Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Duehring"Engels, Friedrich
Philosophy
Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Duehring"
Engels, Friedrich
Dialectical materialism; Dühring, E. (Eugen), 1833-1921; Economics; Philosophy; Socialism
Therefore the impossibility of creating or destroying matter, the
simple forms of its existence as far as they exist, and motion, these
old, well known facts, inadequately expressed, that is the only
positive thing which Herr Duehring is in a position to offer us as a
result of his real philosophy of the inorganic world. All these things
we have long known. But what we have not known is that they are
permanent laws and as such natural properties of the system of things.
It is just the same thing over again as in the case of Kant. Herr
Duehring takes some universally known expressions, pastes the Duehring
label on them and calls them "fundamentally original results and
views, system shaping thoughts, profound science."
We have not long to hesitate on this account. Whatever deficiencies
the most profound science and the best contrived social theories may
have, for once Herr Duehring can say precisely "The quantity of gold
in the universe must always remain the same and cannot be increased or
diminished any more than matter in general. But unfortunately Herr
Duehring does not tell us what we may buy with this gold."
_The Organic World._
"From mechanics in rest and motion to the relation of sensation and
thought there is a uniform progression of interruptions." With this
assurance Herr Duehring spares himself from saying anything further
about the origin of life, though one might reasonably expect that a
thinker who has followed the development of the world from its
self-contained condition, and who is so much at home with the other
heavenly bodies would be here at home also. Besides this assurance is
only half true in so far as it is not yet completed by means of the
log line of Hegel, of which mention has been made already. In all its
gradations the transition from one form of evolution to another
remains a leap, a differentiating movement. So in the transition from
the mechanics of the worlds to those of the smaller amounts of matter
in each single world, just so also in that from the mechanics of the
mass to that of the molecule--the motion which we examine particularly
in physics, so-called, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, just in
the same way also the transition from the physics of the molecule to
the physics of the chemical atom is completed by a differentiating
leap, and it is just the same with the transition from ordinary
chemical action to the chemistry of albumen which we call life. Within
the sphere of life the changes become less frequent and less
remarkable. Therefore Hegel must again correct Herr Duehring.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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