It is remarkable how greatly the upper classes of society, such as the Englishman calls respectable people, or the better sort of people, etc., have intellectually declined and lost their vigour in England. All energy, all activity, all substance are gone; the landed aristocracy goes hunting, the moneyed aristocracy makes entries in the ledger and at best dabbles in literature which is equally empty and insipid. Political and religious prejudices are inherited from one generation to another; everything is now made easy and there is no longer any need to worry about principles as one had to formerly; they are now picked up already in the cradle, ready made, one has no notion where they come from. What more does one need? One has enjoyed a good education, that is, one has been tormented to no avail with the Romans and Greeks at school, for the rest one is respectable, that is, one has so many thousand pounds to one s name and thus does not have to bother about anything except marrying, if one does not already have a wife. And now, to cap it all, this bugbear which people call intellect"! Where should intellect come from, in such a life, and if it did come, where might it find a home with them? Everything there is as fixed and formalised as in China woe be to the man who oversteps the narrow bounds, woe, thrice woe to the man who offends against a timehonoured prejudice, nine times woe to him if it is a religious prejudice. For all questions they have just two answers, a Whig answer and a Tory answer; and these answers were long ago prescribed by the sage supreme masters of ceremony of both parties, you have no need of deliberation and circumstantiality, everything is cut and dried, Dicky Cobden or Lord John Russell has said this, and Bobby Peel or the Duke, that is, the Duke of Wellington, has said that, and that is an end of the matter. You good Germans are told year in, year out by the liberal journalists and parliamentarians what wonderful people, what independent men the English are, and all on account of their free institutions, and from a distance it all looks quite impressive. The debates in the Houses of Parliament, the free press, the tumultuous popular meetings, the elections, the jury system these cannot fail to impress the timid spirit of the average German, and in his astonishment he takes all these splendid appearances for true coin. But ultimately the position of the liberal journalist and parliamentarian is really far from being elevated enough to provide a comprehensive view, whether it be of the development of mankind or just that of a single nation. The English Constitution was quite good in its day and has achieved a fair number of good things, indeed since 1828 it has set to work on its greatest achievement that is to say, on its own destruction but it has not achieved what the liberal attributes to it. It has not made independent men of the English. The English, that is, the educated English, according to whom the national character is judged on the Continent, these English are the most despicable slaves under the sun. Only that part of the English nation which is unknown on the Continent, only the workers, the pariahs of England, the poor, are really respectable, for all their roughness and for all their moral degradation. It is from them that England s salvation will come, they still comprise flexible material; they have no education, but no prejudices either, they still have the strength for a great national deed they still have a future. The aristocracy and nowadays that also includes the middle classes has exhausted itself; such ideas as it had, have been worked out and utilised to their ultimate logical limit, and its rule is approaching its end with giant strides. The Constitution is its work, and the immediate consequence of this work was that it entangled its creators in a mesh of institutions in which any free intellectual movement has been made impossible. The rule of public prejudice is everywhere the first consequence of socalled free political institutions, and in England, the politically freest country in Europe, this rule is stronger than anywhere else except for North America, where public prejudice is legally acknowledged as a power in the state by Iynch law. The Englishman crawls before public prejudice, he immolates himself to it daily and the more liberal he is, the more humbly does he grovel in the dust before his idol. Public prejudice in educated society is however either of Tory or of Whig persuasion, or at best radical and even that no longer has quite the odour of propriety. If you should go amongst educated Englishmen and say that you are Chartists or democrats the balance of your mind will be doubted and your company fled. Or declare you do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and you are done for; if moreover you confess that you are atheists, the next day people will pretend not to know you. And when the independent Englishman for once and this happens rarely enough really begins to think and shakes off the fetters of prejudice he has absorbed with his mother s milk, even then he has not the courage to speak out his convictions openly, even then he feigns an opinion before society that is at least tolerated, and is quite content if occasionally he can discuss his views with some likeminded person in private. Thus the minds of the educated classes in England are closed to all progress and only kept to some degree in movement by the pressure of the working class. It cannot be expected that the literary diet of their decrepit culture should be different from these classes themselves. The whole of fashionable literature moves in a neverending circle and is just as boring and sterile as this blas and effete fashionable society. When Strauss Das Leben Jesu and its fame crossed the Channel, no respectable man dared to translate the book, nor any bookseller of repute to print it. Finally it was translated by a socialist lecturer (there is no German word for this propagandist term) a man, therefore, in one of the world s least fashionable situations a small socialist printer printed it in instalments at a penny each, and the workers of Manchester, Birmingham and London were the only readers Strauss had in England. If, by the way, either of the two parties into which the educated section of the English people is split deserves any preference, it is the Tories. In the social circumstances of England the Whig is himself too much of an interested party to be able to judge; industry, that focal point of English society, is in his hands and makes him rich; he can find no fault in it and considers its expansion the only purpose of all legislation, for it has given him his wealth and his power. The Tory on the other hand, whose power and unchallenged dominance have been broken by industry and whose principles have been shaken by it, hates it and sees in it at best a necessary evil. This is the reason for the formation of that group of philanthropic Tories whose chief leaders are Lord Ashley, Ferrand, Walter, Oastler, etc., and who have made it their duty to take the part of the factory workers against the manufacturers. Thomas Carlyle too was originally a Tory and still stands closer to that party than to the Whigs. This much is certain: a Whig would never have been able to write a book that was half so humane as Past and Present. Thomas Carlyle has become known in Germany through his efforts to make German literature accessible to the English. For several years he has been mainly occupied with the social conditions of England the only educated man of his country to do so! and as early as 1838 he wrote a brief work entitled Chartism. At that time the Whigs were in office and proclaimed with much trumpeting that the spectre of Chartism, which had arisen round 1835, was now destroyed. Chartism was the natural successor to the old radicalism which had been appeased for a few years by the Reform Bill and reappeared in 183536 with new strength and with its ranks more solid than ever before. The Whigs thought they had suppressed this Chartism, and Thomas Carlyle took this as his cue to expound the real causes of Chartism and the impossibility of eradicating it before these causes were eradicated. It is true that as a whole the position taken by that book is the same as in Past and Present, though with rather stronger Tory colouring, but this is perhaps merely a result of the fact that the Whigs as the ruling party were the most open to criticism. At all events, everything that is in the smaller book is to be found in Past and Present, with greater clarity, with the argument further developed, and with an explicit description of the consequences, and therefore makes a critical analysis of Chartism on our part superfluous. Past and Present is a parallel between England in the twelfth and in the nineteenth centuries and consists of four sections, entitled Proem, The Ancient Monk, The Modern Worker and Horoscope. Let us consider these sections in turn, I cannot resist the temptation to translate the finest of the book s often marvellously fine passages. Criticism will no doubt take care of itself. The first chapter of the Proem is called Midas. So much for the poor. How do things stand with the rich? The next chapter gives us the following description of the Manchester insurrection of August 1842. Let us pass over the final chapters of this section, and for the moment too the whole of that which follows, and let us straightaway take the third section which treats of "The Modern Worker , so that we may have before us all of a piece the description of the condition of England which was begun in the Proem. We have abandoned, Carlyle continues, the piety of the Middle Ages and acquired nothing in its place: we have And then there is the other, even worse gospel of dilettantism which has produced a government which does not govern; this gospel has deprived people of all seriousness and impels them to want to appear that which they are not the striving for happiness", that is, for good food and drink; this gospel has lifted crude matter on to the throne and destroyed all spiritual substance, what shall be the consequence of all this? How does the future appear? Matters will not and cannot remain as they are now. We have seen that Carlyle has, as he himself admits, no Morison s pill", no panacea for curing the ills of society. In that too he is right. All social philosophy, as long as it still propounds a few principles as its final conclusion, as long as it continues to administer Morison s pills, remains very imperfect; it is not the bare conclusions of which we are in such need, but rather study; the conclusions are nothing without the reasoning that has led up to them; this we have known since Hegel; and the conclusions are worse than useless if they are final in themselves, if they are not turned into premises for further deductions. But the conclusions must also assume a distinct form for a time, they must in the course of development evolve from vague imprecision into clear ideas, and then of course, in the case of such an exclusively empirical nation as the English are, they cannot avoid becoming Morison s pills". Carlyle himself, although he has absorbed much that is German and is quite far removed from crass empiricism, would probably have a few pills to hand if he were less vague and hazy about the future. Meanwhile he declares everything to be useless and unprofitable as long as mankind persists in atheism, as long as it has not recovered its soul". Not that traditional Catholicism can be restored in its vigour and vitality, nor that today s religion can be maintained he knows very well that rituals, dogmas, litanies and Sinai thunder cannot help, that all the thunder of Sinai does not make the truth any truer, nor does it frighten any sensible person, that we are far beyond the religion of fear, but religion itself must be restored, we ourselves see where two centuries of Atheist Government since the blessed restoration of Charles II have brought us, and we shall gradually also be obliged to recognise that this atheism is beginning to show signs of wear and tear. But we have seen what Carlyle calls atheism: it is not so much disbelief in a personal God, as disbelief in the inner essence, in the infinity of the universe, disbelief in reason, despair of the intellect and the truth; his struggle is not against disbelief in the revelation of the Bible, but against the most frightful disbelief, the disbelief in the Bible of Universal History". That is the eternal book of God in which every man, while his spirit and the light of his eyes are yet with him, may see God s finger write. To make mockery of this is disbelief like none other, a disbelief you would punish, not by burning at the stake, but nevertheless with the most imperative command to keep one s silence until one has something better to say. Why should blissful silence be broken by loud noise, just to proclaim such stuff? If there is no divine reason in the past, but merely diabolic unreason, it will pass away for ever, speak no more of it; we whose fathers were all hanged, should not talk of ropes! But modern England cannot believe in history. The eye sees of all things only so much as it can see by its own inherent capacity. A godless century cannot comprehend epochs filled with God. It sees in the past (the Middle Ages) only empty strife, the universal rule of brute force, it does not see that in the last analysis might and right coincide, it just sees stupidity, savage unreason, more fitting to Bedlam than to a human world. From this it naturally follows that the same qualities should continue to prevail in our own time. Millions held in Bastille workhouses; Irish widows who prove that they are human beings by typhusfever: what would you have? It was ever so, or worse. Has history not always been the exploitation of obdurate stupidity by successful mountebanks? There was no God in the past; nothing but mechanisms and chaotic brutegods: how shall the poor "philosophic historian", to whom his own century is all godless, see any God in other centuries ? And yet our age is not so utterly forsaken. From these excerpts Carlyle s position emerges fairly clearly. His whole outlook is essentially pantheistic, and, more specifically, pantheistic with German overtones. The English have no pantheism but merely scepticism; the conclusion of all English philosophising is the despair of reason, the confessed inability to solve the contradictions with which one is ultimately faced, and consequently on the one hand a relapse into faith and on the other devotion to pure practice, without a further thought for metaphysics, etc. Carlyle with his pantheism derived from German literature is therefore a phenomenon in England, and for the practical and sceptical English a pretty incomprehensible one. People gape at him, speak of German mysticism" and distorted English; others claim there is at bottom something in it, his English, though unusual, is very fine, he is a prophet, etc. but nobody really knows what to make of it all. For us Germans, who know the antecedents of Carlyle s position, the matter is clear enough. On the one hand vestiges of Tory romanticism and humane attitudes originating with Goethe, and on the other scepticalempirical England, these factors are sufficient for one to deduce the whole of Carlyle s view of the world from them. Like all pantheists, Carlyle has not yet resolved the contradiction, and Carlyle s dualism is aggravated by the fact that though he is acquainted with German literature, he is not acquainted with its necessary corollary, German philosophy, and all his views are in consequence ingenuous, intuitive, more like Schelling than Hegel. With Schelling that is to say, with the old Schelling not the Schelling of the philosophy of revelation Carlyle really has a great deal in common; with Strauss, whose outlook is similarly pantheistic, he is on common ground in his heroworship" or cult of genius. The critique of pantheism has recently been so exhaustively set forth in Germany that little more remains to be said. Feuerbach s Theses" in the Anekdota and Bruno Bauer s works contain all the relevant material. We will therefore be able to confine ourselves simply to following up the implications of Carlyle s position and showing that it is basically only a first step towards the position adopted by this journal. Carlyle complains about the emptiness and hollowness of the age, about the inner rottenness of all social institutions. The complaint is fair; but by simply complaining one does not dispose of the matter; in order to redress the evil, its cause must be discovered; and if Carlyle had done this, he would have found that this desultoriness and hollowness, this soullessness this irreligion and this atheism have their roots in religion itself. Religion by its very essence drains man and nature of substance, and transfers this substance to the phantom of an otherworldly God, who in turn then graciously permits man and nature to receive some of his superfluity. Now as long as faith in this otherworldly phantom is vigorous and alive, thus long man will acquire in this roundabout way at least some substance. The strong faith of the Middle Ages did indeed give the whole epoch considerable energy in this way, but it was energy that did not come from without but was already present within human nature, though as yet unperceived and undeveloped. Faith gradually weakened, religion crumbled in the face of the rising level of civilisation, but still man did not perceive that he had worshipped and deified his own being in the guise of a being outside himself. Lacking awareness and at the same time faith, man can have no substance, he is bound to despair of truth, reason and nature, and this hollowness and lack of substance, the despair of the eternal facts of the universe will last until mankind perceives that the being it has worshipped as God was its own, as yet unknown being, until but why should I copy Feuerbach. The hollowness has long been there, for religion represents man s action of making himself hollow; and you are surprised that now, when the purple that concealed it has faded, when the fog that enveloped it has passed away, that now, to your consternation, it emerges in the full light of day? Carlyle accuses the age furthermore this is the immediate consequence of the foregoing of hypocrisy and lying. Naturally the hollowness and enervation must be decently concealed and kept upright by accessories, padded clothes and whalebone stays! We too attack the hypocrisy of the present Christian state of the world; the struggle against it, our liberation from it and the liberation of the world from it are ultimately our sole occupation; but because through the development of philosophy we are able to discern this hypocrisy, and because we are waging the struggle scientifically, the nature of this hypocrisy is no longer so strange and incomprehensible to us as it admittedly still is to Carlyle. This hypocrisy is traced back by us to religion, the first word of which is a lie or does religion not begin by showing us something human and claiming it is something superhuman, something divine? But because we know that all this Lying and immorality follows from religion, that religious hypocrisy, theology, is the archetype of all other lies and hypocrisy, we are justified in extending the term "theology to the whole untruth and hypocrisy of the present, as was originally done by Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer. Carlyle should read their works if he wishes to know the origin of the immorality that plagues our whole society. A new religion, a pantheistic heroworship, a cult of work, ought to be set up or is to be expected; but this is impossible; all the possibilities of religion are exhausted; after Christianity, after absolute, i.e., abstract, religion, after religion as such", no other form of religion can arise. Carlyle himself realises that Catholic, Protestant or any other kind of Christianity is irresistibly moving towards its downfall; if he knew the nature of Christianity, he would realise that after it no other religion is possible. Not even pantheism! Pantheism itself is another consequence of Christianity and cannot be divorced from its antecedent, at least that is true of modern pantheism, of Spinoza s, Schelling s, Hegel s and also Carlyle s pantheism. Once more, Feuerbach relieves me of the trouble of providing proof of this. As I have said, we too are concerned with combating the lack of principle, the inner emptiness, the spiritual deadness, the untruthfulness of the age; we are waging a war to the death against all these things, just as Carlyle is, and there is a much greater probability that we shall succeed than that he will, because we know what we want. We want to put an end to atheism, as Carlyle portrays it, by giving back to man the substance he has lost through religion; not as divine but as human substance, and this whole process of giving back is no more than simply the awakening of selfconsciousness. We want to sweep away everything that claims to be supernatural and superhuman, and thereby get rid of untruthfulness, for the root of all untruth and Lying is the pretension of the human and the natural to be superhuman and supernatural. For that reason we have once and for all declared war on religion and religious ideas and care little whether we are called atheists or anything else. If however Carlyle s pantheistic definition of atheism were correct, it is not we but our Christian opponents who would be the true atheists. We have no intention of attacking the eternal inner Facts of the universe", on the contrary, we have for the first time truly substantiated them by proving their perpetuity and rescuing them from the omnipotent arbitrariness of an inherently selfcontradictory God. We have no intention of pronouncing the world, man and his life a lie"; on the contrary, our Christian opponents are guilty of this act of immorality when they make the world and man dependent on the grace of a God who in reality was only created from the reflected image of man in the crude hyle of his own undeveloped consciousness. We have no intention whatever of doubting or despising the revelation of history", for history is all and everything to us and we hold it more highly than any other previous philosophical trend, more highly than Hegel even, who after all used it only as a case against which to test his logical problem. It is the other side that scorns history and disregards the development of mankind; it is the Christians again who, by putting forward a separate History of the Kingdom of God deny that real history has any inner substantiality and claim that this substantiality belongs exclusively to their otherworldly, abstract and, what is more, fictitious history; who, by asserting that the culmination of the human species is their Christ, make history attain an imaginary goal, interrupt it in midcourse and are now obliged, if only for the sake of consistency, to declare the following eighteen hundred years to be totally nonsensical and utterly meaningless. We lay claim to the meaning of history; but we see in history not the revelation of God but of man and only of man. We have no need, in order to see the splendour of the human character, in order to recognise the development of the human species through history, its irresistible progress, its evercertain victory over the unreason of the individual, its overcoming of all that is apparently supernatural, its hard but successful struggle against nature until the final achievement of free, human self-consciousness, the discernment of the unity of man and nature, and the independent creation voluntarily and by its own effort of a new world based on purely human and moral social relationships in order to recognise all that in its greatness, we have no need first to summon up the abstraction of a God and to attribute to it everything beautiful, great, sublime and truly human; we do not need to follow this roundabout path, we do not need first to imprint the stamp of the divine on what is truly human, in order to be sure of its greatness and splendour. On the contrary, the more divine", in other words, the more inhuman, something is, the less we shall be able to admire it. Only the human origin of the content of all religions still preserves for them here and there some claim to respect; only the consciousness that even the wildest superstition nevertheless has within it at bottom the eternal determinants of human nature, in however dislocated and distorted a form, only this awareness saves the history of religion, and particularly of the Middle Ages, from total rejection and eternal oblivion, which would otherwise certainly be the fate of these godly histories. The more godly they are, the more inhuman, the more bestial, and the godly Middle Ages did indeed produce the culmination of human bestiality, serfdom, jus primae noctis, etc. The godlessness of our age, of which Carlyle so much complains, is precisely its saturation with God. From this it also becomes clear why, above, I gave man as the solution to the riddle of the Sphinx. The question has previously always been: what is God? and German philosophy has answered the question in this sense: God is man. Man has only to understand himself, to take himself as the measure of all aspects of life, to judge according to his being, to organise the world in a truly human manner according to the demands of his own nature, and he will have solved the riddle of our time. Not in otherworldly, nonexistent regions, not beyond time and space, not with a God immanent in or opposed to the world, is the truth to be found, but much nearer, in man s own breast. Man s own substance is far more splendid and sublime than the imaginary substance of any conceivable God, who is after all only the more or less indistinct and distorted image of man himself. So when Carlyle follows Ben Jonson in saying, man has lost his soul and is only now beginning to notice the want of it, the right formulation would be: in religion man has lost his own substance, has alienated his humanity, and now that religion, through the progress of history, has begun to totter, he notices his emptiness and instability. But there is no other salvation for him, he cannot regain his humanity, his substance, other than by thoroughly overcoming all religious ideas and returning firmly and honestly, not to God", but to himself. All of this may also be found in Goethe, the prophet, and anyone who has his eyes open can read this between the lines. Goethe did not like to be concerned with God ; the word made him uncomfortable, he felt at home only in human matters, and this humanity, this emancipation of art from the fetters of religion is precisely what constitutes Goethe s greatness. Neither the ancients nor Shakespeare can measure up to him in this respect. But this consummate humanity, this overcoming of the religious dualism can only be apprehended in its full historical significance by those who are not strangers to that other aspect of German national development, philosophy. What Goethe could only express spontaneously, and therefore, it is true, in a certain sense prophetically, has been developed and substantiated in contemporary German philosophy. Carlyle too embodies assumptions which, logically, must lead to the position set forth above. Pantheism itself is but the last, preliminary step towards a free and human point of view. History, which Carlyle presents as the real revelation, contains only what is human, and only by an arbitrary act can its content be taken away from humanity and credited to the account of a God. Work, free activity, in which Carlyle similarly sees a cult, is again a purely human matter and can only be linked with God in an arbitrary manner. What is the point of continually pushing to the fore a word which at best only expresses the boundlessness of indetermination and, what is more, maintains the illusion of dualism, a word which in itself is the denial of nature and humanity? So much for the inward, religious aspect of Carlyle s standpoint. It serves as a point of departure for the assessment of the outward, politicosocial aspect; Carlyle has still enough religion to remain in a state of unfreedom; pantheism still recognises something higher than man himself. Hence his longing for a true aristocracy, for heroes ; as if these heroes could at best be more than men. If he had understood man as man in all his infinite complexity, he would not have conceived the idea of once more dividing mankind into two lots, sheep and goats, rulers and ruled, aristocrats and the rabble, lords and dolts, he would have seen the proper social function of talent not in ruling by force but in acting as a stimulant and taking the lead. The role of talent is to convince the masses of the truth of its ideas, and it will then have no need further to worry about their application, which will follow entirely of its own accord. Mankind is surely not passing through democracy to arrive back eventually at the point of departure. What Carlyle says about democracy, incidentally, leaves little to be desired, if we discount what we have just been referring to, his lack of clarity about the goal, the purpose of modern democracy. Democracy, true enough, is only a transitional stage, though not towards a new, improved aristocracy, but towards real human freedom; just as the irreligiousness of the age will eventually lead to complete emancipation from everything that is religious, superhuman and supernatural, and not to its restoration. Carlyle recognises the inadequacy of competition, demand and supply, Mammonism, etc., and is far removed from asserting the absolute justification of landownership. So why has he not drawn the straightforward conclusion from all these assumptions and rejected the whole concept of property? How does he think he will destroy competition", supply and demand", Mammonism, etc., as long as the root of all these things, private property, exists? Organisation of labour cannot help in this respect, it cannot even be applied without a certain identity of interests. Why then does he not act consistently and decisively, proclaiming the identity of interests the only truly human state of affairs, and thereby putting an end to all difficulties, all imprecision and lack of clarity? In all Carlyle s rhapsodies, there is not a syllable mentioning the English Socialists. As long as he adheres to his present point of view, which is admittedly infinitely far in advance of that of the mass of educated people in England but still abstract and theoretical, he will indeed not be able to view their efforts with particular sympathy. The English Socialists are purely practical and therefore also propose remedies, homecolonies, etc., rather in the manner of Morison s pills; their philosophy is truly English, sceptical, in other words they despair of theory, and for all practical purposes they cling to the materialism upon which their whole social system is based; all this will have little appeal for Carlyle, but he is as onesided as they. Both have only overcome the contradiction within the contradiction; the Socialists within the sphere of practice, Carlyle within the sphere of theory, and even there only spontaneously, whereas the Socialists, by means of reasoning, have definitely overcome the practical aspect of the contradiction. The Socialists are still Englishmen, when they ought to be simply men, of philosophical developments on the Continent they are only acquainted with materialism but not with German philosophy, that is their only shortcoming, and they are directly engaged on the rectification of this deficiency by working for the removal of national differences. We have no need to be very hasty in forcing German philosophy on them, they will come to it of their own accord and it could be of little use to them now. But in any case they are the only party in England which has a future, relatively weak though they may be. Democracy, Chartism must soon be victorious, and then the mass of the English workers will have the choice only between starvation and socialism. For Carlyle and his standpoint, ignorance of German philosophy is not a matter of such indifference. He is himself a theoretician of the German type, and yet at the same time his nationality leads him to empiricism; he is beset by a flagrant contradiction which can only be resolved if he continues to develop his German-theoretical viewpoint to its final conclusion, until it is totally reconciled with empiricism. To surmount the contradiction in which he is working, Carlyle has only one more step to take, but as all experience in Germany has shown, it is a difficult one. Let us hope that he will take it, and although he is no longer young, he will still probably be capable of it, for the progress shown in his last book proves that his views are still developing. All this shows that Carlyle s book is ten thousand times more worth translating into German than all the legions of English novels which every day and every hour are imported into Germany, and I can only advocate such a translation. But let our hack translators just keep their hands off it! Carlyle writes a very particular English, and a translator who does not thoroughly understand English and references to English conditions would make the most absurd howlers. Following this somewhat general introduction, I shall examine in greater detail in the following numbers of this journal the condition of England and the essential part of it, the condition of the working class. The condition of England is of immense importance for history and for all other countries; for as regards social matters England is of course far in advance of all other countries. Signed: Frederick Engels in Manchester
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