Page:Karl Kautsky - Frederick Engels - 1899.djvu/6

 of existing ones, the Hegelian philosophy has indeed accomplished much.

Besides Heinrich Heine, Feuerbach, Marx and others, Frederick Engels was much influenced by Hegel. The practical and theoretic economic training of Engels made Hegelianism to him not merely a dialectic play of words, but a means of scientific investigation; not a method of constructing the actual existing conditions out of ideas, but a means for extracting the ideas out of the actually existing relations. He wished originally to take economic studies in the university, so after he had gone through the little "Realscule" at Barmen (which by its training in physics and chemistry gave him an invaluable foundation in scientific principles), he went to the "Gymnasium" at Elberfeldt. Family relations and early tendencies toward oppositional politics made every official career hateful to him and left him the year before the examinations to choose the life of a merchant.

He followed his philosophical studies while working in mercantile houses in Bremen and Berlin. From 1842–44 he was employed in a manufacturing establishment in Manchester of which his father was part owner.

In England, the mother land of capitalism, his keen economic and philosophical insight soon made the tendency of capitalistic production plain to him. The actual position of the proletariat, its misery and historical future, were more plainly evident here than anywhere else. His interest in the proletariat was strengthened, and we soon find him in the midst of the agitation of the Utopian socialism, which was then current, as well as of the actual labor movement which had not yet become socialistic. He studied both of these diligently, not as an onlooker but as a fellow-fighter. He was associated with the "Northern Star," the party organ of the Chartists, and the "New Moral World" of Robert Owen.

Upon his return to Germany he visited Marx in Paris, with whom he was already in correspondence. Their friendship, which was to be of such far-reaching significance to both, dates from that time. They agreed so completely in their ideas that they began a book together for the purpose of making known their separation from the Hegelian school.

The Hegelian philosophy, like the greater part of the German philosophy, was ideological. It took for granted that ideas are not images of real conditions, but have an independent-existence, and that their development forms a foundation for the development of things. Marx and Engels