es more or less just and far reaching claims,
serves as a means of agitation to stir the workers, by means of a cry
adopted by the capitalists themselves, against the capitalists, and in
this case stands or falls with bourgeois equality itself. In both
cases the real content of the proletarian claims of equality is the
abolition of classes. Every demand for equality transcending this is
of necessity absurd. We have already given examples and can furnish
many more when we come to consider Herr Duehring's prophecies of the
future.

So the notion of equality, in its proletarian as well as in its
bourgeois form, is itself a historic product. Certain circumstances
were required to produce it and these in their turn proceeded from a
long anterior history. It is therefore anything but an eternal truth.
And if the public regards it as self-evident in one sense or another
if it, as Marx remarks "already occupies the position of a popular
prejudice" it is not due to its being an axiomatic truth but to the
universal broadening of conception in accordance with the spirit of
the eighteenth century. If Herr Duehring then can set up his two
famous men in housekeeping on the grounds of equality, it is apparent
that the prejudices of the mass of men in its favor is an antecedent
condition. In fact Herr Duehring calls his philosophy the "natural"
because it proceeds from generally recognised things, which appear to
him to be entirely natural. But why they seem to him to be natural he
does not take the trouble to enquire.

_Freedom and Necessity._

(The former part of this section is taken up with a criticism of Herr
Duehring's knowledge of law of which he had boasted. It is a purely
technical discussion and is of merely local interest. Having disposed
of Duehring's juristic claims Engels proceeds to discuss "Freedom and
Necessity" as follows.)

One cannot deal properly with the question of morals and law without a
discussion of free will, human responsibility, and the limits of
necessity and freedom. The realistic philosophy has not only one but
two solutions of these questions.

"One must substitute for false theories of freedom the actual
conditions in which reason on the one hand and instinct on the other
unite upon a middle ground. The fundamental facts of this sort of
dynamics are to be learned from observation and as regards the
calculation in advance of phenomena which have not yet occurred, we
must judge of them in gener