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  Anti Duhring   MORALS AND LAW. ETERNAL TRUTHS

    We refrain from giving samples of the mish-mash of platitudes and oracular sayings, in a word, of the simple balderdash with which Herr Dühring regales his readers for full fifty pages as the deep-rooted science of the elements of consciousness. We will cite only this:

    "He who can think only by means of language has never yet learnt what is meant by abstract and authentic thought."

    On this basis animals are the most abstract and most authentic thinkers, because their thought is never obscured by the obtrusive interference of language. In any case one can see from the Dühringian thoughts and the language in which they are couched how little suited these thoughts are to any language, and how little suited the German language is to these thoughts.

    At last the fourth section brings us deliverance; apart from the liquefying pap of rhetoric, it does offer us, at least here and there, something tangible on morals and law. This time we are invited right at the outset to take a trip to the other celestial bodies:

the elements of morals must "occur harmoniously among all extra-human beings whose active reason has to deal with the conscious ordering of life impulses in the form of instincts. . . . And yet our interest in such deductions will remain small. . . . Nevertheless it is an idea which advantageously extends our range of vision, when we think that individual and communal life on other celestial bodies must be based on a scheme which . . . is unable to abrogate or escape from the general fundamental constitution of a rationally acting being."

    In this case, by way of exception, the validity of the Dühringian truths for all other possible worlds too is put at the beginning instead of the end of the relevant chapter, and for a sufficient reason. If the validity of the Dühringian conceptions of morals and justice is first established for all worlds, it is all the easier advantageously to extend their validity to all times. But once again what is involved is nothing less than final and ultimate truth. <"p106">

    The world of morals, "just as much as the world of knowledge in general," has "its permanent principles and simple elements". Moral principles stand "above history and above present differences in national characteristics. . . . The special truths out of which a more complete moral consciousness and, so to speak, conscience are built up in the course of evolution, may, in so far as their ultimate basis is understood, claim a validity and range similar to mathematical insights and their applications. Genuine truths are absolutely immutable . . . so that it is altogether stupid to think that the correctness of knowledge is something that can be affected by time and changes in reality." Hence, when we are in possession of our senses, the certitude of strict knowledge and the adequacy of common knowledge leave no room for despairing of the absolute validity of the principles of knowledge. "Persistent doubt itself is already a pathological state of weakness and nothing but the expression of sterile confusion, which sometimes seeks to contrive the appearance of some stability in the systematic consciousness of its nothingness. In the sphere of ethics, the denial of general principles clutches at the geographical and historical variety of customs and principles, and once the inevitable necessity of moral wickedness and evil is conceded, it believes itself to be far above the recognition of the serious validity and actual efficacy of harmonious moral impulses. This mordant scepticism, which is not directed against particular false doctrines but against mankind's very capacity to develop conscious morality, resolves itself ultimately into a real Nothing, in fact into something that is worse than mere nihilism. . . . It flatters itself that it can easily reign within its confused chaos of dissolved moral ideas and open the gates to unprincipled arbitrariness. But it is greatly mistaken: for mere reference to the inevitable fate of reason in error and truth suffices to show by this analogy alone that natural fallibility does not necessarily exclude the attainment of accuracy."

    Up to now we have calmly put up with all these pompous phrases of Herr Dühring's about final and ultimate truths, the sovereignty of thought, the absolute certainty of knowledge, and so forth, because it is only at the point we have now reached that the matter can be brought to a head. So far it has been enough to inquire how far the separate assertions of the philosophy of reality had "sovereign validity" and "an unconditional claim to truth"; now we come to the question whether any, and if so which, products of human knowledge ever can have sovereign validity and an unconditional claim to truth. When I say "of human knowledge", I do not use the phrase with the intention of insulting the inhabitants of other celestial bodies, whom I don't have the honour of knowing, but only because animals also have knowledge, though it is in no way sovereign. A dog acknowledges his master to be his God, though this master may be the biggest scoundrel on earth.

    Is human thought sovereign? Before we can answer yes or no, we must first inquire, what is human thought? Is it the thought of the individual man? No. But it exists only as the individual thought of many billions of past, present and future men. If, then, I say that the total thought of all these human beings, including the as yet unborn, which is embraced in my idea, is sovereign, able to know the world as it exists, if only mankind lasts long enough and in so far as no limits are imposed on its knowledge by its organs of knowledge or the objects to be known, then I am saying something which is pretty banal and, what is more, pretty barren. For the most valuable result would be that it should make us extremely distrustful of our present knowledge, since in all probability we are just about at the beginning of human history, and the generations which will correct us are likely to be far more numerous than those whose knowledge we are in a position to correct -- often enough with considerable contempt.

    Herr Dühring himself declares it to be a necessity that consciousness, and therefore also thought and knowledge, can become manifest only in a series of individual beings. We can only ascribe sovereignty to the thought of each of these individuals in so far as we know of no power capable of forcibly imposing any idea on him, when he is of sound mind and wide awake. But as for the sovereign validity of the knowledge in each individual thought, we all know that there can be no talk of such a thing, and that according to all previous experience such knowledge without exception always contains much more that is capable of being improved upon than is not or than is correct.

    In other words, the sovereignty of thought is realized in a succession of human beings whose thinking is most unsovereign; the knowledge which has an unconditional claim to truth is realized in a series of relative errors; neither the one nor the other can be fully realized except through an unending duration of human existence.

    Here again we find the same contradiction as we found above between the character of human thought, necessarily conceived as absolute, and its reality in individual human beings who think only limitedly.* This is a contradiction which can be resolved only in the course of an infinite progression, in what is -- at least for us -- the practically endless succession of generations of mankind. In this sense human thought is just as much sovereign as not sovereign, and its capacity for knowledge just as much unlimited as limited. It is sovereign and unlimited in its disposition, its vocation, its possibilities and its final historical goal; it is not sovereign and

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    * See p. 46 above. --Ed.

it is limited in its individual fulfilment and in reality at any particular moment.

    It is just the same with eternal truths. If mankind ever reached the stage at which it worked only with eternal truths, with intellectual conclusions which possess sovereign validity and an unconditional claim to truth, it would have reached the point where the infinity of the intellectual world had been exhausted both in its actuality and in its potentiality, and the famous miracle of the counted uncountable would have thus been performed.

    But then are there any truths which are so well established that any doubt about them seems to us to be tantamount to insanity? That twice two makes four, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, that Paris is in France, that a man who gets no food dies of hunger, and so forth? Are there then eternal truths, final and ultimate truths?

    Of course there are. We can divide the whole realm of knowledge in the traditional way into three great departments. The first includes all sciences that deal with inanimate nature and are to a greater or lesser degree susceptible of mathematical treatment: mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, physics, chemistry. If it gives anyone any pleasure to use big words for very simple things, it can be asserted that certain results obtained by these sciences are eternal truths, final and ultimate truths, for which reason these sciences are called the exact sciences. But this is very far from being the case for all their results. With the introduction of variable magnitudes and the extension of their variability to the infinitely small and infinitely large, mathematics, which was so strictly moral in other respects, fell from grace; it ate of the tree of knowledge which opened up to it a path of most colossal achievements but at the same time a path of error, too. The virgin state of absolute validity and irrefutable proof of everything mathematical was gone for ever; the realm of controversy was inaugurated, and we have reached the point where most people differentiate and integrate not because they understand what they are doing but from pure faith, because up to now it has always come out right. Things are even worse with astronomy and mechanics, and in physics and chemistry hypotheses swarm around us like bees. And it cannot be otherwise. In physics we are dealing with the motion of molecules, in chemistry with the formation of molecules out of atoms, and unless the interference of light waves is a myth, we have absolutely no prospect of ever seeing these interesting objects with our own eyes. As time goes on, final and ultimate truths become remarkably rare here.

    We are even worse off in geology, which by its nature has to deal chiefly with processes which took place not only in our absence but in the absence of any human being whatever. Consequently, the yield of final and ultimate truths is extremely scanty and involves a great deal of trouble here.

    The second department of science is the one which covers the investigation of living organisms. In this field there is such a multiplicity of interrelations and causal connections that not only does the solution of each problem give rise to a host of other problems, but each separate problem can in most cases only be solved piecemeal, through a series of investigations which often require centuries; besides, the need for a systematic presentation of interconnections constantly makes it necessary to surround the final and ultimate truths with a luxuriant growth of hypotheses again and again. What a long series of intermediaries from Galen to Malpighi was necessary for correctly establishing such a simple matter as the circulation of the blood in mammals, how little do we know about the origin of blood corpuscles, and how numerous are the missing links even today, for example, in the establishment of a rational relationship between the symptoms of a disease and its causes! Again, often enough discoveries such as that of the cell are made which compel us to revise completely all formerly established final and ultimate truths in the realm of biology, and to discard whole piles of them once and for all. Therefore, anyone who wants to set up really genuine and immutable truths here will have to be content with such platitudes as all men are mortal, all female mammals have mammary glands, and the like; he will not even be able to assert that the higher animals digest with their stomachs and intestines and not with their heads, for nervous activity, which is centralized in the head, is indispensable to digestion.

    But eternal truths are in an even worse plight in the third group of sciences, the historical ones; what they investigate in their historical sequence and in their resultant present state are the conditions of human life, social relations and forms of law and government, with their ideal superstructure of philosophy, religion, art, etc. In organic nature we are at least dealing with a succession of processes which, so far as our immediate observation is concerned, recur with fair regularity within very wide limits. Organic species have on the whole remained unchanged since the time of Aristotle. In social history, however, the repetition of conditions is the exception and not the rule, once we pass beyond the primitive state of man, the so-called Stone Age; and when such repetitions occur, they never arise under exactly the same circumstances. Such, for example, is the occurrence of an original common ownership of the land among all civilized peoples, or the way it was dissolved. In the sphere of human history our knowledge is therefore even more backward than in the realm of biology.

What is more, when by way of exception the inner connections of the social and political forms of existence in an epoch come to be known, this occurs as a rule only when these forms have already by half outlived themselves and are nearing their decline. Therefore, knowledge is here essentially relative, because it is limited to the investigation of the interconnections and consequences of certain forms of society and state which exist only in a particular epoch and among particular peoples and are transitory by their very nature. Therefore, anyone who sets out here to hunt down final and ultimate truths, genuine, absolutely immutable truths, will bring home but little, apart from platitudes and commonplaces of the sorriest kind -- for example, that generally men cannot live without working; that up to the present they have for the most part been divided into rulers and ruled; that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821; and so on.

    Now it is a remarkable thing that it is precisely in this sphere that we most frequently encounter truths which claim to be eternal, final and ultimate and all the rest of it. That twice two makes four, that birds have beaks, and similar statements are proclaimed as eternal truths only by someone who aims at drawing from the existence of eternal truths in general the conclusion that there are also eternal truths in the sphere of human history -- eternal morality, eternal justice, and so on -- which claim a validity and scope similar to those of the truths of mathematics and its applications. And then we can confidently rely on this same friend of humanity to assure us at the first opportunity that all previous fabricators of eternal truths have been to a greater or lesser extent asses and charlatans, that they were all entangled in error and made mistakes; but that their error and their fallibility are in accordance with nature's laws, and prove the existence of truth and correctness precisely in his case; and that he, the prophet who has now arisen, has in his bag, all ready-made, final and ultimate truth, eternal morality and eternal justice. This has all happened so many hundreds and thousands of times that we can only feel astonished that there should still be people credulous enough to believe this, not of others, oh no! but of themselves. Nevertheless we have here before us at least one more such prophet, who also flies into a highly moral temper much in the usual way when other people deny that any individual whatsoever is in a position to deliver the final and ultimate truth. Such a denial, or indeed mere doubt, is weakness, sterile confusion, nothingness, mordant scepticism, worse than sheer nihilism, utter chaos and other such pleasantries. As with all prophets, instead of critical and scientific examination and judgement we find moral condemnation out of hand.

    We might have also mentioned above the sciences which investigate the laws of human thought, i.e., logic and dialectics. But here eternal truths do not fare any better. Herr Dühring declares that dialectics proper is pure nonsense; and the many books which have been and are still being written on logic provide abundant proof that here, too, final and ultimate truths are much more sparsely sown than some people believe.

    For that matter, there is absolutely no need to be alarmed by the fact that the stage of knowledge which we have now reached is as little final as all that have preceded it. It already embraces a vast accumulation of knowledge and requires highly specialized study on the part of anyone who wants to become at home in any particular science. But a man who applies the measure of genuine, immutable, final and ultimate truth to knowledge which, by its very nature, must either remain relative for many generations and be completed only bit by bit, or which, as in cosmogony, geology and the history of man, must always remain defective and incomplete because of the inadequacy of the historical material -- such a man is only proving his own ignorance and perversity, even if the real background is not, as in this case, the claim to personal infallibility. Truth and error, like all determinations of thought which move in polar opposites, have absolute ,validity only in an extremely limited field. as we have just seen, and as even Herr Dühring would realize if he had any acquaintance with the first elements of dialectics, for it is precisely with the inadequacy of all polar opposites that they deal. As soon as we apply the antithesis between truth and error outside that narrow field referred to above, it becomes relative and therefore unserviceable for exact scientific modes of expression; but if we try to apply it as absolutely valid outside that field, then we really come a cropper: both poles of the antithesis become transformed into their opposites, truth becomes error and error truth. Let us take as an example Boyle's well-known law, according to which, if the temperature remains constant, the volume of a gas varies inversely with the pressure to which it is subjected. Regnault found that this law does not hold good in certain cases. Had he been a philosopher of reality, he would have been obliged to say: Boyle's Law is mutable, hence it is not a genuine truth, hence it is not a truth at all, hence it is an error. But had he done so, he would have committed an error far greater than the one contained in Boyle's Law; his grain of truth would have been lost in a sand-hill of error; he would therefore have wrought his originally correct conclusion into an error compared with which Boyle's Law, together with the particle of error that clings to it, would have seemed like truth. However, Regnault, being a man of science, did not indulge in such childishness, but continued his investigations and discovered that in general Boyle's Law is only approximately true and in particular loses its validity in the case of gases which can be liquefied by pressure, i.e., as soon as the pressure approaches the point at which liquefaction begins. Therefore Boyle's Law was proved to be true only within definite limits. But is it absolutely and finally true within those limits? No physicist would assert that. He would say that it holds good within certain limits of pressure and temperature and for certain gases; and even within these more restricted limits he would not exclude the possibility of a still narrower limitation or of an altered formulation as the result of future investigations.* This is how things stand with final and ultimate truths in physics, for example. Therefore, really scientific works as a rule avoid such dogmatically moral expressions as error and truth, while we meet them everywhere in works such as the philosophy of reality, in which

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    * Since I wrote the above, it would seem to have already been confirmed. According to the latest researches carried out with more exact apparatus by Mendeleyev and Bogusky, all true gases show a variable relation between pressure and volume; the coefficient of expansion for hydrogen, at all the pressures so far applied, has been positive (that is, the diminution of volume was slower than the increase of pressure); in the case of atmospheric air and the other gases examined, there is for each a zero point of pressure, so that this coefficient is positive with pressure below this point and negative above. So Boyle's Law, which has hitherto always been usable in practice, will have to be supplemented by a whole series of special laws. (We also know now -- in 1885 -- that there are no "true" gases at all. They have all been reduced to a liquid form.) [Note by Engels.]

empty phrasemongering attempts to impose itself on us as the most sovereign result of sovereign thought.

    But, a naive reader may ask, where has Herr Dühring expressly stated that the content of his philosophy of reality is final and indeed ultimate truth? Where? Well, for example, in the dithyramb on his system (page 13), part of which we cited in chapter II.[*] Or when he says, in the passage quoted above: Moral truths, in so far as their ultimate bases are understood, claim a validity similar to mathematical truths.[**] And doesn't Herr Dühring assert that, working from his really critical standpoint and by means of those researches of his which go to the root of things, he has forced his way through to these ultimate foundations, the basic schemata, and has thus bestowed final and ultimate validity on moral truths? Or, if Herr Dühring does not advance this claim either for himself or for his age, if he only means to say that perhaps some day in the dark and nebulous future final and ultimate truths may be established, if therefore he means to say, only in a more confused way, much the same as "mordant scepticism" and "sterile confusion" -- then why all the din, what is my master's pleasure?

    If, then, we have not made much progress with truth and error, we can make even less with good and evil. This antithesis manifests itself exclusively in the domain of morals, that is, a domain belonging to the history of mankind, and it is precisely in this field that final and ultimate truths are most sparsely sown. The conceptions of good and evil have varied so much from nation to nation and from age to age

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    * See pp. 35-36 above. --Ed.
    ** See p. 106 above. --Ed.

that they have often been in direct contradiction with each other.

    But all the same, someone may object, good is not evil and evil is not good; if good is confused with evil, there is an end to all morality and everyone can do or leave undone whatever he wants. Stripped of all oracular pomposity, this is also Herr Dühring's opinion. But the matter cannot be so simply disposed of. If it were such an easy business, there would certainly be no dispute at all over good and evil; everyone would know what was good and what was bad. But how do things stand today? What morality is preached to us today? There is first Christian-feudal morality, inherited from past centuries of faith; and this again is divided, essentially, into a Catholic and a Protestant morality, each of which in turn has no lack of subdivisions, from the Jesuit-Catholic and the Orthodox-Protestant to the lax and "enlightened" morality. Beside the Christian-feudal morality we find the modern-bourgeois morality and again beside the latter the proletarian morality of the future, so that in the most advanced European countries alone the past, present and future provide three great groups of ethical theories which are in force simultaneously and side by side. Which, then, is the true one? Not one of them, in the sense of absolute finality; but certainly that morality which contains the most elements promising permanence, which, in the present, represents the overthrow of the present, represents the future, and therefore the proletarian morality.

    But when we see that the three classes of modern society, the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, each have a morality of their own, we can only draw the conclusion that men, consciously or unconsciously, derive dog instead of a black cat. Evil is the cat! That is morality, not only for all worlds, but also -- for the cat![*]

 

 

MORALS AND LAW. EQUALITY

    We have already had more than one occasion to become acquainted with Herr Dühring's method. It consists in splitting up each group of objects of knowledge into their allegedly simplest elements, applying to these elements similarly simple and allegedly self-evident axioms, and then continuing to operate with the results so obtained. Even a problem in the sphere of social life

"is to be decided axiomatically, in accordance with particular, simple basic forms, just as if we were dealing with the simple . . . basic forms of mathematics".

    Thus the application of the mathematical method to history, morals and law is to provide us in these fields, too, with mathematical certainty for the truth of the results obtained, is to characterize them as genuine, immutable truths.

    This is only giving a new twist to the old favourite ideological method, also known as the a priori method, which consists in ascertaining the properties of an object not from the object itself but by a logical deduction from the concept of the object. First, the concept of the object is formed from the object; then the spit is turned round, and the object is measured by its image, the concept. The object is then <"fnp120">

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    * In German a play on words: für die Katze (for the cat) means useless. --Ed.

to conform to the concept, not the concept to the object. With Herr Dühring the simplest elements, the ultimate abstractions he can reach, do service for the concept, which does not alter matters; these simplest elements are at best of a purely conceptual nature. The philosophy of reality, therefore, proves here again to be pure ideology, the deduction of reality not from itself but from its representation.

    Now when such an ideologist constructs morals and law from the concept, or the so-called simplest elements "of society", instead of from the real social relations of the people around him, what material is then available for this construction? Material clearly of two kinds: first, the meagre residue of real content which may possibly survive in the abstractions from which he starts, and, second, the content which our ideologist reintroduces from his own consciousness. And what does he find in his consciousness? For the most part, moral and legal notions which are a more or less accurate expression (positive or negative, corroborative or antagonistic) of the social and political relations amidst which he lives; perhaps also ideas drawn from the literature on the subject; and finally maybe some personal idiosyncrasies. Our ideologist may twist and turn as he likes, but the historical reality which he cast out at the door comes in again at the window, and while he thinks he is framing a doctrine of morals and law for all times and for all worlds, he is in fact only fashioning an image of the conservative or revolutionary tendencies of his day, an image which is distorted because it has been torn from its real basis and, like a reflection in a concave mirror, is standing on its head.

    Herr Dühring thus splits society up into its simplest elements, and discovers in doing so that the simplest society consists of at least two people. With these two people he then proceeds to operate axiomatically. And so the basic moral axiom spontaneously presents itself:

    "Two human wills are as such completely equal to each other, and in the first place one can demand positively nothing from the other." This "characterizes the basic form of moral justice", and equally that of legal justice, for "we need only the utterly simple and elementary relation of two persons for the development of the fundamental concepts of right".

    Not only is it not an axiom that two people or two human wills are as such completely equal to each other, it is actually a gross exaggeration. In the first place, two people, even as such, may be unequal in sex, and this simple fact leads us on at once to the conclusion that the simplest elements of society -- if we enter into this childishness for a moment -- are not two men, but a man and a woman, who found a family, the simplest and first form of association for the purpose of production. But this cannot in any way suit Herr Dühring. For, on the one hand, the two founders of society must be made as equal as possible; and, secondly, even Herr Dühring could not succeed in constructing the moral and legal equality of man and woman from the primitive family. Consequently, one thing or the other: either the Dühringian social molecule, by the multiplication of which the whole of society is to be built up, is doomed from the first, because two men can never by themselves bring a child into the world; or we must think of them as two heads of families. And in that case the whole simple basic scheme is turned into its opposite: instead of the equality of people it proves at most the equality of heads of families, and as women are not consulted, it further proves that they are subordinate.

    We have now to make the unpleasant announcement to the reader that henceforward he will not get rid of this famous twosome for a long time. In the sphere of social relations they play a similar role to that hitherto played by the inhabitants of other celestial bodies, with whom it is to be hoped we have now finished. Whenever there is a question of economics, politics, etc., to be solved, the two men instantly march up and settle the matter in the twinkling of an eye, "axiomatically". An excellent, creative and system-building discovery on the part of our philosopher of reality. But unfortunately, if we want to pay homage to truth, the two men are not his discovery. They are the common property of the whole eighteenth century. They are already to be found in Rousseau's discourse on inequality (1754), where, by the way, they axiomatically prove the opposite of what is asserted by Herr Dühring. They play a leading part with the economists, from Adam Smith to Ricardo; but here they are at least unequal in that each of the two pursues a different occupation -- as a rule one is a hunter and the other a fisherman -- and in that they mutually exchange their products. Besides, throughout the eighteenth century, they serve in the main as a purely illustrative example, and Herr Dühring's originality consists only in elevating this method of illustration into a basic method for all social science and a yardstick for all historical forms. Certainly it would be impossible to simplify the "strictly scientific conception of things and men any further".

    In order to establish the fundamental axiom that two people and their wills are completely equal to each other and that neither lords it over the other, we cannot use any couple of men at random. They must be two people who are so thoroughly detached from all reality, from all the national, economic, political and religious relations present in the world, from all sexual and personal characteristics, that nothing is left of either of them beyond the mere concept, human being, and then of course they are "completely equal". They are therefore two perfect phantoms conjured up by that very Herr Dühring who scents out and denounces "spiritistic" tendencies everywhere. These two phantoms are of course obliged to do everything the man who conjured them up wants them to do, and for that very reason all their feats are of no interest whatever to the rest of the world.

    But let us pursue Herr Dühring's axiomatics a little further. The two wills can demand positively nothing from each other. Nevertheless, if one of them does so and has his way by force, this gives rise to a state of injustice; and it is by this fundamental scheme that Herr Dühring explains injustice, tyranny, servitude -- in short, the whole reprehensible history of the past. Now Rousseau, in the essay referred to above, had already proved the exact opposite -- and at that no less axiomatically -- by means of the two men, that is, given two men, A cannot enslave B by force, but only by putting B into a position in which the latter cannot do without A, a conception, however, which is much too materialistic for Herr Dühring. Let us put the same thing in a slightly different way. Two shipwrecked people are alone on an island and form a society. Formally, their wills are completely equal, and this is acknowledged by both. But from a material standpoint there is great inequality. A has determination and energy, B is irresolute, lazy and flabby. A is quick-witted, B stupid. How long will it be before A regularly imposes his will on B, first by persuasion, later by dint of habit, but always in a voluntary form? Servitude remains servitude, whether the voluntary form is retained or is trampled underfoot. Voluntary entry into servitude was known throughout the Middle Ages, and in Germany until after the Thirty Years' War.[42] When serfdom was abolished in Prussia after the defeats of 1806 and 1807, and with it the obligation of the liege lords to provide for their subjects in need, illness and old age, the peasants petitioned the king asking to be left in servitude -- for otherwise who would look after them when in distress? The scheme of two men is therefore just as "appropriate" to inequality and servitude as to equality and mutual help; and since we are forced, on pain of extinction, to assume that they are heads of families, hereditary servitude is also foreseen from the start.

    But let this entire matter rest for the moment. Let us assume that Herr Dühring's axiomatics have convinced us and that we are enthusiastic supporters of complete equality of rights as between the two wills, of "general human sovereignty", of the "sovereignty of the individual" -- veritable verbal colossi, compared with<"p125a"> whom Stirner's "Ego" together with his Own is a mere amateur, although he too could claim a modest part in them.[43] Well, then, we are now all completely equal and independent. All? No, not quite all.

    There are also cases of "permissible dependence", but these can be explained "on grounds which are to be sought not in the activity of the two wills as such, but in a third sphere, as for example in regard to children, in the inadequacy of their self-determination".

    Indeed! The grounds of dependence are not to be sought in the activity of the two wills as such! Naturally not, for the activity of one of the wills is being actually impeded. But in a third sphere! And what is this third sphere? The concrete determination of the one subjected will as inadequate! Our philosopher of reality has so far departed from reality that, as against the abstract and empty term "will", he regards the real content, the characteristic determination of this will, as a "third sphere". But be that as it may, we must state that the equality of rights has an exception. It does not hold good for a will afflicted with inadequacy of self-determination. Retreat No. 1.

    To proceed.

    "Where beast and man are blended in one person, the question may be asked, on behalf of a second, entirely human, person, whether his mode of action should be the same as if only human persons, so to speak, were confronting each other . . . our hypothesis of two morally unequal persons, one of whom in some sense or other has something of the real beast in his character, is therefore the typical basic form for all relations which may come about in accordance with this difference . . . within and between groups of people."

    Now let the reader see for himself the pitiful diatribe that follows these clumsy subterfuges, in which Herr Dühring twists and turns like a Jesuit priest in order to determine casuistically how far the human man can interfere with the bestial man, how far he may show distrust and employ stratagems and harsh, nay terrorist means, as well as deception against him, without himself deviating in any way from immutable morality.

    So equality also ceases when two persons are "morally unequal". But then it was surely not worth while to conjure up two completely equal people, for there are no two persons who are completely equal morally. But the inequality is supposed to consist in this, that one person is human and the other has a streak of the beast in him. But then it is inherent in the descent of man from the animal world that he can never entirely rid himself of the beast in him, so that it can always be only a question of more or less, of a difference in the degree of bestiality or of humanity. Apart from the philosophy of reality, a division of mankind into two sharply differentiated groups, into human men and bestial men, into good and bad, sheep and goats, is only to be found in Christianity, which quite logically also has its judge of the universe to make the separation. But who is to be the judge of the universe in the philosophy of reality? Presumably the procedure will have to be the same as in Christian practice, in which the pious lambs themselves assume the office of judge of the universe in relation to their profane goat-neighbours, and discharge this duty with notorious success. The sect of philosophers of reality, if it ever comes into being, will assuredly not yield precedence in this respect to the pious of the land. This, however, is of no concern to us; what interests us is the admission that as a result of the moral inequality between men equality has vanished once again. Retreat No. 2.

    Once more, let us proceed.

    "If one man acts in accordance with truth and science and the other in accordance with some superstition or prejudice, then . . . as a rule mutual interference must occur. . . . At a certain degree of incompetence, brutality or perversity of character, conflict is always inevitable. . . . It is not only children and madmen in relation to whom the ultimate resource is force. The character of whole natural groups and cultural classes of human beings may inexorably necessitate the subjection of their will, which is hostile because of its perversity, if it is to be led back to the common social ties. Even in such cases the alien will is still considered as having equal rights ; but the perversity of its injurious and hostile activity has provoked an equalization, and if it is subjected to force, it is only reaping the reaction to its own unrighteousness."

    So not only moral but also mental inequality is enough to remove the "complete equality" of the two wills and to call into being a morality by which all the infamous deeds of civilized robber states against backward peoples, down to the Russian atrocities in Turkestan, can be justified.[44]

 

When in the summer of 1873 General Kaufmann ordered the Tatar tribe of the Yomuds to be attacked, their tents to be burnt and their wives and children butchered -- "in the good old Caucasian way", as the order was worded -- he, too, declared that the subjection of the hostile, because perverted, will of the Yomuds had become an inexorable necessity if it were to be led back to the common social ties, that the means he employed were best suited to the purpose, and that whoever willed the end had also to will the means. Only he was not so cruel as to insult the Yomuds on top of it all and to say that in massacring them for purposes of equalization it was precisely the possession by their wills of equal rights that he was respecting. Once again in this conflict it is the elect, those who claim to be acting in accordance with truth and science and therefore in the last resort the philosophers of reality, who have to decide what are superstition, prejudice, brutality and perversity of character and when force and subjection are necessary for purposes of equalization. Equality, therefore, is now -- equalization by force; and the second will is recognized by the first to have equal rights through subjection. Retreat No. 3, here already degenerating into ignominious flight.

    Incidentally, the phrase that the alien will is recognized as having equal rights precisely through forcible equalization is only a distortion of the Hegelian theory, according to which punishment is the right of the criminal: "punishment is regarded as containing the criminal's right and hence by being punished he is honoured as a rational being." (Rechtsphilosophie, § 100, Anmerk.)[45]

    With that we can break off. It would be superfluous to follow Herr Dühring further in his piecemeal destruction of the equality which he set up so axiomatically, of his general human sovereignty, and so on; to observe how he manages to set up society with his two men, but how in order to create the state he requires a third because -- to put the matter briefly -- without the third no majority decisions can be arrived at, and without these and so without the rule of the majority over the minority, no state can exist; and how he then gradually steers into the calmer waters of the construction of his socialitarian state of the future, where one fine morning we shall have the honour to look him up. We have sufficiently observed that the complete equality of the two wills exists only so long as these two wills will nothing ; that as soon as they cease to be human wills as such and are transformed into real, individual wills, into the wills of two real people, equality comes to an end; that childhood, madness, so-called bestiality, alleged superstition, assumed prejudice and putative incapacity on the one hand, and pretensions to humanity and knowledge of truth and science on the other -- that therefore every difference in the quality of the two wills and in that of the intelligence associated with them justifies an inequality which may go as far as subjection. What more can we ask, when Herr Dühring has so deep-rootedly and fundamentally demolished his own edifice of equality?

    But even though we have finished with Herr Dühring's shallow, amateurish treatment of the idea of equality, this does not mean that we have finished with the idea itself, which played a theoretical role especially thanks to Rousseau and a practical political role during and since the Great Revolution, and which to this day still plays an important agitational role in the socialist movement of almost every country. The establishment of its scientific content will also determine its value for proletarian agitation.

    The idea that all men, as men, have something in common and to that extent are also equal is of course very, very ancient. But the modern demand for equality is something entirely different; it consists rather in deducing from that common quality of being human, from that equality of men as men, a claim to equal political and social status for all human beings, or at least for all citizens of a state or all members of a society. Before that original conception of relative equality could lead to the conclusion that men should have equal rights in the state and in society, before that conclusion could even appear to be something natural and self-evident, thousands of years had to pass and did pass. In the oldest primitive communities equality of rights could apply at most to members of the community; women, slaves, and strangers were excluded from this equality as a matter of course. Among the Greeks and Romans the inequalities of men were of much greater importance than any equality. It would necessarily have seemed crazy to the ancients that Greeks and barbarians, freemen and slaves, citizens and denizens, Roman citizens and Roman subjects (to use a comprehensive term) should have a claim to equal political status. Under the Roman Empire all these distinctions gradually dissolved, except that between freemen and slaves; in this way there arose, for the freemen at least, that equality as between private individuals on the basis of which Roman law developed -- the fullest elaboration we know of law based on private property. But so long as the antithesis between freemen and slaves existed, there could be no talk of drawing legal conclusions from a general human equality; we saw this again recently in the slave states of the North American Union.

    Christianity knew only one equality on the part of all men, that of an equal possession of original sin, which corresponded perfectly to its character as the religion of the slaves and the oppressed. Apart from this it recognized, at most, the equality of the elect, which however was only stressed at the very beginning. The traces of common ownership which are also found in the early stages of the new religion can be ascribed to solidarity among the proscribed rather than to genuine equalitarian ideas. Within a very short time the establishment of the distinction between priests and laymen put an end to even this incipient Christian equality.

    The overrunning of Western Europe by the Germans abolished for centuries all ideas of equality through the gradual building up of a complicated social and political hierarchy such as had never existed before. But at the same time the invasion drew Western and Central Europe into the course of historical development, created a compact cultural area for the first time, and within this area also for the first time a system of predominantly national states influencing each other and mutually holding each other in check. It thus prepared the ground on which alone the question of the equal status of men, of the rights of man, could be raised at a later period.

    Moreover, mediaeval feudalism developed in its womb the class which in the course of its further development was destined to become the standard-bearer of the modern demand for equality, the bourgeoisie. Originally itself a feudal estate, the bourgeoisie had developed the predominantly handicraft industry and the exchange of products within feudal society to a relatively high level, when at the end of the fifteenth century the great maritime discoveries opened up to it a new career of wider scope. Trade beyond the confines of Europe, which had previously been carried on only between Italy and the Levant, was now extended to America and India, and soon surpassed in importance both the mutual exchange between the various European countries and the internal trade within each individual country. American gold and silver flooded Europe and forced its way like a disintegrating element into every gap, fissure and pore of feudal society. Handicraft industry could no longer satisfy the rising demand; in the leading industries of the most advanced countries it was replaced by manufacture.

    But this mighty revolution in the economic conditions of society was not followed by any immediate corresponding change in its political structure. The state order remained feudal, while society became more and more bourgeois. Trade on a large scale, that is to say, particularly international and, even more so, world trade, requires free owners of commodities who are unrestricted in their movements and as such enjoy equal rights, who may exchange their commodities on the basis of laws that are equal for them all, at least in each particular place. The transition from handicraft to manufacture presupposes the existence of a number of free workers -- free on the one hand from the fetters of the guild and on the other from the means by which they could themselves utilize their labour-power -- workers who can contract with the manufacturer for the hire of their labour-power, and who hence, as parties to the contract, have rights equal to his. And finally the equality and equal status of all human labour, because and in so far as it is human labour, found its unconscious but clearest expression in the law of value of modern bourgeois political economy, according to which the value of a commodity is measured by the socially necessary labour embodied in it.[*]

    However, where economic relations required freedom and equality of rights, the political system opposed them at every step with guild restrictions and special privileges. Local privileges, differential duties, exceptional laws of all kinds affected in their trade not only foreigners and people living in the colonies, but often enough whole categories of nationals proper; everywhere and ever anew the privileges of the guilds barred the development of manufacture. Nowhere was the road clear and were the chances equal for the bourgeois competitors -- and yet this was the prime and ever more pressing demand.

    The demand for liberation from feudal fetters and the establishment of equality of rights by the abolition of feudal inequalities was soon bound to assume wider dimensions, once the economic advance of society had placed it on the order of the day. If it was raised in the interests of industry and trade, it was also necessary to demand the same equality of rights for the great mass of the peasantry who, in every degree of bondage, from total serfdom onwards, were compelled to give the greater part of their labour-time to their liege lord without compensation and in addition to render innumerable other dues to him and to the state. On the other hand, it was inevitable that a demand should also be made for the abolition of the feudal privileges, of the nobility's

---

    * This derivation of the modern ideas of equality from the economic conditions of bourgeois society was first demonstrated by Marx in Capital. [Note by Engels.] See Marx, Capital, English edition, Moscow, 1961, Vol. I, p. 60. All subsequent references in the editor's notes to Capital, Vol. I, are to this edition. --Ed.

 

freedom from taxation and of the political privileges of the separate estates. As people were no longer living in a world empire such as the Roman Empire had been but in a system of independent states dealing with each other on an equal footing and at approximately the same level of bourgeois development, it was a matter of course that the demand should assume a general character reaching out beyond the individual state, that freedom and equality should be proclaimed human rights. It is significant of the specifically bourgeois character of these human rights that the American Constitution, the first to recognize the rights of man, in the same breath confirms the slavery of the coloured races existing in America: class privileges are proscribed, race privileges sanctioned.

    But as is well known, from the moment when the bourgeoisie emerged from feudal burgherdom, when this mediaeval estate changed into a modern class, it was always and inevitably accompanied by its shadow, the proletariat. In the same way bourgeois demands for equality were accompanied by proletarian demands for equality. From the moment when the bourgeois demand for the abolition of class privileges was put forward, there appeared beside it the proletarian demand for the abolition of classes themselves -- at first in a religious form, leaning towards primitive Christianity, and later drawing support from the bourgeois equalitarian theories themselves. The proletarians took the bourgeoisie at its word: equality must not be merely apparent, must not apply merely to the sphere of the state, but must also be real, must also be extended to the social and economic sphere. In particular, ever since the French bourgeoisie, from the Great Revolution on, brought civil equality to the forefront, the French proletariat has answered blow for blow with the demand for social and economic equality, and equality has become the battle-cry especially of the French proletariat.

    The demand for equality in the mouth of the proletariat has therefore a double meaning. It is either the spontaneous reaction against the crying social inequalities, against the contrast between rich and poor, the feudal lords and their serfs, the surfeiters and the starving, as was the case especially at the very start, for example in the Peasants' War; as such it is simply an expression of the revolutionary instinct and finds its justification in that, and in that alone. Or, on the other hand, this demand has arisen from the reaction against the bourgeois demand for equality, drawing more or less correct and more far-reaching demands from the latter and serving as an agitational means in order to stir up the workers against the capitalists with the aid of the capitalists' own assertions; and in this case it stands or falls with bourgeois equality itself. In both cases the real content of the proletarian demand for equality is the demand for the abolition of classes. Any demand for equality which goes beyond that of necessity passes into absurdity. We have given examples of this and shall find plenty more when we come to Herr Dühring's fantasies of the future.

    Thus the idea of equality, whether in its bourgeois or in its proletarian form, is itself a historical product, the creation of which required definite historical conditions that in turn themselves presuppose a long previous history. It is consequently anything but an eternal truth. If today it is taken for granted by the general public -- in one sense or another -- if, as Marx says, it "already possesses the fixity of a popular prejudice",* this is not the result of its axiomatic

---

    * Ibid. -- Ed.

truth but of the general diffusion and the persistent up-to-dateness of the ideas of the eighteenth century. If therefore Herr Dühring is able to let his famous twosome function economically on the basis of equality without more ado, this is so because it seems quite natural to popular prejudice. In fact Herr Dühring calls his philosophy natural because it is derived solely from things which seem quite natural to him. But why they seem natural to him is a question which of course he does not ask.

MORALS AND LAW. FREEDOM AND NECESSITY

    "In the sphere of politics and law the principles expounded in this course are based on the most exhaustive specialized studies. It is therefore . . . necessary to proceed from the fact that what we have here . . . is a consistent exposition of the conclusions reached in the sphere of legal and political science. My original special subject was precisely jurisprudence and I not only devoted to it the customary three years of theoretical university preparation but also continued to study it during a further three years of court practice, particularly with a view to the deepening of its scientific content. . . . And certainly the critique of private law relationships and the corresponding legal inadequacies could not have been put forward with such confidence but for the consciousness that all the weaknesses of the subject as well as its stronger sides were known to it."

    A man who is justified in saying this of himself must from the outset inspire confidence, especially in contrast with the "one-time, admittedly neglected, legal studies of Herr Marx".

    Therefore it must surprise us to find that the critique of private law relationships which is advanced with such confidence is restricted to telling us that "the scientific character of jurisprudence has not got very far", that positive civil law is non-law because it sanctions property based on force, and that the "natural basis" of criminal law is revenge --

    an assertion in which in any case only the mystical wrapping of its "natural basis" is new. The conclusions in political science are limited to the transactions of the familiar trio, one of whom has done violence to the others, with Herr Dühring in all seriousness conducting an investigation into whether it was the second or the third who first introduced violence and subjection.

    However, let us go a little more deeply into our confident jurist's most exhaustive specialized studies and his erudition deepened by three years of court practice.

    Herr Dühring tells us of Lassalle that

he was prosecuted for "inciting to an attempt to steal a cash-box" but that "no court sentence could be recorded, as the so-called acquittal for lack of evidence, which was then still possible, supervened . . . this half acquittal".

    The Lassalle case here referred to came up in the summer of 1848 before the assizes at Cologne, where,<"p137"> as in almost the whole of the Rhine province, French criminal law was in force.[46] The Prussian Landrecht had been introduced by way of exception only for political<"p137a"> offences and crimes, but already in April 1848 this exceptional measure had been abrogated by Camphausen.[47] French law has no knowledge whatever of the loose Prussian Landrecht category of "inciting" to a crime, let alone inciting to an attempt to commit a crime. It knows only instigation to crime, and this, to be punishable, must have occurred "by means of gifts, promises, threats, abuse of authority or of power,<"p137b"> machinations or culpable artifices" (Code pénal, art. 60).[48] The Ministry of State, steeped in the Prussian Landrecht, overlooked, just as Herr Dühring does, the essential difference between the sharply defined French code and the vagueness and indefiniteness of the Landrecht and, subjecting Lassalle to a tendentious trial, egregiously failed in the case. Only a person who is completely ignorant of modern French law can venture to assert that French criminal procedure permitted the Prussian Landrecht form of acquittal for lack of evidence, this half acquittal; criminal procedure under French law knows only conviction or acquittal, nothing in between.

    So we are forced to say that Herr Dühring would certainly not have been able to perpetrate this "treatment<"p138"> of history in the grand manner" against Lassalle with such confidence if he had ever had the Code Napoléon in his hands.[49] We must therefore state as a fact that modern French law, the only modern civil code, which rests on the social achievements of the great French Revolution and translates them into legal form, is completely unknown to Herr Dühring.

    In another place, in the criticism of trial by jury with majority decision which was adopted throughout the Continent in accordance with the French model, we are taught:

    "Yes, it will even be possible to familiarize oneself with the idea, which for that matter is not without historical precedent, that a conviction where opinion is divided should be one of the impossible institutions in a perfect community. . . . However, as already indicated above, this serious and profoundly intelligent mode of thought must seem unsuitable for the traditional forms, because it is too good for them."

    Once again, Herr Dühring is ignorant of the fact that under English common law, i.e., the unwritten customary law which has been in force since time immemorial, and certainly at least since the fourteenth century, the unanimity of the jury is absolutely essential, not only for convictions in criminal cases but also for judgements in civil suits. Thus the serious and profoundly intelligent mode of thought, which according to Herr Dühring is too good for the present-day world, had legal validity in England as far back as the darkest Middle Ages, and from England it was brought to Ireland, the United States of America and all the English colonies. Yet the most exhaustive specialized study failed to reveal to Herr Dühring the faintest whisper of all this! The area in which a unanimous verdict by the jury is required is therefore not only infinitely greater than the tiny area where the Prussian Landrecht is in force, but is also more extensive than all the areas taken together in which juries decide by majority vote. Not only is French law, the only modern law, totally unknown to Herr Dühring; he is equally ignorant of the only Germanic law which has developed independently of Roman authority up to the present day and spread to all parts of the world -- English law. And why not? Because the English brand of the juridical mode of thought "would in any case be unable to stand up against the schooling in the pure concepts of the classical Roman jurists achieved on German soil", says Herr Dühring; and he proceeds:

    "What is the English-speaking world with its childish hodge-podge of a language as compared with our natural language structure?" <"p139">

    To which we might answer with Spinoza: Ignotantia non est argumentum, ignorance is no argument."[50]

    We can accordingly come to no other conclusion than that Herr Dühring's most exhaustive specialized study consisted<"p139a"> in his absorption for three years in the theoretical study of the Corpus juris,[51] and for a further three years in the practical study of the noble Prussian Landrecht. That is certainly quite meritorious and would be ample for a really respectable district judge or lawyer in old Prussia. But when a person undertakes to compose a philosophy of law for all worlds and all ages, he should at least have some degree of acquaintance with legal systems like those of the French, English and Americans, nations which have played quite a different role in history from that played by the little corner of Germany in which the Prussian Landrecht flourishes. But let us see further.

    "The variegated medley of local, provincial and national laws, which arbitrarily run counter to one another in the most diverse directions sometimes as common law, sometimes as written law, often cloaking the most important issues in a purely statutory form -- this pattern-book of disorder and contradiction, in which particular points override general principles and general principles sometimes override particular points -- is really not calculated to enable anyone . . . to form a clear conception of jurisprudence."

    But where does this confusion exist? Once again, within the area where the Prussian Landrecht holds sway, where alongside, over or under this Landrecht there are provincial laws and local statutes, here and there also common law and other trash, ranging through the most diverse degrees of relative validity and eliciting from all practising jurists that cry for help which Herr Dühring here so sympathetically echoes. He need not even go outside his beloved Prussia -- he need only come as far as the Rhine to convince himself that all this has ceased to be an issue there for the last seventy years -- not to speak of other civilized countries, where these antiquated conditions have long since been abolished.

    Further:

    "In a less blunt form the natural responsibility of individuals is veiled by means of secret and therefore anonymous collective decisions and actions on the part of collegia or other official institutions of public authority, which mask the personal share of each separate member."

    And in another passage:

    "In our present situation it will be regarded as an astonishing and extremely stringent demand if one opposes the cloaking and covering up of individual responsibility by collective bodies."

    Perhaps Herr Dühring will regard it as an astonishing piece of information when we tell him that in the sphere of English law each member of a judicial bench has to give his decision separately and in open court, stating the grounds on which it is based; that administrative collective bodies which are not elected and do not transact business or vote publicly are essentially a Prussian institution and are unknown in most other countries; and that therefore his demand can only be regarded as astonishing and extremely stringent -- in Prussia.

    Similarly, his complaints about the compulsory introduction of religious practices in birth, marriage, death and burial apply to Prussia alone of all the larger civilized countries, and since the introduction of civil registration no longer even there. What Herr Dühring can accomplish only by means of a future "socialitarian"<"p141"> state of things, even Bismarck has meanwhile managed by means of a simple law.[52]

    It is just the same when he strikes up a specifically Prussian jeremiad with his "complaint over the inadequate preparation of jurists for their profession", a complaint which could be extended to cover "administrative officials"; and even his ridiculously inflated hatred of the Jews, which he exhibits on every possible occasion, is a feature which if not specifically Prussian is yet specific to the region east of the Elbe. That same philosopher of reality who has a sovereign contempt for all prejudices and superstitions is himself so deeply immersed in personal crotchets that he calls the popular prejudice against the Jews, inherited from the bigotry of the Middle Ages, a "natural judgement" based on "natural grounds", and he rises to pyramidal heights in asserting that

"socialism is the only power which can oppose population conditions with a rather strong Jewish admixture" (conditions with a Jewish admixture! What "natural" German!).

    Enough of this. The grandiloquent boasts of legal erudition have as their basis -- at best -- only the most common-place professional knowledge possessed by a very ordinary jurist from old Prussia. The sphere of legal and political science, the achievements of which Herr Dühring consistently expounds, "coincides" with the area where the Prussian Landrecht holds sway. Apart from Roman law, with which every jurist is fairly familiar, even in England nowadays, his knowledge of law is confined wholly and solely to the Prussian Landrecht -- that legal code of an enlightened patriarchal despotism which is written in the kind of German Herr Dühring appears to have been trained in, and which, with its moral glosses, its juristic vagueness and inconsistency, its caning as a means of torture and punishment, belongs entirely to the pre-revolutionary epoch. Whatever exists beyond this Herr Dühring regards as evil -- both modern French civil law and English law with its quite peculiar development and its safeguarding of personal liberty, which is unknown anywhere on the Continent. The philosophy which "cannot allow the validity of any merely apparent horizon, but unfolds all earths and heavens of outer and inner nature in its mighty revolutionizing sweep" -- has as its real horizon the boundaries of the six eastern provinces of old Prussia, and in addition perhaps the few other patches of land where the noble Landrecht holds sway; and beyond this horizon it unfolds neither earths nor heavens, neither outer nor inner nature, but only a picture of the crassest ignorance of what is happening in the rest of the world.

    It is hard to deal with morals and law without coming up against the question of the so-called freedom of the will, of man's responsibility for his actions, of the relation between necessity and freedom. The philosophy of reality has not one but actually two solutions of this problem.

    "All false theories of freedom must be replaced by what we know from experience is the nature of the relation between rational judgement on the one hand and instinctive impulses on the other, a relation which so to speak unites them into a single mean force. The fundamental facts of this form of dynamics must be drawn from observation and must in general also be estimated as closely as possible according to their nature and magnitude with regard to the calculation in advance of events which have not yet occurred. In this manner the silly delusions of inner freedom, which people have chewed and fed on for thousands of years, are not only thoroughly cleared away, but are replaced by something positive, which can be made use of for the practical regulation of life."

    On this basis freedom consists in rational judgement pulling a man to the right while irrational impulses pull him to the left, and in this parallelogram of forces the actual movement follows the direction of the diagonal. Freedom would therefore be the mean between judgement and impulse, between reason and unreason, and its degree in each individual case could be determined<"p143"> on the basis of experience by a "personal equation", to use an astronomical expression.[53] But a few pages later on we find:

    "We base moral responsibility on freedom, which however means nothing more to us than susceptibility to conscious motives in accordance with our natural and acquired intelligence. All such motives operate with the inevitability of natural law, notwithstanding an awareness of the possible contradictions in the actions; but it is precisely on this unavoidable compulsion that we rely when we apply the moral levers."

    This second definition of freedom, which quite unceremoniously gives a knock-out blow to the first, is again nothing but an extreme vulgarization of the Hegelian conception. Hegel was the first to state the relation between freedom and necessity correctly.<"p144"> To him, freedom is the recognition of necessity. "Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood ."[54] Freedom does not consist in an imaginary independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws and in the possibility which is thus given of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves -- two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the facts. Therefore the freer a man's judgement in relation to a definite point in question, the greater the necessity with which the content of this judgement will be determined; while the uncertainty founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and contradictory possibilities of decision, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is commanded by the very object it should itself command. Freedom therefore consists in command over ourselves and over external nature, a command founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.

    The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all esentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in civilization was a step towards freedom. On the threshold of human history there stands the discovery that mechanical motion can be transformed into heat, the production of fire by friction; at the close of the development traversed so far there stands the discovery that heat can be transformed into mechanical motion, the steam-engine. In spite of the gigantic liberating revolution which the steam-engine is carrying through in the social world -- and which is not yet completed by half -- it is beyond all doubt that the generation of fire by friction has had an even greater effect on the liberation of mankind. For the generation of fire by friction for the first time gave man command over one of the forces of nature, and thus separated him for ever from the animal kingdom. The steam-engine will never bring about such a mighty leap forward in human development, however important it may seem in our eyes as representing all those immense productive forces dependent on it, forces which alone make possible a state of society in which there are no longer class distinctions or anxiety over the means of subsistence for the individual, and in which for the first time there can be talk of real human freedom, of an existence in harmony with the known laws of nature. But the simple fact that all past history can be characterized as the history of the epoch from the practical discovery of the transformation of mechanical motion into heat up to that of the transformation of heat into mechanical motion shows how young the whole of human history still is, and how ridiculous it would be to attempt to ascribe any absolute validity to our present views.

    True, Herr Dühring's treatment of history is different. In general, as a story of error, ignorance and barbarity, of violence and subjugation, it is a repulsive object to the philosophy of reality, but considered in detail it is divided into two great periods, namely (1) from the self-identical state of matter up to the French Revolution; (2) from the French Revolution up to Herr Dühring; the nineteenth century remains "still essentially reactionary, indeed from the intellectual standpoint it is that (!) even more so than the eighteenth". Nevertheless, it bears socialism in its womb, and therewith "the germ of a mightier regeneration than was imagined (!) by the forerunners and heroes of the French Revolution".

    The philosophy of reality's contempt for all past history is justified as follows:

    "The few thousand years, the historical recollection of which has been facilitated by original documents, are, together with the constitution of man so far, of little significance when one thinks of the succession of thousands of years to come. . . . The human race as a whole is still very young, and when in time to come scientific recollection has tens of thousands instead of thousands of years to reckon with, the intellectually immature childhood of our institutions becomes a self-evident premise undisputed in relation to our epoch, which will then be revered as hoary antiquity."

    Without dwelling on the really "natural language structure" of the last sentence, we shall note only two points. Firstly, this "hoary antiquity" will in any case remain a historical epoch of the greatest interest for all future generations, because it forms the basis of all subsequent higher development and because it has for its starting-point the moulding of man from the animal kingdom and for its content the overcoming of obstacles such as will never again confront the associated men of the future. Secondly, the close of this hoary antiquity -- contrasted with which the future periods of history hold the promise of quite other scientific, technical and social achievements because they will no longer be retarded by these difficulties and obstacles -- this close is in any case a very strange moment to choose for laying down the law for these thousands of years to come in the form of final and ultimate truths, immutable truths and deep-rooted conceptions discovered on the basis of the intellectually immature childhood of our so very "backward" and "retrogressive" century. Only the Richard Wagner of philosophy -- but minus Wagner's talents -- could fail to see that all the depreciatory epithets flung at previous historical development also remain attached to what is claimed to be its final outcome -- the so-called philosophy of reality.

    One of the most significant morsels of the new deep-rooted science is the section on the individualization of life and the enhancement of its value. Here oracular commonplaces bubble up and gush forth in an irresistible torrent for three full chapters. Unfortunately we must limit ourselves to a few short samples.

    "The deeper essence of all sensation and therefore of all subjective forms of life rests on the difference between states. . . . But for a full (!) life it can be shown without much trouble (!) that appreciation is heightened and the decisive stimuli are developed, not by persistence in a particular state but by a transition from one situation in life to another. . . . The approximately self-identical state which is so to speak in permanent inertia and as it were continues in the same position of equilibrium, whatever its nature may be, has but little significance for the testing of existence. . . . Habituation and so to speak inurement make it something of absolute in difference and unconcern, something which is not very distinct from being dead. At most the torment of boredom also enters into it as a kind of negative life impulse. . . . A life of stagnation extinguishes all passion and all interest in existence, both for individuals and for peoples. But it is our law of difference through which all these phenomena become explicable."

    The rapidity with which Herr Dühring establishes his fundamentally original conclusions passes all belief. The commonplace that the continued stimulation of the same nerve or the continuation of the same stimulus fatigues each nerve or each nervous system, and that therefore in a normal condition nerve stimuli must be interrupted and varied -- which for years has been stated in every textbook of physiology and is known to every philistine from his own experience -- is first translated into the language of the philosophy of reality. No sooner has this hoary platitude been translated into the mysterious formula that the deeper essence of all sensation rests on the difference between states than it is further transformed into "our law of difference". And this law of difference makes "absolutely explicable" a whole series of phenomena, which in turn are nothing more than illustrations and examples of the pleasantness of variety, and which require no explanation whatever even for the most common philistine understanding and gain not the breadth of an atom in clarity by reference to this alleged law of difference.

    But this far from exhausts the deep-rootedness of "our law of difference".

    "The sequence of ages in life and the emergence of the different conditions of life bound up with them furnish a very obvious example with which to illustrate our principle of difference. . . . Child, boy, youth and man experience the intensity of their appreciation of life not so much when the state in which they find themselves has already become fixed as in the periods of transition from one stage to another."

    Even this is not enough.

    "Our law of difference can be given an even more distant application if we take into consideration the fact that the repetition of what has already been tried or done has no attraction."

    And now the reader can himself imagine the oracular twaddle for which sentences of the profundity and deep-rootedness of those cited form the starting-point. Herr Dühring may well shout triumphantly at the end of his book:

    "The law of difference has become decisive both in theory and in practice for the appreciation and enhancement of the value of life!"

    This is likewise true of Herr Dühring's appreciation of the intellectual value of his public: he must believe that it is composed of sheer asses or philistines.

    We are further given the following extremely practical rules of life:

    "The method whereby total interest in life can be kept active" (a fitting task for philistines and those who want to become such!) "consists in allowing the particular and so to speak elementary interests, of which the total interest is composed, to develop or succeed each other in accordance with natural periods of time. Simultaneously, for the same state the succession of stages may be made use of by replacing the lower and more easily satisfied stimuli by higher and more permanently effective excitations in order to avoid the occurrence of any gaps that are entirely devoid of interest. However, it will also be necessary to ensure that natural tensions or those arising in the normal course of social existence are not arbitrarily accumulated or forced or -- the opposite perversion -- satisfied by the lightest stimulation, and thus prevented from developing a want which is capable of gratification. In this as in other cases the maintenance of the natural rhythm is the precondition of all harmonious and agreeable movement. Nor should anyone set himself the insoluble problem of trying to prolong the stimuli of any situation beyond the period allotted them by nature or by the circumstances" -- and so on.

    The good fellow who takes as his rule for the "testing of life" these solemn oracles of philistine pedantry splitting hairs over the shallowest platitudes will certainly not have to complain of "gaps entirely devoid of interest". It will take him all his time to prepare his pleasures and get them in the right order, so that he will not have a moment left to enjoy them.

    We should try out life, full life. There are only two things which Herr Dühring prohibits us:

first "the uncleanliness of indulging in tobacco", and second beverages and foods which "have properties that rouse disgust or are in general reprehensible to the more refined feelings".

    In his Course of Political Economy, however, Herr Dühring writes such a dithyramb on the distilling of spirits that it is impossible that he should include liquor in this category; we are therefore forced to conclude that his prohibition covers only wine and beer. He has only to prohibit meat, too, and he will have then raised the philosophy of reality to the same height as that on which the late Gustav Struve moved with such great success -- the height of pure childishness.

    For the rest, Herr Dühring might be slightly more liberal in regard to liquor. A man who, by his own admission, still cannot find the bridge from the static to the dynamic has surely every reason to be indulgent in judging some poor devil who for once has had a drop too much and so gropes in vain for the bridge from the dynamic to the static.