Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/124

 THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 117

What, then, is this absolute method? The abstraction of movement. What is the abstraction of movement? Movement in the abstract, What is movement in the abstract? The purely logical formula of movement or the movement of pure reason. In what does the move- ment of pure reason consist? To pose, oppose and compose itself, to be formulated as thesis, antithesis and synthesis, or, better still, to affirm itself, to deny itself and to deny its negation.

How does reason act, in order to affirm itself, to place itself in a given category? That is the affair of reason itself and of its apologists.

But once it has placed itself in thesis, this thesis, this thought, opposed to itself, doubles itself into two contradictory thoughts, the positive and the negative, the yes and no. The struggle of these two antagonistic elements, comprised in the antithesis, constitutes the dialectic movement. The yes becoming no, the no be- coming yes, the yes becoming at once yes and no, the no becoming at once no and yes, the contraries balance themselves, neutralise themselves, paralyse themselves. The fusion of these two contradictory thoughts coasti- tutes a new thought which is the synthesis of the two. This new thought unfolds itself again in two contradic- tory thoughts which are confounded in their turn in a new synthesis. From this travail is born a group of thoughts. This group of thoughts follows the same dialectic movement as a simple category, and has for antithesis a contradictory group. From these two groups is born a new group of thoughts which is the synthesis of them.

As from the dialectic movement of simple categories is born the group, so from:the dialectic movement of ‘the