Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/125

 directly we leave behind the prehistoric conditions of humanity, the stone-age, so-called. Where such repetitions do occur, moreover, they never recur under precisely similar conditions, as for example the occurrence of early tribal communism among all peoples anterior to civilisation and the form of its break up. As regards human history, then, as far as science is concerned, we are at a greater disadvantage than in biology. Furthermore, when the intimate relations existing between a social and political phenomenon come to be recognised it is not, as a rule, perceived until the conditions are actually on the way to decay. Knowledge is therefore entirely relative, since it is limited to a given people and a given epoch, and their nature under transitory social and political forms, when it examines relations and forms conclusions. He who therefore is after final truths of last instance, pure and immutable, will only manage to catch flat phrases and the most arrant commonplaces, like these—man cannot, generally speaking, live without working; up to the present men have for the most part been divided into masters and servants; Napoleon died on May 5th, 1821, and things of that sort.

It is worth noting that in this department of knowledge pretended final truths of last instance are met with most frequently. Only the person who wishes to show that there are eternal truth, eternal morality, and eternal justice in human history, and that these are similar in scope and application to those of mathematics, will proclaim that twice two is four and that birds have beaks and the like to be eternal truths. We can also certainly rely upon the same friend of humanity taking the opportunity to explain that all former inventors of eternal truths have been more or less asses or charlatans, that they have been circumscribed by error and have made