Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/59

 foundation concepts of knowledge and consciousness if one should wish to exclude or even to throw suspicion upon their sovereign value and undoubted claims to truth by means of the epithet 'human.'" In order that there may be no suspicion that upon some heavenly body or other twice two may make five, Herr Duehring does not venture to call thought a human attribute, and therefore he is obliged to separate it from the only true foundation on which it rests, as far as we are concerned, namely, from man and nature, and thereby falls, without any possibility of getting out, into an "ideology" which causes him to play baby to Hegel. It is self-evident that one cannot build materialistic doctrines on foundations so ideological. We shall see later that Herr Duehring is compelled to push nature to the front as a conscious agent and, therefore, as that, which people in plain English call God.

Indeed, our philosopher had other motives in shifting the foundation of reality from the material world to that of thought. The knowledge of this general scheme of the universe, of these formal principles of being is just the foundation of Herr Duehring's philosophy. If we derive the scheme of the universe not from our own brain, but merely by means of our own brain, from the material world, we need no philosophy, but simply knowledge of the world and what occurs in it, and the results of this knowledge likewise do not constitute a philosophy, but positive science. In such a case, however, Herr Duehring's entire book would have been love's labor lost.

Further, if no philosophy, as such, is longer required there is no longer the necessity of any philosophy of nature even. The view that all the phenomena of nature stand in systematic mutual relations compels science to