is something which has existed from the
beginning in contradistinction to nature. It would then be of the
greatest importance to bring consciousness and Nature, thought and
existence, into harmony, to harmonise the laws of thought and the laws
of Nature. But one enquires further what are thought and consciousness
and whence do they originate. It is consequently discovered that they
are products of the brain of man, and that Humanity is itself a
product of nature which has developed in and along with its
environment; wherefore it becomes self-apparent that the products of
the brain of man being themselves, in the last instance, natural
products, do not contradict all the rest of Nature but correspond with
it.

But Herr Duehring cannot allow so simple a treatment of the subject.
He thinks not only in the name of Humanity which would be quite a
large affair, but in the name of the conscious and thinking beings of
the whole universe. Indeed, it would be "a degradation of the
foundation concepts of knowledge and consciousness if one should wish
to exclude or even to throw suspicion upon their sovereign value and
undoubted claims to truth by means of the epithet 'human.'" In order
that there may be no suspicion that upon some heavenly body or other
twice two may make five, Herr Duehring does not venture to call
thought a human attribute, and therefore he is obliged to separate it
from the only true foundation on which it rests, as far as we are
concerned, namely, from man and nature, and thereby falls, without any
possibility of getting out, into an "ideology" which causes him to
play baby to Hegel. It is self-evident that one cannot build
materialistic doctrines on foundations so ideological. We shall see
later that Herr Duehring is compelled to push nature to the front as a
conscious agent and, therefore, as that, which people in plain English
call God.

Indeed, our philosopher had other motives in shifting the foundation
of reality from the material world to that of thought. The knowledge
of this general scheme of the universe, of these formal principles of
being is just the foundation of Herr Duehring's philosophy. If we
derive the scheme of the universe not from our own brain, but merely
by means of our own brain, from the material world, we need no
philosophy, but simply knowledge of the world and what occurs in it,
and the results of this knowledge likewise do not constitute a
philosophy, but positive science. In su