ments of the limitations of the materialistic conception of history, as he would have seen that there are farmers here who, after having heard of our naturalist's theory insist on planting trees on brick walls as long as they are directly against the sun.
That Kautsky is correct in his statement that Marx and Engels never denied the influence of ideas in the history of society, and gave quite a prominent place to indirect influence of economic conditions, this even in the earlier of their writings—is plain to every student of Marx and Engels, who has studied their philosophy not from second hand. Of course, there is, as far as I can remember now, nowhere in their writings to be found a direct denial of the absurdities of LaMonte & Co., for the reason stated by Kautsky and quoted above; but there is abundant refutation of it. I shall bring only one quotation from Marx and one from Engels directly in support of Kautsky's views, and when we bear in mind that Marx at least has never written any book or even essay giving an exposition of his philosophy, this will be enough to satisfy the most exacting.
Says Marx in 1845:
"The teaching of the materialists (the ante-Marxian materialists, of course) that man is the product of circumstances and education (Erziehung), that changed men are, therefore the product of different circumstances and changed education, forgets that circumstances themselves are changed by men, and that the educator himself must be educated." Sapientis satis.
Engels is more circumstantial. Says he:
"Men make their history, whatever way this may turn out, by each one pursuing the aims he consciously sets to himself, and the resultant of these wills, in many different directions working, and their manifolded influences on the outer world, are just history. It is therefore also important what these many individuals want. The will is determined by passion or consideration. But the levers which in turn directly determine the passions or considerations are of different kinds. Partly, these may be circumstances standing outside the individual; partly, ideal motives, ambition, enthusiasm for truth and right, personal animosity, or even purely individual whims of all sorts. But, in the first place, we have seen that the many individual wills which are active in the making of history produce mostly quite different, often just opposite, results from those desired; their motives are therefore, also, for the collective result only of
