s to attain its temple in the Bourse, that great theoretic
thought which had been the glory of Germany in the period of its deepest
political humiliation, the zeal for pure scientific progress,
irrespective of practical, profitable results, and of the disapproval of
the police, became lost in educated Germany. It is true that the German
official natural science maintained its position, particularly in the
field of individual discovery, at the head of its time, but now the
American journal "Science" justly remarks that the decisive advances in
the matter of the broadest inclusive statement of the relations between
single facts, and the harmonising of them with law, are making the
greater headway in England, instead of, as earlier, in Germany. And with
regard to the sciences of history, philosophy included, with the
classical philosophy, the old theoretical spirit, with its carelessness
of personal results, first completely disappeared. Thoughtless
eclecticism, eager backward glances at a career, and income down to the
meanest sycophancy occupy their places. The official representatives of
this sort of science have become the open ideologists of the bourgeoisie
and the existing state, but at a time when they both stand in open
antagonism to the working classes.

Only among the working classes does the German devotion to abstract
thought steadily continue to exist. Here it cannot be got rid of. Here
we find no backward glances at a career, at profit making, at kindly
protection from the upper classes, but on the contrary the more
independent and unrestricted the path of science, just so much the more
does it find itself in accord with the interests and endeavors of the
working class. The new tendency, which in the history of the development
of labor made known the key to the understanding of the universal
history of society addressed itself in the first place to the working
class and found in them the ready acceptance which it neither sought nor
expected from official science. The German working-class movement is the
heir of the German classical philosophy.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] It is incumbent upon me to make a personal explanation at this
place. People have lately referred to my share in this theory, and so I
can hardly refrain from saying a few words here in settlement of that
particular matter. I cannot deny that I had before and during my forty
years' collaboration with Marx a certain independent share not only in
laying