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Special pages :
Letter to Friedrich Engels, July 4, 1864
| Author(s) | Karl Marx |
|---|---|
| Written | 4 July 1864 |
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 41
MARX TO ENGELS
IN MANCHESTER
[London,] 4 July 1864
DEAR Frederick,
On 3 June you wrote and told me that you would be SETTLING the business of the money with Borchardt the following day.[1] I have 3 reasons for wishing the thing to be settled:
1. Because of Borchardt; 2. I do not know by what rumour (perhaps deriving from Germany, Trier)) I have come to be known as a 'legatee'. It's fantastic what bills I've been sent, dating back to ANCIENT TIMES (Neue Rheinische Zeitung included).[2] 3. Had I had the money during the past 10 days, I'd have made a great deal of money on the Stock Exchange here. The time has come again when, with WIT and VERY LITTLE MONEY, it's possible to make money in London.
For these reasons I'd like the business to be settled, after deduction, OF COURSE, from my share of the sums required for duties and other outgoings—to the LAWYER, etc.
You WILL MUCH OBLIGE ME BY SETTLING THESE THINGS BEFORE JULY 15. YOU must excuse me for bothering you in view of your CHARGE OF BUSINESS, BUT THERE ARE VERY SERIOUS INTERESTS AT STAKE.
Many thanks for settling the Freiligrath affair.[3] Is the portrait he sent you the sinister Faustian one little Jenny has got in her album?
My wife, who attended an auction to buy the things she still required, has purchased a sturdy CARVING KNIFE AND FORK for you and will send them off today. I had told her there were none in your household.
Greetings from the EMPEROR OF CHINA[4] et cie.
Your
K. M.
My nose, mouth, etc., still bunged up with influenza so that I can neither smell nor taste.
During this time, being utterly incapable of work, have read Carpenter, Physiology, Lord, ditto, Kölliker, Gewebelehre, Spurzheim, The Anatomy of the Brain and the Nervous System, and Schwann and Schleiden, on the cells business.[5] In Lord's Popular Physiology, there's a good critique of phrenology, although the chap's religious. One passage recalls Hegel's Phenomenology; it reads:
'They attempt to break up the mind into a number of supposed original faculties, such as no metaphysician will, for a moment, admit; and the brain into an equal number of organs, which the anatomist in vain asks to be shown, and then proceed to attach one of the former unadmitted suppositions as a mode of action to one of the latter undemonstrated existences.'
As you know, 1. I'm always late off the mark with everything, and 2. I invariably follow in your footsteps. So it's probable that I shall now devote much of my spare time to anatomy and PHYSIOLOGY and, in addition, attend lectures (where there will be practical demonstrations and dissection).