religion and theology. But when the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth 
century had strengthened enough to possess an ideology of its 
own, suited to its own class standpoint, it made its great and 
conclusive revolution, the French one, appealing exclusively to 
juristic and“ political ideas, and troubled itself with religion only 
in so far as it stood in its way. But it never occurred to it to put a 
new religion in place of the old one. Everyone knows how 
Robespierre failed in that.'** 

2 See H. Kopp, Die Alchemie in dilterer und neuerer Zeit and M. Berthelot, Les 
origines de l’alchimie.— Ed. 

b In the 1886 edition this sentence reads: “This holds good, even relatively, only 
so far as the three world religions which have existed up to the present, Buddhism, 
Christianity and Islam, are concerned—and only between them.”— Ed. 

¢ The words “did not proselytise and’ were added by Engels in the 1888 
edition.— Ed. 

4 The words “in regard to Christianity” were added by Engels in the 1888 
edition.— Ed. 

© The words “juristic and” were added by Engels in the 1888 edition.— Ed. 

f This sentence was added by Engels in the 1888 edition.— Ed. 

Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy 377 

The possibility of purely human sentiments in our intercourse 
with other human beings has nowadays been sufficiently curtailed 
by the society in which we must live, which is based upon class 
antagonism and class rule. We have no reason to curtail it still 
more by exalting these sentiments to a religion. And similarly the 
understanding of the great historical class struggles has already 
been sufficiently obscured by current historiography, particularly 
in Germany, so that there is also no need for us to make such an 
understanding totally impossible by transforming the history of 
these struggles into a mere appendix of ecclesiastical history. 
Already here it becomes evident how far today we have moved 
beyond Feuerbach. His “finest passages” in glorification of this 
new religion of love are totally unreadable today. 

The only religion which Feuerbach examines seriously is 
Christianity, the world religion of the Occident, based upon 
monotheism. He proves that the Christian God is only a fantastic 
reflection, a mirror image, of man. Now, this God is, however, 
himself the product of a protracted process of abstraction, the 
concentrated quintessence of the numerous earlier tribal and 
national gods. And accordingly man, whose image this God is, is 
also not a real man, but likewise the quintessence of the numerous 
real men, man in the abstract, therefore himself again a mental 
image. The same Feuerbach, who on every page preaches 
sensuousness, immersion in the concrete, in actuality, becomes 
thoroughly abstract as soon as he begins to talk of any other than 
mere sexual intercourse between human beings. 

This intercourse presents him with only one aspect: morality. 
And here we are again struck by Feuerbach’s astonishing poverty 
when compared with Hegel. The latter’s ethics or doctrine of 
social ethics, is the philosophy of law and embraces: 1) abstract 
law; 2) morality; 3) social ethics under which again are comprised: 
the family, civil society and the state. Here the content is as 
realistic as the form is idealistic. Besides morality the whole sphere 
of law, economy, politics is included here. With Feuerbach it is just 
the reverse. In form he is realistic since he takes man as his point 
of departure; but there is absolutely no mention of the world in 
which this man lives; hence, this man remains always the same 
abstract man who occupied the field in the philosophy of religion. 
For this man is not born of woman; he emerged, as if from a 
chrysalis, from the god of the monotheistic religions. He therefore 
does not live in a real world historically come into being and 
historically determined. True, he has contact with other men; 
however, each one of them is just as much an abstraction as he 

himself. In the philosophy of religion we still had men and women 
at least, but in ethics even this last distinction disappears. 
Feuerbach, however, at long intervals makes such statements as: 

‘Man thinks differently in a palace and in a hut.”4 “If because of hunger, of 

misery, you have no stuff in your body, you likewise have no stuff for morality in 
your head, in your mind or heart.”> “Politics must become our religion,” < etc. 

But Feuerbach knows absolutely nothing what to do with these 
maxims. They remain mere phrases, and even Starcke has to 
admit that for Feuerbach politics constituted an impassable 
frontier and the 

“science of society, sociology, was terra incognita to him.” 4 

He appears just as shallow, in comparison with Hegel, in his 
treatment of the antithesis of good and evil. 
“One believes one is saying something great,” Hegel remarks, “if one says that 

‘man is naturally good’. But one forgets that one says something far greater when 
one says ‘man is naturally evil’.”¢ 

In Hegel evil is the form in which the motive force of historical 
development presents itself. Herein lies the twofold meaning that, 
on the one hand, each new advance necessarily appears as a 
heinous deed against what is sacred, as a rebellion against 
conditions, though old and moribund, yet sanctified by custom; 
and that, on the other hand, it is precisely the wicked passions of 
man—greed and lust for power—which, since the emergence of 
class antagonisms, have become levers of historical development— 
of which the history of feudalism and of the bourgeoisie, for 
example, constitutes singular continual proof.’ But it does not 
occur to Feuerbach to investigate the historical role of moral evil. 
To him history is altogether an uncomfortable, uncanny domain. 
Even his dictum: 

a L. Feuerbach, “Wider den Dualismus von Leib und Seele, Fleisch und Geist” 
in Ludwig Feuerbach’s simmiliche Werke, Vol. II, p. 363.— Ed. 

6 L. Feuerbach, “Noth meistert alle Gesetze und hebt sie auf” in Ludwig 
Feuerbach in seinem Briefwechsel und Nachlass, Vol. II, pp. 285-86. Quoted in 
C. N. Starcke, Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 254.— Ed. 

¢ L. Feuerbach, “Grundsatze der Philosophie” in Ludwig Feuerbach in seinem 
Briefwechsel und Nachlass, Vol. I, p. 409. Quoted in C. N. Starcke, Ludwig Feuerbach, 
p. 280.— Ed. 

dC. N. Starcke, Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 280.— Ed. 

¢ A summary of Hegel’s ideas expressed mainly in his Grundlinien der 
Philosophie des Rechts. §§ 18 and 139 and Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, 
Part 3, II, 3.— Ed. 

f The 1886 edition has “of which the history of feudalism and of the 
bourgeoisie provide the classical example”’.— Ed. 

Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy 379 

‘Man as he sprang originally from nature was only a mere creature of nature, 
not man. Man is a product of man, of culture, of history” 2— 
with him even this dictum remains absolutely sterile. 

What Feuerbach has to tell us about morality can, therefore, 
only be extremely meagre. The urge for bliss is innate in man, 
and must therefore form the basis of all morality. But the urge for 
bliss is subject to a double correction. First, by the natural 
consequences of our actions: after the intoxication comes the 
“hangover”, and habitual excess is followed by illness. Second, by 
their social consequences: if we do not respect the same urge of 
other people for bliss they will defend themselves, and so interfere 
with our own urge for bliss. Consequently, in order to satisfy our 
urge, we must be in a position to correctly appreciate the results of 
our conduct and must likewise allow others an equal right to seek 
bliss. Rational self-restraint with regard to ourselves, and love— 
again and again love!—in our contact with others—these are the 
basic rules of Feuerbach’s morality; from them all others are 
derived. And neither the wisest utterances of Feuerbach nor the 
strongest eulogies of Starcke can hide the tenuity and banality of 
these few propositions. 

Only very exceptionally, and by no means to his and other 
people’s profit, can an individual satisfy his urge for bliss by 
preoccupation with himself. Rather it requires preoccupation with 
the outside world, means to satisfy his needs, that is to say, food, 
an individual of the opposite sex, books, conversation, argument, 
activity, objects to use and work. Feuerbach’s morality either 
presupposes that these means and objects of satisfaction are given 
to every individual as a matter of course, or else it offers him only 
impracticable good advice and is, therefore, not worth a brass 
farthing to people who lack these means. And Feuerbach himself 
states this in plain terms: 

“Man thinks differently in a palace and in a hut.” “If because of hunger, of 
misery, you have no stuff in your body, you likewise have no stuff for morality in 
your head, in your mind or heart.” - 

Do matters fare any better in regard to the equal right of others 
to satisfy their urge for bliss? Feuerbach poses this claim as 
absolute, as holding good for all times and circumstances. But 
since when has it been valid? Was there ever in antiquity between 
slaves and masters, or in the Middie Ages between serfs and 
barons, any talk about an equal right in the urge for bliss? Was 
not the urge for bliss of the oppressed class sacrificed ruthlessly 

a L. Feuerbach, “Fragmente zur Characteristik meines philosophischen Cur- 
riculum vitae” in Ludwig Feuerbach’s simmtliche Werke, Vol. II, p. 411.— Ed. 

and “by right of law” to that of the ruling classPp—Yes, that was 
indeed immoral; nowadays, however, equality of rights is recog- 
nised.— Recognised in words ever since and inasmuch as the 
bourgeoisie, in its fight against feudalism and in the development 
of capitalist production, was compelled to abolish all privileges of 
estate, that is, personal privileges, and to introduce the equality of 
all individuals before the law, first in the sphere of private law, 
then gradually also in the sphere of public law. But the urge for 
bliss lives only to a trivial extent on idealistic rights. To the 
greatest extent of all it lives on material means; and capitalist 
production takes care to ensure that the great majority of those 
with equal rights shall get only what is essential for bare existence. 
It scarcely has, therefore, more respect, if indeed at all, for the 
equal right to the urge for bliss of the majority than had slavery 
or serfdom. And are we better off in regard to the mental means 
of bliss, the educational means? Is not even ‘the school-master of 
Sadowa” *“* a mythical person? 

More. According to Feuerbach’s theory of morals the Stock 
Exchange is the highest temple of social ethics, provided only that 
one always speculates right. If my urge for bliss leads me to the 
Stock Exchange, and if there I correctly gauge the consequences 
of my actions so that only agreeable results and no disadvantages 
ensue, that is, if I always win, then I am fulfilling Feuerbach’s 
precept. Moreover, I do not thereby interfere with the equal right 
of another person to pursue his bliss; for that other man went to 
the Exchange just as voluntarily as I did and in concluding the 
speculative transaction with me he has followed his urge for bliss 
as I have followed mine. If he loses his money, his action is ipso 
facto proved to have been unethical, because it was poorly 
calculated, and since I have given him the punishment he 
deserves, I can even slap my chest proudly, like a modern 
Rhadamanthus. Love, too, rules on the Stock Exchange, in so far 
as it is not simply a sentimental figure of speech, for each finds in 
others the satisfaction of his own urge for bliss, which is just what 
love ought to achieve and how it acts in practice. And if I gamble 
with correct prevision of the consequences of my operations, and 
therefore with success, I fulfil all the strictest injunctions of 
Feuerbachian morality—-and become a rich man into the bargain. 
In other words, Feuerbach’s morality is geared to contemporary 
capitalist society, littke though Feuerbach himself might desire or 
imagine it.* 

a This sentence was added by Engels in the 1888 edition.— Ed. 

Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy 381 

But love!—yes, in Feuerbach love is everywhere and at all times 
the miracle-working god called on to help surmount all difficulties 
of practical life—and that in a society which is split into classes 
with diametrically opposite interests. At this point the last relic of 
its revolutionary character disappears from his philosophy, leaving 
only the old cant: Love one another— fall into each other’s arms 
without distinction as to sex or estate—a universal orgy of 
reconciliation! 

In short, the Feuerbachian theory of morals fares like all its 
predecessors. It is designed to suit all times, all peoples and all 
conditions, and precisely for that reason it is never and nowhere 
applicable. Vis-a-vis the real world it remains as powerless as 
Kant’s categorical imperative. In reality every class, even every 
profession, has its own morality, and even this it violates whenever 
it can do so with impunity. And love, which is to unite all, 
manifests itself in wars, altercations, lawsuits, domestic broils, 
divorces and every possible exploitation of one by another. 

Now how was it possible that the powerful impetus given by 
Feuerbach turned out to be so unfruitful for himself? For the 
simple reason that Feuerbach himself cannot find the way out of 
the realm of abstraction—for which he has a deadly hatred—=into 
that of living reality. He clings fiercely to nature and man; but 
nature and man remain mere words to him. He is incapable of 
telling us anything definite either about real nature or real men. 
But from the abstract man of Feuerbach one arrives at real living 
men only when one considers them as participants in history. And 
that is what Feuerbach resisted, and therefore the year 1848, 
which he did not understand, meant to him merely the final break 
with the real world, withdrawal into solitude. The blame for this 
again falls chiefly on the conditions then obtaining in Germany, 
which condemned him to rot away miserably. 

But the step which Feuerbach did not take had nevertheless to 
be taken. The cult of abstract man, which formed the kernel of 
Feuerbach’s new religion, had to be replaced by the science of real 
men and of their historical development. This further develop- 
ment of Feuerbach’s standpoint beyond Feuerbach was inaugu- 
rated by Marx in 1845 in The Holy Family. 

IV 

Strauss, Bauer, Stirner, Feuerbach—these were the offshoots of 
Hegelian philosophy, in so far as they did not abandon the field of 

philosophy. Strauss, after his Leben Jesu and Dogmatik,* produced 
only literary studies in philosophy and ecclesiastical history a la 
Renan. Bauer worked only in the field of the history of the origin 
of Christianity, though what he did here was important. Stirner — 
remained an oddity, even after Bakunin blended him with 
Proudhon and labelled the blend “anarchism”. Feuerbach alone 
was of significance as a philosopher. But not only did 
philosophy—claimed to soar above all individual sciences and to 
be the science of sciences, connecting them—remain to him an 
impassable barrier, an inviolable sacrament, but as a philosopher, 
too, he stopped halfway, was a materialist below and an idealist 
above. He could not cope with Hegel through criticism; he simply 
cast him aside as useless, while he himself, compared with the 
encyclopaedic wealth of the Hegelian system, achieved nothing 
positive beyond a bombastic religion of love and a meagre, 
impotent morality. 

Out of the dissolution of the Hegelian school, however, there 
emerged still another tendency, the only one which has borne real 
fruit. And this tendency is essentially connected with the name of 
Marx.* 

The departure from Hegelian philosophy was here too the 
result of a return to the materialist standpoint. That means it was 
resolved to comprehend the real world—nature and history— just 
as it presents itself to everyone who approaches it free from 
preconceived idealist quirks. It was decided mercilessly to sacrifice 
every idealist quirk which could not be brought into harmony with 
the facts conceived in their own, and not in a fantastic, 

* Here I may be permitted to make a personal explanation. Lately repeated 
reference has been made to my share in this theory, and so I can hardly avoid 
saying a few words here to settle this point. I cannot deny that both before and 
during my forty years’ collaboration with Marx I had a certain independent share 
in laying the foundations of the theory, and more particularly in its elaboration. 
But the greater part of its leading basic principles, especially in the realm of 
economics and history, and, above all, their final trenchant formulation, belongs to 
Marx. What I contributed—at any rate with the exception of my work in a few 
special fields—Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx 
accomplished I would not have achieved. Marx stood higher, saw further, and took 
a wider and quicker view than all the rest of us. Marx was a genius; we others were 
at best talented.b Without him the theory would not be by far what it is today. It 
therefore rightly bears his name. 

a A reference to the second part of D. Strauss’ Die christliche Glaubenslehre... 
entitled Der materiale Inbegriff der christlichen Glaubenslehre (Dogmatik).— Ed. 
b This sentence was added by Engels in the 1888 edition.— Ed. 

Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy 383 

interconnection. And materialism means nothing more than this. 
But here the materialistic world outlook was taken really seriously 
for the first time and was carried through consistently —at least in 
its basic features—in.all relevant domains of knowledge. 

Hegel was not simply put aside. On the contrary, his revolution- 
ary side, described above, the dialectical method was taken up. 
But in its Hegelian form this method was no use. According to 
Hegel, dialectics is the self-development of the concept. The 
absolute concept does not only exist—unknown where—from 
eternity, it is also the actual living soul of the whole existing world. 
It develops into itself through all the preliminary stages which are 
treated at length in Logik and which are all included in it. Then it 
“alienates” itself by changing itself into nature, where, without 
consciousness of itself, disguised as the necessity of nature, it goes 
through a new development and finally comes again to self- 
consciousness in man. This self-consciousness then elaborates itself 
again in history from the crude form until finally the absolute 
concept again comes to itself completely in Hegelian philosophy. 
According to Hegel, therefore, the dialectical development appar- 
ent in nature and history, that is, the causal interconnection of the 
progressive movement from the lower to the higher, which asserts 
itself through all zigzag movements and temporary retrogressions, 
is only a copy of the self-movement of the concept going on from 
eternity, no one knows where, but at all events independently of 
any thinking human brain. This ideological perversion had to be 
done away with. We comprehended the concepts in our heads 
once more materialistically—as images of real things instead of 
regarding the real things as images of some or other stage of the 
absolute concept. Thus dialectics reduced itself to the science of 
the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of 
human thinking—two sets of laws which are identical in substance, 
but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind can 
apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the 
most part in human history, these laws assert themselves uncon- 
sciously, in the form of external necessity, in the midst of an 
endless series of apparent accidents. Thereby the dialectic of 
concepts itself became merely the conscious reflection of the 
dialectical motion of the real world and thus the Hegelian dialectic 
was placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which 
it was standing, and placed upon its feet. And this materialist 
dialectic, which for years was our best means of labour and our 
sharpest weapon, was, remarkably enough, rediscovered not only 

by us but also, independently of us and even of Hegel, by a 
German worker, Joseph Dietzgen.* 

In this way, however, the revolutionary side of Hegelian 
philosophy was again taken up and at the same time freed from 
the idealist trimmings which with Hegel had prevented its 
consistent execution. The great basic thought that the world is not 
to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a 
complex of processes, in which the apparently stable things, no less 
than their mental images in our heads, the concepts, go through 
uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in 
which, for all apparent accidentality and despite all temporary 
retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself in the 
end—this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time 
of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that in 
this generality it is now scarcely ever contradicted. But to 
acknowledge this fundamental thought in words and to apply it in 
reality in detail to each domain of investigation are two different 
things. If, however, investigation always proceeds from. this 
standpoint, the demand for final solutions and eternal truth ceases 
once and for all; one is always conscious of the necessary limitation 
of all acquired knowledge, of the fact that it is conditioned by the 
circumstances in which it was acquired. On the other hand, one no 
longer permits oneself to be impressed by the antitheses, 
unsuperable for the still common old metaphysics, between true 
and false, good and bad, identical and different, necessary and 
accidental. One knows that these antitheses have only a relative 
validity; that that which is now recognised as true has also its 
hidden false side which will later manifest itself, just as that which 
is now recognised as false has also its true side by virtue of which 
it was previously regarded as true. One knows that what is 
maintained to be necessary is composed of sheer accidents and 
that the allegedly accidental is the form behind which necessity 
hides itself—and so on. 

The old method of. investigation and thinking which Hegel calls 
“metaphysical”, which preferred to investigate things as given, as 
fixed and stable, a method the relics of which still strongly haunt 
people’s minds, had a great deal of historical justification in its 
day. It was necessary first to examine things before it was possible 
to examine processes. One had first to know what any particular 
thing was before one could observe the changes it was undergoing. 
And such was the case with natural science. The old metaphysics, 

* See Das Wesen der Kopfarbeit, von einem Handarbeiter, Hamburg, Meifner. 

Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy 385 

which accepted things as fatts accomplis, arose from a natural 
science which investigated dead and living things as faits accomplis. 
But when this investigation had progressed so far that it became 
possible to take the decisive step forward, that is, to pass on to the 
systematic investigation of the changes which these things undergo 
in nature itself, then the death knell of the old metaphysics struck 
in.the realm of philosophy too. And in fact, while natural science 
up to the end of the last century was predominantly a collecting 
science, a science of faits accomplis, in our century it is essentially a 
systematising science, a science of the processes, of the origin and 
development of these things and of the interconnection which 
binds all these natural processes into one great whole. Physiology, 
which investigates the processes occurring in plant and animal 
organisms; embryology, which deals with the development of 
individual organisms from germ to maturity; geology, which traces 
the gradual formation of the earth’s surface—all these are the 
offspring of our century. 

But, above all, there are three great discoveries which have 
advanced our knowledge of the interconnection of natural 
processes by leaps and bounds: 

First, the discovery of the cell as the unit from whose 
multiplication and differentiation the whole plant and animal body 
develops, so that not only is the development and growth of all 
higher organisms recognised to proceed according to a single 
general law,* but also, in the capacity of the cell to change, the way 
is pointed out by which organisms can change their species and 
thus go through a more than individual development. 

Second, the transformation of energy, which has demonstrated 
to us that all the so-called forces operative in the first instance in 
inorganic nature—mechanical force and its complement, so-called 
potential energy, heat, radiation (light, or radiant heat), electricity, 
magnetism and chemical energy—are different forms of manifes- 
tation of universal motion, which pass into one another in definite 
proportions so that in place of a certain quantity of one which 
disappears, a certain quantity of another makes its appearance and 
thus the whole motion of nature” is reduced to this incessant 
process of transformation from one form into another. Finally, the 
proof which Darwin first developed in coherent form that the 
stock of organic products of nature surrounding us _ today, 

a The words “and differentiation’, “not only”, “general”, and the rest of the 
sentence were added by Engels in the 1888 edition.— Ed. 
b The 1886 edition has “inanimate nature”.— Ed. 

including man, is the product of a long process of evolution from 
a few originally unicellular germs, and that these in turn arose 
from protoplasm or albumen, which came into existence by 
chemical means. 

Thanks to these three great discoveries and the other immense 
advances in natural science, we have now arrived at the point 
where we can demonstrate the interconnection between the 
processes in nature not only in particular spheres but also the 
interconnection of these particular spheres as a whole, and so can 
present in an approximately systematic form a clear picture of the 
coherence in nature by means of the facts provided by empirical 
natural science itself. To furnish this overall picture was formerly 
the task of so-called philosophy of nature. It could do this only 
by putting in place of the real but as yet unknown interconnec- 
tions ideational, fancied ones, filling in the missing facts by mental 
images and bridging the actual gaps merely in imagination. In the 
course of this procedure it conceived many brilliant ideas and 
foreshadowed many later discoveries, but it also produced a 
considerable amount of nonsense, which indeed could not have 
been otherwise. Today, when one needs to comprehend the results 
of natural science only dialectically, that is, in the sense of their 
own interconnection, in order to arrive at a “system of nature” 
sufficient for our time; when the dialectical character of this 
interconnection is forcing itself against their will even into the 
metaphysically trained minds of the natural scientists, today the 
philosophy of nature is definitively discarded. Every attempt at 
resurrecting it would be not only superfluous but a step backwards. 

But what is true of nature, which is hereby recognised also as a 
historical process of development, is likewise true of the history of 
society in all its branches and of the totality of all sciences which 
occupy themselves with things human (and divine). Here, too, the 
philosophy of history, of law, of religion, etc., has consisted in the 
substitution of an interconnection fabricated in the mind of the 
philosopher for the real interconnection demonstrable in events; 
has consisted in the comprehension of history as a whole, as well 
as in its separate parts, as the gradual implementation of 
ideas—and naturally always only the pet ideas of the philosopher 
himself. According to this, history worked unconsciously but of 
necessity towards a certain ideal goal set in advance—as, for 
example, in Hegel, towards the implementation of his absolute 
idea—and the unshakeable trend towards this absolute idea 
formed the inner interconnection of the events in history. A new 
mysterious providence—unconscious or gradually coming into 

Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy 387 

consciousness — was thus put in the place of the real, still unknown 
interconnection. Here, therefore, just as in the realm of nature, it 
was necessary to do away with these fabricated, artificial intercon- 
nections by the discovery of the real ones—a task which ultimately 
amounts to the discovery of the general laws of motion which 
assert themselves as the ruling ones in the history of human 
society. 

In one point, however, the history of the development of society 
turns out to be essentially different from that of nature. In 
nature—in so far as we ignore man’s reverse action upon 
nature—there are only blind, unconscious agencies acting upon 
one another, out of whose interplay the general law comes into 
operation. Of all that happens—whether in the innumerable 
apparent accidents observable upon the surface, or in the ultimate 
results which confirm the regularity inherent in these accidents— 
nothing happens as a consciously desired aim. In the history of 
society, on the contrary, the actors are all endowed with 
consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, 
working towards definite goals; nothing happens without a 
deliberate intention, without a desired aim. But this distinction, 
important as it is for historical investigation, particularly of 
individual epochs and events, cannot alter the fact that the course 
of history is governed by innate general laws. For here, too, on the 
whole, in spite of the consciously desired aims of all individuals, 
accident apparently reigns on the surface. What is desired 
happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous 
desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends 
themselves are from the outset impracticable or the means of 
attaining them are insufficient. Thus the conflicts of innumerable 
individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history 
lead to a state of affairs quite similar to that prevailing in the 
realm of unconscious nature. The ends of the actions are desired, 
but the results which actually follow from these actions are not 
desired; or when they do seem to correspond to the desired end, 
they ultimately have consequences quite other than those desired. 
Historical events thus appear on the whole to be likewise governed 
by chance. But wherever on the surface chance holds sway, it is 
always governed by inner, hidden laws and these laws only have to 
be discovered. 

Men make their own history, whatever its outcome may be, in 
that each person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is 
precisely the result of these many wills operating in different 
directions and of their manifold effects upon the world outside 

that constitutes history. Thus it is also a question of what the many 
individuals desire. The will is determined by passion or delibera- 
tion. But the levers which immediately determine passion or 
deliberation are of very different kinds. In part they may be 
external objects, in part ideal motives, ambition, “enthusiasm for 
truth and justice”, personal hatred or even purely individual 
whims of all kinds. But, on the one hand, we have seen that the 
many individual wills active in history for the most part produce 
results quite other than those desired—often quite the opposite; 
that their motives, therefore, in relation to the total result are 
likewise of only secondary importance. On the other hand, the 
question also arises: What driving forces in turn stand behind 
these motives? What are the historical causes which transform 
themselves into these motives in the minds of the actors? 

The old materialism never asked itself this question. Its 
conception of history, as far as it has one at all, is therefore 
essentially pragmatic; it judges everything according to the motives 
of the action; it divides men who act in history into noble and 
ignoble and then finds that as a rule the noble are defrauded and 
the ignoble are victorious. Hence, it follows for the old materialism 
that nothing very edifying is to be got from the study of history, 
and for us that in the realm of history the old materialism 
becomes untrue to itself because it takes the ideal driving forces 
which operate there as ultimate causes, instead of investigating 
what is behind them, what are the driving forces of these driving 
forces. The inconsistency does not lie in the fact that ideal driving 
forces are recognised, but in the investigation not being carried 
further back from these into their motive causes. On the other 
hand, the philosophy of history, particularly as represented by 
Hegel, recognises that the ostensible and also the actually 
operating motives of men who act in history are by no means the 
ultimate causes of historical events; that behind these motives are 
other motive powers, which have to be explored. But it does not 
seek these powers in history itself, it imports them rather from 
outside, from philosophical ideology, into history. Hegel, for 
example, instead of explaining the history of Ancient Greece out 
of its own inner coherence, simply maintains that it is nothing 
more than the bringing out of “forms of beautiful individuality”, 
the realisation of a “work of art” as such.* He says much in this 
connection about the Ancient Greeks that is fine and profound, 

2G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen tiber die Philosophie der Geschichte, Zweiter Teil, 
Zweiter Abschnitt.— Ed. 

Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy 389 

but that does not prevent us today from refusing to be palmed off 
with such an explanation, which is mere empty talk. 

When, therefore, it is a question of investigating the driving 
powers which—consciously or unconsciously, and indeed very 
often unconsciously—lie behind the motives of men who act in 
history and which constitute the real ultimate driving forces of 
history, then it is not a question so much of the motives of single 
individuals, however eminent, as of those motives which set in 
motion great masses, whole peoples, and again whole classes of the 
people in each people; and even this, not momentarily, giving rise 
to the transient flaring up of a straw-fire which quickly dies down, 
but to lasting action resulting in a great historical transformation. 
Ascertaining the driving causes which in this context, in the minds 
of the acting masses and their leaders—the so-called great 
men—are reflected as conscious motives, clearly or unclearly, 
directly or in ideological, even sanctified form—that is the only 
way which can put us on the track of the laws holding sway in 
history as a whole, as well as in particular periods and in particular 
countries. Everything which sets men in motion must pass through 
their minds; but what form it takes in the mind depends very 
much upon the circumstances. The workers have by no means 
become reconciled to capitalist machine industry now that they no 
longer simply break the machines to pieces, as they did as recently 
as 1848 on the Rhine. 

But while in all earlier periods the investigation of these driving 
causes of history was almost impossible—on account of the 
complicated and concealed interconnections with their effects— 
our present period has so far simplified these interconnections 
that it has been possible to solve the riddle. Since the establishment 
of large-scale industry, that is, at least since the European peace of 
1815, it has been no longer a secret to any man in England that 
the whole political struggle there turned on the claims to 
supremacy of two classes: the LANDED arisrocracy* and_ the 
bourgeoisie (middle class). In France, with the return of the 
Bourbons, the same fact was perceived, the historians of the 
Restoration period, from Thierry to Guizot, Mignet and Thiers, 
speak of it everywhere as the key to the understanding of French 
history since the Middle Ages. And since 1830 the working class, 
the proletariat, has been recognised in both countries as a third 
competitor for power. Conditions had become so simplified that 

a In the original this English term is given in parentheses after its German 
equivalent.— Ed. 

27% 

one would have had to close one’s eyes deliberately not to see in 
the fight of these three great classes and in the conflict of their 
interests the driving force of modern history—at least in the two 
most advanced countries. 

But how had these classes come into existence? If it was possible 
at first glance still to ascribe the origin of the large, formerly 
feudal landed property—at least in the first instance—to political 
causes, to seizure by force, this could not be done in regard to the 
bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Here the origin and development 
of two great classes was seen to lie clearly and palpably in purely 
economic causes. And it was just as clear that in the struggle 
between landed proprietors and the bourgeoisie, no less than in 
the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the 
Matter at issue was, first and foremost, economic interests, which 
were to be secured using political power merely as a means. 
Bourgeoisie and proletariat both arose in consequence of a change 
in the economic conditions, more precisely, in the mode of 
production. The transition, first from guild handicrafts to 
manufacture, and then from manufacture to large-scale industry 
with steam and mechanical power, had caused the development of 
these two classes. At a certain stage the new forces of production 
set in motion by the bourgeoisie—in the first place the division of 
labour and the combination of many workers performing indi- 
vidual operations in one manufactory handling all stages of 
production—and the conditions and requirements of exchange, 
developed through these forces of production, became incompati- 
ble with the existing order* of production handed down through 
history and sanctified by law, that is to say, incompatible with the 
privileges of the guild and the numerous other personal and local 
privileges (which were just as numerous fetters for the un- 
privileged estates) of the feudal order of society. The forces of 
production represented by the bourgeoisie rebelled against the 
order* of production represented by the feudal landlords and the 
guild-masters. The result is well known: the feudal fetters were 
smashed, gradually in England, at one blow in France. In 
Germany the process is not yet finished. But just as, at a definite 
stage of its development, manufacture came into conflict with the 
feudal order* of production, so large-scale industry has even now 
come into conflict with the bourgeois order of production 
established in its place. Tied down by this order, by the narrow 
limits of the capitalist mode of production, this industry produces, 

a The 1886 edition has “relations”. — Ed. 

Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy 391 

on the one hand, an ever-increasing proletarianisation of the great 
mass of the people, and on the other hand, an ever greater 
volume of unsaleable products. Overproduction and mass destitu- 
tion, each the cause of the other—that is the absurd contradiction 
which is its outcome, and which of necessity calls for the 
productive forces to be unfettered by means of a change in the 
mode of production. 

In modern history at least it is, therefore, proved that all 
political struggles are class struggles, and all struggles by classes 
for emancipation, despite their necessarily political form—for 
every class struggle is a political struggle *—turn ultimately on the 
question of economic emancipation. Therefore, here at least, the 
state—the political order—is the subordinate factor and civil 
society—the realm of economic relations—the decisive element. 
The traditional conception, to which Hegel, too, pays homage, saw 
in the state the determining element, and in civil society the 
element determined by it. Appearances correspond to this. As all 
the driving forces of the actions of any individual person must 
pass through his brain, and transform themselves into motives of 
his will in order to set him into action, so also all the needs of civil 
society—-no matter which class happens to be the ruling one— 
must pass through the will of the state in order to attain general 
validity in the form of laws. That is the formal aspect of the 
matter which is self-evident. The question arises, however, as to 
the content of this merely formal will—of the individual as well as 
of the state—and whence this content is derived. Why is just this 
willed and not something else? If we enquire into this, we discover 
that in modern history the will of the state is, on the whole, 
determined by the changing needs of civil society, by the 
supremacy of this or that class, in the last resort, by the 
development of the productive forces and relations of exchange. 

But if even in our modern era, with its gigantic means of 
production and communication, the state is not an independent 
domain with independent development, but one whose existence 
as well as development is to be explained in the last resort by the 
economic conditions of life of society, then this must be still more 
true of all earlier times when the production of the material life of 
man was not yet carried on with these abundant auxiliary aids, 
and when, therefore, the necessity of such production must have 
exercised a still greater rule over men. If the state even today, in 
the era of large-scale industry and railways, is on the whole only 

a The words in dashes were added by Engels in the 1888 edition.— Ed. 

the reflection, in concentrated form, of the economic needs of the 
class controlling production, then this must have been much more 
the case in,an epoch when each generation of men had to spend a 
far greater part of its aggregate lifetime satisfying its material 
needs, and was therefore much more dependent on them than we 
are today. An examination of the history of earlier periods, as 
soon as it deals seriously with this aspect, most abundantly 
confirms this. But, of course, this cannot be gone into here. 

If the state and public law are determined by economic 
relations, so, too, of course is private law, which indeed in essence 
only sanctions the existing economic relations between individuals 
which are normal in the given circumstances.* The form in which 
this occurs can, however, vary considerably. It is possible, as 
happened in England, in harmony with the whole of national 
development, to retain to a large extent the forms of the old 
feudal laws and give them a bourgeois content; in fact, directly 
reading a bourgeois meaning into the feudal name. But, also, as 
happened in continental Western Europe, Roman Law, the first 
world law of a commodity-producing society, with its unsurpassa- 
bly fine elaboration of all the essential legal relations of simple 
commodity owners (of buyers and sellers, creditors and debtors, 
contracts, obligations, etc.), can be taken as the foundation. In 
which case, for the benefit of a still petty-bourgeois and 
semi-feudal society it can either be reduced to the level of such a 
society simply through judicial practice (common law) or else, with 
the help of allegedly enlightened, moralising jurists, it can be 
worked into a special code of law to correspond with such a social 
level—a code which in these circumstances will be a bad one even 
from the legal standpoint (for instance, Prussian common law). In 
which case, however, after a great bourgeois revolution, it is also 
possible to work out upon the basis of this same Roman Law such 
a classic legal code of bourgeois society as the French Code civile. 
If, therefore, bourgeois legal rules merely express the economic 
conditions of life in society in legal form, then they can do so well 
or badly according to circumstances. 

The state presents itself to us as the first ideological power over 
man. Society creates for itself an organ for the safeguarding of its 
common interests against internal and external attacks. This organ 
is the state power. Hardly come into being, this organ makes itself 
independent vis-a-vis society; and, indeed, all the more so, the 

«The words “which are normal in the given circumstances” were added by 
Engels in the 1888 edition.— Ed. 

Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy 393 

more it becomes the organ of a particular class, the more it 
directly enforces the rule of that class. The fight of the oppressed 
class against the ruling class necessarily becomes a political fight, a 
fight first of all against the political rule of this class. Conscious- 
ness of the connection between this political struggle and its 
economic foundation becomes dulled and can be lost altogether. 
While this is not wholly the case with the participants, it almost 
always happens with the historians. Of the ancient sources on the 
struggles within the Roman Republic only Appian tells us clearly 
and distinctly what was ultimately at issue—namely, landed 
property.” 

But once the state has become an independent power vis-a-vis 
society, it immediately produces a further” ideology. It is among 
professional politicians, theorists of public law and jurists of 
private law that the connection with economic facts gets well and 
truly lost. Since in each particular case the economic facts must 
assume the form of juristic motives in order to receive legal 
sanction; and since, in so doing, consideration has, of course, to be 
given to the whole legal system already in operation, the juristic 
form is, in consequence, made everything and the economic 
content nothing. Public law and private law are treated as separate 
spheres, each having its own independent historical development, 
each being capable of, and needing, a systematic presentation by 
the consistent elimination of all innate contradictions. 

Still higher ideologies, that is, such as are still further removed 
from the material, economic basis, take the form of philosophy 
and religion. Here the connection between conceptions and their 
material conditions of existence becomes more and more compli- 
cated, more and more obscured by intermediate links. But the 
connection exists. Just as the whole Renaissance period, from the 
middle of the fifteenth century, was an essential product of the 
towns and, therefore, of the burghers, so also was the subsequent- 
ly newly awakened philosophy. Its content was in essence only the 
philosophical expression of the thoughts corresponding to the 
development of the small and middle burghers into a big 
bourgeoisie. Among the last century’s Englishmen and Frenchmen 
who in many cases were just as much political economists as 
philosophers, this is clearly evident; and we have proved it above 
in regard to the Hegelian school. 

Let us now in addition deal only briefly with religion, since this 

a See Appian of Alexandria, The Roman History, Books 13-17.— Ed. 
b The 1886 edition has ‘‘another”.— Ed. 

stands furthest away from material life and seems to be most alien 
to it. Religion arose in very primitive times from erroneous, 
primitive conceptions by men about their own nature and external 
nature surrounding them. Every ideology, however, once it has 
arisen, develops in connection with the given concept-material, 
and develops this material further; otherwise it would not be an 
ideology, that is, occupation with thoughts as with independent 
entities, developing independently and subject only to their own 
laws. That the material conditions of life of the persons inside 
whose heads this thought process goes on in the last resort 
determine the course of this process remains of necessity unknown 
to these persons, for otherwise all ideology would be finished. 
These original religious notions, therefore, which in the main are 
common to each group of kindred peoples, develop, after the 
group separates, in a manner peculiar to each people, according to 
the conditions of life falling to their lot. For a number of groups 
of peoples, and particularly for the Aryans (so-called Indo- 
Europeans), this process has been demonstrated in detail by 
comparative mythology. The gods thus fashioned among each 
people were national gods, whose domain extended no farther 
than the national territory which they were to protect; on the 
other side of its frontiers other gods held undisputed sway. They 
could continue to exist, in the imagination, only as long as the 
nation existed; they fell with its fall. The Roman world empire, 
the economic conditions of whose origin we do not need to 
examine here, brought about this downfall of the old nationalities. 
The old national gods declined, even those of the Romans, which 
also were geared to suit only the narrow confines of the city of 
Rome. The need to complement the world empire by means of a 
world religion was clearly revealed in the attempts made to 
provide in Rome recognition and altars for all the foreign gods 
that were to the slightest degree respectable, alongside the 
indigenous ones. But a new world religion is not to be made in 
this fashion, by imperial decrees. The new world religion, 
Christianity, had already quietly come into being, out of a mixture 
of generalised Oriental, particularly Jewish, theology, and vulgar- 
ised Greek, particularly Stoic, philosophy. What it originally 
looked like has yet to be laboriously discovered, since its official 
form, as it has been handed down to us, is merely that in which it 
became the state religion, to which purpose it was adapted by the 
Council of Nicaea.**” The fact that it became the state religion in 
as little as 250 years suffices to show that it was the religion 
corresponding to the conditions of the time. In the Middle Ages, 

Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy 395 

in the same measure as feudalism developed, Christianity grew 
into its religious counterpart, with a corresponding feudal 
hierarchy. And when the burghers began to thrive, there 
developed, in opposition to feudal Catholicism, the Protestant 
heresy, which first appeared in Southern France, among the 
Albigenses,**° at the time the cities there were in their heyday. The 
Middle Ages had attached to theology all the other forms of 
ideology—philosophy, politics, jurisprudence—and made them 
subdivisions of theology. It thereby constrained every social and 
political movement to take on a theological form. The sentiments 
of the masses, fed exclusively on religion, had to have their own 
interests presented to them in a religious guise in order to 
create a great turbulence. And just as the burghers from the 
beginning produced an appendage of propertyless urban plebeians, 
day labourers and servants of all kinds, belonging to no recognised 
social estate, precursors of the later proletariat, so likewise* heresy 
soon became divided into a moderate burgher heresy and a 
revolutionary plebeian one, the latter an abomination even to the 
burgher heretics. 

The ineradicableness of the Protestant heresy corresponded to 
the invincibility of the rising burghers. When these burghers had 
become sufficiently strengthened, their struggle against the feudal 
nobility, which till then had been predominantly local, began to 
assume national dimensions. The first great campaign occurred in 
Germany—the so-called Reformation. The burghers were neither 
powerful enough nor sufficiently developed to be able to unite 
under their banner the remaining rebellious estates—the 
plebeians of the towns, the lower nobility and the peasants in the 
countryside. The nobles were the first to be defeated; the peasants 
rose in a_ revolt which formed the climax of the whole 
revolutionary movement; the cities left them in the lurch, and thus 
the revolution succumbed to the armies of the sovereigns, who 
swept the board. Thenceforward Germany disappears for three 
centuries from among the countries playing an independent active 
part in history. But beside the German Luther there had appeared 
the Frenchman Calvin. With true French acuity he put the 
bourgeois character of the Reformation in the forefront, repub- 
licanised and democratised the Church. While the Lutheran 
Reformation in Germany degenerated and reduced the country to 
rack and ruin, the Calvinist Reformation served as a banner for 
the republicans in Geneva, in Holland and in Scotland, freed 

a This part of the sentence was added by Engels in the 1888 edition.— Ed. 

Holland from Spain and from the German Empire and provided 
the ideological costume for the second act of the bourgeois 
revolution, which was taking place in England. Here Calvinism 
stood the test as the true religious disguise of the interests of the 
contemporary bourgeoisie and on this account did not attain full 
recognition when the revolution ended in 1689 in a compromise 
between part of the nobility and the bourgeoisie.” The English 
Established Church was reconstituted; but not in its earlier form, 
as a Catholicism with the king for its pope, being, instead, strongly 
Calvinised. The old Established Church had celebrated the merry 
Catholic Sunday and had fought against the dull Calvinist one. 
The new, bourgeois Church introduced the latter, which adorns 
England to this day. 

In France, the Calvinist minority was suppressed in 1685 and 
either Catholicised or driven out of the country.” But what was 
the good? Already at that time the freethinker Pierre Bayle was 
hard at work, and in 1694 Voltaire was born. The forcible 
measures of Louis XIV only made it easier for the French 
bourgeoisie to carry through its revolution in the irreligious, 
exclusively political form which alone was suited to a developed 
bourgeoisie. Instead of Protestants, freethinkers took their seats in 
the national assemblies. Christianity had thus entered into its final 
stage. It had become incapable of continuing to serve any 
progressive class as the ideological garb of its aspirations. It 
became more and more the exclusive possession of the ruling 
classes and they use it as a mere means of government, to keep 
the lower classes within certain bounds. Moreover, each of the 
different classes uses its own appropriate religion: the landed 
funkers—Catholic Jesuitism or Protestant orthodoxy; the liberal 
and radical bourgeoisie—rationalism; and it makes no difference 
whether these gentlemen themselves believe in their respective 
religions or not. 

We see, therefore: religion, once formed, always contains 
traditional material, just as in all ideological domains tradition 
constitutes a great conservative force. But the changes which this 
material undergoes spring from class relations, that is to say, from 
‘he economic relations of the people who carry out these changes. 
4nd here that is sufficient. 

in the above it could only be a question of giving a general 
outline of the Marxian conception of history, at most with a few 
illustrations as well. The proof must be derived from history itself; 
and in this regard I may be permitted to say that it has been 
sufficiently provided in other writings. This conception, however, 

Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy 397 

puts an end to philosophy in the realm of history, just as the 
dialectical conception of nature makes all philosophy of nature as 
unnecessary as it is impossible. It is no longer a question anywhere 
of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of 
discovering them in the facts. For philosophy, having been 
expelled from nature and history, there remains only the realm of 
pure thought, so far as anything is left of it: the theory of the laws 
of the thought process itself, logic and dialectics. 

With the revolution of 1848, “educated” Germany said farewell 
to theory and went over to the field of practice. Small-scale 
production and manufacture, based upon manual labour, were 
superseded by real large-scale industry. Germany again appeared 
on the world market. The new little German Empire **’ abolished 
at least the most flagrant of the abuses with which this 
development had been obstructed by the system of petty states, the 
relics of feudalism, and bureaucratic management. But to the 
same degree that speculation abandoned the philosopher’s study 
in order to erect its temple in the Stock Exchange, educated 
Germany lost the great aptitude for theory which had been the 
glory of Germany in the days of its deepest political humiliation — 
the aptitude for purely scientific investigation, irrespective of 
whether the result obtained was applicable in practice or not, 
adverse to the police or not. Official German natural science, it is 
true, kept abreast of the times, particularly in the field of 
specialised research. But even the American journal Science rightly 
remarks that the decisive advances in the sphere of the com- 
prehensive correlation of particular facts and their generalisation 
into laws are now being made much more in England, instead of 
in Germany, as used to be the case. And in the sphere of the 
historical sciences, philosophy included, the old reckless zeal for 
theory has now well and truly disappeared, along with classical 
philosophy. Inane eclecticism and an obsessive concern for career 
and income, down to the most vulgar tuft- hunting, have taken its 
place. The official representatives of these sciences have become the 
undisguised ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the existing 
state——but at a time when both stand in open antagonism to the 
working class. 

Only among the working class does the German aptitude for 
theory remain unimpaired. Here it cannot be exterminated. Here 

there is no concern for careers, for profiteering, or for gracious 
patronage from above. On the contrary, the more ruthlessly and 
disinterestedly science proceeds the more it finds itself in harmony 
with the interests and aspirations of the workers. The new 
tendency, which recognised that the key to the understanding of 
the whole history of society lies in the history of the development 
of labour, from the outset addressed itself preferentially to the 
working class and here found the response which it neither sought 
nor expected from official science. The German working-class 
movement is the heir to German classical philosophy. 

399