晨读英语美文100篇 Passage 8. Address by Engels

[00:00.76]Passage 8. Address by Engels

[00:05.79]On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon,

[00:11.91]the greatest living thinker ceased to think.

[00:15.97]He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes,

[00:19.79]and when we came back we found him in his armchair,

[00:24.28]peacefully gone to sleep—but forever.

[00:27.89]An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America,

[00:35.77]and by historical science, in the death of this man.

[00:40.47]The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit

[00:45.51]will soon enough make itself felt.

[00:48.80]Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature,

[00:54.04]so Marx discovered the law of development of human history:

[00:59.51]the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology,

[01:05.09]that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing,

[01:11.33]before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.;

[01:17.13]that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence

[01:22.48]and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people

[01:28.06]or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions,

[01:34.08]the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion,

[01:39.22]of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore,

[01:45.36]be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

[01:51.37]But that is not all.

[01:52.90]Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production

[02:01.00]and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created.

[02:05.81]The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem,

[02:11.28]in trying to solve which all previous investigations,

[02:15.66]of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.

[02:22.00]Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime.

[02:26.82]Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery.

[02:32.95]But in every single field which Marx investigated—and he investigated very many fields,

[02:40.17]none of them superficially—in every field, even in that of mathematics,

[02:46.29]he made independent discoveries.