Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/153

 each by itself, separately, we do not run against any contradictions in them. We find certain qualities sometimes common, sometimes distinctive, occasionally contradictory, but in this last case they belong to different objects and are hence not self contradictory. While we follow this method we pursue the ordinary metaphysical method of thought. But it is quite different when we consider things in their movement, in their change, their life and their mutually reciprocal relations. Then we come at once upon contradictions. Motion is itself a contradiction since simple mechanical movement from place to place can only accomplish itself by a body being at one and the same moment in one place and simultaneously in another place by being in one and the same place and yet not there. And motion is just the continuous establishing and dissolving the contradiction.

Here we have a contradiction which is "objective, and so to speak corporeal in things and events." And what does Herr Duehring say about it? He affirms that "in rational mechanics there is no bridge between the strictly static and the dynamic." Finally the reader is able to see that there is behind this pretty little phrase of Herr Duehring nothing more than this—that the metaphysical mode of thought can absolutely not pass from the idea of rest to that of motion because the aforesaid contradiction intervenes. Motion is absolutely inconceivable to the metaphysician, because a contradiction. And as he affirms the inconceivability of motion he admits the existence of this contradiction against his will and therefore admits that it constitutes an objective contradiction in actual facts and events, and is moreover an actual fact.

But if simple mechanical motion contains a contradiction in itself still more so do the higher forms of motion