Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/13

 or other at what may be called the Duehring stage of controversy. There are two very distinct impulses towards socialism. The individuals who are influenced by these impulses must sooner or later come into collision, and as a result of the impact the movement is for a time divided into hostile parties and a war of pamphleteering and oratory supervenes. This period has just ended in France. For the last few years the French movement has been divided upon the question of the philosophical foundation of the movement, and the parties to the controversy may be divided into those who sought to justify the movement upon ethical grounds and those who have regarded it as a modern political phenomenon dependent alone upon economic conditions. The former of these parties based its claims to the suffrages of the French people upon the justice of the socialistic demands. It proclaimed socialism to be the logical result of the Revolution, the necessary conclusion from the teachings of the revolutionary philosophers. Justice was the word in which they summed up the claims of socialism, that and Equality, for which latter term as Engels points out in the present work, the French have a fondness which amounts almost to a mania. Hence one party of the French socialist movement chose as a platform those very "eternal truths" which Engels ridicules and which it is the sole purpose of the present work to attack.

To kill "eternal truths" is however by no means an easy matter. Years of habit have made them part of the mental structure of the citizens of the modern democratic or semi-democratic states. Not only in France but to an even greater degree in the English speaking countries these "eternal truths" persist, they form the stock in trade of the clergyman and the ordinary