Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/83

 presents the same difficulty. He seems to think that his readers are infants. The proof of the transitions and interrelations of the most insignificant links in the chain of existence is just what constitutes the subject matter of natural science. If there is an impediment anywhere, nobody, not even Herr Duehring, thinks to explain the development as proceeding from nothing, but on the other hand as only proceeding from transition, change, and forward movement from a completed evolutionary stage. Here, however, he undertakes to show with reference to matter that it proceeds from absence of movement and therefore from nothing.

In the second place, we have the "stable bridge." This does not help us appreciably over the difficulty, but we have a right to use it as a bridge between rigid stability and motion. Unfortunately stability consists in absence of motion, and the question as to the generation of motion remains as dark a secret as before. And if Herr Duehring shifts his no-movement at all to universal movement in infinitely small particles and ascribes to this ever so long a duration of time, we are still not the thousand part of an inch further from the place whence we started. Without a creative act we can get nothing from nothing, not even anything as small as a mathematical differential. The bridge of stability is therefore not even a pons asinorum. Herr Duehring is the only person able to cross it.

Thirdly, as long as the present theories of mechanics prevail, this constitutes one of Herr Duehring's most reliable props, we cannot indicate how anything passes from a state of quiescence to one of motion. But the mechanical theory of heat teaches us that the movement of the mass depends upon the movements of the molecules, (so that even in this case movement proceeds from