p Beginning with the years 1844-45, when his views took shape, Marx was a materialist and especially a follower of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose weak points he subsequently saw only in his materialism being insufficiently consistent and comprehensive. To Marx Feuerbach’s historic and “ epochmaking” significance lay in his having resolutely broken 14 with Hegel’s idealism and in his proclamation of materialism, which already "in the eighteenth century, particularly FrenchJ materialism, was not only a struggle against the existing political institutions and against ... religion and theology, but also ... against all metaphysics", (in the sense of "drunken speculation" as distinct from "sober philosophy"). (The Holy Family, in Literarischer Nachlass.) "To Hegel..." wrote Marx, "the process of thinking, which, under the name of ’the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos (the creator, the maker) of the real world.... With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought" (Capital, Vol. I, Afterword to the Second Edition). In full conformity with this materialist philosophy of Marx’s, and expounding it, Frederick Engels wrote in Anti-Dnhring (read by Marx in the manuscript): "The unity of the world does not consist in its being.... The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proved ... by a long and wearisome development of philosophy and natural science...." " Motion is the mode of existence of matter. Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, or motion without matter, nor can there be.... But if the ... question is raised: what thought and consciousness really are, and where they come from; it becomes apparent that they are products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of Nature, which has developed in and along with its environment; hence it is self-evident that the products of the human brain, being in the last analysis also products of Nature, do not contradict the rest of Nature’s interconnections but are in correspondence with them....

“Hegel was an idealist, that is to say, the thoughts within his mind were to him not the more or less abstract images [Abbilder, reflections; Engels sometimes speaks of “ imprints”] of real things and processes, but, on the contrary, things and their development were to him only the images, made real, of the ‘Idea’ existing somewhere or other before the world existed." In his Ludwig Feuerbach—which expounded his own and Marx’s views on Feuerbach’s philosophy, and was sent to the printers after he had reread an old manuscript Marx and himself had written in 15 1844-45 on Hegel, Feuerbach and the materialist conception of history—Engels wrote: "The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is the relation of thinking and being ... spirit to Nature ... which is primary, spirit or Nature.... The answers which the philos, ophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to Nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other ... comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded Nature as primary, belonged to the various schools of materialism." Any other use of the concepts of (philosophical) idealism and materialism leads only to confusion. Marx decidedly rejected, not only idealism, which is always linked in one way or another with religion, but also the views—especially widespread in our day—of Hume and Kant, agnosticism, criticism, and positivism in their various forms; he considered that philosophy a “reactionary” concession to idealism, and at best a " shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the world".^^10^^ On this question, see, besides the works by Engels and Marx mentioned above, a letter Marx wrote to Engels on December 12, 1868, in which, referring to an utterance by the naturalist Thomas Huxley, which was "more materialistic" than usual, and to his recognition that "as long as we actually observe and think, we cannot possibly get away from materialism", Marx reproached Huxley for leaving a “loop-hole” for agnosticism, for Humism. It is particularly important to note Marx’s view on the relation between freedom and necessity: " Freedom is the appreciation of necessity. ’Necessity is blind only insofar as it is not understood’" (Engels in Anti-Duhring). This means recognition of the rule of objective laws in Nature and of the dialectical transformation of necessity into freedom (in the same manner as the transformation of the uncognised but cognisable “thing-in-itself” into the “ thingfor-us”, of the "essence of things" into “phenomena”). Marx and Engels considered that the “old” materialism, including that of Feuerbach (and still more the “vulgar” materialism of Biichner, Vogt and Moleschott), contained the following major shortcomings: (1) this materialism was " predominantly mechanical", failing to take account of the latest 16 developments in chemistry and biology (today it would be necessary to add: and in the electrical theory of matter); (2) the old materialism was non-historical and non-dialectical (metaphysical, in the meaning of anti-dialectical), and did not adhere consistently and comprehensively to the standpoint of development; (3) it regarded the "human essence" in the abstract, not as the "complex of all" (concretely and historically determined) "social relations", and therefore merely “interpreted” the world, whereas it was a question of “changing” it, i.e., it did not understand the importance of "revolutionary practical activity”.