the highest product of matter. This is, of course, pure materialism. 
But, having got so far, Feuerbach stops short. He cannot 
overcome the habitual philosophical prejudice, prejudice not 
against the thing but against the name materialism. He says: 

“To me materialism is the foundation of the edifice of human essence and 
knowledge; but to me it is not what it is to the physiologist, to the natural scientist 
in the narrower sense, for example, to Moleschott, and necessarily is from their 
standpoint and profession, namely, the edifice itself. Backwards I fully agree with 
the materialists; but not forwards.” 239 

Here Feuerbach lumps together the materialism that is a general 
world outlook resting upon a definite conception of the relation 
between matter and mind, and the special form in which this 
world outlook was expressed at a definite historical stage, namely, 
in the eighteenth century.* More than that, he lumps it together 
with the shallow, vulgarised form in which the materialism of the 
eighteenth century continues to exist today in the heads of 
naturalists and doctors, the form in which it was preached on their 
tours in the fifties by Buchner, Vogt and Moleschott. But just as 
idealism underwent a series of stages of development, so also did 
materialism. With each epoch-making discovery even in the sphere 
of natural science it has to change its form; and history too having 

been subjected to materialistic treatment, a new avenue of 
development has opened here as well. 

The materialism of the last century was predominantly mechani- 
cal, because at that time, of all the natural sciences, only 
mechanics, and indeed only the mechanics of solid bodies— 
celestial and terrestrial—in short, the mechanics of gravity, had 
come to any certain conclusion. Chemistry at that time existed only 
in its infantile, phlogistic form.*“° Biology still lay in swaddling 
clothes; plant and animal organisms had been only crudely 
examined and were explained as the result of purely mechanical 
causes. What the animal was to Descartes, man was to the 
materialists of the eighteenth century—a machine. This applica- 
tion exclusively of the standards of mechanics to processes of a 
chemical and organic nature—in which processes the laws of 
mechanics are, indeed, also valid, but are pushed into the 
background by other, higher laws—constitutes one specific, but at 
that time inevitable, limitation of classical French materialism. 

The other specific limitation of this materialism lay in its 
inability to comprehend the world as a process, as matter 
undergoing uninterrupted historical development. This accorded 
with the state of the natural science of that time, and with the 
metaphysical, that is, anti-dialectical manner of philosophising 
connected with it. Nature, so much was known, was in eternal 
motion. But according to the ideas of that time, this motion 
turned just as eternally in a circle and therefore never moved 
from the spot; it produced the same results over and over again. 
This conception was at that time inevitable. The Kantian theory of 
the origin of the solar system had only been put forward and was 
still regarded merely as an oddity. The history of the evolution of 
the earth, geology, was still totally unknown, and the idea that the 
animate natural beings of today are the result of a long sequence 
of evolution from the simple to the complex could not at that time 
scientifically be put forward at all. The unhistorical view of nature 
was therefore inevitable.* We have the less reason to reproach the 
philosophers of the eighteenth century on this account since the 
same thing is found in Hegel. According to him, nature, as a mere 
“alienation” of the idea, is incapable of evolution in time—capable 
only of extending its manifoldness in space, so that it displays 
simultaneously and side by side all the stages of evolution 
comprised in it, and is condemned to an eternal repetition of the 

same processes. This absurdity of evolution in space, but outside 
of time—the fundamental condition of all evolution— Hegel 
imposes upon nature just at the very time when geology, 
embryology, the physiology of plants and animals, and organic 
chemistry were taking shape, and when everywhere on the basis of 
these new sciences brilliant presentiments of the subsequent theory 
of evolution were appearing (for instance, Goethe and Lamarck). . 
But the system demanded it; hence the method, for the sake of 
the system, had to become untrue to itself. 

This same unhistorical conception prevailed also in the domain 
of history. Here the struggle against the remnants of the Middle 
Ages captured the limelight. The Middle Ages were regarded as a 
mere interruption of history by a thousand years of universal 
barbarism. The great progress made in the Middle Ages—the 
extension of the domain of European civilisation, the viable great. 
nations taking form there next to each other, and finally the 
enormous technical advances of the fourteenth and fifteenth 
centuries—all this was not seen. Thus a rational insight into the 
great historical coherence was made impossible, and history served 
at best as a collection of examples and illustrations for the use of 
philosophers. 

The vulgarising pedlars, who dabbled in materialism in the 
Germany of the fifties in no way overcame this limitation of their 
teachers. All the advances of natural science which had been made 
in the meantime served them only as fresh evidence against the 
existence of a world creator, and, indeed, they did not in the least 
make it their business to develop the theory any further. Though 
idealism was stumped and* was dealt a death-blow by the 
Revolution of 1848, it had the satisfaction of seeing that 
materialism had for the moment sunk to even greater depths. 
Feuerbach was unquestionably right when he refused to take 
responsibility for this materialism; only he should not have 
confounded the doctrines of these itinerant preachers with 
materialism in general. 

Here, however, there are two things to be pointed out. First, 
even during Feuerbach’s lifetime, natural science was still in that 
process of intense fermentation which has reached a clarifying, 
relative conclusion only during the last fifteen years. New data for 
cognition were acquired to a hitherto unheard-of extent, but the 
establishment of coherence, and thereby of order, in this chaos of 

discoveries following closely upon each other’s heels, has only 
quite recently become possible. It is true that Feuerbach lived to 
see all three of the decisive discoveries—that of the cell, the 
transformation of energy and the theory of evolution named after 
Darwin. But how was the lonely philosopher in the country to 
sufficiently follow scientific developments in order to appreciate at 
their full value discoveries which natural scientists themselves at 
that time either still contested or did not know how to adequately 
exploit? The blame for this falls solely upon the wretched 
conditions in Germany, in consequence of which brooding eclectic 
flea-crackers had taken possession of the chairs of philosophy, 
while Feuerbach, who towered above them all, had to rusticate and 
go to seed in a little village. It is therefore not Feuerbach’s fault 
that the historical conception of nature, which has now become 
possible and has removed all the one-sidedness of French 
materialism, remained inaccessible to him. 

Secondly, Feuerbach is quite correct in asserting that exclusively 
natural-scientific materialism is indeed 

“the foundation of the edifice of human knowledge, but not the edifice itself”. 

For we live not only in nature but also in human society, and 
this also has its evolution and its science no less than nature. It was 
therefore a question of bringing the science of society, that is, the 
sum total of the so-called historical and philosophical sciences, into 
harmony with the materialist foundation, and of reconstruct- 
ing it thereupon. But it did not fall to Feuerbach’s lot to do this. 
In spite of the “foundation”, he remained bound here by the 
traditional idealist fetters, a fact which he recognises in these 
words: 

“Backwards I agree with the materialists, but not forwards.” 

But it was Feuerbach himself who did not go “forwards” here, 
in the social domain, who did not get beyond his standpoint of 
1840 or 1844. And this was again chiefly due to his reclusion, 
which compelled him—of all philosophers the most inclined to 
social intercourse—to produce thoughts out of his solitary head 
instead of in amicable and hostile encounters with other men of 
his calibre. Below we shall see in detail how much he remained an 
idealist in this sphere. F 

It need only be added here that Starcke looks for Feuerbach’s 
idealism in the wrong place. 

“Feuerbach is an idealist; he believes in the progress of mankind” (p. 19). “The 

foundation, the substructure of the whole, remains nevertheless idealism. Realism 
for us is nothing more than a protection against aberrations, while we follow our 

ideal trends. Are not compassion, love and enthusiasm for truth and justice ideal 
forces?” (p. VIII). 

In the first place, idealism here means nothing but the pursuit 
of ideal goals. But these necessarily have to do with Kantian 
idealism at best, and its “categorical imperative”; however, Kant 
himself called his philosophy “transcendental idealism”; by no 
means because it dealt also with ethical ideals, but for quite other 
reasons, as Starcke will remember. The superstition that 
philosophical idealism revolves around a belief in ethical, that is, 
social, ideals, arose outside philosophy, among the German 
philistines, who learned by heart from Schiller’s poems the few 
morsels of philosophical culture they needed. No one has criticised 
more severely the impotent Kantian “categorical imperative” — 
impotent because it demands the impossible, and therefore never 
attains to any reality—no one has more cruelly derided the 
philistine passion for unrealisable ideals purveyed by Schiller than 
Hegel of all people, the perfect idealist (see, for example, his 
Phanomenologie). 

In the second place, we simply cannot evade the fact that 
everything which motivates men must pass through their brains— 
even eating and drinking, which begins as a consequence of the 
sensation of hunger or thirst transmitted through the brain, and 
ends as a result of the sensation of satisfaction likewise transmitted 
through the brain. The influences of the external world upon man 
express themselves in his brain, are reflected therein as feelings, 
thoughts, impulses, volitions—in short, as “ideal tendencies’, and 
in this form become “ideal powers”. If, then, a man is to be 
deemed an idealist because he follows “ideal tendencies” and 
admits that “ideal powers” have an influence over him, then every 
person who is at all normally developed is a born idealist and how, 
in that case, can there be any materialists at all? 

In the third place, the conviction that humanity, at least at the 
present moment, is moving on the whole in a progressive direction 
has absolutely nothing to do with the antagonism between 
materialism and idealism. The French materialists no less than the 
deists **! Voltaire and Rousseau held this conviction to an almost 
fanatical degree, and often enough made the greatest personal 
sacrifices to it. If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to 
“enthusiasm for truth and justice’—using this phrase in the 
positive sense—it was Diderot, for instance. If, therefore, Starcke 
declares all this to be idealism, this merely proves that the word 
materialism, and the whole antagonism between the two trends, 
has lost all meaning for him here. 

The fact is that Starcke, although perhaps unconsciously, makes 
an unpardonable concession here to the traditional philistine 
prejudice against the word materialism resulting from its long- 
continued defamation by the priests. By the word materialism the 
philistine understands gluttony, drunkenness, lust of the eye, lust 
of the flesh, arrogance, cupidity, avarice, covetousness, profiteer- 
ing and stock-exchange swindling—in short, all the filthy vices in 
which he himself indulges in private. By the word idealism he 
understands the belief in virtue, universal philanthropy and 
altogether a “better world”, of which he boasts to others but in 
which he himself believes at best only so long as he is having the 
blues or going through the bankruptcy consequent upon _ his 
customary “materialist” excesses. It is then that he sings his 
favourite song, What is man?—Half beast half angel. 

For the rest, Starcke takes great pains to defend Feuerbach 
against the attacks and doctrines of the vociferous assistant 
professors who today go by the name of philosophers in Germany. 
For people who afe interested in this afterbirth of classical 
German philosophy this is, of course, a matter of importance, for 
Starcke himself it may have appeared necessary. We will spare the 
reader this. 

II] 

The real idealism of Feuerbach becomes evident as soon as we 
come to his philosophy of religion and ethics. He by no means 
wishes to abolish religion; he wants to perfect it. Philosophy itself 
must be absorbed in religion. 

“The periods of humanity are distinguished only by religious changes. A 
historical movement is fundamental only when it is rooted in the hearts of men. 
The heart is not a form of religion, so that the latter should exist also in the heart; 
the heart is the essence of religion.” (Quoted by Starcke, p. 168).3 

According to Feuerbach, religion is the relation between human 
beings based on affection, on the heart, which relation until now 
has sought its truth in a fantastic mirror image of reality—in the 
mediation of one or many gods, the fantastic mirror images of 
human qualities—but now finds it directly and without any 
mediation in the love between “I” and “Thou”. Thus, in 
Feuerbach sex love ultimately becomes one of the highest forms, if 
not the highest form, of the practice of his new religion. 

Now relations:between human beings, based on affection, and 
especially between the two sexes, have existed as long as mankind. 
Sex love in particular has undergone a development and won a 
place during the last eight hundred years which has made it a 
compulsory pivot of all poetry during this period. The existing 
positive religions *** have limited themselves to the higher consec- 
ration of state-regulated sex love, that is, of the marriage laws, and 
they could all disappear tomorrow without changing in the 
slightest the practice of love and friendship. Thus the Christian 
religion in France, as a matter of fact, so completely disappeared 
in the years 1793-98 that even Napoleon could not re-introduce it 
without opposition and difficulty; and this without any need for a 
substitute, in Feuerbach’s sense, making itself felt in the interval. 

Feuerbach’s idealism consists here in this: he does not simply 
accept people’s relations based on reciprocal inclination, such as 
sex love, friendship, compassion, self-sacrifice, etc., as what they 
are in themselves—without relating them back to a particular 
religion which to him, too, belongs to the past; but instead he 
asserts that they will attain their full value only when consecrated 
by the name of religion. The chief thing for him is not that these 
purely human relations exist, but that they shall be conceived of as 
the new, true religion. They are to have full value only after they 
have been marked with a religious stamp. Religion is derived from 
religare and meant originally a bond. Therefore, every bond 
between two people is a religion. Such etymological tricks are the 
last resort of idealist philosophy. Not what the word means 
according to the historical development of its actual use, but what 
it ought to mean according to its derivation, is what counts. And 
so sex love and sex bonds are apotheosised to a “religion”, merely 
in order that the word religion, which is so dear to idealist 
memories, may not disappear from the language. The Parisian 
reformers of the Louis Blanc trend used to speak in precisely the 
same way in the forties. They likewise were able to conceive of a 
man without religion only as a monster, and used to say to us: 
“Donc, l’athéisme c’est votre religion!”* If Feuerbach wishes to 
establish a true religion upon the basis of an essentially materialist 
conception of nature, that is the same as regarding modern 
chemistry as true alchemy. If religion can exist without its god, 
then alchemy can exist without its philosopher’s stone. By the way, 
there exists a very close connection between alchemy and religion. 
The philosopher’s stone has many godlike properties and the 

Egyptian-Greek alchemists of the first two centuries of our era had 
a hand in the development of Christian doctrines, as the facts 
given in Kopp and Berthelot have proved.* 

Decidedly false is Feuerbach’s assertion that 

“the periods of humanity are distinguished only by religious changes”. 

Great historical turning-points have been accompanied by religi- 
ous changes only so far as the three world religions which have 
existed up to the present, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, are 
concerned.” The old tribal and national religions, which arose 
spontaneously, did not proselytise and‘ lost all their power of 
resistance as soon as the independence of the tribe or people was 
lost. For the Germans it was sufficient simply to have contact with 
the decaying Roman world empire and with its just adopted 
Christian world religion that accorded with its economic, political 
and ideological conditions. Only with these world religions, which 
arose more or less artificially, particularly Christianity and Islam, 
do we find that more general historical movements acquire a 
religious imprint. Even in regard to Christianity’ the religious 
stamp in revolutions of really universal significance is restricted to 
the first stages of the bourgeoisie’s struggle for emancipation— 
from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century—and is to be 
accounted for not, as Feuerbach thinks, by the hearts of men and 
their religious needs, but by the entire previous history of the 
Middle Ages, which knew no other form of ideology than actual