Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/44

 nature which the last four hundred years have brought in their train. But it has caused us occasionally to drop into the habit of regarding natural phenomena and events as entities, apart from the great universal interrelations, and therefore not as moving but quiescent, not as changeable in their essence but fixed and constant, not in their life but in their death. And hence, just as happened with Bacon and Locke, this point of view has been carried over from science into philosophy, and has constituted the specially narrow view of the last century, the metaphysical mode of thought.

For the metaphysician, things and their pictures in the minds, concepts, are separate entities, one following the other without any regard to each other, stable, rigid, eternally fixed objects of investigation. The metaphysician thinks in antitheses. His conversation is "Yea, yea; Nay, nay" and whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. For him a thing exists or it does not exist, a thing can never be itself and something else, at the same time; positive and negative are mutually exclusive, cause and effect stand in stiff antagonism to each other. This method of thought seems at the first glance to be quite plausible because it is in accordance with sound common sense. But sound common sense, respectable fellow though he may be in his own home surrounded by his four walls, meets with strange adventures when he betakes himself into the wide world of investigation; and the metaphysical way of looking at things, sound and useful as it is, under given conditions, runs sooner or later into a stone wall, beyond which it is one-sided, stupid and abstract, and. loses itself in insoluble contradictions. Because it omits to notice the interrelations of the individual phenomena, their existence, their coming and their going, their static