Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/58

 As a matter of fact, we prefer Hegel's "Encyclopedia," with all its fever phantoms, to the "final truths of the last instance" of Herr Duehring. In the first place, according to Herr Duehring we have the general scheme of the universe which by Hegel is called "logic." Then according to both of them we have the application of this scheme to nature by means of the logical categories, the philosophy of nature, and finally their application to Humanity, by what Hegel calls "the Philosophy of the Spirit." "The inner logical arrangement" of Duehring's scheme brings us therefore logically back to Hegel's "Encyclopedia" from which it is taken with a fidelity which would move that Wandering Jew of the Hegelian school, Professor Michelet of Berlin, to tears.

Such a result follows if one takes it for granted that "consciousness," "thought," 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