it. Against it [dialectical philosophy] nothing is final, absolute, 
sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in 
everything; nothing can endure against it except the uninter- 
rupted process of becoming and passing away, of ascending 
without end from the lower to the higher. And dialectical 
philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this 
process in the thinking brain. It has, however, also a conservative 
side: it recognises that definite stages of cognition and society are 
justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far. The 
conservatism of this outlook is relative; its revolutionary character 
is absolute—the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits. 

It is not necessary, here, to go into the question of whether this 
outlook is thoroughly in accord with the present state of natural 
science, which predicts a possible end for the earth itself and for 
its habitability a fairly certain one; which therefore recognises that 
for the history of mankind, too, there is not only an ascending but 
also -a descending branch. At any rate we are still a considerable 
distance from the turning-point at which the historical course of 
society becomes one of descent, and we cannot expect Hegelian 
philosophy to be concerned with a subject which, in its time, 
natural science had not yet placed on the agenda at all. 

But what really must be said here is this: that in Hegel the views 
developed above are not so sharply defined. They are a necessary 
conclusion from his method, but one which he himself never drew 
with such explicitness. And this, indeed, for the simple reason that 
he was compelled to make a system and, in accordance with 
traditional requirements, a system of philosophy must conclude 
with some sort of absolute truth. Therefore, however much Hegel, 
especially in his Logik, emphasises that this eternal truth is nothing 
but the logical, or, the historical, process itself, he nevertheless 
finds himself compelled to supply this process with an end, just 
because he has to bring his system to a termination at some point 
or other. In his Logik he can make this end a beginning again, 
since here the point of conclusion, the absolute idea—which is 
only absolute in so far as he has absolutely nothing to say about 
it— ‘‘alienates’’, that is, transforms itself into nature and comes to 
itself again later in the mind, that is, in thought and in history. 
But at the end of the whole philosophy a similar return to the 
beginning is possible only in one way. Namely, by conceiving the 
end of history as follows: mankind arrives at the cognition of this 

selfsame absolute idea, and declares that this cognition of the 
absolute idea is attained in Hegelian philosophy.* In this way, 
however, the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian system is 
declared to be absolute truth, in contradiction to his dialectical 
method, which dissolves all that is dogmatic. Thus the revolutio- 
nary side is smothered beneath the overgrowth of the conservative 
side. And what applies to philosophical cognition applies also to 
historical practice. Having, in the person of Hegel, reached the 
point of working out the absolute idea, mankind must also in 
practice have advanced so far that it can carry out this absolute 
idea in reality. Hence the practical political demands of the 
absolute idea on contemporaries should not be pitched too high. 
And so we find at the conclusion of the Rechtsphilosophie” that the 
absolute idea is to be implemented in that monarchy based on 
social estates which Frederick William III so persistently promised 
his subjects to no avail, that is, in a limited and moderate, indirect 
rule of the possessing classes suited to the petty-bourgeois German 
conditions of that time; and, moreover, the necessity of the 
nobility is demonstrated to us in a speculative fashion. 

The inner necessities of the system are, therefore, of themselves 
sufficient to explain why a thoroughly revolutionary method of 
thinking produced an extremely tame political conclusion. As a 
matter of fact, the specific form of this conclusion derives from 
the fact that Hegel was a German, and like his contemporary 
Goethe, had a bit of the philistine’s tail dangling behind. Each of 
them was an Olympian Zeus in his own sphere, yet neither of 
them ever quite freed himself from German philistinism. 

But all this did not prevent the Hegelian system from covering 
an incomparably greater domain than any earlier system, nor from 
developing in this domain a wealth of thought which is astounding 
even today. The phenomenology of the mind (which one may call 
a parallel to the embryology and palaeontology of the mind, a 
development of individual consciousness through its different 
stages, set in the form of an abbreviated reproduction of the 
stages through which the consciousness of man has passed in the 
course of history), logic, philosophy of nature, philosophy of the 
mind, and the latter in turn elaborated in its separate, historical 
subdivisions: philosophy of history, of law, of religion, history of 

philosophy, aesthetics, etc.—in all these different historical fields 
Hegel worked to discover and demonstrate the pervading thread 
of development. And as he was not only a creative genius but also 
a man of encyclopaedic erudition, he played an epoch-making role 
in every sphere. It is self-evident that owing to the needs of the 
“system” he very often had to resort to those forced constructions 
about which his pygmean opponents make such a terrible fuss 
even today. But these constructions are only the frame and 
scaffolding of his work. If one does not loiter here needlessly, but 
presses on farther into the huge edifice, one finds innumerable 
treasures which still today retain their full value. With all 
philosophers it is precisely the “system” which is perishable; and 
for the simple reason that it springs from an imperishable need of 
the human mind—the need to overcome all contradictions. But if 
all contradictions are once for all disposed of, we shall have 
arrived at so-called absolute truth—world history will be at an 
end. And yet it has to continue, although there is nothing left for 
it to do—hence, a new, insoluble contradiction. Once we have 
realised—and in the long run no one has helped us to realise it 
more than Hegel himself—that the task of philosophy thus stated 
means nothing but the task that a single philosopher should 
accomplish that which can only be accomplished by the entire 
human race in its ongoing development—as soon as we realise 
that, it is the end of all philosophy in the hitherto accepted sense 
of the word. One leaves alone ‘absolute truth’, which is 
unattainable along this path or by any single individual; instead, 
one pursues attainable relative truths along the path of the 
positive sciences, and the summation of their results by means of 
dialectical thinking. With Hegel philosophy comes to an end 
altogether: on the one hand, because in his system he sums up its 
whole development in the most splendid fashion; and on the other 
hand, because, even if unconsciously,’ he shows us the way out of 
the labyrinth of systems to real positive cognition of the world. 

One can imagine what a tremendous effect this Hegelian system 
must have produced in the philosophy-tinged atmosphere of 
Germany. It was a triumphal procession which lasted for decades 
and which by no means came to a standstill on the death of Hegel. 
On the contrary, it was precisely from 1830 to 1840 that 
“Hegelianism” reigned most exclusively, and to a greater or lesser 
extent infected even its opponents. It was precisely in this period 

that Hegelian views, consciously or unconsciously, most extensively 
penetrated the most diversified sciences and leavened even 
popular literature and the daily press, from which the average 
“educated consciousness” derives its mental pabulum. But this 
victory along the whole front was only the prelude to an internal 
struggle. 

As we have seen, Hegel’s doctrine, taken as a whole, left plenty 
of room to accommodate the most diverse practical party views. 
And in the theoretical Germany of that time, two things were 
practical above all; religion and politics. Whoever placed the 
emphasis on the Hegelian system could be fairly conservative in 
both spheres; whoever regarded the dialectical method as the main 
thing could belong to the most extreme opposition, both in 
religion and politics. Hegel himself, despite the fairly frequent 
outbursts of revolutionary wrath in his works, seemed on the 
whole to be more inclined to the conservative side. Indeed, his 
system had cost him much more “hard mental plugging” than his 
method. Towards the end of the thirties, the cleavage in the 
school became more and more apparent. The Left wing, the 
so-called Young Hegelians, in their fight with the pietist orthodox 
and the feudal reactionaries, abandoned bit by bit that philosophi- 
cal-genteel reserve in regard to the burning questions of the day 
which up to that time had secured state toleration and even 
protection for their teachings. And when, in 1840, orthodox 
sanctimony and absolutist feudal reaction ascended the throne 
with Frederick William IV, open partisanship became unavoidable. 
The fight was still carried on with philosophical weapons, but no 
longer for abstract philosophical aids. It turned directly on the 
destruction of traditional religion and the existing state. And while 
in the Deutsche Jahrbticher the practical ends were still predomi- 
nantly put forward in philosophical disguise, in the Rhetnische 
Zeitung of 1842 the Young Hegelian school revealed itself directly 
as the philosophy of the aspiring radical bourgeoisie and used the 
meagre cloak of philosophy only to deceive the censors. 

At that time, however, politics was a very thorny field, and 
hence the main fight came to be directed against religion; this 
fight, particularly since 1840, was indirectly also political. Strauss’ 
Leben Jesu, published in 1835, had provided the initial impetus. 
The theory therein developed of the formation of the gospel 
myths was combated later by Bruno Bauer with proof that a whole 
series of evangelical stories had been invented by the authors 
themselves. The controversy between these two was carried on in 
the philosophical disguise of a battle between “self-consciousness”’ 

and “substance”. The question whether the miracle stories of the 
gospels came into being through unconscious traditional myth- 
creation within the bosom of the community or whether they were 
invented by the evangelists themselves was blown up into the 
question whether, in world history, “substance” or “self- 
consciousness” was the decisive operative force. Finally came 
Stirner, the prophet of contemporary anarchism—Bakunin has 
taken a great deal from him—and surpassed the sovereign 
“self-consciousness” by his sovereign “ego’’.* 

We shall not go further into this aspect of the decomposition 
process of the Hegelian school. More important for us is the 
following: the bulk of the most determined Young Hegelians 
were, by the practical necessities of their fight against positive 
religion,”° driven back to Anglo-French materialism. This brought 
them into conflict with their school system. While materialism 
conceives nature as the sole reality, nature in the Hegelian system 
represents merely the “alienation” of the absolute idea, so to say, a 
degradation of the idea. At all events, thinking and its thought- 
product, the idea, is here the primary, nature the derivative, which 
only exists at all by the condescension of the idea. And in this 
contradiction they floundered as well or as ill as they could. 

Then came Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christenthums. With one blow 
it pulverised the contradiction, by plainly placing materialism on 
the throne again. Nature exists independently of all philosophy. It 
is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves 
products of nature, have grown up. Nothing exists outside nature 
and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have 
created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence. The 
spell was broken; the “system” was exploded and cast aside, and 
the contradiction, shown to exist only in our imagination, was 
dissolved.c~One must have experienced the liberating effect of 
this book for oneself to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was 
universal: we were all Feuerbachians for a moment. How 
enthusiastically Marx greeted the new conception and how 
much—in spite of all critical reservations—he was influenced by 
it,” one may read in The Holy Family. 

Even the shortcomings of the book contributed to its immediate 
effect. Its literary, sometimes even bombastic, style secured for it a 
large public and was at any rate refreshing after long years of 

abstract and abstruse Hegelianising. The same is true of its 
extravagant deification of love, which, coming after the now 
intolerable sovereign rule of “pure reason”, had its excuse, if not 
justification. But what we must not forget is that it was precisely 
these two weaknesses of Feuerbach that “true socialism’”,”?’ which 
had been spreading like a plague in “educated” Germany since 
1844, took as its starting-point, putting literary phrases in the 
place of scientific knowledge, the liberation of mankind by means 
of “love” in place of the emancipation of the proletariat through 
the economic transformation of production—2in short, losing itself 
in the nauseous fine writing and ecstasies of love typified by Herr 
Karl Grin. 

Another thing we must not forget is this: the Hegelian school 
had disintegrated, but Hegelian philosophy had not been over- 
come through criticism; Strauss and Bauer each took one of its 
sides and set it polemically against the other. Feuerbach broke 
through the system and simply discarded it. But a philosophy is 
not disposed of by the mere assertion that it is false. And so 
mighty a work as Hegelian philosophy, which had exercised so 
enormous an influence on the intellectual development of the 
nation, could not be disposed of by simply being ignored. It had 
to be “transcended” in its own sense, that is, in the sense that 
while its form had to be annihilated through criticism, the new 
content which had been won through it had to be saved. How this 
was brought about we shall see below. 

But in the meantime the Revolution of 1848 thrust the whole of 
philosophy aside as unceremoniously as Feuerbach had thrust 
aside Hegel. And in the process Feuerbach himself was also 
pushed into the background. 

Il 

The great basic question of all, especially of latter-day, philosophy, 
is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. From very 
early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of 
their own bodies, and prompted by dream apparitions* came to 
believe that their thinking and sensation were not activities of their 

* Among’ savages and lower barbarians the idea is still universal that the human 
forms which appear in dreams are souls which have temporarily left their bodies; 
the real man is, therefore, held responsible for acts committed by his dream 
apparition against the dreamer. Thus Im Thurn found this belief current, for 
example, among the Indians of Guiana in 1884. 

bodies, but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it 
upon death—from this time men have been driven to reflect 
about the relation between this soul and the outside world. If 
upon death it left the body and lived on, there was no occasion to 
ascribe another distinct death to it. Thus arose the idea of its 
immortality, which at that stage of development appeared not at 
all as a consolation but as a fate which it was pointless to fight, and 
often enough, as among the Greeks, a positive misfortune. Not 
religious desire for consolation, but the quandary arising from the 
universal ignorance of what to do with this soul, once its existence 
had been accepted, after the death of the body, led everywhere to 
the tedious fancy of personal immortality. In quite a similar 
manner the first gods arose through the personification of natural 
forces. And as religions continued to take shape, these gods 
assumed more and more an extramundane form, until finally by a 
process of abstraction, I might almost say of distillation, occurring | 
naturally in the course of man’s intellectual development, out of 
the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods there 
arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of 
the monotheistic religions. 

Thus the question of the relation of thinking to being, of the 
mind to nature—the paramount question of the whole of 
philosophy—has, no less than all religion, its roots in the 
narrow-minded and ignorant notions of savagery. But it was 
possible to put forward this question for the first time in full 
clarity to give it its full significance, only after humanity in Europe 
had awakened from the long hibernation of the Christian Middle 
Ages. The question of the position of thinking in relation to being, 
a question which, by the way, had played a great part also in the 
scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the question: which is primary, 
mind or nature—that question, in relation to the Church, was 
sharpened into this: Did God create the world or has the world 
existed for all time? 

Answers to this question split the philosophers into two great 
camps. Those who asserted the primacy of the mind over nature 
and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in 
some form or other—and among the philosophers, e.g., Hegel, 
this creation often becomes still more intricate and impossible than 
in Christianity—comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who 
regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of 
materialism. 

These two expressions, idealism and materialism, originally 
signify nothing else but this; and here they are not used in any 

other sense either. What confusion arises when some _ other 
meaning is put into them will be seen below. 

But the question of the relation of thinking and being has yet 
another side: in what relation do our thoughts about the world 
surrounding us stand to this world itself? Is our thinking capable 
of cognition of the real world? Are we able in our ideas and 
notions of the real world to produce a correct reflection of reality? 
In the language of philosophy this question is called the question 
of the identity of thinking and being, and the overwhelming 
majority of philosophers answer it in the affirmative. In Hegel, for 
example, its affirmation is self-evident: for what we cognise in the 
real world is precisely its thought content—that which makes the 
world a gradual realisation of the absolute idea, which absolute 
idea has existed somewhere from eternity, independent of the 
world and before the world. But it is manifest without further 
proof that thinking can cognise a content which is from the outset 
a thought content. It is equally manifest that what is to be proved 
here is already tacitly contained in the premiss. But that in no way 
prevents Hegel from drawing the further conclusion from his 
proof of the identity of thinking and being that his philosophy, 
because it is correct for his thinking, is therefore the only correct 
one, and that the identity of thinking and being must prove its 
validity by mankind immediately translating his philosophy from 
theory into practice and transforming the whole world according 
to Hegelian principles. This is an illusion which he shares with 
well-nigh all philosophers. 

In addition there is yet another set of philosophers—those who 
dispute the possibility of any cognition, or at least of an exhaustive 
cognition, of the world. Among them, of the more recent ones, we 
find Hume and Kant, and they have played a very important role 
in philosophical development. What is decisive in the refutation of 
this view has already been said by Hegel, as far as this was possible 
from an idealist standpoint. The materialist additions made by 
Feuerbach are more quick-witted than profound. The most telling 
refutation of this as of all other philosophical quirks is practice, 
namely, experimentation and industry. If we are able to prove the 
correctness of our conception of a natural phenomenon by 
bringing it about ourselves, producing it out of its conditions and 
making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then the 
ungraspable Kantian “thing-in-itself”’ is finished. The chemical 
substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained 
just such “things-in-themselves” until organic chemistry began to 
produce them one after another, whereupon the “thing-in-itself” 

became a thing for us, as, for instance, alizarin, the colouring 
matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the 
madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and 
simply from coal tar. For three hundred years the Copernican 
solar system was a hypothesis with a hundred, a thousand or ten 
thousand chances to one in its favour, but still always a hypothesis. 
But when Leverrier, by means of the data provided by this system, 
not only deduced that an unknown planet must exist, but also 
calculated the position in the heavens which this planet must 
necessarily occupy, and when Galle really found this planet,”** the 
Copernican system was proved. If, nevertheless, the Neo-Kantians 
are attempting to resurrect the Kantian conception in Germany 
and the agnostics that of Hume in England (where it never 
became extinct), this is, in view of their theoretical and practical 
refutation accomplished long ago, scientifically a regression and 
practically merely a shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting 
materialism, while denying it before the world. 

But during this long period from Descartes to Hegel and from 
Hobbes to Feuerbach, the philosophers were by no means 
impelled, as they thought they were, solely by the force of pure 
reason. On the contrary, what really pushed them forward most 
was the powerful and ever more rapidly onrushing progress of 
natural science and industry. Among the materialists this was 
plain on the surface, but the idealist systems also filled themselves 
more and more with a materialist content and attempted 
pantheistically to reconcile the antithesis between mind and 
matter. Thus, ultimately, the Hegelian system represents merely a 
materialism idealistically turned upside down in method and 
content. 

It is, therefore, comprehensible that Starcke in his characterisa- 
tion of Feuerbach first of all investigates the latter’s position in 
regard to this fundamental question of the relation of thinking 
and being. After a short introduction, in which the views of the 
preceding philosophers, particularly since Kant, are described in 
unnecessarily ponderous philosophical language, and in which 
Hegel, by an all too formalistic adherence to certain passages of 
his works, gets far less than his due, there follows a detailed 
description of the course of development of Feuerbach’s 
“metaphysics” itself, in the manner it arises from the sequence of 
this philosopher’s relevant works. This description is industriously 
and lucidly elaborated; only, like the whole book, it is loaded with 

a ballast of philosophical phraseology by no means everywhere 
unavoidable, which is the more disturbing in its effect the less the 
author keeps to the manner of expression of one and the same 
school, or even of Feuerbach himself, and the more he interjects 
expressions of the most various tendencies, especially of those now 
rampant and calling themselves philosophical. 

Feuerbach’s evolution is that of a Hegelian—a never quite 
orthodox Hegelian, it is true—into a materialist; an evolution 
which at a certain stage gives rise to a complete break with the 
idealist system of his predecessor. With irresistible force Feuerbach 
is finally driven to the realisation that the Hegelian premundane 
existence of the “absolute idea’, the “pre-existence of the logical 
categories” before the world existed, is nothing more than a 
fantastic remnant of the belief in the existence of an extramun- 
dane creator; that the material sensuously perceptible world to 
which we ourselves belong is the only reality; and that our 
consciousness and thinking, however suprasensuous they may 
seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain. 
Matter is not a product of the mind, but the mind itself is merely