icles.

The anti-religious note is noticeable throughout, in itself an echo of
controversies long past, when the arguments of the critics of the Bible
were creating now fury, now dismay, throughout Christendom, before the
Higher Criticism had become respected, and before soi-disant sceptics
could continue to go solemnly to church.

Moreover, the work was written in German for German workmen for whom
religion has not the same significance as it apparently still continues
to possess for the English-speaking people, whose sensitiveness upon the
subject appears to have outlived their faith. However that may be,
religious bodies possess a curious and perhaps satisfactory faculty of
absorbing the truths of science, and still continuing to exist, and even
to thrive, upon what the inexperienced might easily mistake for a deadly
diet.

Under the circumstances there is no reason why Engels' remarks should
affect even the timorous, although it must be remembered that a very
able English socialist philosopher is reputed to have damaged his
chances irretrievably by an ill-judged quotation from Mr. Swinburne.

It must be confessed that the occasional bitterness in which Engels
indulges is to be deplored, in a work of so essentially intellectual a
character, but it is little to be wondered at. His contempt for
university professors and the pretentious cultivated classes, who claim
so much upon such slight grounds, is not strange, when we consider the
honest labors of himself and his colleagues and the superficial
place-hunting of the recognized savants. He loves learning for its own
sake, for the sake of truth and scientific accuracy, and he cannot feel
anything but scorn for those who use it as a means to lull the
consciences of the rich, and to gain place and power for themselves. The
degradation of German philosophy affects him with a real sorrow; the
scholar is outraged at the mockery. "Sterility," "eclecticism," these
are the terms in which he sums up the teachings of the official
professors, and they are almost too gentle to be applied to the
dispiriting and disheartening doctrines which are taught to the
English-speaking student of to-day under the name of economics or
philosophy.

In the first part of his pamphlet, for it is little more in size, Engels
gives a short and concise account of the work of Hegel and the later
Hegelian School. He shows how the philosophy of Hegel has both a
conservative and a radical side and