Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/91

 and then flung free so that it should remain hanging in a self contained condition and in a state of rest, you would have to appeal to a public of sucking infants to declare that the existing condition of that body represents no mechanical labor and that its removal from its earlier condition has no measure in mechanical work. Any passerby would tell Herr Duehring that the stone did not come on the string by its own efforts and the first good hand book in mechanics would inform him that if he let the stone fall again, the latter in its fall does just as much mechanical work as is necessary to lift it to the height of ten meters. The very simple fact that the stone is suspended represents mechanical force in itself, since if it remain long enough, the string breaks, as soon as it, as a result of its chemical constitution, is no longer strong enough to hold the stone. All mechanical phenomena, may, we must inform Herr Duehring, be reduced to just such simple fundamental forms, and the engineer is still unborn who cannot discover the bridge from statics to dynamics as long as he has sufficient initial force at his disposal.

It is quite a hard nut and bitter pill for our metaphysician that motion should find its measure in its opposite rest. It is such a glaring contradiction, and every contradiction is an absurdity in the eyes of Herr Duehring. It is nevertheless true that the hanging stone by reason of its weight and its distance from the ground represents a means of mechanical movement sufficiently easily measured in different ways, as for example through gravity direct, through glancing on an incline or through the undulation of a wave—and it is just the same with a loaded gun. The expression of motion in terms of its opposite rest presents no difficulty at all to the dialectic philosophy. The whole contradiction in its eyes is