They, of course, offer their goods on their best knowledge
and conscience. And we do believe that they know little ;
but the worst of it is that they don't want to know and
don't want to learn. The superstition is with them not
as much a matter of brains as of instinct. They are
alarmed at ghost-freed thought, for they feel instinctively
that it is dangerous to their interests. And it is that
instinctive fear which paralyzes them and renders them
unfit for courageous and consistent research.
Under such circumstances it would be a mistake to
treat them as equals, to meet them in a friendly spirit and
to try to bring them tack on the right path. They are
by no means stray lanlbs, but bitter foes. Since Kant a
century has gone; Hegel and Feuerbach have come and
gone, and before all, the capitalist system has fully devel-
oped which exploits the people and, finally, when no
profits can be made out of them, throws them pitilessly
on the street and leaves them to starvation. Then the
people open their innocent eyes. All ideology is driven
out of them, and thus we need no tender pedagogues, nor
Moses and the Prophets to educate the masses. Our
pupils, the wage-earners, possess all qualifications neces-
sary to gain an insight into the Social-Democratic Phi-
losophy, which regards the natural phenomena as the
material for theoretical or scientific truth, the empirical
and materialist, or, if you like, also subjective truth,
which, however, must be clearly distingui^ed frc«n the
extravagant or cracked truth of metaphysics.
