it in a simpler way: the question as to the priority of mind or matter. In themselves these two terms have nothing to do with ethical ideas. A philosophical materialist may cherish such ideals in the highest and purest degree, while the philosophical idealist may be completely destitute of them. However, the term materialism, owing to its being continually defamed by persons, has in time acquired something suggestive of immorality which gradually made its way into bourgeois literature. 'The Philistine understands under materialism gluttony, drunkenness, lust, pride, rapacity, greed, profit-hunting, etc., in short, all those repugnant vices to which he is covertly subservient; and under idealism he understands the firm belief in virtue, the brotherhood of man, and generally a "higher world" of which he declaims, and in which he perhaps believes when he has to go through all the misery which necessarily follows his "materialistic" excesses, chanting the refrain: "What is man,—half brute, half angel" (this quotation is from Engels). If we are to use these words in this, secondary, sense, it must be admitted that nowadays it requires a good deal of ethical idealism to have the courage of professing historic materialism, for it invariably carries with it poverty, persecution and slander, while the profession of historic idealism is the business of every heeler, for it offers the best prospects to all earthly goods, to fat sinecures, orders, titles and dignities."
As the reader sees, far from being horrified at the thought that a Socialist may be an idealist, as LaMonte's Champion is, Mehring says that it requires a lot of ethical idealism to be a materialist, or, as I said, simply a Socialist.
So says also Sadi Gunter, perhaps the only man in Germany who has the distinction of being acknowledged a philosopher both by Socialists and bourgeois. In an article which appeared in the Neue Zeit (1897-98, No. 41) he makes use of the following language:
"There is a firmly rooted prejudice in the educated circles of the bourgeoisie that the materialistic conception of history excludes all ideals. Even men who begin to advance theoretically towards the materialistic conception of history, and do not dismiss it, like Dr. Barth, with a few phrases which only show a lack of understanding on the part of those who use them, still find in that prejudice a cause which prevents them from joining it entirely. . . . We must however discuss more fully the second objection which is based on that very widely accepted metaphysical
