Here Feuerbach lumps together the materialism that is a general world outlook resting upon a definite conception of the

relation between matter and mind, and the special form in which this world outlook was expressed at a definite historical stage, namely, in the eighteenth century. http://www.wsws.org/IML/ludwigfeuerbach/index.shtml The second specific limitation of this materialism lay in its inability to comprehend the universe as a process, as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development.http://www.wsws.org/IML/ludwigfeuerbach/index.shtml The history of the development of the earth, geology, was still totally unknown, and the conception that the animate natural beings of today are the result of a long sequence of development from the simple to the complex could not at that time scientifically be put forward at all. http://www.wsws.org/IML/ludwigfeuerbach/index.shtml econdly, Feuerbach is quite correct in asserting that exclusively natural-scientific materialism is indeed "the foundation of the edifice of human knowledge, but not the edifice itself". For we live not only in nature but also in human society, and this also no less than nature has its history of development and its science. It was therefore a question of bringing the science of society, that is, the sum total of the so-called historical and philosophical sciences, into harmony with the materialist foundation, and of reconstructing it thereupon. http://www.wsws.org/IML/ludwigfeuerbach/index.shtml man is a product of human society, of education, and of history. p85 But if even in our modern era, with its gigantic means of production and communication, the state is not an independent domain with an independent development, but one whose existence as well as development is to be explained in the last resort by the economic conditions of life of society, then this must be still more true of all earlier times when the production of the material life of man was not yet carried on with these abundant auxiliary means, and when, therefore, the necessity of such production must have exercised a still greater mastery over men. http://www.wsws.org/IML/ludwigfeuerbach/index.shtml

The state presents itself to us as the first ideological power over man. Society creates for itself an organ for the safeguarding of its common interests against internal and external attacks. This organ is the state power. http://www.wsws.org/IML/ludwigfeuerbach/index.shtml