Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/114

 ashamed to fling at Darwin the question do animals develop from plants? so that it is a question whether he is more ignorant with regard to plants or animals.

Of life in general Herr Duehring can only tell us "The change in the form of matter which fulfills itself by plastic constructive arrangement remains a distinguishing characteristic of the individual life-process."

That is all that we learn of life and with respect to the plastic creative arrangement we sink knee deep in the nonsense of Duehring's jargon. If we want to learn what life is we shall have to look at the problem a little more closely on our own account.

That organic change in matter is the most universal and distinctive evidence of life has been declared by physiological chemists and chemical physiologists times without number during the last thirty years and their utterances are translated by Herr Duehring into his own clear and elegant language. But to define life as an organic change of matter is simply to define life as life, for organic change of matter, or change of matter with plastic creative arrangement is a statement which must itself be explained by life, and the explanation in its turn by the difference between organic and inorganic, that is between that which is alive and that which is not alive. So that with this explanation we do not get at the problem.

Organic change, as such, is frequently found where life does not exist. There are whole series of processes in chemistry, which by the proper combination of the elements, produce again their own conditions, so that thereby a certain body is the creator of a process. Thus in the manufacture of sulphuric acid by the burning of sulphur, there is created in this process sulphuric dioxide SO2, and if one add steam and nitric acid