ys on Feuerbach printed here as an
appendix. These are notes hurriedly scribbled in for later elaboration,
not in the least degree prepared for the press, but invaluable, as the
first written form, in which is planted the genial germ of the new
philosophy.

FRIEDRICH ENGELS.

London, 21 February, 1888.

FEUERBACH

I.

The volume before us brings us at once to a period which, in the matter
of time, lies a full generation behind us, but which is as foreign to
the present generation in Germany as if it were quite a century old.
And, still, it was the period of the preparation of Germany for the
revolution of 1848, and all that has happened to us since is only a
continuation of 1848, only a carrying out of the last will and testament
of the revolution.

Just as in France in the eighteenth, so in Germany in the nineteenth
century, revolutionary philosophic conceptions introduced a breaking up
of existing political conditions. But how different the two appear! The
French were engaged in open fight with all recognized science, with the
Church, frequently also with the State, their writings were published
beyond the frontiers in Holland or in England, and they themselves were
frequently imprisoned in the Bastile. The Germans, on the contrary, were
professors, appointed instructors of youth by the State, their writings,
recognized text-books, and their definite system of universal progress,
the Hegelian, raised, as it were, to the rank of a royal Prussian
philosophy of government. And behind these professors, behind their
pedantically obscure utterances, in their heavy wearisome periods, was
it possible that the revolution could conceal itself? Were not just the
people who were looked upon at that time as the leaders of the
revolution, the Liberals, the bitterest opponents of the brain-turning
philosophy? But what neither the Governmentalists nor the Liberals saw,
that saw, at least one man, and that man was Heinrich Heine.

Let us take an example. No philosophic statement has so invited the
thanks of narrow-minded governments and the anger of the equally narrow
Liberals as the famous statement of Hegel: "All that is real is
reasonable, and all that is reasonable is real." This was essentially
the blessing of all that is, the philosophical benediction of despotism,
police-government, star-chamber justice and the censorship. So Frederick
William III and his subjects understood it; but, according to Hegel, n