Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/42

 it except a sort of eclectic, average socialism, which is, as a matter of fact, up to the present, the prevailing notion in the minds of the great majority of socialist agitators in France and England—a mixture admitting of manifold shades, of a few notable critical utterances, economic teachings and pictures of a future state of society by leaders of different sects, a mixture which flows all the easier in proportion as the sharp precise corners are rubbed off the separate notions in the stream of debates, just as pebbles become round in a brook.

In order that a science can be made out of socialism it is first necessary that it be placed on a sound basis.

Meanwhile, close to and just after the French philosophy of the eighteenth century, the new German, philosophy arose and culminated in Hegel. Its greatest service was the restoration of the dialectic as the_highest form of thought. The old Greek philosophers were all natural dialecticians, and the most universal intellect among them, Aristotle, was already the discoverer of the essential forms of dialectic thought. On the other hand, subsequent philosophy although in it there were brilliant exponents of the dialectic (e. g. Descartes and Spinoza), was more and more involved in the socalled metaphysical mode of thought, chiefly owing to English influence which completely mastered the French philosophers, at least of the eighteenth century. Outside of the strict frontiers of philosophy, masterpieces of the dialectic might be found occasionally of which I can only recall "Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot, and the treatise upon the origin of human inequality by Rousseau.

We now give briefly the essential features of the two modes of thought: we will return to them more fully later.

If we examine nature, the history of man or our own