side and how conservatives and radicals alike might, (as a matter of fact they did), each derive support from his teachings, according to the amount of stress laid respectively upon the great divisions of his work, the "System" and the "Dialectic."

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 influence upon his subsequent career. His critics lay the blame for much of the obscurity 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 investigation of actual facts, his insistence on the value of positive knowledge as compared with abstract theory, and his diligent and persistent use of blue-books and statistics, were in a great measure results of the same training.