Ryde, Isle of Wight, 1 July 1891 

Dear Schmidt, 

I have taken refuge here for a few days. Pumps is now living in 
this place where her husband has taken on an agency and, since my 
work had become altogether too much for me, I have come to stay 
with her for a few days if only to get a breath of fresh air and to deal 
with the most pressing correspondence. Tomorrow I go back to Lon- 
don again. 

I have before me your two letters of 5 March and 18 June. You 
would be well-advised not to finish your work on the credit system 
and the money market until Volume III * comes out; in it you will find 
much that is new on these topics and still more that yet remains to be 
explored — new solutions, that is, and new tasks. As soon as my sum- 
mer holiday is over, I shall set to work unremittingly on Volume 
III.— Your second project — the transitional stages on the way to 
a communist society — is worth thinking about, but my advice to you 
is nonum prematur in annum? it’s the most difficult subject on earth be- 
cause conditions are constantly changing. For instance, every new 

* of Capital- Let it be kept quiet till the ninth year (Horace, Ars Poetica, 388). 

Engels to Schmidt. | July 1891 213 

trust causes them to change while the vantage points never remain 
the same from one decade to the next. 

Your latest academic adventures in Zurich are exceedingly 
funny. ?’* These gentlemen are everywhere alike. Well, I hope you 
will eventually succeed, to the mortification of the whole of that 
clique, and thus at long last be left in peace. 

I found Barth’s book* a great disappointment, having expected 
something a bit less superficial and makeshift. A man who assesses 
every philosopher, not in accordance with what is enduring and 
progressive in his work, but in accordance with what is of necessity 
transitory and reactionary, in accordance with the system, would have 
done better to hold his peace. For according to him the history of phi- 
losophy is nothing but a ‘heap of rubble’, the detritus of exploded sys- 
tems. Old Hegel stands head and shoulders above this, his supposed 
critic! And then he believes himself to be criticising Hegel if here and 
there he succeeds in detecting one of the false starts which Hegel, like 
any other systematic philosopher, is bound to make in hammering 
out a system for himself! What a colossal discovery — that Hegel occa- 
sionally rolls into one what are contrary and contradictory opposites! 
I could put him on the track of some far better wheezes if only I could 
be bothered. The man’s what we in the Rhineland call a Korinthen- 
scheisser?; he reduces everything to insignificance and until he gets 
out of that habit he will, to use Hegel’s words, ‘come to nothing, from 
nothing, through nothing’. ° 

His critique of Marx is truly comical! First he concocts a material- 
istic theory of history such as, in his opinion, Marx ought to have had, 
only to discover that Marx’s writings say something quite different. 
From this, however, he does not deduce that he, Barth, has put 
a wrong construction upon Marx — far from it; but that, on the con- 
trary, Marx contradicts himself and is incapable of applying his own 
theory! ‘Oh, if only these people could read!’ as Marx used to exclaim 
when confronted by criticism of this kind. 

I have not got the book here; if I had time I could point out to you 
hundreds more absurdities of the same nature. It is a pity, for one can 
see that the man might be capable of something if he were not in such 
a hurry to pass judgment. Let us hope he will soon write something 

@ P. Barth, Die Geschichtsphilosophie Hegel’s und der Hegelianer bis auf Marx und Hart- 
mann. - i, e. someone who trivialises everything -‘ G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, 
Th. I, Abt. 2. In: Werke, Bd. TV, Berlin, 1841, S. 15, 75, 146. 

214 Engels to Schmidt. | July 1891 

upon which more attacks will be launched; a really sound drubbing 
would do him good. 

As for me, I am very well — better than this time last year and shall, 
I think, be quite fit again after a bit of a holiday. If only one could 
work with fewer interruptions! 2 or 3 months ago I set to work on the 
new edition of the Origin of the Family, etc.* and should have finished 
it in a fortnight had it not been for the arrival of the new draft pro- 
gramme which they wanted me to criticise, on top of which all sorts 
of little ineptitudes were perpetrated on the. Continent, thus making 
it more difficult for us here in England— where the material is good 
but needs careful handling — to pave the way for the Brussels Con- 
gress, '9° etc. All this tends to throw me off course again and to dis- 
tract me, and yet the thing must not only be almost entirely revised 
and brought up to date, but must also be finished if | am to get down 
to Volume ITI. WELL, since it’s got to be managed somehow, managed 
it will be. 

You'd almost think yourself in Prussia here. On Sunday” we en- 
countered 4 or 5 sailors from the Stosch, splendid fellows, very well 
able to stand comparison with the English mMan-or-war’s MEN; this morn- 
ing, constant rumbling of guns and explosions of shells from the gun- 
nery practice at the Portsmouth forts. 

Many kind regards from Pumps, Percy and 

Your old friend 
F. Engels