from a definite point
makes a complete breach with the idealistic system of his predecessor.
With irresistible force he brings himself to the view that the Hegelian
idea of the existence of the absolute idea before the world, the
pre-existence of the logical categories before the universe came into
being, is nothing else than the fantastical survival of the belief in
the existence of an extra-mundane creator; that the material, sensible,
actual world, to which we ourselves belong, is the only reality, and
that our consciousness and thought, however supernatural they may seem,
are only evidences of a material bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not
a product of mind, but mind itself is only the highest product of
matter. This is, of course, pure materialism. When he reached this point
Feuerbach came to a standstill. He cannot overcome ordinary
philosophical prejudice, prejudice not against the thing, but against
the name materialism. He says "Materialism is for me the foundation of
the building of the being and knowledge of man, but it is not for me
what it is for the physiologists in the narrow sense, as Moleschott, for
example, since necessarily from their standpoint it is the building
itself. Backwards, I am in accord with the materialists but not
forwards."

Feuerbach here confuses materialism, which is a philosophy of the
universe dependent upon a certain comprehension of the relations between
matter and spirit, with the special forms in which this philosophy
appeared at a certain historical stage--namely in the eighteenth
century. More than that he confuses it with the shallow and vulgarized
form in which the materialism of the eighteenth century exists today, in
the minds of naturalists and physicians, and was popularized during a
period of fifty years in the writings of Buechner, Vogt and Moleschott.
But as idealism has passed through a series of evolutionary
developments, so also has materialism--with each epoch-making discovery
in the department of natural science it has been obliged to change its
form; since then, history also, being subjected to the materialistic
method of treatment, shows itself as a new road of progress.

The materialism of the preceding century was overwhelmingly mechanical,
because at that time of all the natural sciences, mechanics, and indeed,
only the mechanics of the celestial and terrestrial fixed bodies, the
mechanics of gravity, in short, had reached any definite conclusions.
Che