Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/132



By dint of experience we have come to learn Herr Duehring's "method." It consists in separating each department of knowledge into what are assumed to be its most simple elements, then of making so called self evident axioms with regard to these simple elements, and thereupon operating with the results obtained in this way. Thus a sociological question is to be "decided on simple axiomatic principles just as if it were a matter of elementary mathematics." Thus the application of the mathematical method to history, ethics and law gives mathematical certainty to the final results which appear as pure and immutable truths.

This is only another form of the old ideological, a priori method so called, which learned the properties of an object not from the object itself but derived them by proof from the concept of the object. First you derive a concept of the object from the actual object, then you turn the spit and measure the object in terms of its derivative the concept. The concept is not shaped after the pattern of the object but the object after the pattern of the concept. In Herr Duehring's method, the simplest elements, the last abstractions to which he can attain do duty for the concept which is unchangeable, the simplest elements are under the best conditions purely imaginary in their nature. The philosophy of realism hence appears to be mere ideology, and has no derivation