elf, is a product of economic
conditions. After he once thoroughly learns this there will be no danger
of his being a Democrat or Anarchist or any other species of dangerous
reactionary. The bourgeois tail is harder to lose. It consists of
animistic, theological and dualistic habits of thought, issuing in
utopianism and non-materialistic idealism. For, if I may be permitted to
toy with the Hegelian dialectic in the manner of Marx, no man can be a
fruitful idealist until he has become a materialist.

The reader of this volume will probably find himself able to agree
pretty fully with what I have said in "Science and Socialism." That is
because, when I wrote that, I had not fully gotten rid of my idealistic
tadpole tail. He will probably have more difficulty in assenting to the
theses of "The Nihilism of Socialism." That is because he has not yet
gotten rid of his tadpole tail. I do not wish to be understood as
speaking with contempt or depreciation of the tadpole tails. Without
their aid most of us bourgeois socialist frogs would never have been
able to get out of our old conservative shells. It was the utopianism of
our tails, in most cases, that first cracked the shell.

I should be sorry to have any reader interpret the materialism of "The
Nihilism of Socialism" into a disposition to deny or depreciate the
great and beneficent influence that Christianity has had in the past. I
should be greatly chagrined to be accused of irreverence in discussing
religion. Irreverence is ever a sign of a narrow intellectual horizon
and a limited vision. The scoffer is the product of the limited
knowledge characteristic of what Engels called "metaphysical
materialism." Unfortunately the mental development of many in the past
has been arrested at this Ingersoll-Voltaire stage. But with the growth
of Modern Socialism the tendency is for the metaphysical materialist to
_grow_ into socialist or dialectic materialism with its Hegelian
watchword, "Nothing is; every thing is becoming."

The socialist materialist realizes that the obsolescent ideals of
Christianity and the Family have played leading roles in the great drama
of human progress. It is impossible for him to speak lightly or
contemptuously of the ideals which have sustained and comforted, guided
and cheered countless hosts of his fellows through the long, dark ages
of Christian Faith. But he knows that those ages are past and that
present day adherence to the old ideals is atavis