The total perversion of modern German idealism of necessity drove men to materialism, but not, and this is well worth noting, to the mere metaphysical mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century. In contradiction to the naively simple revolutionary pushing on one side of all earlier history, modern materialism sees in history the process of the development of society, to discover the laws of whose development is its task. In contradistinction to the conception of nature which prevailed among the French philosophers, as well as with Hegel, as something moving in a narrow circle with an eternal and unchangeable substantial form, as Newton conceived it, and with invariable species of organic beings, as Linnaeus thought, materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which nature has also a history in time. For the forms of the worlds, like the species of organisms by which they are inhabited under suitable conditions, come into being and pass away, and the cycles of their progress, in so far as it is permissible to use the term, take on eternally more magnificent dimensions. In either case it is entirely dialectic and no longer forces a static philosophy upon the other sciences. As soon as the demand is made upon each separate branch of science that it make clear its relation to things in general, and science as a whole, the individual science thereupon becomes superfluous. Of all philosophy up to the present time the only peculiar property which remains as its characteristic is the study of thought and the formal laws of thought--logic and the dialectic. All else belongs to the positive sciences of nature and history.