540 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



later writings and in his scheme of positive polity, the 

 endeavour to re-establish an intellectual and spiritual 

 control of human affairs. With this interest clearly 

 before him he looks back with admiration on the Middle 

 Ages, where such a control existed, and sympathises 

 with the endeavours of the reactionary school of social 

 politics, represented by de Maistre, to bring back again 

 a spiritual hierarchy. Only with him the spiritual 

 power is to be intellectual and leased upon science, and 

 not theocratic and based on revelation. 



Marx came from the school of Hegel and inherited 

 the monistic and systematic tendencies of that school. 

 He came early under the influence of Feuerbach. From 

 him he had learnt to look upon religion and the ideal 

 forces in human nature and history as mere idealisations 

 of natural or purely material processes, which have no 

 independent existence and no influence except as logical 

 abstractions. Coming, therefore, in contact with the 

 French school of social philosophers he, following his 

 monistic tendency of thought, discarded the ideal ele- 

 ments in social life as merely secondary and derived 

 and fastened with so much the more tenacity on the 

 naturalistic side. To him history, notably modern his- 

 tory, was entirely a product of the economic factors 

 of progress. And this conception he was led to sub- 

 stantiate and develop further when, through his friend, 

 Engels (1820-1895) — who had forestalled him in the 

 76. study of British political economy, — he became acquainted 



Influence of . , , . . p » t r^ • i t i • <. n 



British With the writiuffs 01 Adam bmith and his followers. 



Political ° 



Economy. Now wc havc sccu that with Adam Smith political 



economy formed only a province in the larger region 



