(Hegel and Left Hegelians—David Friedrich Strauss.— The Brothers Bruno and Edgar Bauer.—Feuerbach.)

p German idealist philosophy played an extremely important role in the history of the development of science in the nineteenth century. It had an impressive impact even on natural science. But incomparably more powerful was its influence on those “disciplines” which in France are called the moral and political sciences. Here the influence of German idealist philosophy must be recognised as decisive in the full meaning of the word. It raised, and to some extent solved, problems of which the solution was absolutely imperative if scientific investigation of the process of social development was to be possible. As an example, it is sufficient to refer to Schilling’s solution of the problem of the relationship of freedom to necessity (in his System des transzendentalen Idealismus, Tubingen, 1800). But Schelling was only a forerunner; German idealism found its most complete exponent in the person of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

p It was quite natural that his influence should be felt most of all in his native land, Germany. But after Germany, there was no country where Hegel’s teaching had such an influence as it had in Russia.  [600•* 

It is impossible to understand the history of West European philosophy and West European social science in the nineteenth century unless one is acquainted with the main features of the philosophies of Hegel and Feuerbach. That is self-evident. But at first glance it is much less easy to grasp the incontestable fact that it was precisely to these two non-Russian thinkers that those Russian writers had to refer who were attempting to solve what might appear to be purely Russian problems. Further consideration will show, I hope, that there was in fact nothing at all strange about that. For the moment I will confine myself to saying that the whole point is the scientific character of the philosophical systems of Hegel and Feuerbach. It is this character in particular we have to note above all, beginning, of course, with Hegel.