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 32 The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science. This edition met with great success, and was translated in a large number of languages. In the early seventies, the growth and success of the German Social Democracy tended to attract to a greater and greater extent the more discontented and liberal sections of the bourgeoisie. Now there is no objection whatever to welcoming members of the middle and upper classes in our Socialist organisations, providing these elements have completely freed themselves from their own class modes of thought and ideals, and have completely adopted the proletarian revolutionary standpoint. But the stampede of the bourgeoisie to the Socialist camp by no means conformed to this rule. On the contrary, the new bourgeois elements sought to deprive it of its proletarian character, to make it acceptable to the middle classes, in short, to make Socialism "respectable." Amongst the most talented of these new bourgeois leaders was Eugene Dühring, who was beginning to have great influence, especially over the younger men of the party. He was a man of undoubted great abilities who had overcome many great difficulties in the circumstances of his early life. He wrote on, and knew a fair amount of, a very large number of subjects, but he lacked thoroughness in them all, and, above all, he had no unifying principle, no fundamental conception of the relations existing between the various branches of knowledge and their development. Nevertheless, on account particularly of his growing influence in the party, he was not an unworthy opponent, and Engels, with his own encyclopedic knowledge and his incomparable mastery of the dialectic method, followed Dühring into the subjects touched on by him, and not merely made short work of him, but what was of far greater importance, produced a work of enduring value, forming a brilliant exposition of scientific Communism, and treating the whole of modern science from the Marxian materialistic point of view; whilst in its treatment of practical questions, arising from the social revolution, it is as valuable to us as a guide at the present day as it was when first written.

In the first place, it forms a searching investigation into the sources of historic materialism, and elucidates the dialectic method of investigation employed by himself and Marx, and gives it its rightful place in science and philosophy. It illustrates the dialectic principle—that is, the growth of the new within the old, and, indeed, as a result of it, until the new at a certain stage of development or maturity inevitably replaces the old—Engels illustrates this principle in the various physical, natural, and biological sciences as well as in the realms of history, philosophy, and so forth.

"According to the dialectic method of thinking," says Engels, "which regards things and their concepts in relation to their connection with each other, their concatenation, their coming into being and passing away, phenomena like the preceding (various natural occurrences), are so many confirmations of its own philosophy. Nature is