Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

the now matured philosophical reason are all equally reprehensible, and which one would best forget as quickly as possible, but as the development process of humanity itself. It became the task of thought to follow its gradual stages through all errant paths and to demonstrate its inner lawfulness through all apparent contingencies.

That the Hegelian system did not solve the task it set for itself is indifferent here. Its epoch-making merit was to have set it. It is, in fact, a task that no individual will ever be able to solve. Although Hegel—alongside Saint-Simon—was the most universal mind of his time, he was nonetheless limited, first by the necessarily restricted scope of his own knowledge, and second by the knowledge and views of his epoch, which were also limited in scope and depth. To this, however, was added a third factor. Hegel was an idealist; that is, the thoughts in his head were not to him the more or less abstract reflections of real things and processes, but conversely, things and their development were to him only the realized reflections of the "Idea" which existed somehow already before the world. Everything was thereby turned on its head, and the real connection of the world completely reversed. And however correctly and ingeniously some individual connections were grasped by Hegel, for the stated reasons, much in the details necessarily had to be patched, artificial, constructed, in short, distorted. The Hegelian system as such was a colossal miscarriage—but also the last of its kind. It suffered from an internal, incurable contradiction: on one hand, it had as its essential premise the historical view that human history is a process of development which, by its nature, cannot find its intellectual finality through the discovery of a so-called absolute truth; on the other hand, it claims to be the epitome of this very absolute truth. An all-encompassing, once-and-for-all final system of knowledge of nature and history stands in contradiction to the fundamental laws of dialectical thinking; this, however, by no means excludes, but on the contrary includes, the fact that the systematic knowledge of the entire external world can make giant strides from generation to generation.

The insight into the total distortedness of previous German idealism led necessarily to materialism, but, mind you, not to the merely metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the 18th century. In contrast to the naive-revolutionary, simple rejection of all earlier history, modern materialism sees in history the development process of humanity, whose laws of motion it is its task to discover.