des Christenthums." With one blow it cut the contradiction, in that it placed materialism on the throne again without any circumlocution. Nature exists independently of all philosophies. It is the foundation upon which we, ourselves products of nature, are built. Outside man and nature nothing exists, and the higher beings which our religious phantasies have created are only the fantastic reflections of our individuality. The cord was broken, the system was scattered and destroyed, the contradiction, since it only existed in the imagination, was solved. One must himself have experienced the delivering power of this book to get a clear idea of it. The enthusiasm was universal, we were all for the moment followers of Feuerbach. How enthusiastically Marx greeted the new idea and how much he was influenced by it, in spite of all his critical reservations, one may read in the "Holy Family."

The very faults of the book contributed to its momentary effect. The literary, impressive, even bombastic style secured for it a very large public and was a constant relief after the long years of abstract and abstruse Hegelianism. The same result also proceeded from the extravagant glorification of love, which in comparison with the insufferable sovereignty of pure reason, found an excuse, if not a justification. What we must not forget is, that just on these two weaknesses of Feuerbach "true Socialism" in educated Germany fastened itself like a spreading plague since 1844, and set literary phrases in the place of scientific knowledge, the freeing of mankind by means of love in place of the emancipation of the proletariat, through the economic transformation of production, in short lost itself in nauseous fine writing and in sickly sentimentality, of the type of which class of writers was Herr Karl Gruen.

We must furthermore not forget that though the Hegelian school was destroyed the Hegelian philosophy was not critically vanquished. Strauss and Bauer took each a side and engaged in polemics. Feuerbach broke through the system and threw it as a whole aside. But one has not finished with a philosophy by simply declaring it to be false, and so enormous a work as the Hegelian philosophy which has had so tremendous an influence upon the mental development of the nation did not allow itself to be put aside peremptorily. It had to be destroyed in its own way, which means in the way that critically destroys its form but saves the new acquisitions to knowledge won by it. How this was brought about we shall see below.

But for the moment, the Revolution of 1848 put aside all philosophical discussion just as unceremoniously as Feuerbach laid aside Hegel. And then Feuerbach was himself crowded out.

II.

The great foundation question of all, especially new, philosophies is connected with the relation between thinking and being. Since very early times when men, being in complete ignorance respecting their own bodies, and stirred by apparitions,[1] arrived at the idea that thought and sensation were not acts of their own bodies, but of a special soul dwelling in the body and deserting it at death, ever since then they have been obliged to give thought to the relations of this soul to the outside world. If it betook itself from the body and lived on, there was no reason to invent another death for it; thus arose the conception of their immortality, which, at that evolutionary stage, did not appear as a consolation, but as fate, against which a man cannot strive, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. Not religious desire for consolation but uncertainty arising from a similar universal ignorance of what to associate with the soul when once it was acknowledged, after the death of the body, led universally to the tedious idea of personal immortality. Just in a similar fashion the first gods arose, through the personification of the forces of nature, and these in the further development of the religions acquired greater and greater supernatural force, until by a natural process of abstraction, I might say of distillation, from the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods, in the course of spiritual development, at last the idea of the one all embracing god of the monotheistic religions took its place in the minds of men.

The question of the relation of thinking to being, of the relation of the spirit to nature, the highest question of universal philosophy, has therefore, no less than all religion, its roots in the limited and ignorant ideas of the condition of savagery. It could first be understood, and its full significance could first be grasped, when mankind awoke from the long winter sleep of Christian Middle Ages. The question of the relation of thought to existence, a question which had also played a great role in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the question what is at the beginning spirit or nature, this question was in spite of the church now cut down to this: "Has God made the world or is the world from eternity?"

As this question was answered this way or that the philosophers were divided into two great camps. The one party which placed the origin of the spirit before that of nature, and therefore in the last instance accepted creation, in some form or other—and this creation, is often according to the philosophers, according to Hegel for example, still more odd and impossible than in Christianity—made the camp of idealism. The others, who recognized nature as the source, belong to the various schools of materialism.

The two expressions signify something different from this. Idealism and materialism, originally not used in any other sense, are not here employed in any other sense. We shall see what confusion arises when one tries to force another signification into them.

The question of the relationship of thinking and being has another side; in what relation do our thoughts with regard to the world surrounding us stand to this world itself? Is our thought in a position to recognize the real world? Can we, in our ideas and notion of the real world, produce a correct reflection of the reality? This question is called in philosophical language the question of the identity of thinking and being, and is affirmed by the great majority of philosophers. According to Hegel, for example, its affirmation is self-evident, for that which we know in the actual world is its content, according to our thought, that which compels the world to a progressive realization as it were of the absolute Idea, which absolute idea has existed somewhere, unattached from the world and before the world; and that thought can recognize a content which is already a thought content herein, from the beginning, appears self-evident. It is also evident that what is here to be proved is already hidden in the hypothesis. But that does not hinder Hegel, by any means, from drawing the further conclusion from his proof of the identity of thought and existence that his philosophy, because correct for his thought, is, therefore, the only correct one, and that the identity of thought and existence must show itself in this, that mankind should forthwith translate his philosophy from theory to practice and the whole world shift itself to a Hegelian base. This is an illusion which he shares alike with all philosophers.

In addition there is still another class of philosophers, those who dispute the possibility of a perception of the