WEITLING AND MARX 107... an excellent, constructive head, and an unselfish character,
the only really great communist of pre-Marxian times."^3
In the search for an explanation for the final break between
Marx and Weitling, it is clear that the religious phase of the lat¬
ter's communism was bound to prove extremely distasteful to
Marx. Whether Marx attended any of the discussions previously
described is not entirely certain, though it is known that Marx
met Weitling in London and received reports of the London de
bates from his friends. It is also known that long before the Brussels
conference Marx had begun to work on a plan to divorce com
munism from religious sentimentality and reduce it to a scientific
doctrine. Weitling, the simple-minded Utopian, knew nothing
about a law of economic determinism and did not have the formal
education which would have enabled him to follow Marx's learned
excursions into history and prophecy. He realized that men could
not be spiritually free while held in economic bondage, but such
a conclusion was relatively simple for a man who had to work with
his hands. Weitling appealed to the emotions and the heart. He
rejected the doctrine that made self-interest the sole motivation
of life. He believed that man had an inner desire to do good and a
potentiality for self-sacrifice which could be developed by train
ing in morality and religion; and he desired to use religion to
achieve a kind of communism which would be like the good life
of the genuine Christian, and give men a faith which would help
them to penetrate the black night of their despair.
Weitling was not an avowed atheist like Ludwig Feuerbach,
nor a materialist like Marx or Karl Heinzen. He was not a church
man either. But he wanted to use Christian faith to stir the emo
tions necessary for revolution. "Cold reason has never produced a
(^3) Max Beer, Karl Marx: Sein Leben und Seine Lehre (Berlin, 1919), 435-39.
Two French scholars have pointed out Weitling's influence on the Communist
Manifesto. See Charles Andler, Le Manifeste Communiste de Karl Marx et
F. Engels (Paris, n.d.), 6, 162; Caille, Wilhelm Weitling, 73; and C. Bougie,
Socialisme francais de "Socialisme utopique a la Democratie industrielle" (Paris,
1933), 136.