Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/72



We now come to natural philosophy. Here again Herr Duehring takes it upon himself to be dissatisfied with his predecessors. He says "Natural philosophy sank so low that it became barren dregs of poetry and had fallen into the degraded rubbish of the sham philosophy of a Schelling and the like, grubbing in priest craft and mystifying the public." Disgust has rid us of these deformities, but up to the present it has been succeeded by instability, and "what is of concern to the public at large is that the disappearance of a particularly great charlatan merely gives an opportunity to a smaller but more expert successor who repeats the production in another form." Naturalists have little desire for "a flight into the kingdom of the universe-comprehending ideas," and therefore indulge too freely in speculations which "go to pieces." Thus complete salvation must be found, and, fortunately, Herr Duehring is at hand.

In order to comprehend aright the following conclusions respecting the unfolding of the universe in time and its limitation in space, we must again turn our attention to certain portions of the "scheme of the universe."

Eternity is ascribed to existence, in agreement with Hegel, what Hegel calls "tiresome (schlecht) eternity,"