Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/48

 completely upside down, and though of these interrelations, many single ones were set out justly and correctly by Hegel, much of the detail is patched, labored, made up, in short, incorrect. The Hegelian system was, to speak briefly, a colossal miscarriage, and the last of its kind. It rested on an incurable contradiction; on the other hand, it actually proclaimed the historical conception according to which human history is a process of development, which, in its very nature, cannot find its intellectual conclusion in the discovery of a so-called absolute truth, on the other hand it declared itself to be the central idea of just such an absolute truth. An all embracing and determined knowledge of nature and history is in absolute contradiction with the foundations of dialectic thought, but it is not denied, on the contrary, it is strongly affirmed, that the systematic knowledge of the entire external world may from age to age make giant strides.

The total perversion of modern German idealism of necessity drove men to materialism, but not, and this is well worth noting, to the mere metaphysical mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century. In contradiction to the naively simple revolutionary pushing on one side of all earlier history, modern materialism sees in history the process of the development of society, to discover the laws of whose development is its task. In contradistinction to the conception of nature which prevailed among the French philosophers, as well as with Hegel, as something moving in a narrow circle with an eternal and unchangeable substantial form, as Newton conceived it, and with invariable species of organic beings, as Linnaeus thought, materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which nature has also a history in time. For the forms of the worlds, like the