ABSTRACT
The German word Wissenschaft expresses a romantic rather than a matter-of-fact ideal, and is more tolerant both toward poetic literature and religious metaphysics than our word science. And the reason for this is that the Germans, notwithstanding their great achievements in the laboratory, have remained by comparison with the authors primitively credulous and animistic. “German criticism right up to its very latest achievements has not abandoned the field of Philosophy; not only has it not examined its own general philosophical presuppositions, but on the contrary all the questions with which it is occupied have grown up out of the soil of one definite philosophical system, the Hegelian. For Marx, too, that must have been the great thing in the Hegelian philosophy. The authors may imagine that even in youth he accepted somewhat perfunctorily Hegel’s conception of thought, or the Idea, as “demiourgos of the world.”.
