SCIENCE AND THE WORKING CLASS 



ingless ethical generalizations of love. On this 

 field, Hegel himself had gone farther than his 

 revolutionary disciple. Feuerbach overcame the 

 natural and religious idealism of Hegel, but 

 failed to even suspect the meaning of the Hegel- 

 ian philosophy of state and law. When con- 

 fronted with the actual problems of social 

 evolution, he was as helpless as the French so- 

 cialists of the i8th century, who were masters of 

 philosophic criticism, but had nothing construc- 

 tive to offer save Utopian abstractions. 



Marx, on his part, had arrived at an under- 

 standing of the deep and significant interrelation 

 between politics and philosophy. In Kant's 

 philosophy, Marx recognized the German theory 

 of the French revolution. And with a fine sense 

 of discrimination, he pointed out the real progress 

 of Hegel over Kant in sociology and history. 

 While Kant had still maintained the distinction 

 between privileged citizens of the state and un- 

 privileged members of society, Hegel regarded 

 the state as that great organism, in which every 

 human being should realize its legal, moral and 

 political liberty. And the dialectic process, as 

 outlined by Hegel, was praised by Marx as a 

 wonderful advance over the historical blindness 

 of Kant. 



113 



