435

p (I)^^291^^ The author here has in mind a series of articles on Germany by Heine, which appeared originally in Revue des deux Mondes and were then published as a separate book (the foreword to its first edition was dated December 1834). The reader will find this splendid work of Heine ^^292^^ in the complete collection of his works. Unfortunately the Russian translation has been horribly disfigured by the censor.

p The modern Aristophanes did not adopt towards the philosophy of his time the Greek genius’ attitude towards the “sophists”. He not only understood the revolutionary siginificance of German philosophy, he warmly sympathised with it because of its very revolutionary significance. However, in his book on Germany, Heine dwells far more on the revolutionary significance Cwhich he greatly exaggerated! of Kant (his Critique of Pure Reason ) than of Hegel. By the forties he was more decisive in his pronouncements on Hegel. In a still extant excerpt from his first and only letter "On Germany" we find a humorous exchange of thoughts between the author and "the king of philosophy”. "Once when I was embarrassed over the saying: ’All that exists is rational,’ he laughed in a peculiar way and observed: ’It could also be worded: all that is rational must exist.’ He looked around in alarm but soon regained his self-possession, for only Heinrich Beer^^293^^ had heard what he said.” It does not matter in the case in question who Heinrich Beer was. All that needs to be noted here is that in Heine’s opinion Hegel himself understood the revolutionary significance of his philosophy but was afraid to bring it to light. Again, to what extent this opinion of Hegel is true is another question, which will be answered, by the way, in the present pamphlet. But there can be no doubt that Heine himself was by no means one of those limited and short-sighted people who were afraid of the conclusions following from Hegel’s philosophy. In the conversation quoted it was not without intent that Hegel’s famous proposition was changed: real was replaced by existing in general. Heine apparently wished to show that even in the vulgar form which the proposition was given by people who 436 were little versed in the secrets of Hegel’s philosophy, it invariably retains its revolutionary meaning.

p (2)^^294^^ We know that the question of how to understand Hegel’s teaching on the rationality of everything which is “real” played a great role in our philosophical circles in the late thirties and early forties. Thanks to it, V. G. Belinsky, the clearest brain among Russian writers, experienced, so to speak, a real tragedy. His articles on Menzel and the anniversary of Borodino^^295^^ are full of the sharpest attacks on those who permitted themselves to condemn “reality”, i.e., the social relations around them. Later he very much disliked to recall these articles, because he considered them as shameful error. In his passionate negation of the infamous Russian system he could not be restrained by any philosophical considerations on their alleged rationality. People who wrote after him in the same trend did not consider it necessary to return to Hegel and check the theoretical premises that the outstanding critic took as his starting-point at the time of his conservative infatuations. They thought that those premises contained nothing but error. Such is the view of “progressive” Russian writers at the present too. Is it correct?

p In his My Life and Thoughts Herzen relates how he logically bypassed the theoretical stronghold which at a first (and, it must be noted, extremely superficial and incorrect) glance the teaching of the “rationality” of all that is “real” seems to represent. He decided that this teaching was merely a new formulation of the law of sufficient cause. But the law of sufficient cause does not at all lead to the justification of every given social system. If in the history of Russia there was sufficient cause for the appearance and growth of despotism, the emancipatory movement of the Decembrists also apparently had sufficient cause of its own. If in this case despotism was “rational”, the wish to do away with it once for all was obviously no less “rational”. Hence, Herzen decided Hegel’s teaching is rather a theoretical justification for every emancipation struggle. It is the real algebra of the revolution.^^296^^

p Herzen was perfectly right in the sense of his final conclusion. But he arrived at it by an erroneous way. Let us explain this by means of an example.

p “The Roman Republic was real,” Engels says, developing Hegel’s thought, "but so was the Roman Empire, which superseded it.” The question is: why did the Empire supersede the Republic? The law of sufficient cause only guarantees that this fact could not have been without a cause. But it does not give the slightest indication as to where the cause or causes of the fact in question are to be sought. Perhaps the Republic was superseded by the Empire because Caesar had greater military 437 talent than Pompey; perhaps because Cassius and Brutus made mistakes; perhaps because Octavius was very skilful and cunning, or perhaps for some other accidental reason. Hegel was not satisfied with such explanations. In his opinion accident is merely a wrapping hiding necessity. Of course, the concept of necessity itself can also be interpreted very superficially; one can say that the fall of the Roman Republic became necessary because and only because Caesar defeated Pompey. But with Hegel this concept had another, incomparably profounder meaning. When he qualified a particular social phenomenon as necessary, he meant that it had been prepared by all the preceding course of the development of the country in which it took place. It is there that we must seek the cause or causes. Consequently, the fall of the Roman Republic is not explained by Caesar’s talents or the mistakes made by Brutus or any other man or group of men, but by the fact that there had been changes in the home relationships of Rome, and that as a result of those changes the further existence of the Republic became impossible. What exactly were those changes? Hegel himself often gave unsatisfactory answers to such questions. But that is not the point. The important thing is that Hegel’s view of social phenomena is far more profound than that of people who know only one thing, namely that there is no action without cause. Neither is that all. Hegel brought out a far more profound and more important truth. He said that every particular aggregate of phenomena in the process of its development creates out of its very self the forces that lead to its negation, i.e., its disappearance; that consequently every particular social system, in the process of its historical development, creates out of its very self the social forces that destroy it and replace it by a new one. Hence the conclusion suggests itself—although it is not brought out by Hegel—that if I adopt a negative attitude to a particular social system, my negation is “rational” only if it coincides with the objective process of negation proceeding within that very system itself, i.e., if that system is losing its historical meaning and entering into contradiction with the social needs to which it owes its appearance.

p Let us now try to apply this standpoint to the social questions which agitated Russian educated youth in the thirties. Russian “reality”—the serfdom, despotism, the allpowerfulness of the police, censorship and the like—appeared to them as infamous, unjust. Involuntarily they remembered with sympathy the recent Decembrists’ attempt to improve our social relationships. But they, at least the most gifted among them, were no longer satisfied with the abstract revolutionary negation of the eighteenth century, or the conceited and self-loving negation of the romantics. Thanks to Hegel they had already become far more exacting. 438 They said to themselves: "Prove the rationality of your negation, justify it by the objective laws of social development or abandon it as a personal whim, a childish caprice.” But to justify the negation of Russian reality by the inner laws of its own development meant to solve a problem which was beyond even Hegel’s ability. Take for example Russian serfdom. To justify its negation meant to prove that it negated itself, i.e., that it no longer satisfied the social needs by virtue of which it had at one time come into being. But to what social needs did Russian serfdom owe its appearance? To the economic needs of a state which would have died of exhaustion without the serf peasant. Consequently, it was a matter of proving that in the nineteenth century serfdom had already become too poor a means for satisfying the economic needs of the state; that, far from satisfying them any longer, it was a direct obstacle to their satisfaction. All this was proved later in the most convincing way by the Crimean War. But, we repeat, Hegel himself would not have been capable of proving that theoretically. According to the direct meaning of his philosophy the conclusion was that the causes of any given society’s historical development have their roots in its internal development. This correctly indicated the most important task of social science. But Hegel himself contradicted, and could not but contradict, this profoundly correct view. An “absolute” idealist, he regarded the logical qualities of the “idea” as the principal cause of any development. Thus the qualities of the idea turned out to be the radical cause of historical movement. And every time a great historical question towered before him, Hegel referred first of all to these qualities. But to refer to them meant to leave the ground of history and voluntarily to deprive himself of any possibility of finding the actual causes of historical movement. As a man of tremendous and truly genial intelligence, Hegel himself felt that there was something wrong and that, properly speaking, his explanations explained nothing. Therefore, paying due tribute to the “idea”, he hastened down to the concrete ground of history to seek the real causes of social phenomena no longer in the qualities of ideas, but in the ideas themselves, in the very phenomena that he was investigating at the time. In so doing he often made surmises that were truly genial (noting the economic causes of historical movement). But these surmises of genius were all the same no more than surmises. Having no firm systematic basis, they played no serious role in the historical views of Hegel and the Hegelians. That is why, at the time they were pronounced, hardly any attention was paid to them.

p The great task pointed out by Hegel to the social science of the nineteenth century remained unfulfilled; the real, internal causes of the historical movement of humanity remained undiscovered. 439 And it goes without saying that it was not in Russia that the man capable of finding them could appear. L>ocial relationships in Russia were too underdeveloped, social stagnation held too tight a hold on the country for these unknown causes to emerge on the surface of social phenomena in Russia. They were found by Marx and Engels in the West, under completely different social conditions. But this did not happen till some time later, and during the period of which we are speaking the Hegelian negators there, too, became involved in the contradictions of idealism. After all that we have said, it is easy to understand why the young Russian followers of Hegel began by completely reconciling themselves with Russian “reality”, which, to tell the truth, was so infamous that Hegel himself would never have recognised it as “reality”: unjustified theoretically, their negative attitude to it was deprived in their eyes of any reasonable right to existence. Renouncing it, they selflessly and disinterestedly sacrificed their social strivings to philosophical honesty. But on the other hand, reality itself saw to it that they were forced to retract their sacrifice. An hourly and daily eyesore to them by its infamy, it forced them to aspire to negation at any cost, i.e., even to negation not founded on any satisfactory theoretical basis. And, as we know, they yielded to the insistence of reality. Parting with the "philosophical blinders" of Hegel, Belinsky undertook vigorous attacks on the very system that he had but recently justified. This, of course, was very good on his part. But it must be admitted that, acting thus, the writer of genius was lowering the level of his theoretical demands and was admitting that he, and in his person all progressive Russian thought, was an insolvent debtor as far as theory was concerned. = ^^297^^ This did not prevent him from occasionally expressing extremely profound views on Russian social life. For example, in one of his letters at the end of the forties he said that only the bourgeoisie, i.e., only capitalism, would provide the ground for serious and successful negation of the monstrous Russian reality.^^298^^ But all the same, on the whole he adhered in his negation to Utopian views of social phenomena. Similar views were held by Chernyshevsky, the “subjective” writers of the late sixties and early seventies and the revolutionaries [bf the same period and] of all trends. And it is remarkable that the farther the matter went and the more Hegel was forgotten, the less the Russian negators realised that their social views descended from a certain theoretical fall from grace. Our “subjective” writers made a scientific insolvency a dogma. They took pains to write and rewrite a certificate of theoretical indigence for Russian thought, imagining that they were making out for it a most flattering and precious document. But that could not go on for ever. The revolutionary failures of 440 the seventies alone were enough to make the Russian social thought stop admiring its own insolvency. The theoretical task which Russian philosophical circles in the forties could not solve turned out to be easy after Marx "turned Hegel’s philosophy upside down”, i.e., placed it on a materialist basis. Marx discovered the inner causes of the historical movement of humanity. All that remained to be done was to view Russian social relationships from his standpoint. This was done by the Social-Democrats, who very often arrived independently one of another at the same views on Russian life. Russian social thought, as represented by the Social-Democrats, at last entered the general channel of scientific thought of the nineteenth century. The theoretical fall from grace of the old occidentalists was redeemed: a firm objective basis for the negation of Russian reality was found in that reality itself. [See my article "Zu Hegel’s sechszigstem Todestage" in Neue Zeit , XI, 1891 and my speech "V. G. Belinsky”, Geneva, 1898.] ^^2^^"

p (3)^^300^^ In 1827 the Hegelian Henning began to publish Jahrbiicher fur wissenschaftliche Kritik (Year-Books of Scientific Criticism) to spread and defend the views of his teacher. But Henning followed a conservative trend and his journal did not satisfy the Young Hegelians. In 1838 A. Ruge and T. Echtermeyer founded the Halle Year-Books of German Science and Art (Hallische Jahrbiicher fur deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst ) which was renamed Deutsche Jahrbiicher (German Year-Books ) when the editorial office was transferred to Leipzig in 1841. From both the religious and political points of view, German Year-Books was of a radical trend. In 1843 it was prohibited in Saxony and then Ruge and Marx decided to publish it in Paris under the title German-French Year-Books ( DeutschFranzosische Jahrbiicher ). Among its contributors were Frederick Engels and H. Heine. Unfortunately only one volume of German-French Year-Books appeared, combining both the first and the second issues. In it, among other things, were Marx’s remarkable articles "Einleitung zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechtsphilosophie" “(Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”)—published in Russian in Geneva in 1888 and "Zur Judenfrage" “(On the Jewish Question”) and a no less remarkable article by Engels: "Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalokonomie" “(Sketch of a Criticism of National Economy" which was reprinted in Neue Zeit , No. 8 of the ninth year of its publication).^^301^^

p The Rheinische Zeitung^^302^^ was founded in Cologne by Camphausen, Hansemann and their fellow-thinkers. Marx was its most active and talented contributor. In [mid-October] 1842 he became the editor. At that time he was not yet a socialist^^303^^ but his attacks on the government were already so vigorous that the 441 paper lasted only a few months under his direction. [The issue of March 17, 1843, contained this short notice: "The undersigned declares that as a result of the present censorship conditions he has retired from the editorial board of Rheinische Zeitung. Dr. Marx. " (Italics in the original). On March 31 of the same year the paper was compelled to cease publication as a result of a government decree which had been published on January 25. The editorial board ceased publication a few days before the term, on March 28.] Marx, by the way, was almost glad of this prohibition. Previous literary activity had proved to him the insufficiency of his economic information and he wished to complete it; the penalty imposed on the Cologne Gazette^^304^^ gave him an opportunity of engrossing himself in his study. When Marx again took up literary and political activity he already had an extensive stock of knowledge which he had not had before, but, most important of all, he had a new view of economic science which constituted an epoch in its history.

p [The most remarkable of Marx’s articles in this newspaper were recently published by Franz Mehring in Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, 1841 bis 1850 , Vol. I, pp. 208-321. For Russian readers these articles have still not lost their publicistic interest. It is superfluous to add that they are very important in the history of Marx’s own intellectual develop- ment.]^^305^^

p In June 1848, Marx, with the collaboration of Engels, Freiligrath and Wilhelm Wolff (to whose memory Capital is dedicated), founded, again in Cologne, the Neue Rheinische Zettung. In it Marx and his main collaborators wrote as already completely convinced socialists in the most modern sense of the word, i.e., in the sense it has in their own works. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung , as even its enemies admit, was the most remarkable literary event of its time. But more can and must be said about it: not one of the socialist newspapers either before or after it can be compared with it. It was prohibited in June 1849 for its open call to "insubordination to the government”, which was then rapidly recovering from the blows dealt it by the revolution.^^306^^

p (4)^^307^^ Thanks to the solicitude of the censors the views of Strauss and B. Bauer which Engels mentions are still little known to Russian readers. We therefore do not consider it superfluous to expound them here in brief.

p The matter is as follows. If you are convinced that the Holy Scripture was dictated by God himself (the Holy Ghost), selecting as his secretary sometimes one, sometimes another holy man, you will not tolerate even the idea that it can contain any [mistakes or] incoherences. All that is related there has for you the significance 442 of the most indisputable fact. In tempting Eve, the serpent pronounces a speech worthy of an insinuating Jesuit, full of experience of life. This is rather strange, but for God nothing is impossible: the apparent strangeness is only a new instance of his omnipotence. Balaam’s famous she-ass entered into conversation with her rider. This again is quite an extraordinary phenomenon, but for God, etc., etc., according to the same once and for ever established formula. Faith is not embarrassed by anything Ceven by absurdity: credo quia absurduml. Faith is "the announcement of things we hope for, the revelation of things invisible, i.e., the certainty of what we can see and also what we cannot see, what we desire and anticipate as if it were already present”. For the religious man the omnipotence of God, the creator and lord of nature, is precisely what he “desires” above everything. All this would have been very good, very touching and even very lasting ii man, in his struggle against nature for his existence had not been obliged to taste of the "tree of knowledge of good and evil”, i.e., gradually to study the laws of nature itself. Once he has tasted of the fruit of this dangerous “tree” he is no longer so easily influenced by fiction. If he continues by force of habit to believe in the omnipotence of God, his faith assumes a different character: God recedes into the background, behind the stage of the world, so to speak, and nature with its eternal, iron immutable laws, comes on to the proscenium. But miracles arc incompatible with conformity to law; conformity to law leaves no room for miracles; miracles preclude conformity to law. The question now is: How can people who have grown to the concept of immutable laws in nature regard the account of miracles in the Bible? They are bound to negate them. But negation can assume various forms according to the constitution and course of social life in which the particular intellectual trend takes place.

p The French thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment simply laughed at the Bible stories, regarding them as a manifestation of ignorance and even of quackery. This sharply negative attitude to the Bible was prompted to the French by the struggle that the third estate in the country was then waging against the “privileged” in general and the clergy in particular. In Protestant Germany of the time the situation was different. First, since the Reformation the German clergy itself played quite a different role from that of the clergy in Catholic countries; secondly, the "third estate" in Germany was then far from the thought of struggling against the "old order”. This circumstance laid its impress upon the whole of the history of eighteenth-century German literature. Whereas in France the educated representatives ol the third estate used every new conclusion [every new hypothesis] of science as a weapon to fight the ideas and conceptions 443 which had grown out of the obsolete social relationships, in Germany it was not so much a question of eradicating old prejudices as of bringing them into agreement with recent discoveries. For the revolutionary-minded French thinkers of the Enlightenment, religion was the fruit of ignorance and deception; for the German supporters of the Enlightenment—even the most progressive among them [for example, Lessing]—it was the "education of the human race". Accordingly the Bible was not in their eyes a book to be denied and ridiculed. They tried to “enlighten” this book, to give its narrations new meaning and bring them into line with the "spirit of the time”. Then began the most arduous rending of the Bible. In the Old Testament God “speaks” on almost every page. But that does not mean that he spoke in reality. That is only one of those figurative expressions to which Orientals are so inclined. When we read that God said one thing or another, we must understand it in the sense that he impressed these or those ideas on one or the other of his loyal worshippers. The same with the tempting serpent and Balaam’s she-ass. These animals did not speak at all in reality. They only suggested certain thoughts to their so-to-speak interlocutors. On the Day of Pentecost, as is known, the Holy Ghost came down on the apostles in the form of tongues of fire. This again is a figurative expression. By it the author or authors of the Acts of the Apostles merely meant that the apostles felt at the time a vehement access of religious fervour. However, in the interpretation of other “enlightened” investigators the matter took place in a somewhat different manner. The tongues of fire which descended on the apostles represented a perfectly natural phenomenon, namely, electric sparks. In exactly the same way if Paul became blind on his way to Damascus, this is explained by the natural effect of lightning, and if the old man Ananias healed him by the contact of his hands, it is well known, that old men often have very cold hands, and cold calms inflammation. If Jesus raised many dead people to life, this is explained by the quite simple circumstance that he had to deal not with corpses but with living organisms in a swoon. His own death on the cross was only apparent death. In the interpretation of Doctor Paulus, who was well known in his time,  [443•*  Jesus himself was astonished (voll Verwunderung) at his unexpected return to life. Finally, there can be no question of his ascension into heaven, for the evangelists themselves are extremely vague on this point: they say that he was taken up into heaven (Mark); but does not that mean that his soul was taken up into heaven after his death? And then, on what 444 grounds would it have occurred to the evangelists to relate things that neither a naturalist nor an astronomer, "able to calculate exactly how long it would take a cannon ball to reach ... Sirius”, could have believed?

p It would be superfluous to prove that this kind of criticism of the Gospels is quite inconsistent and that it testifies to its representatives’ complete lack of a true critical attitude to the question. [It could be good and useful as a. first step. But the first step, already made by Spinoza, had to be followed by the second, and the German thinkers of the Enlightenment did not take that second step.] The whole merit of Strauss (1808-74) consisted in putting a stop to fruitless attempts to "make the improbable probable and to make historically conceivable things which did not happen in history”. Strauss regarded the Gospel narratives not as accounts (more or less accurate, more or less distorted) of actual events, but only myths unconsciously formed in Christian communities and expressing the idea of the Messiah at the time of its origin. Similarly, the speeches of Jesus, particularly the loftiest among them, quoted in the so-called Gospel of John, were in Strauss’ view of later creation. In his latest arrangement of The Life of Jesus he thus expounds the view he then held of the origin of the Gospel myths:

p “In my earlier works I suggested the idea of the myth as the key to the Gospel stories of miracles and other reports which are contrary to the view of history. In vain, I said, have attempts been made to present stories like the star which appeared to the Wise Men, the transfiguration, the miraculous feeding of crowds and the like as natural processes; but since it is also impossible to believe that such unnatural things really happened, narrations of this kind are to be considered as fictions. Answering the question how people came, in the time in which these Gospels originated, to imagine such things about Jesus, I referred first of all to the expectation of the Messiah at that time. When once, I said, first a few people, and then many, had come to see Jesus as the Messiah, they thought that everything must have happened to him which was expected from the Messiah in the prophecies and parables of the Old Testament and their current explanations. No matter how common knowledge it was that Jesus was a Nazarene, since the Messiah was the son of David, he had to be born in Bethlehem, for Micheas had prophesied it so. No matter how strictly Jesus condemned his compatriots’ passion for wonders, the first saviour of the people, Moses, had worked miracles, and therefore the last saviour, the Messiah, and that was Jesus, was also bound to work miracles. Isaiah had prophesied that in that time, i.e., the time of the Messiah, the blind would see, the deaf would hear, the lame would leap like a hart and the tongue of the dumb man would be 445 loosened; thus it was known in detail what miracles Jesus had to work, since he was the Messiah. In this way it came about that in the first Christian communities stories could, and even had to be imagined about Jesus, without the consciousness that they were fictions.... In such a conception the compositon of myths by the early Christians is placed on the same level as we find elsewhere in the origin of religions. The progress of science in the field of mythology is precisely that it has understood that a myth in its original form is not an intentional and conscious invention of one single person but the product of the community consciousness of a people or a religious cirlce, first indeed uttered by a single person, but then believed precisely because that single person thus becomes the mouthpiece of the general conviction; the myth is not a wrapping in which a clever man covers an idea which has occurred to him for the use and edification of the ignorant crowd; but only with the story, and even in the form of the story which he tells, does he become conscious of the idea which he himself was unable to understand in its pure form....

p “But the more the evangelical myths take, at least partly, a new and independent character, all the more difficult is it to imagine that their authors did not realise that they were passing off what they themselves had imagined for actual events. The one who first reported the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem could honestly believe it, since the prophet Micheas had foretold that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem, and Jesus was the Messiah, and must accordingly have been born in Bethlehem. The one, on the other hand, who first reported that at the death of Jesus the veil of the temple was rent asunder (Matthew, 27, 51) must, it seems, have known that he was relating something that he had not seen, that he had never heard of, but had imagined himself. Precisely in this case a figurative expression like the one in the Epistle to the Hebrews (10, 19), where it is said that the death of Jesus opened for us the way through the veil of the temple to the Holy of Holies, could easily be understood by listeners in the literal sense, and thus the story could arise without any conscious invention. In exactly the same way the story of the calling of the four apostles to be fishers of men could be conveyed in the form that the fishing to which Jesus called them would be far more productive than their previous poorly paying occupation, and from this, continuing to pass from one person to another, the story of the miraculous catch of fish (Luke, 5) could easily have arisen of itself. The data out of which the story of the resurrection of Christ took shape also seem at a first glance to be either true events or an undeniable and conscious lie. But here too, if we examine the matter carefully we shall see that it is not so. In an 446 argument with a Christian a Jew could have said: ’No wonder the tomb was empty, when you had stolen the body out of it.’ ’We stole it? ’ the Christian could have retorted. ’How could we when you were guarding the grave so closely? ’ He could have said that because he supposed it was so; but the next narrator, using the same words, could have conveyed far greater certainty: ’the grave was guarded.’ Then it would have been said that it was sealed, since one is reminded of the seal by Daniel, whose lion’s den serves as a symbol for the tomb of Jesus.... Or the Jew could have said: ’Perhaps he appeared to you, but as an incorporeal vision from the other world.’ ’How so, an incorporeal vision! ’ the Christian would have objected. ’Why, he still had the wounds from the nails (that was quite obvious for the Christian), he showed them.’ In the next narration the touching of the wounds could aslo have been added; such narrations could have arisen with complete honesty although they were quite contrary to historical truth.”  [446•* 

p There is no doubt that Strauss’ view was a huge step forward compared with the above-mentioned views of his predecessors. But it is not difficult to see that it also had certain shortcomings. "The change which historical facts undergo in passing through oral tradition, the growth of myths pointed out by Strauss, in a word, the popular Christian legend explains only the features common to all the Gospels or versions of them which are noted for their accidental and unintentional character and therefore betray no precise tendency and are not peculiar to any one of these expositions. But when, on the contrary, we see certain characteristic features constantly produced in one of the Gospels, whereas they are absent from the rest of evangelical tradition, we can no longer explain them by motives common to the whole of the Christian legend; we must recognise in them the influence of opinions and interests peculiar to the author of the book or to the group of Christians whose mouthpiece he is. And when this special character is manifest not only in certain isolated points of the work, but the whole work seems conceived so as to bring them out, when it leaves its mark on the arrangement of the material, the chronology, the accessory details of the narration and the style itself; when the work contains long discourses or conversations usually not preserved in legend—all circumstances which strike one in the fourth Gospel and also, although to a lesser degree, in the third—we can be certain that we are in presence not of a simple editing of religious legends but of the deliberate 447 work of the writer."  [447•*  Consequently, Strauss’ mythological theory is far from explaining all that needs explanation. Subsequently Strauss himself was convinced of this. In his latest arrangement of The Life of Jesus he gave a far larger place to "the deliberate work of the writers”. But at the time referred to by Engels, i.e., in the forties, he had not yet noticed the weak side of his view which was so vigorously attacked by Bruno Bauer.

p Bauer (1809-82) reproached Strauss with a tendency to the mystic and the supernatural because in his myth theory "the chief factor is the general, the tribe, the religious community, tradition”, and no room is left for the mediating activity of self-consciousness. "Strauss’ mistake,” he says, "consists not in indicating a certain general force (i.e., the force of tradition), but in making that force work exclusively in a general form, directly out of its generality. This is a religious view, faith in miracles, the reproduction of religious ideas from the standpoint of criticism, religious vulgarity and ingratitude towards self-consciousness".... The opposition between the views of Strauss, on the one hand, and Bauer, on the other, is an "opposition of the tribe and self-consciousness, the substance and the subject".  [447•**  In other words, Strauss points out the unconscious appearance of the Gospel narrations, while Bauer says that in the historical process of their formation they went through the consciousness of people who deliberately composed them for some religious purpose. This is perfectly noticeable in the so-called Gospel of John  [447•***  who created a quite special Jesus absolutely unlike the one of the other Gospels. But the other evangelists, too, were by no means innocent of such composing. The so-called Luke recarves and pieces together again as he likes the Gospel written by the so-called Mark; the so-called Matthew, who wrote after them, treats Luke and Mark without any ceremony, trying to conciliate them with each other and to adapt their narrations to the religious views and strivings of his time. But still he does not succeed in this by no means easy task. He gets muddled up in the most absurd contradictions. Here is one out of many examples. Matthew says that after being baptised Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. The question is: why did the Spirit, i.e., God, need to tempt Jesus by the intermediary of the devil? "For ... he could have known that the one whom he had just called his beloved son" (at the baptism—G.P.) "was inaccessible to 448 temptation".  [448•*  But the fact is that Matthew simply got muddled up in his narration. He did not wish "simply to copy what he read in the writings of his predecessors, but to explain it and give it internal cohesion".  [448•**  He read in Luke and Mark that the Spirit led Jesus into the desert, where in fact he was tempted by the devil. So he made up his mind that the Spirit led Jesus into the desert for the purpose of tempting him with the help of the devil. And that is what he wrote in his Gospel, not noticing what a ridiculous situation his omniscient god was getting into by finding it necessary to tempt his own son. And here is a more vivid example. Isaiah “prophesies” about the "voice crying in the wilderness" “(prepare ye the ways of the Lord”). In order that "the words of the prophet" should be fulfilled, Mark and Matthew make John the Baptist preach "in the desert”. Matthew even names the desert—the Desert of Judea.  Then, evidently repeating the words of Mark and Luke, he reports that many people who repented came to John and that he baptised them in the Jordan. But it is sufficient to glance at the map of Palestine to see that it was absolutely physically impossible for John to baptise the penitents in the Jordan if he was preaching in the Desert of Judea, which is far from the river.  [448•***  [Such errors must be considered as personal blunders on the part of the narrator.]

p By picking out of the various evangelists features from the life of Jesus which for some reason struck them, the faithful, or even simply sentimental, compose for their spiritual use a more or less attractive figure of the “redeemer” according to their concepts, tastes and inclinations. Strauss’ criticism already made this fabrication of a mosaic of Christ very difficult, but Bauer, by his criticism of the Gospels,  [448•****  threatened to make it absolutely impossible: he did not recognise Jesus as historical at all. It is therefore easy to understand the horror with which he inspired pious and “respectable” people. He was deprived of the right to teach in the theological faculty of Bonn University (where he was an assistant professor) , and was severely censured in a number of booklets, articles and faculty reports. But Germany in the forties of the nineteenth century was no longer the Germany of the eighteenth. The revolutionary storm of 1848 was approaching; the agitation among the progressive sections of the German people was growing, as the saying goes, not daily but hourly; the 449 literary representatives of these sections were by no means embarrassed by the conclusions from their criticism being opposed to established ideas; on the contrary, they were becoming more and more permeated with the tendency to negation. B. Bauer answered the attacks of his “respectable” opponents very sharply, sparing neither religion in general nor the "Christian state”. His brother Edgar showed still greater vigour and for his Der Streit der Kritik mit Kirche und Staat (Criticism’s Dispute with Church and State ), published in Berne in 1844, he was imprisoned in a fortress. It goes without saying that such a method of arguing used by the defenders of the system could not be considered very praiseworthy, but it must also be conceded that in this work Edgar Bauer went so far that his views could even now horrify very many of the “progressive” representatives of Russian literature. He recognised neither God, private property nor state. He went so far that one could go no farther in the direction of negation. But no, we are mistaken: one more step could and should have been made—the most decisive step in that direction: the question could and should have been posed: How strong was the weapon of criticism? How well-grounded was it in its negation? Or, in other words, to what extent did it free itself from the prejudices it was attacking? This question was set by people who went farther than the Bauer brothers, by Marx and Engels in their book Die heilige Familie (The Holy Family).™^^9^^ It turned out that "critical criticism" based itself entirely on the very same idealism that it was fighting so furiously. That was its main shortcoming. As long as B. Bauer basing himself on the right of “self-consciousness” analysed the Gospel stories, he could strike many heavy blows at prejudices which time had rendered sacred; but when he and his brother went over to criticism of the “state” and to the appraisal of such great events as those in France at the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, he arrived at conclusions some of which were absolutely erroneous and others altogether inconsistent and unconvincing. Nor could it be otherwise. To say that a particular social form is opposed to my “self-consciousness” is not equivalent to defining its historical significance. But without appraising its significance one cannot understand it correctly or fight it with any serious hope of success. Marx and Engels did precisely what was suggested by the whole course of the development of philosophical thought in the nineteenth century: once having broken with idealism, one had to break also with autocratic “self-consciousness”, one had to find and point out the causes by which it in turn is determined. Here is not the place to discuss whether Marx and Engels were successful in the task they undertook; let the reader judge by their works. We shall only note that the abstract radicalism of the Bauer brothers recalls in many 450 respects our Russian "subjective method in sociology”; the same unceasing references to “criticism” and to the "critical spirit" (called "critical thought" in our country); the same inability to penetrate by thought into the critical process which goes on within social relationships themselves and which determines the “self-consciousness” of people. It would be very interesting and extremely instructive to write a special essay drawing a parallel between the arguments advanced by Edgar Bauer (Der Streit der Kritik , viertes Kapitel) against Hegel, on the one side, and the objections made by Nikolai Mikhailovsky to Spencer, on the other.^^310^^ Such a parallel would show how little is new in the notorious subjective method. It would also show how all the originality of the Russian subjective sociologists comes to unconscious repetition of the mistakes of others which have long ago been pointed out and corrected by thinkers in Western Europe.

p (5)^^311^^ Having neither the necessity nor the possibility here to go into details on the life of Feuerbach, we shall confine ourselves to a few lines from the History of Modern Philosophy by Uberweg-Heinze^^312^^ (p. 394 of the Russian translation). "Born in 1804 ... the son of the famous criminalist Anselm Feuerbach, he studied theology and ... became a Hegelian. From 1824 he lived in Berlin, where he attended lectures by Hegel and devoted himself entirely to philosophy. In 1828 he became a lecturer in Erlangen and lived from 1836 in the village of Bruckberg, between Ansbach and Bayreuth, and from 1869 in Rechenberg near Nuremberg in difficult conditions and died in 1872."

p The contents of his Essence of Christianity can also be set forth in a few words. ^^313^^

p “Religion,” Feuerbach says, "is unconscious self-consciousness of man.” In religion man deifies himself, his own “essence”.  The essence of God is the essence of man, or to express it better, the essence of man purified, freed from the limitation of the individual person. "The perfection of God,” says Leibniz in his Theodicée, "is the perfection of our souls, but he possesses it in all its fulness ... in us there is a certain might, a certain knowledge, a certain goodness, all these attributes are fully inherent in God.” This is quite true and only means that "all attributes of God are attributes of man". But the religious man is not conscious of deifying his own essence. He objectifies it, i.e., "contemplates and honours it as another being, separate from him and existing independently”. Religion is the splitting of man in two, his separating from himself. From this follows a double conclusion.

p First, Hegel absolutely distorted truth when he said "what man knows about God is God’s knowledge of Himself”, or, in other words, "God knows himself in man”. In actual fact it is just the other way round: man knows himself in God and "what man 451 knows of God, is man’s knowledge of himself”. The attributes of God change according to what man thinks and feels. "Whatever is the value of man, that, and no more, is the value of his God ... religion is the solemn revelation of the hidden treasures of man, the open confession of his love secrets.” Every step forward in religion is a step forward in man’s knowledge of himself. Christ, the incarnation of God, is "god personally known to man ... the happy certainty that God exists and exists in the very form in which it is necessary and desirable that he should exist.... That is why the last desire of religion is fulfilled only in Christ, the secret of religious feeling revealed (revealed of course in the figurative language characteristic of religion); what in God was essence becomes a manifestation in Christ ... in this sense the Christian religion can be called absolute religion”. The oriental religions, for example Hinduism, also speak of the incarnations of God. But in them these incarnations take place too often and "for that very reason they lose all their meaning”. In them the God incarnate does not become a person, i.e., a man, for without a person there is no man.

p Secondly, since in religion man is dealing with himself, as with a separate being outside and opposed to himself; as religion is only the unconscious self-consciousness of man, it inevitably leads to a number of contradictions. When the believer says God is love, he says in essence only that love is superior to anything in the world. But in his religious consciousness love is degraded to the level of an attribute of a separate being, God, who has significance even independently of love. For the religious man belief in God becomes the indispensable condition for a loving, cordial attitude to his neighbour. He hates the atheist in the name of that very love which he professes and deifies. Thus the belief in God distorts the mutual relations between people, by distorting man’s attitude to his own essence. It becomes a source of fanaticism and of all the horrors which go with it. It damns in the name of salvation, it becomes violent in the name of beatitude. God is an illusion. But this illusion is extremely harmful, it binds reason, it kills man’s natural inclination to truth and goodness.... That is why reason which has grown to self- consciousness must destroy it. And it is not difficult for reason to do this. It needs only to turn inside out all the relationships created by religion. What in religion is a means (e.g., virtue, which serves as a means of acquiring eternal happiness) must become an end; what in religion is a subordinate, secondary thing, a condition (e.g., love of one’s neighbour—the condition for God’s favour towards us) must become the principal thing, the cause. "Justice, truth, and good contain their sacred foundation in themselves, in their quality. For man there is no being superior to man."

452

p [In 1902 the editorial board of the Mouvement socialiste undertook a wide enquete on the attitude of the socialist parties in different countries to clericalism.^^314^^ This question now has obvious practical importance. But in order to solve it correctly we must first of all make clear to ourselves another mainly theoretical question: the attitude of scientific socialism to religion. This last question is hardly analysed at all in the international socialist literature of our time. And this is a great deficiency, which is explained precisely by the “practicalness” of the majority of present-day socialists. They say: religion is a personal matter. That is true, but only in a definite, limited sense. It goes without saying that the socialist party in each individual country would act very improvidently if it refused to accept in its ranks a man who recognises its programme and is ready to work for its fulfilment but at the same time still entertains certain religious prejudices. Yet it would be still more improvident of any party to renounce the theory underlying its programme. And the theory—modern scientific socialism— rejects religion as the product of an erroneous view of nature and society and condemns it as an obstacle to the all-round development of the proletarians. We have not the right to close the doors of our organisation to a man who is infected with religious belief; but we are obliged to do all that depends on us in order to destroy that faith in him or at least to prevent—with spiritual weapons, of course—our religious-minded comrade from spreading his prejudices among the workers. A consistent socialist outlook is in absolute disagreement with religion. It is therefore not surprising that the founders of scientific socialism had a sharply negative attitude towards it. Engels wrote: "We wish to remove from our path all that appears to us under the banner of the superhuman and the supernatural.... That is why we declare war once and for all on religion and religious conceptions."^^3^^ Marx called religion the opium with which the higher classes try to put to sleep the consciousness of the people and said that to abolish religion, as the imaginary happiness of the people, is to demand their real happiness. And Marx again said: "The criticism of religion disillusions man in order that he may think and act and arrange his life like a sober man, free from any inebriation, so that he may gravitate round himself, i.e., round his genuine sun."^^316^^

p This is so true that in our country all those former “Marxists” who, because of their bourgeois strivings, neither wish nor can wish that the proletariat should become completely sober, have now returned to the fold of religious belief.^^317^^ ]

p (6)^^318^^ Engels uses the word “belles-lettres” and “literary” in a sense in which it is not now used in Russia. Hence there can arise a misunderstanding: "How does it come,” the reader may 453 ask, "that ’true’ socialism has degenerated into unattractive belles-lettres? Probably its followers wrote poor tendentious novels and tales?" But the point is that the Germans class among belles-lettres (the so-called schonen Wissenschaften) not only poetry (Dichtkunst) but also oratory (Redekunst). That is why the degeneration of true socialism into belles-lettres means its degeneration into unattractive rhetorics, as a Russian writer would put it. We will recall that in Belinsky the word " belleslettres" did not have the same meaning as we give it now.

p [On German, or “true”, socialism, cf. Fr. Mehring, Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie , l.Theil, S. 199-203^^319^^ (first edition).] This trend is characterised in greater detail by Mehring in his explanatory notes to the works of Marx and Engels published by him (Aus dem literarischen Nachlass , etc., Vol. II, pp. 349-74). Professor Adler’s book Geschichte der ersten sozialpolitischen Bewegungen in Deutschland is interesting in this respect mainly by the excerpts it contains from the works of “true” socialists, especially M. Hess and K. Griin. A scientific characteristic of the latter is contained in Marx’s article: "Karl Griin: Die soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien oder die Geschichtsschreibung des wahren Sozialismus". ^^32^^° which appeared originally in Westphalischen Dampfboot,^^321^^ August-October 1847, and was then reprinted in Neue Zeit , Nos. 1-6, 1899-1900. Last but not least, mention must be made of a few extraordinarily substantial and correct although very rigorous pages of the Manifesto of the Communist Party on true socialism (Chap. Ill, pp. 29-33 of my translation, 1900 edition). Mr. Struve’s articles in Neue Zeit (Nos. 27 and 28 of 1895-96 and 34 and 35 of 1896-97) have now lost nearly all their interest. The first sets forth the content of two articles by Marx one of which has now been published in full by Mehring (the article on Hermann Kriege "Aus dem literarischen Nachlass”, II. B., S. 415-45) and the other (on Karl Griin) reprinted in the above-mentioned issues of Neue Zeit; the second article of Mr. P. Struve, "Studien und Bemerkungen zur Entwickelungsgeschichte des wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus" is devoted to the "history of the idea of the class struggle". According to him Lorenz von Stein appears as the first to have proclaimed this idea, at least in German literature. Mr. Struve thinks Marx borrowed it from Stein. This is an unfounded and completely improbable guess. In order to corroborate it, Mr. Struve should have proved that at the time of publication of L. von Stein’s book on French socialism Marx still had no knowledge of the works of the French historians of the period of the Restoration, who already firmly adhered to the idea of the class struggle. Mr. Struve did not prove and will never be able to prove that. (For the reader interested in this question I allow myself to refer to my foreword to the 454 Manifesto of the Communist Party , 1900 edition.) Mr. Struve’s article is interesting only from one point of view: it shows us how high Mr. Struve was in 1896-97, in spite of all the defects of his thinking and all the gaps in his education, in comparison with the level to which he sank in his Osvobozhdeniye. = ^^322^^ That man "developed out of the ape" is a very gratifying thing, but there is nothing sadder than the opposite metamorphosis—from man to “ape”.

p The “true” German socialists erred in theory by having no idea of economics generally and of the class struggle in particular; in practice their gravest fault was their negative attitude to “politics”.  Karl Griin’s attacks on the liberal movement of the German bourgeoisie at the time would be now readily subscribed to by any of our defenders. Marx was extremely severe in his condemnation of this enormous error; this was one of the many services he rendered. But in condemning the “true” socialists one must remember that the question of socialism’s attitude to politics was incorrectly solved by the Utopian socialists in all countries. Russia is no exception to the general rule; our Narodniks and Narodovoltsi also coped very badly with this problem. More than that, even now rather strange views are spread among the Russian Social-Democrats as far as the political tasks of the working class are concerned. It suffices to recall the talk about the seizure of power by the Social-Democrats during the now impending bourgeois revolution. The supporters of such a seizure forget that the dictatorship of the working class will be possible and opportune only where it is a case of a socialist revolution. These supporters (who rally round the paper Proletary^^323^^ ) are returning to the political standpoint of the late Narodnaya Volya trend. The founders of scientific socialism had a different view of the seizure of power. "The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party,” says Engels in his book Der deutsche Bauernkrieg , "is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents, and for the realisation of the measures which that domination implies. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the degree of contradiction between the various classes, and upon the level of development of the material means of existence, of the conditions of production and commerce upon which class contradictions always repose. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him or the stage of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to the doctrines and demands hitherto propounded which, again, do not proceed from the class relations of the moment,  [454•*  or from the more or less accidental  [454•**  level of production 455 and commerce, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus, he necessarily finds himself in an insolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions, principles and immediate interests of his party, and what he ought to do cannot be done. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the interests of the movement he is compelled to advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, and with the asseveration that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. Whoever is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost"^^324^^ (quoted by me in Our Differences , pp. 288-89).

p It would be useful for Lenin and the Nietzscheans and Machists surrounding him to give this some thought. But there are grounds to fear that these “supermen” have lost the ability to think.] ^^325^^

p (7)^^326^^ What is the meaning of "to deny the possibility of knowing the world" or "not to consider complete knowledge of it possible"? We shall see this presently.

p I cannot doubt my own existence for a minute; it is vouched for by my own internal conviction which nothing can refute. "Judging according to common sense,” the reader may add, "it seems that it may be conceded that there are no grounds for doubting the existence of the paper on which you are writing those lines.” At another time I would not doubt of it, but now I have been seized with a desire to philosophise and for the philosopher the current "judgements of common sense" are not always convincing. I ask the reader: of which existence of the paper are you talking? If you assume that it exists outside of me, that it is one of the objects that make up what is called the external world, I will ask you another question: How do you know of the existence of those objects? [What vouches to you for the existence of the external world? ] Your external senses tell you of it, it is testified to you by your sensations: you see this paper and feel this desk. That is undeniable. But that means that you are dealing, properly speaking, not with objects but with sensations and with conceptions arising from them. You only conclude as to the existence of these objects on the basis of your sensations. But by what will you prove the correctness of such a conclusion? You think that the objects cause the sensations. But leaving aside the question of how consistent your conception of cause in general is, I would ask you to explain to me why you are so sure that the cause of your sensations lies outside you and not in yourself. It is true that you are in the habit of dividing your sensations into two categories: 1) those whose cause lies within you; 2) those which are caused by objects outside you. But that is only a habit. How do you know 456 that this habitual classification of sensations is not a consequence of the properties of your “ego”, which is conscious of itself only insofar as, by an unconscious act of creation, it creates and counterposes to itself, in its very self, the outer world, what is "not your ego"? It seems more probable to me that this is exactly what takes place in reality, and that there is no external world at all, no world existing outside my “ego”.

p While giving vent to your indignation at my “sophism” I shall continue philosophising. But now I shall abandon the standpoint of subjective idealism , whose most prominent representative was Fichte, and change into a sceptic.

p I open Hume’s book Investigation of Human Reason and read you the following passage from Chapter XII. "It seems evident that men are carried, but by natural instinct or prepossession, to repose faith in their senses.... It seems aslo evident that, when men follow this blind and powerful instinct of nature, they always suppose the very images, presented by the senses, to be the external objects, and never entertain any suspicion, that the ones are nothing but representations of the others....” But if philosophy wanted to prove that instinct does not deceive man, it would have extreme difficulty. The decisive argument can be taken only from experience; but "here experience is silent and must be silent”; we are dealing only with images and shall never be able to check their connection with objects. That is why reason gives no grounds whatsoever for admitting any such connection. Of course this need not embarrass us. All such arguments are only fruitless play of the mind. The sceptic himself would be embarrassed if he were asked what he really wants, what he is aiming at with his clever arguments. "Man must act, reason and believe”, although, in spite of all his efforts, he cannot be completely sure of the ultimate basis of his actions and his reasoning. But, all the same, in philosophy one must not lose sight of this impossibility. It must be remembered that the field of knowledge of the world accessible to us is limited by fairly narrow bounds. We are not even in a position to understand the true nature of the causal connection between one phenomenon and another. Thousands of times we have seen a stone falling to the ground. Therefore we believe that it will always fall unless some support prevents it. But our belief is founded only on habit. Reason does not make it obligatory, and cannot do so. It does not vouch to us that what we call a law of nature is immutable.

p Let us go further. Let us remember the basic proposition in the philosophy of Kant, who was influenced by Hume’s scepticism. Outside us there exist objects of some kind. But exactly what kind, we do not know. Actually we are dealing only with our own sensations and with images of those objects which are formed in us 457 on the basis of the sensations. But sensation, and consequently the image of the object, is the resultant of two forces: the properties of the objects which produce a certain impression on us and those of the receiver which receives the impressions, the properties of our “ego”, which groups them in a certain manner, disposes them and connects them in a manner conforming to its own nature.  It is already obvious from this that our ideas of objects cannot be similar to the objects which give rise to them, that our images are one thing and things as they exist in themselves are another. Nor is that all. We said that our “ego” groups the impressions it receives from external things (things in themselves which are inaccessible to us) in a manner conforming to its own nature. But how does it group them, how does it dispose and connect them? We see things in space. The question is: does space exist in itself? Experience cannot give a direct answer to this question. As for reason, the presumption that space exists outside us and independently of us leads it to contradictory conclusions: it remains to presume that space (just as time) is nothing but a form of our contemplation (or outlook, as some Russian writers express it), and that consequently it has absolutely no relation to things in themselves (to noumena). From images let us go on to concepts and take, for example, the concept of cause.  It is quite possible that we are mistaken when we say that phenomenon A is the cause of phenomenon B. But we are not mistaken when we say in general that there exists a causal connection between phenomena. Abolish the concept of cause and you will have nothing left but a chaos of phenomena which you will understand nothing at all about. But the point is precisely that it is impossible to abolish this concept. It is obligatory for us, it is one of the forms of our thinking. We shall not enumerate the other forms, but shall merely say that as forms of our thinking they lose all significance as soon as we talk of things as they exist in themselves, independently of our thinking. In other words, what we call laws of nature extend only to the world of phenomena which exists in our consciousness, and the noumena (things in themselves) are not at all subject to those laws.

p Thus Kant’s doctrine on the world of phenomena contains two elements: 1) a subjective idealist element: the form of our contemplation or thought, of knowledge in general; 2) a realistic element: the indeterminate material which the noumena give us and which is processed by our consciousness. Kant calls his philosophy transcendental idealism. As our concept of natural necessity is not applicable to the world of noumena, it can be considered—by anybody who wishes—as a kingdom of complete freedom. In this world all those spectres—God, the immortality of the soul, freedom of will—which do not fit in with the 458 concept of conformity to law—can find their place. Kant, who fought these spectres in his Critique of Pure Reason , lays down his arms before them in his Critique of Practical Reason , i.e., when it is a question of action, not of abstract speculation.

p This dualism is the Achilles’ heel of Kant’s idealism. By the way, its inconsistency is apparent even from the standpoint of Kant’s premises.

p [For example, what is a phenomenon in the sense of Kant’s philosophy? It is the resultant of two forces:

p 1) Action on our ego by those objects (noumena) which exist outside us  [458•*  and are known to us not in themselves, but only through the intermediary of the impressions they produce upon us;

p 2) the properties of our ego, which processes according to these properties the impressions which it receives from the thing in itself.

p But if the phenomenon is caused by the action upon us of the thing in itself, the action of this thing is the cause of the phenomenon. And yet, according to Kant’s doctrine, the category of causality is applicable only within the limits of the world of phenomena but is inapplicable to the thing in itself. There are only two ways out of this obvious contradiction which has already been pointed out in German philosophy of the end of the eighteenth century: either we continue to maintain that the category of causality is inapplicable to things in themselves and consequently reject the thought that the phenomenon is brought forth by the action upon us of the thing in itself; or we continue to consider this thought as correct and then admit that the category of causality is applicable to things in themselves. In the first case we are taking the direct road to subjective idealism , because, if the thing in itself does not act upon us, we know nothing of its existence and the very idea of it must be declared unnecessary, that is, superfluous in our philosophy; in the second case we enter upon the path of materialism , for the materialists never affirmed that we know what things are in themselves, i.e., independently of their action upon us, but only maintained that these things are known to us precisely because they act upon the organs of our 459 senses and in the very measure in which they act upon them. "We do not know either the essence or the true nature of matter,” says Holbach, "although by its action upon us we can judge of some of its properties. For us, matter is what acts in one way or another upon our senses."  [459•*  ^^327^^ If Lange wrote in his History of Materialism (Vol. I, p. 349 of the Russian translation, where he deals precisely with Holbach) that "...materialism obstinately considers the world of sensuous appearance as the world of real things”,^^328^^ this is explained only by the fact that he " obstinately" refused to understand materialism. But however this may be, the question of the unknowableness of the external world in both the cases I have mentioned is settled positively.  Indeed, if we go on to the standpoint of subjective idealism it will be clear to us that our ego is capable of knowing the non-ego which it itself creates. And if we prefer to be materialists, with a little reflection we must come to the conviction that if we, thanks to the action upon us of things in themselves, know some properties of these things , then, contrary to Holbach’s opinion, their nature is also known to us to a certain extent , for the nature of a thing is manifest in its properties.  The current counterposition of nature to properties is completely unfounded and it is precisely this counterposition that has led the theory of knowledge into the scholastic labyrinth in which Kant got lost and in which the present opponents of materialism continue to wander helplessly. Goethe, with his feeling of a poet and thinker of genuis, understood better than Kant, the "transcendental idealist”, and even better than Holbach, the materialist, where truth lies. He said:

p Nichts ist innen, Nichts ist draussen,
Denn was innen, das ist aussen.
So ergreifet ohne Sdumniss
Heilig öffentlich Geheimniss... ^^329^^

p Those few words may be,said to contain the whole “gnosiology” of materialism: but neither these words nor the materialist theory of knowledge can yet be understood by the scholastics who speak of nothing but the unknowableness of the external world.

p Hegel revealed with extraordinary clarity the logical, or, if you prefer, the gnosiological, error which underlies all arguments that things in themselves are inaccessible to our knowledge. It is, indeed, impossible for us to answer the question what a thing in itself is. And the reason for this is very simple: the 460 question "what is? " presupposes that the thing in question has properties which must be pointed out; this question has any sense only with this presumption. But "philosophical people" who indulge in talk about the unknowableness of things in themselves preliminarily make abstraction of all properties of the thing and by this abstraction make the question absurd and therefore the answer impossible. Kant’s transcendental idealism, Hegel says, "transports into consciousness all the properties of things, in relation to both form and content. It is understandable that from this standpoint it depends only on me, on the subject, that the leaf of the tree appears to me green, not black; that sugar sweet, not bitter, and that when the clock strikes two, I perceive its strokes successively, not simultaneously and that I do not consider the first stroke as either the cause or the effect of the second”, etc. (Wissenschaft der Logik , I. Band, I. Abth., S. 55; II Abth., S. 150. Priestley in his Disquisitions and also in his polemic with Price ^^330^^ made, before Hegel, many most apt remarks about what, properly, must be understood by the word knowledge.)

p But pardon, the reader may object, is not light or sound something quite subjective? Is the perception of sound or colour similar to that kind of movement by which it is caused, according to the teaching of modern natural science? Of course, it is not. But if iron at different temperature has different colours, there is an objective cause of this which does not depend on the qualities of my “spiritual” organisation. Our famous physiologist Sechenov was perfectly right when he wrote that "every vibration or change of sound according to intensity, pitch or duration that we feel, corresponds to a perfectly definite change in the sound movement in reality. Sound and light as sensations are products of the organisation of man; but roots of the forms and movements which we see, just as the modulations of sound which we hear, lie outside us in reality" “(Objective Thought and Reality " in the collection Help for the Hungry published by Russkiye Vedomosti , p. 188). Sechenov adds: "Whatever the external objects may be in themselves, independently of our consciousness—even if it be granted that our impressions of them are only conventional signs—the fact remains that the similarity or difference of the signs we perceive corresponds with a real similarity or difference. " In other words, "the similarities or differences man finds in the objects he perceives are real similarities or differences" (ibid. , p. 207).^^331^^ This again is true. Only we must note that Mr. Sechenov does not express himself quite precisely. When he admits that our impressions may be only conventional signs of things in themselves he seems to acknowledge that things in themselves have some kind of " appearance" that we do not know of and which is inaccessible to our consciousness. But “appearance” is precisely only the result of the 461 action upon us of the things in themselves: outside this action they have no “appearance” whatsoever. Hence, to oppose their “appearance” as it exists in our consciousness to that " appearance" of theirs which they supposedly have in reality means not to realise which concept is connected with the word appearance. Such an imprecision of expression underlies, as we said above, all the “gnosiology” of the scholasticism of Kantianism. I know that Mr. Sechenov is not inclined to such scholasticism; I have already said that his theory of knowledge is perfectly correct, but we must not make to our opponents in philosophy concessions in terminology which prevent us from expressing our own thoughts with complete precision. Another reason why I make this reservation is because in the notes to the first edition of my translation of this pamphlet by Engels I also failed to express myself quite exactly and only subsequently felt all the awkwardness of that inexactness.

p And so, things in themselves have no “appearance” at all. Their “appearance” exists only in the consciousness of those subjects on whom they act. The question is now, who are those subjects? People? No, not only people, but all organisrns which, thanks to certain peculiarities of their structure, have the possibility to “see” the external world in one way or another. But the structure of these organisms is not identical; for that reason the external world has not for them an identical “appearance”; I do not know how the snail “sees” things, but I am sure that it does not “see” things the same as people do. From this, however, it does not follow that the properties of the external world have only subjective significance. By no means! If a man and a snail move from point A to point B, the straight line will be the shortest distance between those two points for both the man and the snail; if both these organisms went along a broken line they would have to expend a greater amount of labour for their advance. Consequently, the properties of space have also objective significance , although they are “seen” differently by different organisms at different stages of development.

p Nor is that all. What is a snail for me? A part of the external world which acts upon me in a definite manner determined by my organism. So that if I admit that the snail “sees” the external world in one way or another, I am obliged to acknowledge that the “appearance” in which the external world presents itself to the snail is itself determined by the properties of this really existing external world. Thus, the relation of object to subject, of being to thought, this, Engels says, basic question of modern philosophy, presents itself to us in a completely new light. The counterposition of the subject to the object disappears: the subject becomes object too; matter (remember Holbach’s definition: "for us matter is what acts in one way or another upon our senses”) turns out 462 under definite conditions to be endowed with consciousness.  This is the purest materialism; but it is the only at all satisfactory answer not contradicting science to the question of the relation of subject to object.

p Further. Kant places his theory of knowledge outside all connection with the doctrine of development which dominates science today and to the substantiation of which he himself contributed so much by his work Allgemeine Theorie und Geschichte des Himmels. This is a great shortcoming, which is naturally explained by the state of biology contemporaneous to Kant but is clearly felt now by certain biologists who place Kant’s philosophy very high. As an example I shall point out an interesting article by Professor Reinke, "Kant’s Erkenntnisslehre und die moderne Biologic" in Deutsche Rundschau , issue of July 1904.

p Reinke finds that modern natural science, especially biology, does not fit in with Kant’s teaching "on the a priori properties of human reason".

p Kant, as we know, says that the category of causality is inapplicable to things in themselves , and applicable only to phenomena , and this because causality is introduced into phenomena by our reason, is an a priori law of nature. Generally, according to Kant, reason serves as the source of all order in nature, since it dictates its laws to nature. This is what embarrasses Reinke. "Does such an a priori exist? " he asks. And he answers as follows, "Man from his very birth, and consequently prior to any experience whatsoever, is compelled by the properties of his reason to think according to the category of causality and to imagine phenomena in time and in space (Reinke also calls time and space categories; that in not a misprint, but a peculiar way of understanding the doctrine of the categories, on which I shall not dwell here); but in just the same way he is compelled by the properties of his organism to breathe, to move, to take food, etc. As man is part of nature he is subject to its great law—the law of adaptation to the conditions of existence. And it would be perfectly ridiculous to think that this law of adaptation is prescribed to nature by our reason. But the spiritual properties of organism too are subject to this law, for they are also part of nature; they also develop with the development of the organism. All forms of adaptation of the organism to the medium around it—lungs, branchiae, etc., are given to the organism just as a priori as the forms of thought. Both these groups of properties of the organism are acquired by it through heredity and develop proportionally to its growth from the cell, in which such properties are quite unnoticeable. If we ask ourselves how they were acquired by a given species of animal we will have to turn to the history of the development of the earth, but if we take a separate individual—man or some other animal—all 463 its properties, physical as well as spiritual, are given to it a priori."

p Such is Reinke’s reasoning. His arguments are interesting and correct, but Kant’s a priori acquires a completely new meaning thanks to him. And Reinke would hardly be approved by Kant. It is sufficient to say that Reinke refuses to attribute an exclusively subjective character to time, space and causality. On the contrary. "Analogy with the adaptation of bodily forms leads me to the conclusion,” he says, "that a priori laws of thought would not exist at all if they ... did not correspond to realities outside us.” This already sounds quite materialistic, although Reinke, being one of the pillars of contemporary neovitalism, is naturally not a materialist. And it goes without saying that the present neo-Kantians like Cohen, Lasswitz or even Riehl would not at any price agree with what Reinke says about a priori. But modern biology leaves them no rest.

p “I do not know,” says one German author, "how philosophers who adhere to Kant’s theory of knowledge deal with the doctrine of development. For Kant, man’s soul was a datum invariable in its elements. For him it was only a question of determining its a priori property and deducing all the rest from it, not of proving the origin of that property. But if we proceed from the axiom that man developed gradually out of a tiny piece of protoplasm, we shall have to deduce from the elementary vital manifestations of the cell the very thing which for Kant was the basis ... of the whole world of phenomena" (P. Beck, Die Nachahmung und . ihre Bedeutung fur Psychologic und Volkerkunde , Leipzig, 1904, S. 33). The point is, however, that up to now the Kantians have given no thought to whether their theory of knowledge fits in with the teaching on development and were even very surprised when anybody suggested that they should think of this. I remember how my Kantain friends shrugged theii shoulders in scorn when arguing with Konr. Schmidt I brought forward against Kant the arguments that P. Beck advances in the passage I have just cited. But truth is coming into its own and today even such an incorrigible, we may say, Kantian as Windelband has found himself forced to ask whether “phenomenality” of time (die Phaenomenalitat der Zeit) can be acknowledged by one who adheres to the theory of development (cf. his article "Nach hundert Jahren" in the collection Zu Kant’s Geddchtniss , Berlin, 1904, S. 17-18).

p Windelband finds that here science sets Kantianism a "difficult problem”. But the “problem” in the present case is not “difficult”, it is simply unsolvable.

p Development takes place in time and yet, according to Kant, time is only a subjective form of contemplation. If I hold the 464 philosophy of Kant, I contradict myself when I speak of what was before me , i.e., when I did not exist and consequently neither did the forms of my contemplation: space and time. It is true that Kant’s disciples tried to get out of this difficulty by the reference that with Kant it is a matter of the forms of contemplation and thought, not of the individual man, but of the whole of humanity. But such a reference is of no help, it only creates new difficulties.

p Firstly, I must admit either one or the other: either other people exist only in my imagination and in that case they did not exist before me and will not exist after my death; or they exist outside me and independently of my consciousness, in which case the idea of their existence before and after me naturally does not contain any contradiction; but now is the time when new and insuperable difficulties arise for Kant’s philosophy. If people exist outside me, that "outside me" is apparently what thanks to the structure of my brain appears to me as space.  So that space is not only a subjective form of contemplation; to it corresponds also a certain objective "an sich" “(in itself”). If people lived before me and will live after me , then again to this "before me " and to this "after me " apparently corresponds some "an sich" which does not depend on my consciousness and is only reflected in that consciousness in the form of time. So that time is not only subjective either. Finally, if people exist outside me they are among those things in themselves on the possibility of knowing which we materialists are arguing with the Kantians. And if their actions are in any way capable of determining my actions, and mine are capable of influencing theirs, which he must necessarily admit, who acknowledges that human society and the development of its culture do not exist only in his consciousnessthen it is clear that the category of causality is applicable to the really existing external world, i.e., to the world ofnoumena, to things in themselves. In a word, there is no other way out: either subjective idealism , leading logically to solipsism (i.e., the acknowledgement that other people exist only in my imagination) or the renunciation of Kant’s premises, a renunciation whose logical consummation must be the transition to the standpoint of materialism as I already proved in my argument with Konrad Schmidt.^^332^^

p Let us go further. Let us transport ourselves in thought to the time when only very remote ancestors of man existed upon the earth, for example in the Secondary Period. The question is: how did the matter of space, time and causality stand then? Whose subjective forms were they then? Subjective forms of the ichthyosaurus? And whose reason dictated its laws to nature then? The reason of the archaeopteryx? Kant’s philosophy 465 cannot give any answer to this question. And it must be rejected as disagreeing with modern science.

p Idealism says: without a subject there is no object. The history of the earth shows that the object existed long before the subject appeared , i.e., long before any organism appeared which had any perceptible degree of consciousness. The idealist says: reason dictates its laws to nature. The history of the organic world shows that “reason” appears only on a high rung of the ladder of development. And as this development can be explained only by the laws of nature, it follows that nature dictated its laws to reason. The theory of development reveals the truth of materialism.

p The history of mankind is a particular case of development in general. That is why what has been said includes the answer to the question whether Kant’s teaching can be united with the materialist explanation of history. Of course, the eclectic can unite everything in his mind. With the help of eclectic thinking one can unite Marx not only with Kant, but even with the “realists” of the Middle Ages. But for people who think consistently the illegal cohabitation of Marx with the philosophy of Kant must appear as something monstrous in the fullest sense of the word.

p Kant says in his Critique of Practical Reason that the greatest obligation of the philosopher is to be consistent, but that this is precisely what we most seldom meet with. One cannot help recalling this remark of his in connection with Kant himself and with the journeymen and novices of philosophy who want to unite him with Marx.

p The "critics of Marx”, including the above-mentioned armer Konrad, have shouted much and loud that Engels showed utter misunderstanding of Kant when he said that the teaching of the unknowableness of the external world was refuted best of all by experiment and industry. In actual fact Engels was absolutely right. Every experiment and every productive activity of man represents an active relation on his part to the external world, a deliberate calling forth of definite phenomena. And as a phenomenon is the fruit of the action of a thing in itself upon me (Kant says: the affecting of me by that thing), in carrying out an experiment or engaging in production of this or that product, I force the thing in itself to “affect” my “ego” in a definite manner determined beforehand by me. Consequently, I know at least some of its properties, namely those through whose intermediary I force it to act. But that is not all. By forcing this thing to act upon me in a certain way, I enter into a relation of cause towards it. But Kant says that the category of cause has no relation whatsoever to "things in themselves”; consequently, experience here refutes him better than he refuted himself when he said that the category of cause is related only to phenomena (not to things 466 in themselves) and at the same time maintained that the thing "in itself" acts upon our “ego”, in other words, that it is the cause of phenomena. From this again it follows that Kant was seriously mistaken when he said that the "forms of our thought" ( categories, or "basic concepts of reason”, e.g., causality, interaction, existence, necessity) are only "a priori forms”’ , i.e., that things in themselves are not subjected to causal relations, interaction, etc. In reality the basic forms of our thought not only correspond completely to the relations existing between things in themselves, they cannot fail to correspond to them, because otherwise our existence in general, and consequently the existence of our "forms of thought" would be made impossible. It is true that we are quite capable of error in investigating these basic forms: we may take for a category what is not a category at all. But that is another question, not directly related to the present one. In connection with it we shall merely make one remark: when we speak of the knowableness of the external world, we do not at all mean thereby that any philosopher you come across has the correct conception of it.

p Well, granted that Kant is wrong, granted that his dualism cannot withstand criticism. But the very existence of external objects is all the same still not proved. How will you prove that Hume is not right, that the subjective idealists, for example Berkeley, whose views you set forth at the beginning of this note, are not right?

p I do not even consider it necessary to give an answer concerning subjective idealism. It is useless to argue with one whose mind can be satisfied with this philosophy which logically leads, as we have said above, to solipsism; but we can and must request him to be consistent. And consistency for a man like him means, for example, to deny even the act of his own birth; the solipsist who does not recognise anything but his own “ego” would, of course, commit a great error in logic, a real salto mortale of the mind, if he admitted that his mother exists or existed otherwise than in his imagination. And yet nobody “perceived” himself during the process of his birth; hence the solipsist has absolutely no grounds for saying that he was "born of woman”. But only the mind of an unfortunate Poprishchin^^333^^ can be satisfied with such idealism. This idealism is nothing but a reductio ad absurdum of criticism which doubts the knowableness of the external world. Man must act, reason and believe in the existence of the external world, said Hume. It remains for us materialists to add that such “belief” is the necessary preliminary condition for critical thought in the best sense of the word, that it is the inevitable salto vitale of philosophy.^^334^^ The basic question in philosophy is not solved by opposing “ego” to “non-ego”, i.e., to the 467 external world; such a counterposition can only lead us into the blind alley of the absurd. The solution of this particular question requires one to go beyond the limits of the “ego” and consider how “it” (an organism endowed with consciousness) stands in regard to the external world surrounding it. But as soon as the question assumes this—the only rational—form, it becomes obvious that the “subject” in general, and consequently my “ego” too, far from dictating laws to the objective world, represents only a component part of that world, considered from another aspect , from that of thought, not of extent, as Spinoza would say, he an indisputable materialist, although historians of philosophy refuse to recognise him as such.  [467•* 

p This decisive step of thought cuts the Gordian knot of Hume’s scepticism. It goes without saying that as long as I doubt the existence of external objects, the question of the causal connection between them necessarily remains before me in the same form that it assumed with Hume: I am entitled to talk only of the consistency of my own impressions, the source of which is unknown. But when the work of my thought convinces me that doubt in the existence of the external world leads my mind to absurdity, and when /, no longer “dogmatically”, but “critically” , declare the existence of the external world indubitable, I then, by the very fact, admit that my impressions are the result of the action upon me of external objects, i.e., I attribute an objective significance to causality.

p Of course to a thinker in a certain state of mind the salto vitale of thought that I alluded to may appear unjustified and he will feel inclined to return to Hume. But Hume’s standpoint condemns thought to complete immobility: Hume himself abandoned it every time he, in a desire to think, began to “believe” in the existence of the external world. That is why a return to Hume is, as Engels justly remarks, a step back compared with materialism. Such a step back, by the way, is made in the present time by the empiriomonists, whose philosophy Riehl quite correctly calls a renewal of Hume’s philosophy (Zur Einleitung in die Philosophic der Gegenwart , Leipzig, 1903, S. 101).I

p (8)^^335^^ In this connection it may perhaps be remarked that both chemistry and biology will finally be reduced, in all probability to molecular mechanics.^^336^^ But the reader sees that Engels is not talking of the mechanics which the French materialists had not and could not have in mind, any more than Descartes, their 468 teacher, had when he spoke of building an "animal machine". We can see already from the first part of Descartes’ work On the Passions (Des passions en general , etc.) what mechanical causes he resorted to in explaining phenomena accomplished in the animal organism. But how little the mechanical outlook of the French materialist tallies with the historical view of nature is shown best of all by the famous book Systeme de la Nature (The System of Nature). = ^^337^^ In the sixth chapter of the first part of this book its authors come up against the question of the origin of man. Although the thought of his gradual (zoological) development does not seem to them “contradictory”, it is clear from everything that in their eyes it is a very improbable “surmise”. If anybody had objected against such a surmise, if anybody had told them that " nature acts with the help of a definite aggregate of universal and immutable laws" (as though universal and immutable laws are contradictory to development! ! ); if to this they had added that "man, the quadruped, the fish, the insect, the plant, and so on, have existed for ever and remain for ever immutable”, the authors "would not have opposed this either”; they would merely have remarked that neither was this view contradictory to the truths (of mechanical materialism) which they were expounding. In the end they get out of the difficulty with these considerations: "It is not given to man to know everything; it is not given to him to know his origin; it is not given to him to penetrate into the essence of things down to the primary causes; but he is capable of having reason and good intentions, he is capable of admitting sincerely that he does not know what he cannot know and of not putting incomprehensible words and absurd propositions in the place of his ignorance" (Syst. de la Nat. , London edition, 1781, Part I, p. 75). A warning for those who like to philosophise on "the limits to knowledge of nature".

p The authors of The System of Nature explain all the historical evils of mankind by lack of “reason”.  "The peoples did not know the true foundations of authority, they did not dare to demand happiness of their rulers, who were obliged to give it to them.... The inevitable consequence of such opinions was the degeneration of politics into the fatal art of sacrificing the happiness of all to the caprice of a single one or of a few privileged ones”, etc. (Ibid., p. 291). With such views one could fight with success against existing “privileges”, but one could not even think of a scientific conception of history. [For more details on this see Beltov, The Development of the Monist View of History , and my book Beitrdge zur Geschichte des Materialismus.l

p (9)^^338^^ What is a categorical imperative? Why does Engels speak of it with such scorn? Is it only because it suggests too high ideals? [No, it is not.]

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p What is an ideal? "An ideal,” the philistine answers, "is a goal towards which we are morally obliged to strive but which is so high that we will never reach it.” From this the philistine draws the conclusion—an extremely pleasant one for him—that "faith in an ideal" is compatible with actions which, to say the least, have nothing in common with the “ideal”. In the seventies there were such “ideal” gendarme officers in Russia who when arresting a “nihilist” assured him that socialism was indeed a very good thing, that nothing better could be imagined, but that at the same time the ideal was unattainable and that, living on earth, one must think of what was earthly, and that what was “earthly” demanded that he, the ideal gendarme officer, "having tracked down" the no less ideal nihilist, "should bring him to judgement" and so he was "tracking down and bringing to judgement”. In all probability the gendarmes were lying when they spoke of their striving towards an “ideal”. But let us take another example. Our “legal” Narodniks strived with complete sincerity towards their “ideals”. But see what came of their sincere attitude to those ideals. Their social ideal was a free “people”, developing independently, without any hindrances from the government and the higher estates. Both the government and the higher estates were completely deleted, if not completely annihilated in the Narodnik ideal. But what did the Narodniks do to fulfil their ideals? Sometimes they simply moaned over the disintegration of the “foundations” “(they wept over figures”, as G. I. Uspensky^^339^^ put it). Sometimes they advised the government to increase the peasants’ allotments and to lighten the burden of taxation. Sometimes—these were the most consistent and irreconcilable— they "settled on the land”. But all this did not bring Russian reality any closer to the Narodnik ideal. That is why the Narodniks wept not only over figures, but over themselves too. They were conscious of the complete impotence of their ideals. But what was the cause of this impotence? It is clear: they had no organic connection between their ideals and reality. Reality went in one direction and their ideals in another, or, to put it better, they remained stationary, continuing to be "settled on the land " with Messrs, the liberal Narodniks, so that the distance between ideals and reality kept increasing, as a result of which their ideals became more and more powerless day by day. Engels would have laughed at such ideals, of course, as Hegel indeed did. However, the mockery would be directed not against the loftiness of the ideals, but against their very impotence, their severance form the general course of the Russian movement. Engels dedicated his entire life to an extremely lofty aim: the emancipation of the proletariat. He also had his “ideal”, but he was not severed for ever from reality. His ideal was reality itself, but the 470 reality of tomorrow, a reality which will be fulfilled, not because Engels was a man of an ideal, but because the properties of the present reality are such that out of it, by its own inner laws, there must develop that reality of tomorrow which we may call Engels’ ideal. Uneducated people may ask us: if the whole point consists in the properties of the reality, then what has Engels to do with it, why does he intervene with his ideals in the inevitable historical process? Cannot the matter do without him? From the objective standpoint the position of Engels appears as follows: in the process of the transition from one form to another, reality seized on him as on one of the necessary instruments of the impending revolution. From the subjective standpoint it turns out that it was pleasant for Engels to partake in that historical movement, that he considered it his duty and the great task of his life. The laws of social development can no more be fulfilled without the intermediary of people than the laws of nature without the intermediary of matter. But this does not in any sense mean that the “personality” can ignore the laws of social development. In the best of cases he will be punished for this by being reduced to the position of a ridiculous Don Quixote.

p [In his well-known work Wirtschaft und Recht Stammler expressed amazement at the Social-Democrats considering, on the one hand, that the revolution of the proletariat is inevitable, and, on the other, finding it necessary to promote the advent of that revolution. In his opinion this was just as strange as creating a party to promote astronomically inevitable eclipses of the moon. But his making such a remark shows—as does, by the way, the whole of his book—that he did not understand the materialist philosophy underlying modern socialism. Even D. Priestley says, and quite rightly: "Though the chain of events is necessary, our own determinations and actions are necessary links of that chain" (Disquisitions, Vol. I, p. 110). Kant considered Priestley a fatalist. But where is the fatalism in this? There is no trace of it, as Priestley pointed out in his argument with Price.

p Let us now speak of the categorical imperative. What is it? Kant calls imperatives rules which have the "mark of obligation”. An imperative can be conditional or categorical.  A conditional imperative determines the will only in relation to a given desirable action. A categorical imperative determines the will independently of this or that end in view; it determines the will as such, "even before I ask myself whether I have sufficient ability to produce the action I have in view or what I must do to produce it”. Besides the mark of obligation, the categorical imperative has, therefore, the mark of unconditional necessity.  If somebody is told that he must work and put money aside for a rainy day, this 471 is a conditional imperative; he must put money aside only if he does not want to be in need when he is old and has no other means of protecting himself against poverty. But the rule not to make false promises applies only to man’s will as such and does not depend on the aims pursued by that man. By this rule the act of will is determined a priori. This is a categorical imperative. " Consequently,” Kant says, "practical laws apply only to the will, independently of what is created by its causality, and one can renounce the latter in order to have these laws pure.” (Critique of Practical Reason , Russian translation by N. M. Sokolov, St. Petersburg, 1897, p. 21.)

p There is, properly, only one categorical imperative which says: act only in accordance with such a rule as you could desire to elevate to a universal law (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten , Leipzig, 1897, S. 44).

p To explain his thought Kant cites several examples. A particular person is so unhappy that life has become a burden for him and he asks whether it is permissible to kill himself. Where must the answer to this question be sought? In the categorical imperative. What would happen if suicide were made a universal law? What would happen is that life would cease. Therefore, suicide does not conform to morality. Another example. Somebody has trusted his chattels to the safe keeping of another man. Is it permissible for the other man to keep it for himself? To Kant this question too seems just as easy to solve with the help of the categorical imperative: if all people appropriated what they had been entrusted with to them nobody would give property for safe keeping. A third example. A well-to-do man could help a poor man but refuses to do so. Is this not contrary to moral duty? It is: nobody can desire that such conduct should be the general rule, since each may find himself in difficulty.

p These examples provide a good explanation of Kant’s thought, but they also reveal its groundlessness. Hegel has already noted ^^340^^ that the example of giving chattels for safe keeping is not convincing, for one can ask: where is the harm if things are not entrusted for safe keeping? And if anyone replied that it would then be more difficult to guard chattels and that property itself would be impossible in the end, it could also be objected, what is property needed for? Kant’s teaching, as Hegel says, does not contain a single law of morality clear in itself, without any further arguments and without contradictions, independently of other qualifications. This is correct and it is especially noticeable in the example of suicide. Indeed, in this example it is a question of the suicide not of all people generally, but only of such as are broken by the difficult struggle of life, and the suicide of such people would not put an end to life.

472

p Besides, Hegel says that with Kant each definite law of morality is an empty statement, a meaningless tautology like the formula A=A, chattels entrusted for safe keeping are chattels entrusted for safe keeping, property is property. That is also correct and quite comprehensible. For Kant there simply existed no such questions as those which Hegel counterposes to his "empty statements": Where is the harm if things are not entrusted for safe keeping? Why is property needed? etc. Kant’s ideal , his "kingdom of aims" (Reich der Zwecke, cf. Grundlegung, p. 58) was an abstract ideal of bourgeois society, whose standards seemed to Kant to be unquestionable orders of "practical reason”. Kant’s morality is bourgeois morality, translated into the language of his philosophy, whose main defect, as we have seen, was the complete inability to cope with the questions of development.  To support this I shall dwell on the third example cited above and borrowed from Kant himself. But first I ask the reader to note that Kant was a resolute opponent of utilitarian morality. In his opinion, the principle of happiness contains no other bases to determine the will than those which are inherent in the ability to desire; but reason, determining the will, cannot take this lower ability into account. Reason is so different from this ability that even the slightest admixture of the impulses deriving from the latter "deprives it of force and superiority, just as the slightest empirical admixture, as a condition in a mathematical proof, debases and destroys the whole action of the demonstration" (Critique of Practical Reason , p. 27). The principle of morality consists in being independent of the desired object.

p This being independent of the desired object has long provided occasion for jokes and epigrams (cf. for example 388-389 Xenien of Schiller and Goethe). I cannot give them here.  [472•*  All I wish to say is that the third example cited above from Kant can be considered as convincing only in the event of our adopting the standpoint of utilitarian morality and compelling our " practical reason" to take into account our "ability to desire " : for according to Kant I must help others because I also may be in need of their help. What could be more utilitarian? Besides, I wish 473 to draw the reader’s attention to the circumstance that while objecting to utilitarianists, Kant always has in mind the principle of "personal happiness" which he correctly calls the principle of self-love. And that is precisely why he cannot cope with the basic questions of morality. Indeed, morality is founded on the striving not for personal happiness, but for the happiness of the whole: the clan, the people, the class, humanity. This striving has nothing in common with egoism.  On the contrary, it always presupposes a greater or lesser degree of self-sacrifice.  And as social feelings can be transmitted from generation to generation and strengthened by natural selection (cf. Darwin’s most apt remarks on this point in his book on the origin of man)^^342^^ selfsacrifice can take a form as if it were a matter of "autonomous will”, without any admixture of "the ability to desire”. But this indisputable circumstance does not in the least preclude the utilitarian principle of this lofty ability. If self-sacrifice were not useful for the particular society, class, or, finally, the particular animal species in its struggle for existence (remember that social feelings are not characteristic of man alone), then it would be alien to the individuals belonging to this society, class or species. That is all. A particular individual is born with an a priori "ability for selfsacrifice" just as it is born—according to the remark by Reinke quoted above (in Note 7)—with an "a priori" ability to breathe and digest; but there is nothing mysterious in this "a prioriness": it was formed gradually in the long, long process of development.

p From the standpoint of development and social usefulness it is easy to solve those questions by means of which Hegel refuted Kant’s moral laws: what is the safe keeping of chattels needed for? Why is property needed? etc. But—I repeat—still more clearly in his teaching on morality than in his theory of knowledge is his inability and that of his followers to adopt the standpoint of development displayed. And here, just as often as in connection with Kant’s theory of knowledge, we have to remember Kant’s own words: "The greatest obligation of the philosopher is to be consistent, but this is precisely what we most seldom meet with".

p Jacobi, a contemporary of Kant, revolted against his teaching on morality and said in a letter to Fichte: "Yes, I am an atheist and a godless man, who desires, contrary to a will which desires nothing, to lie like Desdemona when she was dying; I want to lie and deceive like Pylades when he tried to pass as Orestes; to kill like Timoleon, to break laws and oaths like Epaminondas and Jan de Witt; to commit suicide like Otto; to plunder the temple like David and even to pluck ears of corn on the Sabbath just because I am hungry and because the law is made for man and not 474 man for the law”. That is very good, and Hegel was perfectly right in his opinion that these thoughts of Jacobi’s were "perfectly pure, since their expression in the first person, ’I am’, ’I desire’, cannot hinder their objectivity".^^343^^ But the absolutely correct thought that the law is made for man and not man for the law provides an unshakable foundation for utilitarian morality understood in its true, i.e., objective significance.]

p (10)^^344^^ Hegel had already noted that it is absurd to consider historical events from the moral point of view (cf. his Lectures on the Philosophy of History , p. 67 of the first edition, Vol. IX of the complete collection of his works). But our "progressive writers" still do not understand the correctness of this remark (which, I admit, they have yet hardly heard of). They lament with the utmost sincerity over the deterioration of morals which accompanies the disintegration of the ancient “foundations” of the people’s life, foundations on which whole forests of birchrods and mountains of blows have grown. The factory proletariat is in their eyes a vessel of all kinds of vices. Scientific socialism takes a different view of the matter. The representatives of scientific socialism knew long before “progressive” Russian writers noticed it, that the development of capitalism inevitably leads to what may be called the demoralisation of the workers, i.e., first and foremost a break with traditionally established morality (cf. for example Engels’ Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England , Leipzig, 1845, pp. 120 et seq.). But Engels did not dream of a resumption of patriarchal relationships, and, what is most important, he understood that out of the " immorality " of the factory proletariat there grows a new “morality”, the morality of revolutionary struggle against the existing order of things , which in the end will create a new social system in which the workers will not be “perverted”, because the sources of their “perversion” will disappear (pp. 256 et seq.). The contemporary condition of Russian “progressive” thought can be expressed as follows: we have not even an idea of what really progressive thought in the West already knew half a century ago. Really, there is enough to drive us to despair!

p [These lines were written in 1892 when our arguments with illegal Narodism (still in existence as remnants of the Narodnaya Volya trend) were still going on and our polemic with the legal Narodniks, which became particularly sharp in the second half of the nineties, was as yet only in preparation. Now our " progressive" writers have no time to mourn over the disintegration of the "ancient foundations" and they no longer regret the appearance of the proletariat in our country: life itself has now shown them how great the revolutionary significance of this class is; and the “progressive” press is now lavish in praise of it. 475 Better late than never, as the saying goes. But I say: better early than late. If our “progressive” people had abandoned their absurd view of the proletariat as of a mere “ulcer” earlier; if, renouncing this view, they had promoted with all their might the development of consciousness in this class, the infamous Black Hundred would not now be playing its dangerous role in politics. Stubborn and persistent defence by the “progressive” intelligentsia of the prejudices of Narodism truly constitutes their political crime for which implacable history is now severely punishing them.]

p (12)^^345^^ As for primitive society, Marx’s historical views are brilliantly corroborated by the studies of Morgan (cf. his Ancient Society^^346^^ which was first published in English; now there is a German, [Russian! and, if we are not mistaken, a Polish translation). Some dishonest critics maintain that Morgan’s conclusions regarding tribal life are founded only on the study of the social life of the Red Indians in North America. It is sufficient to read his book to be convinced that such “critical” remarks are completely unfounded. In the same way it is sufficient to become acquainted in detail, i.e., from first sources, with the history of the antique world to see how indisputable is all that Morgan and Engels say about it (cf. the latter’s Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats , i.e., The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. ) [But notwithstanding many scientists’ malevolent attitude towards Morgan’s work, this man’s thoughts of genius have not been lost for modern ethnology. Under his influence there has arisen in North America a whole school of ethnologists whose works are published in the annual— and extremely noteworthy—reports of the Smithsonian Institution and provide much most valuable data for the materialist explanation of the history of primitive society. Among the works in Europe based on the studies of Morgan we must include first of all the valuable works of our German comrade H. Cunow on the systems of relations among the Australian Negroes, the social structure in Mexico and the state of the Incas, and finally on matriarchy in connection with the development of the productive forces in the “savage” tribes.^^347^^ However, one must admit when speaking of Europe, that the influence of Morgan’s ideas, properly speaking, is still relatively weak. But there is no doubt that here too “ethnology” resorts with increasing frequence to purely materialist explanations of social phenomena. I do not think that an investigator such as Karl von den Steinen would take any interest in historical materialism; in his works at least there is not so much as a hint that he is even a little acquainted with this theory. But in his instructive book Unter den Naturvolkern Zentral-Brasiliens , Berlin, 1894, this method, recommended by the “economic” materialists, is applied invariably from beginning to end, and in the 476 majority of cases successfully. Even Ratzel, who considers it necessary to defend himself against the reproach of materialism (cf. his Volkerkunde, II, S. 631), places the development of “spiritual” culture in causal dependence on the development of “material” culture. He says: "The sum of cultural acquisitions in each people in each stage of their development is made up of material and spiritual acquisitions. These acquisitions are achieved by various means, with differing ease and at different times.... Underlying spiritual cultural acquisitions are the material ones" (ibid., Vol. I, p. 17). This is the same historical materialism but not thought out to the end and therefore partly inconsistent, partly naive. And we come across the same, so to speak, naturally grown and therefore nai’ve and more or less inconsistent materialism in a large number of works on the development of different special fields of primitive “culture”, or, to use Marx’s expression, different ideologies.  Thus, the investigation of primitive art has taken a firm stand on materialist ground; this could be confirmed by quoting a long list of works published in Europe and in the United States of North America, but I will confine myself to indicating the works of Grosse, Die Anfdnge der Kunst , and of Biicher, Arbeit und Rhythmus , of which there are Russian translations. It is interesting that this latter work was written by a man whose view of the basic causes of social development is directly opposed to the materialist view (as can be seen from what Biicher wrote about the mutual relations of play and labour). But it is obvious that now even the bourgeois scientist cannot always avoid the influence of truth, although he finds it unpleasant to acknowledge it because of some or other prejudices. Everything shows that we are now rapidly approaching the time when what we can now observe in natural science will be repeated in social sciences: all phenomena will be given a materialist explanation but the basic thought of the materialists will be rejected as being groundless. It is not difficult to understand what explains this dual attitude to materialism: the consistent materialist outlook is mainly a revolutionary view of the world , and the "educated classes" in the Western countries are by no means inclined towards revolution at present. It can be seen from an interesting book written by an American, Edwin R. A. Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History , New York, 1902, that I am not calumniating the "educated classes”. Professor Seligman says expressly that historical materialism is doing itself a lot of harm in the eyes of scientists by its close connection with socialism (cf. p. 90 of his book) and its alleged "absurd exaggerations”, including its negative attitude to religion in general and to Christianity in particular (see the whole of Chapter IV of the book quoted). As Seligman considers the materialist explanation of history to be 477 correct and as he wishes to have its correctness recognised by other scientists, he tries to prove that one can adhere to the materialist explanation of history and not share the atheist and socialist conclusions at which the enormous majority of its supporters have arrived so far. It must be admitted that Seligman is right in his way: with a certain inconsistency the logical operation which he suggests is obviously possible. And it would be useful for social sciences if bourgeois scientists listened to the advice that Seligman gives them: by renouncing the " exaggerations" of modern Marxism they would, of course, be making a big mistake. But by rejecting historical materialism outright they are making not one, but a large number of mistakes; of the two evils the former would therefore all the same be the lesser....

However this may be, the late N. Mikhailovsky was cruelly mistaken when he maintained in his argument with the "Russian pupils of Marx" that historical materialism is incapable, because of its inherent groundlessness, to attract the attention of the scientific world. The attention of the scientific world is now being drawn to it from all sides and although bourgeois scientists, due to the causes pointed out above, still show little inclination to acknowledge its scientific worth in the majority of cases, now it is not rare even for experts in geography to speak about it in special works and, for example, certain members of the Berlin Geographical Society have spared no efforts to fight it. This is a gratifying sign of the times, and one that is of no little importance.]