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The object of this historical sketch is to show the origin of Feuerbach's philosophy as well as of that of Marx and Engels. As the fight between the Young Hegelians and the conservatives grew hotter, the radicals were driven back upon the English-French materialism of the preceding century.
It was only several years after the beginning of our acquaintance that I felt myself in essential agreement with Hans Broechner. I had been enraptured by a study of Ludwig Feuerbach's books, for Feuerbach was the first thinker in whose writings I found the origin of the idea of God in the human mind satisfactorily explained.
The veil which I afterwards saw spread over so many things in Feuerbach's writings at that time produced the same influence upon me as the mist whence rise here the towers, yonder the battlements of a castle.
And since I carry on my operations with more exact prudence and therefore with greater success I fulfill the strongest maxims of the Feuerbach moral philosophy and become a rich man into the bargain. In other words, Feuerbach's morality is hewn out of the capitalistic system of today, little as he might wish or think it to be.
Two new and important works, ethically related to this, have just been issued; the one in France, called Qu'est-ce que la Religion, d'après la Nouvelle Philosophie Allemande, wherein Feuerbach's daring evolutions of Hegel's principles are translated for the benefit of those who cannot read German; the other, called The Progress of Intellect, showing the various developments of religious ideas through history.
I thought of my mother and blind old Langethal, of Tzschirner, and of Herbert Pernice, and, dissatisfied with myself, resolved to do in the future not only what was seemly, but what the duty of entering more deeply into the science which I had chosen required. The childish faith which Feuerbach's teachings had threatened to destroy seemed to gaze loyally at me with my mother's eyes.
Thus the Christian religion in France was, as a matter of fact, so completely overthrown between the years 1793 and 1798, that Napoleon himself could not re-introduce it without opposition and difficulty, without, in the interval, any desire for a substitute, in Feuerbach's sense, making itself felt.
We remained silent a long time, and whenever impatience, suffering, and faintness threatened to overpower me, I found, like Antaeus when he touched the earth that had given him birth, new strength in my mother's heart. My old life seemed henceforward to lie far behind me. I did not take up Feuerbach's writings again; his way could never again have been mine.
We remained silent a long time, and whenever impatience, suffering, and faintness threatened to overpower me, I found, like Antaeus when he touched the earth that had given him birth, new strength in my mother's heart. My old life seemed henceforward to lie far behind me. I did not take up Feuerbach's writings again; his way could never again have been mine.
Then came Feuerbach's "Wesen des Christenthums." With one blow it cut the contradiction, in that it placed materialism on the throne again without any circumlocution. Nature exists independently of all philosophies. It is the foundation upon which we, ourselves products of nature, are built.
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