Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/135

 make the thing axiomatic forthwith. This is a remarkable, clever, and system-shaping discovery of our system-shaping philosopher. But to give the truth its due we are regretfully bound to say that he did not discover the two men. They are common to the whole of the eighteenth century. They appear in Rousseau's Treatise on Equality, 1754, where, by the way, they serve to prove axiomatically the direct opposite of Herr Duehring's contentions. They play an important part in political economy from Adam Smith to Ricardo, but here they are so far unequal that they follow different trades, principally hunting and fishing, and they exchange their mutual products. They serve through the entire eighteenth century principally as mere illustrative examples, and the originality of Herr Duehring consists in the fact that he elevates this method of illustration to a fundamental method for all social science and to a measure of all historical instruction. There is no easier way to arrive at "a really scientific philosophy of things and men."

In order to create the fundamental axiom the two men and their wills are mutually equal and neither has any right to lord it over the other. We cannot find two suitable men. They must be two men who are so free from all national, economic, political and religious conditions, from sex and personal peculiarities that nothing remains of either of them but the mere concept "man" and then they are entirely equal. They are therefore two fully-equipped ghosts conjured up by that very Herr Duehring who particularly ridicules and denounces "spiritistic" movements. These two phantoms must of course do all that their wizard wants of them and so their united productions are a matter of complete indifference to the rest of the world.