SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION 



from the mass of the Young-Hegelians by ad- 

 mitting the value of the materialists of the i8th 

 century, although he objected to the " crude ma- 

 terialism " of a Holbach and Helvetius. Koep- 

 pen never divested himself fully of the bourgeois 

 psychology, but his historical talent proved to be 

 invaluable to Karl Marx, who was destined to be- 

 come the first scientific spokesman of the prole- 

 tarian revolution. 



With the development of the German bour- 

 geoisie, and its repression by the feudal nobility, 

 the thinkers of the rising classes felt the need of 

 finding a philosophical expression for their his- 

 torical condition. In the minds of Bruno Bauer, 

 Koeppen and Marx, this longing for self-expres- 

 sion found vent in a study of self-consciousness. 

 Their starting point was Hegel's analysis of the 

 Grecian philosophy of consciousness, particularly 

 the development of self-consciousness in its rela- 

 tion to social consciousness, in the Sceptics, Epi- 

 cureans and Stoics. In the Sceptics, self-con- 

 sciousness had renounced all contact with the 

 world and retreated into itself. The Epicureans 

 had undertaken to show that the principle of in- 

 dividual consciousness was the compelling motive 

 of the universe. The Stoics, finally, had empha- 

 sized the interrelation of individual consciousness 



108 



