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1 " the foremost philosopher of the German petty bourgeoisie also drew this conclusion. Schopenhauer rejected the whole of the ‘charlatan’ Hegel; above all he rejected Hegel’s philosophy of history. He did not see any progressive process of development in the history of humanity; he only saw in it a history of individuals; the German petty-bourgeois, whose prophet he was, is the same person he was from the very beginning and will be in the future. Schopenhauer’s philosophy reached its highest point in the ‘insight’ that ‘at all times, the same was, is and will be the same.’ He writes: ‘History shows on all sides, only the same thing, except in different forms: the chapters of the history of humanity are basically only different in name and the dates; the really essential content is the same everywhere ... The material of history is the individual in his solitude and fortuitousness, what always is, and then is not, forevermore, the fleeting intertwining like clouds in the wind of moving humanity, which so often can be transformed completely, through the slightest chance.’ So closely comes Schopenhauer’s philosophical idealism to mechanical materialism in its conception of history. In fact, they are opposite poles of the same narrow outlook. And when Schopenhauer said grimly of the materialism of the natural sciences: ‘These gentlemen of the crucible must be taught that simple chemistry makes one capable of being a chemist but not a philosopher’ so he should be taught that simple philosophizing makes one capable of sneaking about, but not of historical investigation. However Schopenhauer was consistent in his own fashion, and as soon as he had thrown away Hegel’s dialectical method, then he had to throw away Hegel’s historical constructions with it. "
‘History shows on all sides, only the same thing, except in different forms: the chapters of the history of humanity are basically only different in name and the dates; the really essential content is the same everywhere ... The material of history is the individual in his solitude and fortuitousness, what always is, and then is not, forevermore, the fleeting intertwining like clouds in the wind of moving humanity, which so often can be transformed completely, through the slightest chance.’
‘These gentlemen of the crucible must be taught that simple chemistry makes one capable of being a chemist but not a philosopher’
― Franz Mehring ,
2 " and so mankind only posed for itself such tasks as it could solve. Looked at more closely, as Marx explains, it will be found that the task only arises where the material conditions for its solution are already in existence, or at least in the process of becoming. "
3 " So humanity is not the helpless plaything of a dead mechanism, but its development consists precisely in the growing power of the human mind over the dead mechanism of nature. But - and this is only said by historical materialism - the human spirit develops from, with and out of the material mode of production. The human mind is not the father of the mode of production, but the mode of production is the mother of the human mind. "
4 " It is certainly not the task of the history researcher to use moral standards. He should tell us how things were on the basis of an objective scientific investigation. We do not demand to know what he thinks about them according to his subjective moral outlook. ‘Moral standards’ are caught up, involved in a continuous transformation, and for the living generation to impose on former generations its changing standards of today, is like measuring the geological strata against the flying sand of the dunes. Schlosser, Gervinus and Ranke, and Janssen – each of them has a different moral standard, each has his own class morals, and even more faithfully than the times they depict, they reflect in their works the classes they speak for. "
