Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/49

 species of organisms by which they are inhabited under suitable conditions, come into being and pass away, and the cycles of their progress, in so far as it is permissible to use the term, take on eternally more magnificent dimensions. In either case it is entirely dialectic and no longer forces a static philosophy upon the other sciences. As soon as the demand is made upon each separate branch of science that it make clear its relation to things in general, and science as a whole, the individual science thereupon becomes superfluous. Of all philosophy up to the present time the only peculiar property which remains as its characteristic is the study of thought and the formal laws of thought—logic and the dialectic. All else belongs to the positive sciences of nature and history.

While the revolution in natural science was only able to be completely carried out in proportion as investigation furnished the necessary positive material, there were known a multitude of earlier historical facts which gave a distinct bias to the philosophy of history. In 1831 in Lyons the first purely working class revolt occurred. The first national working class movement, that of the English Chartists, reached its height between 1838 and 1842. The class war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie proceeded historically in the most advanced European countries just in proportion as the newly developed greater industry has progressed, on the one hand, and the political power of the bourgeoisie on the other. The teachings of the bourgeois economists with respect to the identity of the interests of capital and labor and with respect to the universal peace and well being which would follow as a matter of course from the adoption of free trade were more and more contradicted by facts. All these things could be as little