London, 31 May 1858 
9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, 
Haverstock Hill 

Dear Lassalle, 

Post tot discrimina rerum* at long last a sign of life. As for 
me, what’s been happening since my wife wrote to you is simply 
this: 

Having been totally incapable of writing—not only nN a Lirerary, 
BUT IN THE LITERAL SENSE OF THE word—for several weeks, and striven in 
vain to rebel against my illness; having, moreover, been pumped 
full of medicine and all to no use, I was positively assured by my 
doctor that I must have a change of air, secondly that I must pror 
all INTELLECTUAL LABOUR FOR SOME TIME and, finally, engage in riding as 
the main form of treatment. In itself the illness wasn’t danger- 
ous—enlargement of the liver—but on this occasion the accom- 
panying symptoms were particularly revolting; moreover, in my 
family it has nasty implications in that it was the starting-point of 
the illness which led to my father’s death. Wett. With the utmost 
reluctance I eventually gave way to the insistence of doctor and 
family, joined Engels in Manchester,’ went in for riding and 
other physical exercises and, after spending a month up there, 
finally returned to London fully restored. The illness—altogether 
a very expensive Luxury in my circumstances—was all the more 
inopportune in that I had already begun to prepare the first 
instalment‘ for publication. I shall now settle down to this with a 
will. I trust you will be so kind as to tell the publisher? all about 
these apventures. You will readily be able to imagine the state of 
mind I was in during my illness when I tell you that liver 
complaints as such tend to make one hypochondriacal and that, in 
addition, my life was bedevilled by all manner of domestic 
circumstances, not to speak of the hitch over publication. Now I 
have recovered my accustomed good humour. 

a After so many setbacks (Virgil, Aeneid, I, 204).- > See this volume, p- 
570. - ¢ K. Marx. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. - 4 Franz Gustav 
Duncker 

During this time of tribulation I carefully perused. your 
Heraclitus? Your reconstruction of the system from the scattered 
fragments I regard as brilliant, nor was I any less impressed by the 
perspicacity of your polemic. In so far as I have any fault to find, 
it is largely formal. I believe your exposé could have been rather 
more condensed without in any way jeopardising the import. I 
should, moreover, have liked to find in the text proper some 
critical indications as to your attitude to Hegelian dialectic. This 
dialectic is, to be sure, the ultimate word in philosophy and hence 
there is all the more need to divest it of the mystical aura given it 
by Hegel. Finally, there are some details upon which I do not 
agree with you; e.g. your interpretation of Democritus’ natural 
philosophy. These, however, are all minor points. I am all the 
more aware of the difficulties you had to surmount in this work in 
that asout 18 years ago I myself attempted a similar work on a far 
easier philosopher, Epicurus—namely the portrayal of a com- 
plete system from fragments, a system which I am convinced, by 
the by, was—as with Heraclitus—only implicitly present in his 
work, not consciously as a system. Even in the case of philosophers 
who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the 
true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in 
which it was consciously presented by him. It is incomprehensible 
to me, by the by, how you found the time in the midst of all your 
other work to acquire so much Greek philology. 

On the whole the present moment of time is a pleasing one. 
History is clearly about to TAKE AGAIN A NEW start, and the signs of 
dissolution EVERYWHERE ARE DELIGHTFUL FOR EVERY MIND NOT BENT UPON THE 
CONSERVATION OF THINGS AS THEY ARE, 

Salut. 

Your 
K. M.