London, 24 January 1895 
41 Regent’s Park Road, N. W. 

Dear Sir, 

I still have to thank you for your kindness in sending me your critique of 
Barth ‘s book and your interesting article on Pestalozzi. “”’ I would beg you 
to excuse the delay which was occasioned by an excess of work, the latter 
being aggravated by my having moved house (please note the change of 
address). 

I should say that you have let Mr Barth off rather lightly; he would, at any 
rate, have fared far worse at my hands. However, in literary debate one has to 
get used to the fact that, lawyer-fashion, one’s opponent suppresses what 
doesn’t suit his book and introduces extraneous matter if he thinks this will 
enable him to pull the wool over his reader’s eyes. But in Mr Barth’s case 
this is done in a manner and to an extent that cannot but lead one to ask 
whether what we have here is simple ignorance and boneheadedness or 
deliberate, wilful distortion. To take only his chapter on Marx—how does 
one explain the horrendous misinterpretations, nearly all of which are 
incomprehensible in a man who does, after all, claim to have read my Anti- 
Dühring and Feuerbach‘ which should have constituted a perfectly adequate 
antidote? And what can one say about the absurd causal nexus attributed to 
me on p. 135. 

‘In France Calvinism had been conquered, which is why in the eighteenth 
century, Christianity had become incapable of serving as an ideo- 

“F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. 

logical cloak for any sort of progressive class’? When I compare it with the 
original, Feuerbach, p. 65," find it virtually impossible to believe that this is 
not deliberate distortion. 

I am interested by what you have to say about August Comte. So far as 
this ‘philosopher’ is concerned, there still remains, in my opinion, a fair 
amount of work to be done. For five years Comte was secretary and con- 
fidant of Saint-Simon. The latter positively suffered from an over-fertile 
intellect; he was at once a genius and a mystic. Lucid analysis, classification, 
systematisation, none of this was his cup of tea. Thus in Comte he got hold of 
a man intended, perhaps, to present this proliferation of ideas to the world in 
orderly fashion after the Master’s death; Comte’s mathematical training and 
mode of thought may have made him seem peculiarly suited to the purpose 
as compared with the other, visionary disciples. But then Comte suddenly 
broke with the ‘Master’ and withdrew from the school. After quite a while he 
re-emerged with his ‘positive philosophy’. In this system there are three 
characteristic elements; 1. A series of brilliant ideas nearly all of which, 
however, suffer to a greater or lesser extent from inadequate development; 2. 
A correspondingly narrow, philistine outlook in stark contrast to that 
brilliance; 3. A religious system of undoubtedly Saint-Simonian origin but 
stripped of all mysticism, hierarchically organised and utterly flat—with, at 
its head, a pope, no less. Thus Huxley was able to say of Comtism*”' that it 
was Catholicism without Christianity.° 

Now I am willing to bet that No. 3 supplies the key to the otherwise 
incomprehensible inconsistency of Nos | and 2; namely, that Comte derived 
all his brilliant ideas from Saint-Simon but he assembled them in a manner 
peculiar to himself and by so doing bowdlerised them. By stripping them of 
the mysticism with which they were imbued, he simultaneously degraded 
them to a lower level, giving them a philistine slant in accordance with his 
own lights. A great many of them can be easily traced back to their Saint- 
Simonian source and I feel sure that certain others would admit of the same 
treatment if only someone could be found who would seriously apply himself 
to the task. This fact would assuredly have been discovered long since had 
not Saint-Simon’s own writings been 

*“ F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy“ See present 
edition, Vol. 26, p. 396 -° A. Comte, Cours de philosophie Positive —° See Th. Henry Huxley, 
On the Physical Basis of Life. In The Fortnightly Review, No. XXVI, Vol. V, 1 February 1869 

completely overwhelmed after 1830 by the clamour of the école et religion 
saint-simmoniennes* which emphasised individual aspects of the Master’s 
teaching and elaborated it at the cost of the grand design. 

There is one further point I should like to put right, namely the note on p. 
513. *° Marx was never Secretary General to the International but merely 
Secretary for Germany and Russia. And none of the Comtists in London 
participated in the founding of the International. At the time of the 
Commune, Professor E. Beesly did yeoman service in defending the 
International in the press against the violent attacks then being made upon it, 
and Frederic Harrison also publicly defended the Commune. *” But a few 
years later the Comtists’ attitude towards the labour movement grew 
perceptibly cooler; Labour was becoming too powerful and, if a proper 
balance was to be maintained between capitalists and workers (both being, of 
course, producteur’ in the sense understood by Saint-Simon *”’), the former 
should again, it was felt, be given support, since which time the Comtists 
have kept quite mum on the subject of the labour question. 

Yours sincerely, 
F. Engels