Thus Karl Marx appropriated Hegel’s determinism and put it to his own use. When the whole wealth of Hegel’s dialectical skill served no better purpose than to deify the Prussian military state, as a kind of ultimate revelation of the counsels of God, it was easy enough to discredit its optimistic illusions without destroying its determinism. The residual determinism became the basis of a new philosophy of history in which natural instinct and economic necessity took the place of divine will as man’s inexorable fate. The reaction from Hegel to Marx is a perfect symbol of the whole course of Western thought in the last hundred years with its change from a supernatural to a naturalistic determinism. Religion left to itself, even when it elaborates theologies, tries to do some justice to the reality of moral conflict even though it may confuse the issue by a faulty definition of divine omnipotence. But its necessary coöperation with metaphysics drives it inevitably into more and more consistent monisms in which moral enthusiasms are destroyed. The monistic and pantheistic element in Western religion was greatly increased by its intimate collaboration with philosophies which dealt chiefly with the problem of knowledge. For the solution of the epistemological problem the philosophical idealists thought it necessary to posit an all-knowing intelligence. It was this all-knowing absolute which became the support of religion’s faith in God against the attacks of realists and empiricists, though there was little enough affinity between the God of any healthy religious theism and the impersonal absolute of monistic philosophers.