utterly devoid of the historic sense which made Hegel a truly great philosopher and his system a great step forward in the development of philosophy.
Indeed, their aversion towards anything that has some historic sense leads Weisengruen, otherwise a sane and bright thinker, to declare that the real force that makes History is the imagination or phantasy (Phantasie). To use his own words: "Phantasy is the demi-urge of all History. . . . Not the developed intellect, but the elementary phantasy."[1] A discovery which is worthy to rank with that of the charlatan Nossig, who, after posing as a great scientific Marx-critic, gravely announced, with all the pomp of pseudo-science, that he discovered a remedy to all our social evils in the old Jewish custom of the Jubilee.
We cannot, however, go here into the details of the philosophic objection and its numerous variants. Such discussions are only intended by their authors for German professors and such others as enjoy the perusal of bulky volumes. Under no circumstances are they meant for people who have no time to spend on the verbiage of metaphysical speculation. We will simply say, therefore, that the sum and substance of all these arguments amounts to this: That there is no way in which material conditions can be shown, philosophically, to turn into ideas; consequently, that ideas cannot be the result of economic conditions; and that, therefore, the existence of ideas and their influence on History not being denied, economic conditions cannot be the prime movers of History.
The answer to all of which is, again without going into long and abstruse philosophic discussions, that, as Engels puts it, the proof of the pudding is in the eating; that if we can prove by historic data that the development of ideas did follow the development of economic conditions then we need not worry over the "philosophic" question of how the transformation was accomplished. It will then be the
- ↑ Paul Weisengruen, Der Marxismus und das Wesen der sozialen Frage. Leipzig, 1900.
