Socialism, Utopian and ScientificEngels, Friedrich
Philosophy
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
Engels, Friedrich
Socialism
[2] From "The Revolution in Mind and Practice," p. 21, a memorial
addressed to all the "red Republicans, Communists and Socialists of
Europe," and sent to the provisional government of France, 1848, and
also "to Queen Victoria and her responsible advisers."
[3] Note, l. c., p. 70.
II
In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy of the
eighteenth century had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating
in Hegel. Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as
the highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all
born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopædic
intellect of them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of
dialectic thought. The newer philosophy, on the other hand, although
in it also dialectics had brilliant exponents (_e.g._ Descartes and
Spinoza), had, especially through English influence, become more and
more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of reasoning, by
which also the French of the eighteenth century were almost wholly
dominated, at all events in their special philosophical work. Outside
philosophy in the restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced
masterpieces of dialectic. We need only call to mind Diderot's "Le
Neveu de Rameau," and Rousseau's "Discours sur l'origine et les
fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes." We give here, in brief,
the essential character of these two modes of thought.
When we consider and reflect upon nature at large, or the history of
mankind, or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture
of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations
and combinations, in which nothing remains what, where, and as it was,
but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. We
see, therefore, at first the picture as a whole, with its individual
parts still more or less kept in the background; we observe the
movements, transitions, connections, rather than the things that move,
combine, and are connected. This primitive, naïve, but intrinsically
correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy,
and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is
not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly
coming into being and passing away.
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