[(1840) lightheartedly represents different national cultures and world-views…]

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(1840) lightheartedly represents different national cultures and world-views through the lands in which they developed.

The most important single piece in the volume is Schelling and Revelation, the longest of Engel's three essays against the attacks on Hegel, which Schelling mounted during his lectures in Berlin in 1841. Schelling had been Hegel's close companion when they were young men in the 1790's, and Hege! regarded Schelling's successive attempts at a 'philosophy of nature' as a significant development. But a decade after Hegel's death, Schelling returned to the rostrum in an attempt to extinguish the 'atheistic' and anti-religious results of Hegelianism, then being brought out ever more clearly by the radical 'Young Hegelians' of which Engels was an enthusiastic member.

The kernel of Schelling's attack was that Hegel attempted to conjure up the existence of the real world out of "pure reason' • the 'negative' side, and that therefore he could not get to grips with the empirical world as it is grasped by the human senses. Against this Schelling proposed a 'positive philosophy' of ia priori empiricism' Engels basing itself 'immediately exists'.

There was, undoubtedly, an element that was 'positive' in Schelling ', critique of Hegelian idealism. But Enge's puts his finger on its reactionary central content. By clain ing the existence of "pure' facts, Schelling opens the door to irrationality and mysticism, the separation of thought from being. His 'positive' philosophy saw the empirical world as merely the revelation' of the Christian creator.

Instead of sensuous nature being open for mind to grasp through a body of rational knowledge it is seen as obscured in the mists, referred to by theologians as 'evidence' for the existence of their concept of God (their supernatural employer). While he does not yet break with religion, Engels insists that the scientific content of Hegel's objective idealism, his claim that all that is real is rational (i.e. knowable), must be defended agains Schelling, for whom Engels shows "The unity of philosophy, the Chartists marching in 1848 wholeness of any world outlook, is torn apart into a most unsatisfactory dualism, the contradiction which makes up the world-historic significance of Christianity [i.e.,the apparent separation of thought from being]is raised to the principle ot philosophy as well". Engels moves towards materialism when he edfends Hegel against the misrepresentation which "takes reason really for something which could also exist without the world organsim, and so places its true realm in the hollow, empty abstaction". But as a whole the essays on Schelling remain within 'radical' philosophical Marx ted riçk La could adequately grasp.

In studying the struggles of the working class he became convinced that "principles can develop only from interests, that is to say, the revolution will be social, not political" . He became convinced of some thing else too: the dispossessed are coming to realise "the revolution by peaceful means is impossible and that only a forcible abolition of the existing unnatural conditions, a radical overthrow of the nobility and the industrial aristocracy, can improve the position of the proletarians"

young bourgoris intelectual, ene els wrote the lines of verse which introduced this review. From another pen these lines might be read as an encouragement to the English disdain for theoretical questions. But within four years Engels began to realise the essential insight contained in them.

Soon after his return from England in 1842, he came together with Marx, and they began their joint struggle to establish the world-view of historical materialism and the programme and party of the workers revolution.

The publication of this volume enables us to understand more deeply the difficulty and richness ot the struggle through which they came to the conscious recognition of this task.

Karl and 'rederick Eng Coll Works Volume Fred Engels 1838-42 (197 wrence and Wishart, DOCHERT