VI

Rome, May 28, 1897.

In the scientific biography of our two great authors there is a blank. A certain work of theirs wandered to the printer in 1847. But for accidental reasons it remained unpublished. In that work, which remained in the form of a manuscript, and which, so far as I know, was never seen by any other outside author since, they squared accounts with their own consciences by coming to an understanding about their position toward the other currents of contemporaneous philosophy. There is no doubt that this account was closed principally with the Hegelian conclusions and their materialistic counterpart in the theories of Feuerbach. Aside from general reasons connected with the philosophical movement of that time, this opinion is further strengthened by various passages from magazine and newspaper articles, which were recently published by Struve in the Neue Zeit, as souvenirs of former controversies of Marx. But what was the full mental position of these two writers? How far did their bibliographical horizon reach? What attitude did they assume toward the other scientific struggles, which later on blossomed out into so many revolutions, in the field of natural philosophy as well as in that of historical philosophy, and how much did they know about those things? We have no satisfactory replies to these questions. Of course, we understand that one might be sorry to have published in his young years some writings which one would write quite differently in his advanced years. But still it is so much harder for us to get access to them, when we wish to study these authors. Engels himself was of the opinion that this work had produced the desired effect, inasmuch as it had cleared up the question for those who had written it.

Subsequently, after the authors had taken their own road, they did not write any more on questions of philosophy in the strict meaning of the term. Not only their occupation as practical agitators, as publicist writers, as devotees of the proletarian movement, influenced them in this respect, but also their own mental inclinations tended to take them away from the occupation of professional philosophers. It would, therefore, be a vain undertaking to search step by step for the personal opinions they entertained in their studies and reading of new conclusions of science, whether these were in line with their new method of historical research or opposed to it. It is certain that we must recognize as auxiliaries, and as cases analogous to the rise of historical materialism, the recently developed psychology, the trenchant critique of professional philosophy, the school of industrial history, Darwinism in its strict and wide meaning, the growing tendency in history to recognise natural phenomena, the discovery of the institutions of prehistoric times, and the ever increasing inclination to combine philosophy and science. But it would be ridiculous to apply the yardstick of an editor of some Critical Review, by which he measures new books, or of a professor who lays before his pupils the successive impressions of his own reading, to Marx and Engels. That is not the way to estimate the work which the two thinkers may have done, or actually did, in assimilating the fruits of contemporaneous science, these thinkers who looked at things from their own specific and specified point of view and used their historical materialism as an individualized instrument of research and analysis. This is substantially the mark of originality. To use this term without such restrictions would be absurd. But while they gave up philosophical writing in the strict professional meaning of the term, they became the most perfect types of philosophical scientists. This scientific philosophy is for many but an unattainable desire, while others make of it a means of telling the plain truth about obvious facts of scientific experience in a new style of phraseological affectation. Sometimes it is a general form of rationalism, and after all it is not possible to grasp it, unless one makes himself familiar with the particulars of real life in the penetrating way, which is appropriate for a genetic method arising out of the nature of things. Engels wrote recently in his Anti-D�hring: "As soon as every individual science is confronted with the necessity of coming to a clear understanding of its position in the general interrelation of things and the knowledge of things, any special science of the general interrelation becomes superfluous. No portion of the entire philosophy of previous times will then remain independent, except the theory of cognition and its laws, in other words, formal logic and dialectics. All the rest of it will be absorbed by the positive science of nature and history." Anything is possible for the erudite, the seekers of subjects for dissertations, the budding post-graduates. They have made a stew of the ethics of Herodotus, the psychology of Pindar, the geology of Dante, of the entomology of Shakespeare, and the pedagogy of Schopenhauer. For stronger and better reasons they may speak of the logic of Capital and construct a system of the philosophy of Marx, duly specified and classified according to the sacramental canons of professional science. That is a matter of taste. For my part, I prefer the artlessness of Herodotus and the ponderous style of Pindar to that erudition which extracts their specific properties by the help of posthumous analysis. I prefer to leave untouched the individuality of Capital, to which have contributed, as to an organism, all the ideas and knowledge which are distinguished by the name of logic, psychology, sociology, law and history, in their strict meaning. Also that rare flexibility and smoothness of thought have contributed to it which form the aesthetics of the dialectic method.

Of course, this book is, and will always be subject to particular analysis, in spite of this. But it will never be refuted as a whole by the mere experimenters, the scholastics who love nice definitions that are not assimilated by the flow of thought, the utopian thinkers of all shades, especially the critical utopians and the libertarians, who are more or less anarchists without knowing it. It is an almost insuperable difficulty for some intellectuals to merge themselves in the reality of social and historical interrelations. Instead of taking society as a whole, in which certain laws are generated by a natural process and become the mutual relations of movements, many feel the need of looking upon things as fixed, for instance, egoism here, altruism there, and so forth. A typical case of this sort is that of the modern hedonists. They are not satisfied with studying the social combination as seen from the point of view of the economic interpretation, but resort to the expedient of evaluation as the logical psychologic premise of economics. This expedient supplies them with a scale, and they study its degrees as though these were the theoretical expressions of definite types. One might as well study formal aesthetics by studying only degrees of pleasure. By means of this scale, with its degrees of estimating needs, they measure the things which they call good. They examine the relations of things to the various degrees of this scale, taking into account their available and obtainable quantities, and in this way they determine the quality of their values, the limits of their values, and their final value. After they have thus constituted political economics on a basis of abstract generalities, which are indifferent to the things which nature freely gives as well as to those which are produced in the sweat of the human brow (and by the thankless labor of history), they transform poor, obvious, and plain production, with its familiar common life, which the theoretical writers of classic economy and of critical socialism have analysed, into a particular case of universal algebra. Work, which is the very nerve of life from our point of view, because it is man in the making becomes from their point of view a means of avoiding pain or selecting the least pain. Amid this abstract atomistic of forces, estimates, and degrees of pleasure, a man loses sight of history, and progress resolves itself into a mere shadow.

If I had to give some sort of an outline, it would not be out of place to say that the philosophy, which historical materialism implies, is the tendency toward monism. And I lay a special stress upon the word tendency. I say tendency, and let me add, a formal and a critical tendency. With us it is not a question of relying on an intuitive theosophical or metaphysical knowledge of the universe, on the assumption that we have arrived without further ceremony at a comprehensive view of the basic substance of all phenomena and processes by an act of transcendental cognition. The word tendency expresses precisely that our mind has adapted itself to the conviction that everything can be conceived as in the making, that even the conceivable is but in the making, land that the process of growth is similar in character to continuity. The thing which differentiates this conception of the genetic process from the vague transcendental imaginations of men like Schelling is the critical discernment. This implies a specialization of research and an adherence to empirical methods in following the internal movements of the process. It means giving up the pretense of holding in one's hand a universal diagram for all things. This is the way in which the vulgar evolutionists proceed. Once that they have taken hold of the abstract idea of growth (evolution), they catch everything with it, from the concentration of a nebula to their own fatuity. It was the same with the imitators of Hegel, with their everlasting rhythm of a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The main principle of critical cognition, by which historical materialism corrects monism, is this: It takes its departure from the practice of things, from the development of the labor process, just as it is the theory of man at work, so does it consider science itself as work. It impresses the empirical sciences definitely with the implicit understanding that we accomplish things by experiment, and brings us to a realisation of the fact that things are themselves in the making.

The passage from Engels, which I quoted a while ago, might, perhaps, give rise to some curious results. Some people take your whole hand, when you offer them a little finger. If it is admitted that logic and dialectics continue to exist as independent lines of thought, does not that open a fine opportunity to rebuild the entire encyclopedia of philosophy? By doing over, piece by piece, or in every individual science, the work of abstracting the formal elements contained in them, vast and comprehensive systems of logic may be written, such as those of Sigwart and Wundt. These are, indeed, veritable encyclopedias of the doctrine of the principles of understanding. Well, if that is all the professors want, they may rest assured that their chairs will not be abolished. The division of labor on the intellectual field permits of many practical combinations. If a man wants to make a compilation and diagrammatic outline of principles, by which we give ourselves account of a definite group of facts, for instance of a certain course of law, there is nothing to prevent him from calling his work the general science of law, or, if he likes, the philosophy of law, so long as he keeps in mind that he is simply arranging in a tentative way a certain class of historical facts, or that he is collecting a certain line of historical facts which are products of historical development.

A formal and critical tendency toward monism on one side, an expert ability to keep a level head in special research, on the other, that is the outcome. If a man swerves but a little from this line, he either falls back into simple empiricism (without philosophy) or he rises to the transcendental field of hyper-philosophy with its pretense that a man call grasp the whole world-process by mere intellectual intuition.

If you have not read H�ckel's lecture on monism, do me the favor of reading it. It has been introduced into France by an enthusiastic Darwinian in sociology under the title Le Monisme lien entre la Religion et la Science (traduction de G. Vacher de Lapouge, Paris, 1897.) H�ckel combines in his personality three different faculties: A marvelous capacity for specialised research and exposition, for profound systematization of special facts, and for a poetical intuition of the universe, which, while it is purely imagination, sometimes takes on the aspect of philosophy. But, my illustrious H�ckel, it surpasses even the strength of your excellent mind to explain the whole universe, from the vibrations of the ether to the formation of your brain! But why do I stop at your brain? Further on, from the origins of nations and states and ethics to our times, including the protecting principles of your university at Jena, to which you render homage on only 47 pages of octavo! Don't you remember all the riddles which the universe presents even to our advanced science? Or have you at your home a large armory full of those nightcaps, which Heine said the Hegelians used for covering up those riddles? Or don't you remember that case, which ought to appeal to you more directly, the case of that Bathybius which Huxley named after you, and which turned out later to be a mistake?

In short, this tendency towards monism must be accompanied by a clear recognition of the specialization of all research. It is a tendency to combine science and philosophy, but at the same time also a continual scrutiny of the concrete thought used by us, and of its bearing. This concrete thought can be very well detached from its concrete object, as happens in logic, strictly so called, and in the general theory of cognition, which you call metaphysics. We can think concretely, and yet at the same time ponder in abstract reflections over the materials and conditions of thinkable things. Philosophy is and it not. For any one who has not arrived at this understanding, it is something beyond science. And for any one who has arrived there, it is science brought to perfection.

Nowadays, as of yore, we may write treatises on the abstract aspects of some special experience, for instance on ethics or politics, and we may impress our work with all the perspicuity of a system. But we must also keep in mind that the fundamental premises of our treatise are products of genetic interrelation. We must not fall into the metaphysical illusion that principles are eternal diagrams, or supernatural things outside of human experience.

So far as this is concerned, there is no reason why we should not enunciate a formula like the following: all the knowable may be known; and all the knowable will be known in an infinite time; and for the knowable reflecting about itself, for us, on the field of cognition, there is nothing of any higher importance. Such a general statement reduces itself practically to saying: Knowledge is valuable to the extent that we can actually know things. It is a mere play of fantasy to suppose that our mind recognises as a fact an absolute difference between the limits of the knowable and the absolutely unknowable. That is what you, von Hartmann, have been doing these many years by haunting the regions of the Unconscious, which you see so consciously in operation, and you, Mr. Spencer, who operate continually with the knowledge of the Unknowable, of which you at bottom know something, while you define the limits of cognition. Behind these phrases of Spencer hides the God of the catechism. It is, after all, nothing but the relic of a hyper-philosophy which devotes itself, like religion, to the cult of an unknown, which is yet at the same time declared to be known and transformed into an object of worship. In this state of mind, philosophy is reduced to a study of phenomena (the semblance of things), and the concept of evolution does not imply at all that real things are in process of growth.

In opposition to this mode of thought, historical materialism, the process of formation, or evolution, is real and deals with reality itself. So is labor real, which is the self-development of man, who rises from mere life (animaldom) to perfected liberty (in communism). By this practical inversion of the problem of cognition we confide ourselves wholly to the hands of science, which is our work. Another victory over fetishism! Knowledge is a necessity for us. It is produced naturally, refined, perfected, strengthened by materials and technique, like any other human need. We learn by slow degrees the things that we must know. Experimental experience is a process of growth. What we call progress of the mind is an accumulation of energies of labor. It is this prosaic process, into which the alleged absoluteness of consciousness resolves itself, this consciousness, which was for the idealist a postulate of reason, or an ontological entity.

A queer thing (that so-called thing in itself), which we do not know, neither today, nor tomorrow, which we shall never know, and of which we nevertheless know that we cannot know it. This thing cannot belong to the field of knowledge, for it gives us no information of the unknowable. That such ideas enter into the scope of philosophy is due to the fact that the consciousness of the philosopher is not quite scientific, but rather harbors still so many other elements, such as feelings and emotions, which generate psychic combinations under the influence of fear, or through fantasy and myths. These combinations hindered the development of rational understanding in the past, and still cast their shadows upon the field of studied and prosaic thought. We think of death. Theoretically it is immanent in life. Death, which appears so tragical in complex individuals, who seem to be the true and rightful organisms to common intuition, is immanent in the primitive elements of organic substance, owing to the instability and slight plasticity of protoplasm. But the fear of death is quite different. It is the egoism of life. And so it is with all other feelings and emotions. Their mythical, poetical and religious antecedents have thrown, are throwing, and will throw their shadows more or less upon the field of consciousness. The philosophy of a purely theoretical thinker, who contemplates all things from the point of view of things in themselves, belongs in the same class as the attempt to apply abstract thought to the entire field of consciousness without meeting any byways or stops. Look at Baruch Spinoza, that true hero of thought, who studied in his own person the way in which the emotions and passions, as expressions of his internal mechanism, transform themselves for him into objects of geometrical analysis! In the meantime, until the heroism of Baruch Spinoza shall become the matter-of-fact virtue of everyday life in the higher developed humanity of the future, and until myths, poetry, metaphysics and religion shall no longer overshadow the field of consciousness, let us be content that up to now, and for the present, philosophy in its differentiated and its improved sense has served, and serves, as a critical instrument and helps science to keep its formal methods and logical processes clear; that it helps us in our lives to reduce the obstacles, which the fantastic projections of the emotions, passions, fears and hopes pile in the way of free thought; that it helps and serves, as Spinoza himself would say, to vanquish imaginationem et ignorantiam.