Home > Work > Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy
1 " If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable “thing-in-itself”. The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such “things-in-themselves” until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the “thing-in-itself” became a thing for us "
― Friedrich Engels , Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy
2 " The world is to be comprehended not as a complex of ready-made things but as a complex of processes, in which apparently stable things no less than the concepts, their mental reflections in our heads, go through an uninterrupted change of coming in to being and passing away, in which, through all the seeming contingency and in spite of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development finally asserts itself. "
3 " What is now recognized as true also has its hidden false side which will later manifest itself, just as what is now recognized as false also has its true side, by virtue of which it could previously be regarded as true; that what is maintained to be necessary is composed of sheer contingencies, and that the so-called accidental is the form behind which necessity hides itself - and so on. "
4 " History is as little able as cognition to reach a final conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity; a perfect society, a perfect "state," are things which can only exist in the imagination. On the contrary, every successive historical situation is only a transitory stage in the endless course of development of society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But it becomes decrepit and unjustified in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb. It must give way to a higher stage which in its turn will also decay and perish. "
