eed of it through persistent elimination of all inner
contradictions.

Still higher ideological conceptions, i. e., still further removed from
the economic foundations, take the form of philosophy and religion.
Here, the connection of the ideas with the material conditions of
existence become more and more complicated and obscured by reason of the
increasing number of links between them, but it exists. As the whole
Rennaissance from the middle of the fifteenth century was an actual
product of the city, and therefore of the bourgeois domination, so was
also the philosophy, since that time newly awakened. Its content was
actually only the philosophical expression of the thoughts corresponding
with the development of the small and middle bourgeois into the great
bourgeois. Among the English and French of the preceding century, who
were for the most part as good political economists as they were
philosophers, this is quite evident, and we have proofs on its very
face, as regards the Hegelian school.

Let us now give a slight glance at religion since it appears to stand
furthest away from and to be most foreign to material life. Religion
arose at a very remote period of human development, in the savage state,
from certain erroneous and barbaric conceptions of men with regard to
themselves and the outside world of nature around them. Every
ideological notion develops, however, when once it has arisen; it grows
by additions to the given idea, and develops it further, otherwise
there would be no ideology, that is, no occupation with thoughts as with
independent thought-existence, developing independently and subject only
to its own laws. That the material conditions of life of the men within
whose heads this thought force is at work finally determine the course
of this thought-process necessarily remains still unknown to these men,
otherwise there would be an entire end of the ideology. These original
religious notions, therefore, which are for the most part common to each
kindred group of peoples, develop after the separation of the group in a
special manner peculiar to each tribe, according to its particular
conditions of existence, and this process is for a class of groups of
people, and particularly for the Aryans (Indo-Europeans) shown
individually by comparative mythology. The gods developed by each tribe
were national gods, whose power extended no further than to protect the
national territory; beyond the frontier other