January 16, 1957 Miss Roberta Yerkes Yale University Press New Haven 7, Conn. Dear Miss Yerkes: Thanks for your kind letter and for the second batch of the manuscript. (This registered letter, mailed January 11 in New Haven, arrived January 12 in New York and was delivered January 14 in the afternoon.) I fully agree with your suggestion concerning vehement words. What concerns repetitions, the decision depends on the special conditions of each case. Thus, for instance: On page 96, note *** The last three lines of the note repeat, although in other words, what has been said in the text. However, this is one of the best known and most frequently quoted dicta of Marx. Positivists, Idealists, Thomists, Existentialists, Pragmatists quoted it again and again in order to illustrate the "activism" of Marx. And nobody, as far as I can see, observed that this dictum is incompatible with the whole tenor of Marxian determinism, philosophy of history, and "ideology" doctrine. Here one must be emphatic, even if it appears to be repetitious. Incidentally Marx committed these famous Thoses on Feuerbach to paper in 1845. But he did not publish them. Perhaps because he realized that some of them -- or at least the last and most important of them, the one we are dealing with -- are in conflict with his philosophy as he developed it in his later years. Engels who never scented an incon- sistency or a contradiction, either in his own writings or in those of Marx, published them after the death of Marx. Marx himself would never have published them. It is just an accident that he did not throw them into the waste paper basket. As in other similar cases, Engels here too badly served his friend's memory.