philosophical and political principles forcing them towards communism, and the reason of their hesitation in accepting it is probably expressed by Ruge, when he says (in an article in Heinzen's "Die Opposition," p. 103), that the element of truth in communism was its sense of the necessity of political emancipation, but that there was a great danger of communists forgetting the political question in their zeal for the social. It was chiefly under the influence of the Humanism into which Feuerbach had transformed the Idealism of Hegel, that the Hegelian Left passed into communism. Humanist and communist became nearly convertible terms. Friedrich Engels mentions in his book on the condition of the English working classes, published in 1845, that all the German communists of that day were followers of Feuerbach, and most of the followers of Feuerbach in Germany (Ruge seems to have remained an exception) were communists. Lassalle was one of Feuerbach's correspondents, and after he started the present socialist movement in Germany, he wrote Feuerbach on 21st October, 1863, saying that the Progressists were political rationalists of the feeblest type, and that it was the same battle which Feuerbach was waging in the theological, and he himself now in the political and economic sphere. Stein attributed French socialism greatly to the prevailing sensualistic character of French philosophy, which conceived enjoyment to be man's only good, and never rose to what he calls the great German conception, the logical conception of the Ego, the idea of knowing for the sake of knowing. The inference this contrast suggests is that the metaphysics of Germany had been her protector, her national guard, against socialism, but as we see, at the very time he was writing the guard was turning traitor, and a native socialism was springing up by natural generation out of the idealistic philosophy. The fact, however, rather confirms the force of Stein's remark, for the Hegelian idealism first bred the more sensualistic system of humanism, and then humanism bred socialism.