VII

Rome, June 16, 1897.

I have had a nice experience. Before I got to the end of these letters, I had to discuss the very same subject, which is the topic of my conversation with you, in another place, in a different form, and not quite so pleasantly.

In one of the recent issues of the Critica Sociale, there appeared a sort of a message, sent forth by Mr. Antonino De Bella, a sociologist of Calabria, against those exclusive socialists, who, according to him, take the word of Marx for everything in every question. De Bella forgot to tell us, whether the Marx, to whom those whom he is raking over the coals appeal, is the genuine specimen, or another made to order, as it were, invented on purpose, a blond Marx, or some other. He considered me worthy of a place among those obstinate ones, to whom he addresses his admonition and advice, in order that they may perfect themselves by means of a wider culture in sociology and natural history. But he mentions only my name, without telling us to what particular book, saying, or action of mine he is referring. Then he adds a little of the usual rigmarole of sociology with a smattering of Darwinism and the inevitable long list of names of authors.

I thought it opportune to reply. In the first place, I wanted to tell him curtly that scientific socialism was not in such bad condition as to need his advice. Then I wanted to show that his suggestions referred either to things that were understood, or to things that were contrary to Marxism. And above all, since I was just engaged in a conversation with you on the subject of socialism and philosophy, I thought it opportune to use a living illustration in bringing home some of the critical observations, which I am exchanging with you in this somewhat bizarre manner.

I enclose my reply, just as it appeared in yesterday's Critica Sociale. It is also a letter. And although it is not addressed to you, still you may file it along with the others, as though it were their continuation. It completes and sums up the others, with a few slight and excusable repetitions.

This special letter, which I sent to the editor of the Critica Sociale, is not particularly sweet. I did not write it exactly with the intention of doing Mr. De Bella a favor. It is ill-humored in some places. Perhaps this bitterness in my critique is due to the fact that, being deeply intent on the study of this grave problem of the relations of historical materialism to the other scientific thought of my time, I felt that the advice of Mr. De Bella was rather inopportune, at least so far as I was concerned, if for no other reason than that I had not asked it. Of course, it was not my intention that he should see what I was writing to you.

Rome, June 5, 1897.

Dear Turati! I am not quite certain whether De Bella really means me, when he mentions my name. I am rather inclined to think that he is addressing his tirade to a strawman of his own making, on whose back he has pasted my name because it was handy. However that may be, as soon as he mixes my name up in his meditations, I cannot refrain from adding a postscript to your reply.

It is well known that I explicitly and publicly allied myself with socialist thought ten years ago. Ten years are not a very long time of my physical existence, since I count four more than half a hundred. But they are certainly a short span of my intellectual life. Before I became a socialist, I had had the inclination, leisure, time, opportunity, and obligation to square my accounts with Darwinism, Positivism, Neokantianism, and so many other scientific questions that developed around me and gave me occasion to develop among my contemporaries. For I hold the chair of philosophy at my university since 1871, and before that I had studied the things which are needed for a philosopher. When I turned to Socialism, I did not look to Marx for an ABC of knowledge. I did not look in Marxism for anything but what it actually contains, namely its determined critique of political economy, its outlines of historical materialism, and its proletarian politics, which it proclaims or implies. Neither did I look in Marxism for a knowledge of that philosophy, which is its premise and which it, in a way, continues after having inverted the dialectics of that philosophy. I mean Hegelianism, which flourished in Italy in my youth and in which I had been brought up, as it were. I don't say it with any intent to be spiteful, but my first composition in philosophy, dated May, 1862, is a Defense of Hegel's dialectics against the return to Kant initiated by Ed. Zeller! Therefore I did not have to familiarise myself first with the dialectic mode of thought, or the evolutionary or genetic method, whatever you wish to call it, before I could understand scientific socialism, for I had lived in this circle of ideas ever since I had begun to think consciously. I add, however, that while Marxism did not offer any difficulties to me so far as the intrinsic and formal outlines of its conception and method were concerned, I acquired its economic content only by dint of hard work. And while I acquired this knowledge in the best way that I could, I was neither compelled nor permitted to confound the line of development germane to historical materialism, in other words, to confound the meaning of evolution in this concrete case with that almost diseased condition of some people's brains, especially in Italy, which leads them to speak of a Madona Evolution and to worship her.

What is it that De Bella wants of me? That I should go back to school like a plucked freshman and start my course over again? Or does he want me to be rebaptised by Darwin, reconfirmed by Spencer, thereupon to recite my general confession before my comrades, and prepare to receive the extreme unction from him? For the sake of peace I should be willing to dismiss all the other things. But I strongly protest against an appeal to the consciences of my comrades. I admit that there is some reason for strictness and often tyranny on the part of my comrades in matters of party politics, to a certain extent and under certain conditions. But that my comrades should have authority to speak with arbitrary decision in matters of science, simply because they are comrades.... Go away, science will never be put to a test vote, even in the so-called society of the future! Or does he want something less presumptuous than that? Am I to affirm and swear that Marxism is not the universal science, and that the things which it studies are not the universe. All right, I grant that at once. And I defy the idea that I cannot grant that. I have but to remember the plan of study at the university and the numerous courses it includes. I grant even more than that. Here it is: "This doctrine itself is only in its beginning and still has need of many developments." (Historical Materialism, I, page 97.)

In fact, the thing that torments De Bella and others like him is precisely the chase after that universal philosophy, into which socialism might be fitted as the central point of everything Go ahead! The paper is patient, say the German editors to budding writers. But I cannot refrain from making two remarks. The first is, that no wise man will ever succeed in giving us an idea of this universal philosophy in two columns of Critica Sociale. The second is a personal one. For twenty years I have detested systematic philosophy. This attitude of my mind made me not only more apt to accept Marxism, which is one of the ways in which the scientific mind has freed itself from philosophy as such, but has also made of me an inveterate opponent of the philosopher Spencer, who gave us still another diagram of the universe in his First Principles. And now I must quote from my own writings: "I did not come to this university, twenty-three years ago, as the representative of any orthodox philosophy, nor for the purpose of hatching out any new system. By a fortunate accident of my life I gained my education under the direct and straight influence of two great systems, which marked the close of that philosophy, which we now may call classic. I mean the systems of Herbart and Hegel, which brought to its extreme culmination the antithesis between realism and idealism, between pluralism and monism, between scientific psychology and phrenology of the mind, between a specialisation of methods and an anticipation of every method by omniscient dialectics. The philosophy of Hegel had already blossomed out into the historical materialism of Karl Marx, and that of Herbart into empirical psychology, which, under certain conditions and within certain limits, is also experimental, comparative, historical, and social. Those were the years, in which the intensive and extensive application of the principle of energy, of the atomic theory, of Darwinism, and the rediscovery of the precise forms and conditions of general philosophy, revolutionized before our eyes our entire conception of nature. And in those times, the comparative study of institutions, aided by the comparative study of languages and mythology, then of prehistory, and finally of industrial history, overthrew most of the actual positions and hypotheses, upon which and by which people had hitherto philosophized concerning law, morality, and society. The ferments of thought, those ferments which are implied by new or renewed sciences, did not approach as yet, nor do they approach now, a new development of systematic philosophy, which should contain and dominate the entire field of experience. I pass by such philosophies for private use, and of private invention, as those of Nietzsche and von Hartmann, and save myself all criticism of those pretended returns to the philosophers of other times, which produce a philology instead of a philosophy, as happened to the Neokantians." "I pause here in order to call attention to the almost incredible mistake, by means of which many, especially in Italy, confound without further ceremony Positivism, as a certain philosophy, with the Positive acquisitions made by incessant experience in nature and society. To such people it happens, for instance, that they cannot distinguish the indisputable merit of Spencer, namely that of having contributed to the formulation of a general philosophy, from his incapacity to explain a single historical fact by means of his wholly diagrammatic sociology. They are unable to separate that which belongs to the scientist Spencer from that which belongs to the philosopher Spencer. The latter is also a back number, for he is sparring with such categories as the Homogeneous, the Heterogenous, the Indistinct, the Differentiated, the Known, and the Unknown. In other words, he is alternately a Kantian without knowing it and a caricature of Hegel." "The lecture plan of the university should distinctly reflect the actual state of philosophy, which demands at present the insistence of thought on really known things. In other words, it demands just the reverse of any preconceived theories concerning cognition by means of theological or metaphysical cogitation." (L'Universita e la Liberta della scienza, Rome 1897, pages 15, 16, and 17.)

Ultimately, then, this so-called philosophy championed by De Bella is at bottom nothing but another edition of that trinity Darwin-Spencer-Marx, which Enrico Ferri set in circulation about three years ago with such suggestive eloquence, but with so little good luck. Well now, dear Turati, I honestly wish to assume the role of devil's advocate and admit that there is a germ of truth, a demand for the satisfaction of a real need, in these vague aspirations to a philosophy of socialism, and in the many silly things said in this respect (and some have almost gotten to the point of believing that it should be a sort of philosophy for the private use of the socialists alone). Many of these who embrace socialism, and not merely as simple agitators, lecturers, and candidates, feel that it is impossible to accept it as a scientific conviction, unless it can be combined in some way with the rest of that genetic conception of things, which lies more or less at the bottom of all other sciences. This accounts for the mania of many to bring within the scope of socialism all the rest of science, which is at their disposal. This leads to many mistakes and ingenuities, all of which are explicable. But it also carries with it a danger. For many of these intellectuals may forget that socialism has its real basis in the present conditions of capitalist society and in the possible aims and actions of the proletariat and other poor people. Marx may become a mythical personage through the work of the intellectuals. And while they discuss the whole scale of evolution up and down, and down and up, the comrades may put the following philosophical thesis to a vote in one of their next conventions: The first fundament of socialism is found in the vibrations of the ether.

In this way I explain to myself the ingenuity of De Bella. If Marx were still alive! Don't you see? He was born on May 5, 1818, and died on March 14, 1883, and therefore he might still be alive, as human life is measured. And if alive, I should continue, he could have completed volume III of Capital, which is so disconnected and so obscure. No sirree! says De Bella, he would have become a materialist! But gracious me! That is what he was since 1845, and he fell out with the radical ideologists of his acquaintance on account of it. And he would not only have become a materialist, according to De Bella, but also a positivist! Positivism! In vulgar chronology, this term signifies the philosophy of Comte and his followers. Now, it had given up its ghost ideally even before Marx died physically. What a fine sight! Materialism – Positivism– Dialectics, a holy trinity! And still another fine sight! The scientific papacy of Comte reconciled with the infinite process of historical materialism, which solves the problem of cognition differently from all other philosophies and declares: There are no fixed limits, whether a priori or a posteriori, to cognition, because human beings learn all that they must know by an infinite process of labor, which is experience, and of experience, which is labor.

Comte, on the contrary, proclaimed that the cycle of physics and astronomy was for ever closed, just at the moment when the mechanical equivalent of heat was found, and a few years before the brilliant discovery of spectral analysis. And in 1845 he declared the research after the origin of species to be absurd! But, continues De Bella, historical materialism must study prehistoric society. And this is precisely where the devil plays his joke. Ancient Society, by Lewis H. Morgan, which was published in America and reached Europe in a few copies through the firm of Macmillan, London, (1877), was almost killed by the pitiless silence of the English ethnographers, who were either envious or afraid. But the results of Morgan's investigations went around the world precisely because Engels rescued them by his book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, (first edition 1884, fourth edition 1891). This book is at the same time a review, an exposition, and a supplement of Morgan's. It is a combination of Morgan and Marx. And what does Engels say of Morgan? That he had, "in a manner, discovered anew the materialistic conception of history, originated by Marx..." and, "in comparing barbarism and civilisation, he had arrived, in the main, at the same results as Marx." And why did Engels write his book? Because he desired to utilize the notes and comments left by Marx.

There! Ordinary chronology is of great importance, even for socialists.

And now let us turn to the inevitable Spencer. Is there any one outside of Italy who ever considered him a socialist? Is Spencer, perhaps, a philosopher of the other world? You can read him, and about him, in every language, not excluding that of modernized Japan. He does not sin through lack of clearness. From my point of view, who loves succinct brevity, he rather suffers from prolixity and overdone popularization. The first of his known writings bears the date of 1843. That was the time when Chartism was at its height. This work is entitled, The Proper Sphere of Government. Spencer was in the eyes of the whole world as an admired contributor to the Westminster Review, the Economist, and the Endinburgh Review. And take note once more of the dates of his contributions, especially from 1848 to 1859. Has any one ever deceived himself in England as to the meaning and value of his social and political work. His Social Statics appeared in 1551, his Psychology (first edition ) in 1855, his Education in 1861, the first edition of First Principles in 1862, his Classification of Sciences in 1864, his Biology from 1564 to 1867, not to mention his smaller essays, among the most notable of them his Hypothesis of Development (1852), his Genesis of Science (1854), and his Progress and Its Law (1857). Here I will close this enumeration, stopping at the works which appeared before the first volume of Capital was out (July 25, 1867). Surely it did not recquire the genius of a Marx in order to discover what I realized as a simple student of philosophy, namely, that those writings of Spencer, and the doctrine of evolution enunciated in them, are diagrammatical, not empirical, that Spencer's evolution is one of phenomena, not one of real things, that behind it stands the spectre of Kant's thing in itself, which he worshipped from the beginning in all his essays as God or Divinity (Statics, edition of 1851), and which he later circumscribed with the revered name of the Unknowable.

If Marx had ever reviewed the works of Spencer between 1860 and 1870, I will bet that he would have done it in the following style: "Here we have the last advance of the shadow cast by the English Deism of the 17th century; here we have the latest attempt of English hypocrisy to combat the philosophy of Hobbes and Spinoza; here we have the last projection of Transcendentalism into the field of positive science; here we have the latest mixture of the egoistic cretinism of Bentham with the altruistic cretinism of the Rabbi of Nazareth; here we have the last attempt of the bourgeois intellect to save, by means of free research and free competition in this world, an enigmatical shred of faith in the next world. Only the triumph of the proletariat can secure for the scientific mind the full and perfect conditions of its existence, because the intellect cannot be clear until the conditions in which it works are made transparent." This Marx would have written, or could have written. But he was busy attending to the International, and Spencer had no time to take notice of this association.

On March 17, 1883, Engels spoke in Highgate Cemetery in memory of his friend Marx, who had died three days before, and he began his address with these words: "Just as Darwin discovered the laws of development in organic nature, so Marx discovered the laws of development of human history." Should not De Bella feel mortified on reading this?

Nor is this all. In his Anti-D�hring (first edition 1878, third edition 1894), the same Engels had already acquired all the fundamental ideas of Darwinism, which are required for the general orientation of a scientific socialist. It had taken him about ten years to acquire this new education in natural science, and he declared frankly that he was more at home in it than Marx, while Marx was better versed in mathematics. Nor is even this all. The first edition of Capital contains a characteristic and very original note concerning the new world discovered by Darwin. Understand well that these two modest mortals, who never made any supernatural portions of the universe, were always referring to no other Darwinism but that prosaic one of the Origin of Species (1859), which consists of a series of observations and experiences on the limited field of reality, a reality which extends beyond the origins of life and precedes human history by a considerable length. They could not help perceiving that the Darwinian theories presented an analogous case to their epigenetic conception of history, which they had partly defined, partly just begun studying. They never heard anything of that Darwinism, which De Bella calls the discoverer of the laws of entire humanity, of that Darwinism, which is supposed to be good for everything, which is a gratuitous invention of scientific publicists and philosophical decadents. Did not their friend Heine tell them that the universe is full of holes, and that the German professor of Hegel's school covers these holes with his nightcap?

But let us leave aside the universe and its holes, dear Turati, and let us all do our duty. I always remember that strong invective, which the Hegelian B. Spaventa hurled about 30 years ago: "In our country they study the history of philosophy in the geography of Ariosto, and they quote as equals Plato and the Abb� Fornari, Torquato Tasso and Totonno Tasso."