78
PARTISAN REVIEW
authority of
all
the gods in his breast, and in one of his early
Rheini–
sche Zeitung
articles on the freedom of the press, in asserting that
writing is an end in itself to which the writer must sacrifice himself
and which must not be considered as a means of earning a living,
he declares that the writer must "in his way adopt the principles of
the preacher of religion, 'Obey God rather than man,' among those
men in whose society he is confined with his human needs and
desires." And as for Engels, his boyhood had been passed under the
pulpit of the great Calvinist evangelist Friedrich Wilhelm Krum–
macher, who preached in Elberfeld and reduced his congregation to
weeping and stupefaction. Engels tells in one of his "Letters from
the Wupperthal" how Krummacher would subdue his auditors by
the logic of his terrible argument. Given the preacher's primary
assumption-the total "incapacity of man by dint of his own effort
to will the good, let alone to accomplish it"-it followed that God
must give men this capability; and since the will of God
himself
was free, the allotment of this capability must be arbitrary; it fol–
lowed that "the few that were chosen would
nolentes volentes
be
blessed, while the others would be damned forever. 'Forever?'
Krum–
macher would query; and answer, 'Yes, forever!'" This seems to
have made an immense impression on the young Engels.
Karl Marx had identified his own
will
with the antithesis of
the dialectical process. "The philosophers have only interpreted the
world," he had written in his "Theses on Feuerbach." "Our business
is to change it." The
will
had always tended in German philosophy
to play the role of a superhuman force; and this will had been sal–
vaged by Marx and incorporated in Dialectical Materialism. It was
the "dynamic
princip~e"
of which he spoke, and it gave to Marx's
revolutionary ideas a peculiar endurance and drive. For a really
active and purposeful man like Lenin it may be an added source
of strength to have the conviction that history is with
him,
that he
is
certain of achieving his goal. The Dialectic so simplifies the whole
picture: it seems to concentrate the complexities of society into
an
obvious protagonist and antagonist; it gives the confidence not only
that the upshot of the struggle will certainly be successful, but that
it
will
resolve all such struggles forever. The triad of the Dialectic
has thus had its real validity as a symbol for the recurring insurgence
of the young and growing forces of life against the old and the sterile,
for the cooperative instincts of society against the barbarous and
the anarchic. It is an improvement over the earlier point of view it
superseded: "Down with the tyrant! Let us have freedom!"-in that
it conceives revolutionary progress as an organic development out of
the past for which the reactionary forces have themselves in their
