is because he has not yet gotten rid of his tadpole tail. I do not wish to be understood as speaking with contempt or depreciation of the tadpole tails. Without their aid most of us bourgeois socialist frogs would never have been able to get out of our old conservative shells. It was the utopianism of our tails, in most cases, that first cracked the shell.
I should be sorry to have any reader interpret the materialism of "The Nihilism of Socialism" into a disposition to deny or depreciate the great and beneficent influence that Christianity has had in the past. I should be greatly chagrined to be accused of irreverence in discussing religion. Irreverence is ever a sign of a narrow intellectual horizon and a limited vision. The scoffer is the product of the limited knowledge characteristic of what Engels called "metaphysical materialism." Unfortunately the mental development of many in the past has been arrested at this Ingersoll-Voltaire stage. But with the growth of Modern Socialism the tendency is for the metaphysical materialist to grow into socialist or dialectic materialism with its Hegelian watchword, "Nothing is; every thing is becoming."
The socialist materialist realizes that the ob-
