This modern world-philosophy (Weltanschauung), being a socialist or proletarian one, takes issue with the bourgeois conceptions; it was first conceived as a new view of the world, entirely opposite to the ruling bourgeois conceptions, by Marx and Engels, who developed its sociological and historical contents; its philosophical basis is here developed by Dietzgen; its real character is indicated by the terms dialectic and materialist. By its core, historical materialism, it gains a wholly new theory of social evolution that forms its chief content. This theory was for the first time sketched in its main outlines in the Communist Manifesto, and later on fully developed in a number of other works and thoroughly vindicated by innumerable facts. It gives us the scientific assurance that the misery and imperfectness of present society, which bourgeois philosophy regards as inevitable and natural, is but a transitory condition, and that man will within measurable time emancipate himself from the slavery of his material wants by the regulation of social production. By this certainty socialism is put on an eminence so far above all bourgeois conceptions that these appear barbarous in comparison with it. And what is more significant, our world-philosophy may justly claim to have for the first time thrown the light of an indisputable science on society and man; combined with the maturest products of natural sciences it forms a complete science of the world, making all superstitions superfluous, and thus involving the theoretical emancipation, that is to say the emancipation of the mind. The science treating of the human mind forms the essence and foundation of this theory of society and man, not only because it gives us the same as the natural sciences a scientific or experience-proven theory of the function of human thinking, but also, because this theory of cognition can alone assure us that such sciences are able to furnish us an adequate picture of the world, and that anything outside of them is mere fantasy. For this reason we owe to Dietzgen's theory of cognition the firm foundation of our world-philosophy.