FREDERICK ENGELS ANTI-DÜHRING (Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science) FOREIGN LANGUAGES PRESS PEKING 1976 First Edition 1976

The present English edition of Engels' Anti-Dühring ^[1] to a substantial extent follows previous English translations. In comparing these translations with the original text of the third German edition of Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (1894) it was found necessary to make numerous and sometimes drastic corrections and revisions.
    The book includes the author's three Prefaces to the first three German editions.
    As he indicated in the Preface to the second German edition (p. 10 below) he revised the "Introduction", Chapter I and Part III, Chapters I and II more or less to conform with the changes he had made in them for his pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Words and passages in the pamphlet not included in this revision are here given in square brackets. The most important formulations from Engels' rough draft of the "Introduction" and certain passages in the pamphlet which differ from the corresponding passages in the German edition of Anti-Dühring are given in footnotes.
    This edition includes the special introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific which Engels wrote in English himself in 1892.
    It is also supplied with notes and subject and name indexes.

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PREFACES TO THE THREE EDITIONS


I

    The following work is by no means the fruit of any "inner urge". On the contrary.

    When three years ago Herr Dühring suddenly issued his challenge to his century as an adept and at the same time a reformer of socialism, friends in Germany repeatedly urged on me their desire that I should subject this new socialist theory to a critical examination in the central organ of the Social-Democratic Party, at that time the Volksstaat.[2] They thought this absolutely necessary in order to prevent a new occasion for sectarian splitting and confusion from developing within the Party, which was still so young, just having finally achieved unity. They were in a better position than I to judge the situation in Germany, and I was therefore duty bound to accept their view. Moreover, it became apparent that the new convert was being welcomed by a section of the socialist press with a warmth which it is true was only extended to Herr Dühring's goodwill, but which at the same time also indicated that its reciprocation of his goodwill

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itself moved it to accept Herr Dühring's doctrine, and sight unseen into the bargain. Besides, there were people who were already preparing to spread this doctrine in a popularized form among the workers. Finally Herr Dühring and his little sect were using all the arts of advertisement and intrigue to force the Volksstaat to take a definite stand in relation to the new doctrine which had come forward with such mighty pretensions.

    Nevertheless it was a year before I could make up my mind to neglect other work and get my teeth into this sour apple. It was the kind of apple that, once bitten into, had to be completely devoured; and it was not only very sour, but also very large. The new socialist theory was presented as the ultimate practical fruit of a new philosophical system. It was therefore necessary to examine it in connection with this system, and in doing so to examine the system itself; it was necessary to follow Herr Dühring into that vast territory in which he dealt with all things under the sun and with some others as well. Such was the origin of a series of articles which appeared in the Leipzig Vorwärts, the successor of the Volksstaat, from the beginning of 1877 and which are here presented as a connected whole.

    It was thus the nature of the object itself which forced the criticism to assume a length entirely out of proportion to the scientific content of this object, that is to say, of Dühring's writings. But there are two other considerations which may excuse this length. On the one hand, in connection with the very diverse subjects to be touched on here, it gave me the opportunity of setting forth in a positive form my views on controversial issues which are of quite general scientific or practical interest today. This has been done in every single chapter, and although this work cannot in any way aim at

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presenting another system as an alternative to Herr Dühring's "system", it is to be hoped that the reader will not fail to observe the connection inherent in the various views I have advanced. I have already had proof enough that in this respect my work has not been entirely fruitless.

    On the other hand, Herr Dühring the "system-creator" is by no means an isolated phenomenon in contemporary Germany. For some time now in Germany systems of cosmogony, of natural philosophy in general, of politics, of economics, etc., have been springing up by the dozen overnight, like mushrooms. The most insignificant doctor of philosophy, nay, even the students will go in for nothing less than a complete "system". Just as in the modern state it is presumed that every citizen is competent to pass judgement on all the issues on which he is called to vote, and just as in economics it is assumed that every consumer is a connoisseur of all the commodities which he has occasion to buy for his maintenance -- so similar assumptions are now to be made in science. Freedom of science is taken to mean that people write on every subject they have not studied and proclaim this as the only strictly scientific method. Herr Dühring is one of the most characteristic types of this bumptious pseudo-science which is nowadays forcing its way to the front everywhere in Germany and is drowning everything with its resounding -- sublime nonsense. Sublime nonsense in poetry, in philosophy, in politics, in economics, in historiography, sublime nonsense in the lecture-room and on the platform, sublime nonsense everywhere; sublime nonsense which lays claim to a superiority and depth of thought distinguishing it from the simple, commonplace nonsense of other nations; sublime nonsense, the most characteristic mass product of Germany's intellectual industry -- cheap but bad -- just like other German-made goods, with which unfortunately

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it was not exhibited at Philadelphia.[3] Particularly since Herr Dühring's good example, even German socialism has lately gone in for a considerable amount of sublime nonsense, producing various persons who give themselves airs about "science", of which they "never really learnt a word". This is an infantile disease which marks, and is inseparable from, the incipient conversion of the German student to Social-Democracy, but which our workers with their remarkably healthy nature will undoubtedly overcome.

    It was not my fault that I had to follow Herr Dühring into realms where at best I can only claim to be a dilettante. In such cases I have for the most part limited myself to putting forward the correct, undisputed facts in opposition to my adversary's false or distorted assertions. This applies to jurisprudence and in some instances also to natural science. In other cases it has been a question of general views connected with theoretical natural sciences that is, a field where even the professional natural scientist is compelled to pass beyond his own speciality and encroach on neighbouring territory -- territory on which he is, therefore, just as much a "semi-initiate" as any one of us, as Herr Virchow has admitted. I hope I shall be granted the same indulgence in respect of minor inexactitudes and clumsiness of expression as people show each other in this domain.

    Just as I was completing this preface, I received a publisher's notice, composed by Herr Dühring, of a new "authoritative" work of Herr Dühring's, Neue Grundgesetze zur rationellen Physik und Chemie.* Conscious as I am of the inadequacy of my knowledge of physics and chemistry, I still believe that I know my Herr Dühring, and therefore, without having seen

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    * New Basic Laws for Rational Physics and Chemistry. --Ed.

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the work itself, think that I am entitled to say in advance that the laws of physics and chemistry put forward in it will be worthy to take their place, by their erroneousness or triteness, among the laws of economics, world schematism, etc., which were discovered earlier by Herr Dühring and are examined in this book of mine; and also that the rhigometer, the instrument constructed by Herr Dühring for measuring extremely low temperatures, will serve as a measure not of temperatures either high or low, but simply and solely of Herr Dühring's ignorant arrogance.

London, June 11, 1878


 


II



    I had not expected that a new edition of this book would have to be published. The object of its criticism is now practically forgotten; the work itself was not only available to many thousands of readers in the form of a series of articles published in the Leipzig Vorwärts in 1877 and 1878, but also appeared in its entirety as a separate book in a large edition. How then can anyone still be interested in what I had to say about Herr Dühring years ago?

    I owe this in the first place probably to the fact that this book was banned within the German Empire immediately after the promulgation of the Anti-Socialist Law,[4] as was generally the case with almost all my works still circulating at the time. To anyone whose brain has not been ossified by the hereditary bureaucratic prejudices of the countries of the Holy Alliance,[5] the effect of this measure must have been self-evident: a doubled and trebled sale of the banned books,

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and the exposure of the impotence of the gentlemen in Berlin who issue bans they cannot enforce. Indeed the kindness of the Imperial Government has brought me more new editions of my minor works than I can claim the credit for; I have had no time to make a proper revision of the text, and in most cases have been obliged simply to allow it to be reprinted as it stood.

    But there was also another factor. The "system" of Herr Dühring which is criticized in this book ranges over a very wide theoretical domain; I was compelled to follow him wherever he went and to oppose my conceptions to his. As a result, my negative criticism became positive; the polemic was transformed into a more or less connected exposition of the dialectical method and of the communist world outlook represented by Marx and myself -- an exposition covering a fairly comprehensive range of subjects. After it had been first presented to the world in Marx's Poverty of Philosophy and in The Communist Manifesto and after it had passed through an incubation period of fully twenty years before the publication of Capital,[6] this outlook of ours has been extending its influence among ever-widening circles with growing rapidity, and now finds recognition and support far beyond the boundaries of Europe, in every country which contains proletarians on the one hand and undaunted scientific theorists on the other. Therefore, it seems that there is a public with an interest in the subject great enough to accept the polemic against the Dühring tenets for the sake of the positive conceptions accompanying it, although the polemic has now largely lost its point.

    I must note in passing that since the outlook expounded io this book was founded and developed in far greater measure by Marx, and only in an insignificant degree by myself, it was

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automatically understood between us that this exposition of mine should not be issued without his knowledge. I read the whole manuscript to him before it was printed, and the tenth chapter of the part on economics ("From the Critical History ") was written by Marx but unfortunately had to be shortened somewhat by me for purely external reasons. As a matter of fact, we had always been accustomed to help each other out in special subjects.

    With the exception of one chapter, the present new edition is an unaltered reprint of the previous one. For one thing, I had no time for a thoroughgoing revision, although there was much in the presentation that I should have liked to alter. Besides I am under the obligation to prepare for the press the manuscripts left by Marx, and this is much more important than anything else. Then again, my conscience rebels against making any alterations. The book is a polemic, and I think I owe it to my adversary not to improve anything in my work when he is unable to improve his. I could only claim the right to make a rejoinder to Herr Dühring's reply. But I have not read, and will not read, what Herr Dühring has written concerning my attack, unless there is some special reason to do so; in point of theory I have finished with him. Besides, I must observe the rules of decency in literary warfare all the more strictly in his regard because of the despicable injustice that has since been done to him by the University of Berlin. It is true that the University has not gone unpunished. A university that so abases itself as to deprive Herr Dühring of his academic freedom in circumstances which are well known must not be surprised to find Herr Schweninger forced on it in circumstances which are equally well known.[7]

    The only chapter in which I have allowed myself some additional elucidation is the second chapter of Part III,

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"Theoretical". This chapter deals solely and simply with the exposition of a pivotal point in the world outlook for which I stand, and my adversary cannot therefore complain if I attempt to state it in a more popular form and to make it more coherent. In fact, there was an extraneous reason for doing so. I had revised three chapters of the book (the first chapter of the "Introduction" and the first and second of Part III) for my friend Lafargue with a view to their translation into French as a separate pamphlet; and after the French edition had served as the basis for Italian and Polish editions, I issued a German edition under the title, Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft.[*] This ran through three editions within a few months and also appeared in Russian and Danish translations. In all these editions it was only the chapter in question which had been amplified, and in the new edition of the original work it would have been pedantic to have tied myself down to its original text instead of the later text which had become known internationally.

    Whatever else I should have liked to alter relates in the main to two points. First, to the history of primitive society, the key to which was provided by Morgan only in 1877.[8] But as I have since had the opportunity to work up the material, which had in the meantime become available to me, in my book Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats ** (Zürich, 1884), a reference to this later work meets the case.

    The second point concerns the section dealing with theoretical natural science. There is much that is awkward in the exposition, and much of it could be expressed today in a clearer

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    * Published in English under the title Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. --Ed.
    ** The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. --Ed.

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and more definite form. I have not allowed myself the right to improve this section, and for that very reason am under an obligation to criticize myself here instead.

    Marx and I were pretty well the only people to salvage conscious dialectics from German idealist philosophy for the materialist conception of nature and history. But a knowledge of mathematics and natural science is essential to a conception of nature which is dialectical and at the same time materialist. Marx was well versed in mathematics, but we could keep up with the natural sciences only piecemeal, intermittently and sporadically. For this reason, when I retired from business and transferred my home to London,[9] thus enabling myself to give the necessary time to it, I went through as complete a "moulting", as Liebig calls it, in mathematics and the natural sciences as was possible for me, and spent the best part of eight years on it. I was right in the middle of this "moulting" process when, as it happened, I had to occupy myself with Herr Dühring's so-called natural philosophy. It was therefore only too natural that in dealing with this subject I was sometimes unable to find the correct technical expression, and in general moved with considerable clumsiness in the field of theoretical natural science. On the other hand, my lack of assurance in this field, which I had not yet overcome, made me cautious, and I cannot be charged with real blunders in relation to the facts as then known or with an incorrect presentation of recognized theories. In this connection there was only one unrecognized genius of a mathematician who complained in a letter to Marx that I had made a wanton attack upon the honour of .

    It goes without saying that my recapitulation of mathematics and the natural sciences was undertaken in order to convince myself in detail -- of what in general I was not in doubt -- that

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in nature, amid the welter of innumerable changes, the same dialectical laws of motion impose themselves as those which in history govern the apparent fortuitousness of events; the same laws as those which similarly form the thread running through the history of the development of human thought and gradually rise to consciousness in the mind of man; the laws which Hegel first developed in all-embracing but mystified form, and which we made it one of our aims to strip of this mystic form and to bring clearly before the mind in their complete simplicity and universality. The old natural philosophy -- in spite of its real value and the many fruitful seeds it contained* -- was manifestly unable to satisfy us. As is more fully brought out in this book, the old natural philosophy, particularly in the Hegelian form, erred because it did not concede to nature any development in time, any "succession", but only "co-existence". This was on the one hand grounded in the Hegelian system itself, which ascribed continued historical

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    * It is much easier, along with the unthinking mob à la Karl Vogt, to assail the old natural philosophy than to appreciate its historical significance. It contains a great deal of nonsense and fantasy, but no more than the unphilosophical theories of the empirical natural scientists of the time, and it began to be perceived after the spread of the theory of evolution that there was much that was sensible and rational in it. Haeckel was therefore fully justified in recognizing the merits of Treviranus and Oken. In his primordial slime and primordial vesicle Oken put forward as a biological postulate what was in fact subsequently discovered as protoplasm and cell. As far as Hegel specifically is concerned, he is in many respects head and shoulders above his empiricist contemporaries, who thought that they had explained all unexplained phenomena when they had endowed them with some force or power -- the force of gravity, the power of buoyancy, the power of electrical contact, etc. -- or where this would not do, with some unknown substance, the substance of light, of heat, of electricity, etc. The imaginary substances have now been pretty well discarded, but the power humbug against which Hegel fought [cont. onto p. 13. -- DJR] still pops up gaily. For example, as late as 1869 in Helmholtz's Innsbruck lectures (Helmholtz, Popular Lectures, German edition, 1871, Vol. 2, p. 190).[10] In contrast to the deification of Newton which was handed down from the French of the eighteenth century and the English heaping of honours and wealth on him, Hegel brought out the fact that Kepler, whom Germany allowed to starve, was the real founder of the modern mechanics of the celestial bodies, and that the Newtonian law of gravitation was already contained in all three of Kepler's laws, in the third law even explicitly. What Hegel proves by a few simple equations in his Philosophy of Nature, §270 and Addenda (Hegel's Works, German edition, 1842, Vol. VII, pp. 98 and 113-15),[11] reappears as the outcome of the most recent mathematical mechanics in Gustav Kirchhoff's Lectures on Mathematical Physics (2nd German edition, Leipzig, 1877, p. 10) and in essentially the same simple mathematical form as had first been developed by Hegel. The natural philosophers stand in the same relation to consciously dialectical natural science as the Utopians to modern communism. [Note by Engels.]

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development only to the "spirit", but on the other hand was also due to the whole state of the natural sciences in that period. Here Hegel fell far behind Kant, whose nebular theory had already indicated the origin of the solar system, and whose discovery of the retardation of the earth's rotation by the tides had also proclaimed the doom of that system.[12] Finally, for me there could be no question of superimposing the laws of dialectics on nature but of discovering them in it and developing them from it.

    But to do this systematically and in each separate department is a gigantic task. Not only is the domain to be mastered almost limitless; in this entire domain natural science itself is undergoing such a mighty process of revolutionization that even people who can devote the whole of their spare time to it can hardly keep pace. Since Karl Marx's death, however, my time has been requisitioned for more urgent duties, and I have therefore been compelled to lay my work aside. For

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the present I must content myself with the indications given in this book, and must await some later opportunity to put together and publish the results which I have arrived at, perhaps in conjunction with the extremely important mathematical manuscripts left by Marx.[13]

    Yet the advance of theoretical natural science may possibly make my work very largely or entirely superfluous. For the revolution which is being forced on theoretical natural science by the sheer necessity of setting the huge accumulation of purely empirical discoveries in order is such that it must increasingly bring the dialectical character of natural processes to the consciousness even of those empiricists who are most opposed to it. The old rigid antagonisms, the sharp, impassable dividing lines are disappearing more and more. Since even the last "true" gases have been liquefied and since it has been proved that a body can be brought into a condition in which the liquid and the gaseous forms are indistinguishable, the aggregate states have lost the last relics of their former absolute character. With the thesis of the kinetic theory of gases, that in perfect gases at equal temperatures the squares of the speeds with which the individual molecules of gas move are in inverse ratio to their molecular weights, heat also takes its place directly among the forms of motion which can be immediately measured as such. Whereas only ten years ago the great basic law of motion, then recently discovered, was as yet conceived as a mere law of the conservation of energy, as the mere expression of the indestructibility and uncreatability of motion, that is, merely in its quantitative aspect, this narrow, negative conception is being more and more supplanted by the positive idea of the transformation of energy, in which for the first time the qualitative content of the process comes into its own and the last vestige of an extramundane creator is obliterated. That

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the quantity of motion (so-called energy) remains unaltered when it is transformed from kinetic energy (so-called mechanical force) into electricity, heat, potential energy of position, etc., and vice versa, no longer needs to be preached as something new; it serves as the basis which has already been secured for the now much more pregnant investigation into the very process of transformation, the great basic process, knowledge of which comprises all knowledge of nature. And since biology has been pursued in the light of the theory of evolution, one rigid boundary line of classification after another has been swept away in the domain of organic nature. The almost unclassifiable intermediate links are growing daily more numerous, closer investigation throws organisms out of one class into another, and distinguishing characteristics which had almost become articles of faith are losing their absolute validity; we now have mammals that lay eggs, and, if the report is confirmed, also birds that walk on all fours.[14] Years ago, following on the discovery of the cell, Virchow was compelled to dissolve the unity of the individual animal being into a federation of cell-states -- thus acting more progressively than scientifically and dialectically[15] -- and now the conception of animal (and therefore also human) individuality is becoming far more complex owing to the discovery of the white blood corpuscles which creep about amoeba-like within the bodies of the higher animals. But it is precisely the polar antagonisms put forward as irreconcilable and insoluble, the forcibly fixed lines of demarcation and class distinctions, which have given modern theoretical natural science its restricted metaphysical character. The recognition that these antagonisms and distinctions, though to be found in nature, are only of relative validity, and that on the other hand their imagined rigidity and absolute validity have been introduced into nature

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only by our thought -- this recognition forms the kernel of the dialectical conception of nature. It is possible to arrive at this recognition because the accumulating facts of natural science compel us to do so; one arrives at it more easily if one approaches the dialectical character of these facts equipped with an understanding of the laws of dialectical thought. In any case natural science has now advanced so far that it can no longer escape dialectical generalization. However, it will make this process easier for itself if it does not lose sight of the fact that the results in which its experiences are summarized are concepts, that the art of working with concepts is not inborn and also is not given with ordinary everyday consciousness but requires real thought, and that similarly this thought has a long empirical history, no more and no less than empirical natural science. Only by learning to appropriate the results of the development of philosophy during the past 2,500 years will it rid itself on the one hand of any natural philosophy standing apart from it, outside it and above it, and on the other of its own limited method of thought inherited from English empiricism.

London, September 23, 1885




III

    The following new edition is a reprint of the preceding one, except for a few very unimportant stylistic changes. It is only in one chapter -- the tenth of Part II: "From the Critical History " -- that I have allowed myself to make substantial additions on the following grounds.

    As already stated in the preface to the second edition, this chapter was in all essentials the work of Marx. I was forced

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to make considerable cuts in Marx's manuscript, which in its first wording had been intended as an article for a journal; and I had to cut precisely those parts in which the critique of Dühring's propositions was overshadowed by Marx's own developments regarding the history of economics. But this is just the section of the manuscript which is of the greatest and most permanent interest even today. I consider myself under an obligation to give in as full and faithful a form as possible the passages in which Marx assigns to people like Petty, North, Locke and Hume their appropriate place in the genesis of classical political economy, and even more his explanation of Quesnay's "Economic Tableau", which has remained an insoluble riddle of the sphinx to all modern political economy. On the other hand, wherever the thread of the argument makes this possible, I have omitted passages which refer exclusively to Herr Dühring's writings.

    For the rest I may be perfectly satisfied with the extent to which the views presented here have spread since the previous edition in the scientific and working-class consciousness in every civilized country of the world.

F. Engels  

London, May 23,1894




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INTRODUCTION


I

GENERAL


    Modern socialism is, in its content, primarily the product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms prevailing in modern society between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers, and on the other, of the anarchy ruling in production. In its theoretical form, however, it originally appears as a more developed and allegedly more consistent extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.* Like every new theory, modern socialism

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    * In a rough outline of the "Introduction" the above passage runs as follows: "Modern socialism, although it arose essentially from the perception of the class antagonisms existing in society between proprietors and non-proprietors and between workers and exploiters, first appears in its theoretical form as a more consistent and more developed extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, who also included Morelly and Mably, socialism's first representatives." --Ed.

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had at first to link itself with the intellectual data ready to hand, however deeply its roots lay in [material] economic facts.

    The great men who in France were clearing men's minds for the coming revolution acted in an extremely revolutionary way themselves. They recognized no external authority of any kind. Religion, conceptions of nature, society, political systems -- everything was subjected to the most unsparing criticism: everything had to justify its existence before the judgement-seat of reason or give up existence. The reasoning intellect became the sole measure of everything. It was the time when, as Hegel says, the world was stood on its head,* first in the sense that the human head and the principles arrived at by its thinking claimed to be the basis of all human action and association; but then later also in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction with these principles was, in fact, turned upside down. Every previous form of society

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    * [This is the passage on the French Revolution: "The thought, the concept of right, all at once asserted itself, and against this the old scaffolding of wrong could make no stand. In this conception of right, therefore, a constitution has now been established, and henceforth every thing must be based upon this. Ever since the sun has been in the firmament and the planets have circled round it, the sight had never been seen of man standing on his head -- i.e., on thought -- and building reality after this image. Anaxagoras was the first to say that nous, reason, rules the world; but now, for the first time, man had come to recognize that the Idea must rule mental reality. And this was a magnificent sunrise. All thinking beings have joined in celebrating this epoch. A sublime emotion prevailed at that time, an enthusiasm of reason sent a thrill through the world, as if the reconciliation of the divine with the profane, had only now come about" (Hegel, Philosophy of History, German ed., 1840, p. 535). Is it not high time to set the Anti-Socialist Law in action against these teachings of the late Professor Hegel which are so subversive and such a public danger?] (Note by Engels; italics in the last three sentences of the quotation from Hegel are Engels'. --Ed.)

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and state, every old traditional notion was flung into the lumber-room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudice; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. The light of day [,the realm of reason,] now appeared for the first time; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege and oppression were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal justice, equality based on nature, and the inalienable rights of man.

    We know today that this realm of reason was nothing more than the idealized realm of the bourgeoisie; that eternal justice found its realization in bourgeois justice; that equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the most essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, Rousseau's Social Contract, came into being, and could only come into being, as a bourgeois democratic republic. The great thinkers of the eighteenth century were no more able than their predecessors to go beyond the limits imposed on them by their own epoch.

    But side by side with the antagonism of the feudal nobility and the burghers [who claimed to represent all the rest of society], there was the general antagonism of exploiters and exploited, of the rich idlers and the toiling poor. It was precisely this circumstance that enabled the representatives of the bourgeoisie to put themselves forward as the representatives not of one special class but of the whole of suffering humanity. Still more. From its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists cannot exist without wage-workers, and, in the same proportion as the mediaeval burgher of the guild developed into the modern bourgeois, so the guild journeyman and the day-labourer outside the guilds developed into the proletarian. And although, on the whole, the burghers in

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their struggle with the nobility[*] could claim to represent at the same time the interests of the different working classes of that period, in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the more or less developed forerunner of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants' War, Thomas Münzer's trend [**] in the great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution, Babeuf.[16]

    There were theoretical manifestations corresponding with these revolutionary uprisings of an as yet immature class; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, utopian pictures of ideal social conditions, in the eighteenth, direct communistic theories (Morelly and Mably). The demand for equality was no longer limited to political rights but was also extended to the social conditions of individuals; it was not merely class privileges that were to be abolished, but class distinctions themselves. An ascetic communism [prohibiting all the pleasures of life] copied from Sparta was thus the first form of the new teaching. Then came the three great Utopians: Saint-Simon, to whom the bourgeois current still had a certain significance side by side with the proletarian, Fourier, and Owen, who in the country where capitalist production was most developed and under the influence of the antagonisms begotten by it systematically worked out his proposals for the abolition of class distinctions in direct relation to French materialism.

    One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of the proletariat which

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    * In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, "in their struggle with the nobility" is italicized. --Ed.
    ** In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, the first part of the sentence reads: "For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants' War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Münzer;" --Ed.

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historical development had in the meantime produced. Like the philosophers of the Enlightenment, they want to emancipate not a particular class [to begin with], but all humanity [at once]. Like them, they wish to bring in the realm of reason and of eternal justice, but this realm is as far as heaven from earth from that of the philosophers of the Enlightenment. For the bourgeois world based upon the principles of these philosophers is also irrational and unjust and, therefore, finds its way to the dustbin just as readily as feudalism and all earlier orders of society. If pure reason and justice have not hitherto ruled the world, it is only because they have not been rightly understood. What was wanting was only the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who has recognized the truth. The fact that he has now arisen, that the truth has been recognized precisely at this moment, is not an inevitable event following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.

    This outlook is essentially that of all English and French and of the first German socialists, including Weitling.* [To all these] socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice and needs only to be discovered to conquer the world by virtue of its own power; as absolute truth is independent of time, space, and human historical development, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. At the same time, absolute truth, reason and justice are different for the

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    * In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, this runs as follows: "The Utopians' outlook has governed the socialist ideas of the nineteenth century for a long time and in part still does. Until very recently all French and English socialists paid homage to it. The earlier German communism, including that of Weitling, also belongs to it." --Ed.

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founder of each different school; and as each one's special brand of absolute truth, reason and justice is in turn conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they should grind each other down. Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average socialism, such as in fact has dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England up to the present time; a mish-mash permitting of the most manifold shades of opinion; a mish-mash of the less striking critical statements, economic theories and pictures of future society of the founders of different sects; a mish-mash which is the more easily produced, the more the sharp edges of precision of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.

    To make a science of socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.

    In the meantime, the new German philosophy, terminating in Hegel, had arisen along with and after the French philosophy of the eighteenth century. Its greatest merit was its resumption of dialectics as the highest form of thinking. The old Greek philosophers were all born dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic intellect among them, had already investigated the most essential forms of dialectical thought.* On the other hand, although the newer philosophy, too, included brilliant exponents of dialectics (e.g., Descartes

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    * The rough draft of the "Introduction" runs as follows: "The old Greek philosophers were all been dialecticians, and Aristotle, the Hegel of the ancient world, had already investigated the most essential forms of dialectical thought." --Ed.

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and Spinoza), it had become -- especially under English influence -- increasingly stuck in the so-called metaphysical mode of reasoning, by which the French of the eighteenth century were also almost wholly dominated, at all events in their special philosophical works. Outside philosophy in the narrow sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of dialectic; we need only call to mind Diderot's Rameau's Nephew and Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men.[17] We give here, in brief, the essential character of these two modes of thought; we shall have to return to them later in greater detail.

    When we reflect on nature or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless maze of connections and interactions, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. [At first therefore, we see the picture as a whole, with its individual parts still more or less kept in the background; we observe the movements, transitions, connections, rather than the things that move, change and are connected.] This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and also is not, for everything is in flux, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.

    But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of phenomena as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we cannot do this,* we are not clear about the

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    * Socialism: Utopian and Scientific has "we do not know these" instead of "we cannot do this". --Ed.

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whole picture. In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately according to its nature, special causes and effects, etc. This is primarily the task of natural science and historical research, branches of science which for the Greeks of classical times occupied only a subordinate position on very good grounds, because they had first of all to piece together the materials [for these sciences to work upon]. [Only after a certain amount of natural and historical material has been collected can critical analysis, comparison, and arrangement in classes, orders, and species be undertaken.] The beginnings of the exact natural sciences were [,therefore,] worked out first by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period,[18] and later on, in the Middle Ages, further developed by the Arabs. Genuine natural science dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, and from then on it has advanced with ever increasing rapidity. The analysis of nature into its individual parts, the division of the different natural processes and objects into definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms -- these were the fundamental conditions for the gigantic strides in our knowledge of nature that have been made during the last four hundred years. But this has bequeathed us the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, detached from the general context; of observing them not in their motion, but in their state of rest; not as essentially variable elements, but as constant ones; not in their life, but in their death. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last centuries.

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    To the metaphysician, things and their mental images, ideas, are isolated, to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, fixed, rigid objects of investigation given once for all. He thinks in absolutely unmediated antitheses. "His communication is 'yea, yea; nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other.

    At first sight this way of thinking seems to us most plausible[*] because it is that of so-called sound common sense. Yet sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. The metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and even necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the object, invariably bumps into a limit sooner or later, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions, because in the presence of individual things it forgets their connections; because in the presence of their existence it forgets their coming into being and passing away; because in their state of rest it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees. For every day purposes we know and can definitely say, e.g., whether an animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that this is sometimes a very complex question, as the jurists very well know. They have cudgelled their brains in vain to dis cover a rational limit beyond which the killing of the child in

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    * Socialism: Utopian and Scientific has "obvious" instead of "plausible". --Ed.

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its mother's womb is murder. It is just as impossible to deter mine the moment of death, for physiology proves that death is not a sudden instantaneous phenomenon, but a very protracted process.

    In like manner, every organic being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment it assimilates matter supplied from without and gets rid of other matter; every moment some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time the matter of its body is completely renewed and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organic being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.

    Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis, like positive and negative, are as in separable as they are opposed, and that despite all[*] their opposition, they interpenetrate. In like manner, we find that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to the individual case as such; but as soon as we consider the individual case in its general connection with the universe as a whole, they merge, they dissolve in the concept of universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are constantly changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.

    None of these processes and modes of thought fit into the frame of metaphysical thinking. But for dialectics, which grasps things and their conceptual images essentially in their interconnection, in their concatenation, their motion, their coming into and passing out of existence, such processes as those mentioned above are so many corroborations of its own procedure.

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    * In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, "all" is italicized. --Ed.

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    Nature is the test of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this test with very rich and daily increasing materials, and thus has shown that in the last resort nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; [that she does not move in an eternally uniform and perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a genuine historical evolution. In this connection Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of nature the heaviest blow by his proof that the organic world of today -- plants, animals, and consequently man too -- is the product of a process of evolution going on through millions of years]. But since the natural scientists who have learned to think dialectically are still few and far between, this conflict of the results of discovery with traditional modes of thinking explains the endless confusion now reigning in theoretical natural science, the despair of teachers as well as students, of authors and readers alike.

    An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution and of that of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of men can therefore only be obtained by the method of dialectics with its constant regard to the general actions and reactions of becoming and ceasing to be, of progressive or retrogressive changes. And it is in this spirit that modern German philosophy immediately set to work. Kant began his career by resolving the stable solar system of Newton and its eternal duration, after the famous initial impulse had once been given, into a historical process, the formation of the sun and all the planets out of a rotating nebulous mass. From this he already drew the conclusion that, given this origin of the solar system, its future death followed of necessity. Half a century later his theory was established mathematically by Laplace, and after another half century the spectroscope con-

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firmed the existence in cosmic space of such incandescent masses of gas in various stages of condensation.

    This new German philosophy terminated in the Hegelian system. In this system -- and this is its great merit -- the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is for the first time represented as a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt was made to show internal interconnections in this motion and development.[*] From this point of view the history of man kind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgement-seat of mature philosophic reason and best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of humanity itself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner logic running through all its apparently contingent phenomena.

    That [the] Hegel[ian system] did not solve the problem [it posed itself] is immaterial here. Its epoch-making merit was that it posed the problem. This problem is indeed one that no single individual will ever be able to solve. Although Hegel was -- with Saint-Simon -- the most encyclopaedic

---

    * In the rough draft of the "Introduction" Hegelian philosophy is described as follows: "The Hegelian system was the last and most consummate form of philosophy, in so far as the latter is represented as a special science superior to every other. All philosophy collapsed with this system. But what remained was the dialectical method of thinking and the conception of the natural, historical and intellectual world moving and transforming itself endlessly in a constant process of becoming and passing away. Not only philosophy but all the sciences were now required to discover the laws of motion of this constant process of transformation, each in its particular domain. This was the legacy Hegelian philosophy bequeathed its successors." --Ed.

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mind of his time, he was restricted, first, by the necessarily limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his epoch. To these limits a third must be added. Hegel was an idealist. To him the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract images of actual things and processes, but on the contrary, things and their development were only the realized images of the "Idea", existing somewhere[*] from eternity before the world existed. Consequently everything was stood on its head and the actual interconnection of things in the world was completely reversed. Although Hegel had grasped some individual interconnections correctly and with genius, yet for the reasons just given there is much that in point of detail necessarily turned out botched, artificial, laboured, in a word, upside down. The Hegelian system as such was a colossal miscarriage -- but it was also the last of its kind. In fact, it was suffering from an internal and incurable contradiction. On the one hand, its essential postulate was the conception that human history is a process of development, which, by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute truth. But on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of precisely this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge which is all-embracing and final for all time is in contradiction with the fundamental laws of dialectical thinking; which by no means excludes, but on the contrary includes, the idea that systematic knowledge of the entire external world can make giant strides from generation to generation.

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    * Socialism: Utopian and Scientific has "somehow" instead of "some where". --Ed.

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    The recognition of the complete inversion of previous German idealism necessarily led to materialism, but, it must be noted, not to the purely metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century. In contrast to the naively revolutionary, flat rejection of all previous history, modern materialism sees history as the process of development of humanity and its own task as the discovery of the laws of motion of this process. The conception was prevalent among the French of the eighteenth century and [later] in Hegel that nature was a whole, moving in narrow circles and [for ever] remaining immutable, with eternal celestial bodies, as in Newton's teaching, and with unalterable species of organic beings, as in Linnaeus' teaching. In opposition to this conception, modern materialism embraces the more recent advances of natural science, according to which nature too has its history in time, the celestial bodies, like the organic species with which they became peopled under favourable conditions, coming into being and passing away, and the recurrent cycles, in so far as they are at all admissible, assuming infinitely vaster dimensions. In both cases modern materialism is essentially dialectical and no longer needs any philosophy standing above the other sciences. As soon as each separate science is required to clarify its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous. All that remains in an independent state from all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its laws -- formal logic and dialectics. Everything else merges into the positive science of nature and history.

    But whilst the revolution in the conception of nature could only be made to the extent that research furnished the corresponding positive materials, certain historical events had already asserted themselves much earlier which led to a

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decisive change in the conception of history. In 1831, the first working-class rising took place in Lyons; between 1838 and 1842, the first national working-class movement, that of the English Chartists, reached its height. The class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie came to the front in the history of the most advanced countries in Europe in proportion to the development, on the one hand, of modern industry, and on the other, of the recently acquired political supremacy of the bourgeoisie. Facts more and more strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois economics on the identity of the interests of capital and labour, on the general harmony and general prosperity flowing from free competition.* None of these things could be ignored any longer, any more than the French and English socialism, which was their theoretical, though extremely imperfect, expression. But the old idealist conception of history, which was not yet dislodged, knew nothing of class struggles based on material interests, indeed knew nothing at all of material interests; production and all economic relations appeared in it only as incidental, subordinate elements in the "history of civilization".

    The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history [, with the exception of its primitive stages,] was the history of class

---

    * The rough draft of the "Introduction" contains the following addition: "In France the Lyons insurrection of 1834 had likewise proclaimed the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. The English and French socialist theories acquired historic importance and were bound to have their repercussion and criticism in Germany as well, although its industry was only just beginning to climb out of the stage of small-scale production. The theoretical socialism that now took shape, among Germans rather than in Germany, had therefore to import all its material. . . ." --Ed.

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struggles; that these social classes warring with each other are always the products of the relations of production and exchange -- in a word, of the economic relations of their epoch; that therefore the economic structure of society always forms the real basis, from which, in the last analysis, the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period is to be explained. [Hegel had freed the conception of history from metaphysics -- he had made it dialectical; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic.] But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the conception of history; new a materialist treatment of history was advanced, and the way found to explain man's consciousness by his being, instead of, as heretofore, his being by his consciousness.

    [Henceforward socialism no longer appeared as an accidental discovery by this or that intellect of genius, but as the necessary outcome of the struggle between two classes produced by history -- the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture as perfect a system of society as possible, but to examine the historico-economic process from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung and to discover in the economic situation thus created the means of ending the conflict.] But the earlier socialism was just as incompatible with this materialist conception of history as the French materialists' conception of nature was with dialectics and modern natural science. The earlier socialism certainly criticized the existing capitalist mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain this mode of production, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of it. It could only simply reject it as evil. [The more violently it denounced the exploitation of the working class,

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which is inseparable from capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consists and how it arises.] But for this it was necessary, on the one hand, to present the capitalist mode of production in its historical interconnection and its necessity for a specific historical period, and therefore also the necessity of its doom; and, on the other, to lay bare its essential character, which was still hidden, as its critics had hitherto attacked its evil consequences rather than the process as such.[*] This was done by the discovery of surplus-value. It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the basic form of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker effected by it; that even if the capitalist buys the labour-power of his worker at the full value it possesses as a commodity on the market, he still extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the last analysis this surplus-value forms those sums of value from which there is heaped up the constantly increasing mass of capital in the hands of the possessing classes. The process both of capitalist production and of the production of capital was explained.

    These two great discoveries, the materialist conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalist production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With them socialism became a science, which had now to be elaborated in all its details and interconnections.

    This, approximately, was how things stood in the fields of theoretical socialism and extinct philosophy, when Herr Eugen Dühring, not without considerable din, sprang onto the stage and announced that he had accomplished a complete and

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    * In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, the clause beginning with "as its critics . . ." is deleted. --Ed.

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thoroughgoing revolution in philosophy, political economy and socialism.

    Let us see what Herr Dühring promises us and how he fulfils his promises.




II

WHAT HERR DÜHRING PROMISES


    The writings of Herr Dühring with which we are here primarily concerned are his Kursus der Philosophie, his Kursus der National- und Sozialökonomie, and his Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Sozialismus.[19] The first of these particularly claims our attention now.

    On the very first page Herr Dühring introduces himself as

"the man who claims to represent this power" (philosophy) "in his age and for its immediately foreseeable development".*

    He thus proclaims himself the only true philosopher of today and of the "foreseeable" future. Whoever diverges from him diverges from truth. Many people, even before Herr Dühring, have thought something of the kind about themselves, but -- except for Richard Wagner -- he is probably the first who has calmly blurted it out. And the truth to which he refers is "a final and ultimate truth".

    Herr Dühring's philosophy is

"the natural system or the philosophy of reality. . . . In it reality is so conceived as to exclude any tendency to a visionary and subjectively limited conception of the world."

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    * With the exception of Part II, Chapter X. all italics in quotations from Dühring are Engels'. --Ed.

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    This philosophy, therefore, is such that it lifts Herr Dühring above the bounds set by what he himself can hardly deny are his personal and subjective limitations. And this is necessary if he is to be in a position to lay down final and ultimate truths, although so far we do not see how this miracle should come to pass.

    This "natural system of knowledge which in itself is of value to the mind" has "securely established the basic forms of being without in any way compromising the profundity of thought". From its "genuinely critical standpoint" it provides "the elements of a philosophy which is real and therefore directed to the reality of nature and of life, a philosophy which cannot allow the validity of any merely apparent horizon, but unfolds all earths and heavens of outer and inner nature in its mighty revolutionizing sweep "; it is a "new mode of thought", and its results are "fundamentally original conclusions and views . . . system-creating ideas . . . established truths". We have before us "a work which must find its strength in concentrated initiative" (whatever that may mean) an "investigation going to the roots . . . a deep-rooted science . . . a strictly scientific conception of things and of men . . . an all-round penetrating work of thought . . . a creative outline of premises and conclusions controllable by thought . . . the absolutely fundamental ".

    In the economic and political sphere he gives us not only

"historical and systematically comprehensive works", of which the historical ones are, to boot, notable for "my treatment of history in the grand manner", while those dealing with economics have brought about "creative changes",

    but he even finishes with a fully worked-out socialist plan of his own for the society of the future, which is the "practical fruit of a clear theory going to the ultimate roots of things " and, like the Dühring philosophy, is consequently infallible and the only way to salvation. For

"only in that socialist structure which I have characterized in my 'Course of Political and Social Economy' can a true Own take the place of the ownership which is merely apparent and transitory or even based on violence". And the future has to follow these directions.

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    This bouquet of glorifications of Herr Dühring by Herr Dühring could easily be multiplied tenfold. It may already have created some doubt in the reader's mind as to whether it is really a philosopher with whom he is dealing, or a -- but we must beg the reader to reserve judgement until he has got to know the above-mentioned deep-rootedness at closer quarters. We have given the above anthology only for the purpose of showing that we have before us not any ordinary philosopher and socialist, who merely expresses his ideas and leaves it to the future to judge their worth, but quite an extraordinary creature, who claims to be no less infallible than the Pope, and whose doctrine is the one way to salvation and simply must be accepted by anyone who does not want to fall into the most abominable heresy. What we are here confronted with is certainly not one of those works to be found in plenty in all socialist literature and recently in the German, too, works in which people of various calibres, in the most straightforward way in the world, try to become clear on problems the solution of which requires material that to a greater or lesser extent is not at their disposal; works whose socialist goodwill is always deserving of recognition, whatever their scientific and literary shortcomings. On the contrary, Herr Dühring offers us principles which he declares are final and ultimate truths, and besides which any other views are therefore false from the outset; he is in possession not only of the exclusive truth but also of the sole strictly scientific method of investigation, in contrast with which all others are unscientific. Either he is right -- and in this case we have before us the greatest genius of all time, the first superhuman, because infallible, human being. Or he is wrong, and in that case, whatever our judgement may be, benevolent regard for his possibly good

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intentions would nevertheless be the most deadly insult to Herr Dühring.

    When a man is in possession of the final and ultimate truth and of the only strictly scientific approach, it is only natural that he should have a certain contempt for the rest of erring and unscientific humanity. We must therefore not be surprised that Herr Dühring should speak of his predecessors with the most extreme disdain and that there are only a few great men who, by way of exception, are so entitled by him and who find mercy at the bar of his "deep-rootedness".

    Let us first hear what he has to say about the philosophers:

    "Leibnitz, devoid of any better sentiments . . . that best of all possible courtier-philosophizers."

    Kant is barely tolerated; but after Kant everything got into a muddle:

    there followed the "wild ravings and equally inane and windy stupidities of the immediate epigoni, notably, a Fichte and a Schelling . . . monstrous caricatures of ignorant natural philosophizing . . . the post-Kantian monstrosities" and "the delirious fantasies" crowned by "a Hegel ". The latter used a "Hegel jargon" and spread the "Hegel pestilence" by means of his "method which was unscientific even in form" and by his 'crudities".

    The natural scientists fare no better, but as only Darwin is cited by name, we must confine ourselves to him:

    "Darwinian semi-poetry and dexterity in metamorphosis, with its gross-minded narrowness of comprehension and blunted sense of differentiation. . . . In our view what is specific to Darwinism, from which of course the Lamarckian elements must be excluded, is a piece of brutality directed against humanity."

    But the socialists come off worst of all. With the exception at most of Louis Blanc -- the most insignificant of them all --

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they are sinners, all and sundry, and they fall short of the reputation they should have before (or behind) Herr Dühring. And not only in regard to truth and scientific approach -- no, also in regard to their character. Except for Babeuf and a few of the Communards of 1871, not a single one of them is a "man". The three Utopians are called "social alchemists". As for them, a certain indulgence is shown in the treatment of Saint-Simon, in so far as he is merely charged with "mental queerness", and there is a charitable insinuation that he suffered from religious mania. With Fourier, however, Herr Dühring completely loses patience. For Fourier

"revealed every element of insanity . . . ideas which one would normally have most expected to find in madhouses . . . the wildest dreams . . . products of insanity . . . the unspeakably silly Fourier", "this childish mind", this "idiot", is withal not even a socialist; his phalanstery[20] has not the least bit of rational socialism in it but is "a misshapen edifice on the pattern of everyday commerce".

    Finally:

    "Anyone who does not find these effusions" (of Fourier's, about Newton) "sufficient to convince him that it is only the first syllable in Fourier's name and in the whole of Fourierism" (fou = crazy) "that has any truth in it, should himself be classed under some category of idiot."

    Lastly, Robert Owen

"had feeble and paltry ideas . . . his reasoning, so crude in its ethics . . . a few commonplaces which degenerated into perversions . . . nonsensical and crude way of looking at things. . . . Owen's range of ideas is hardly worth subjecting to more serious criticism . . . his vanity" -- and so on.

    Herr Dühring characterizes the Utopians according to their names with devastating wit: Saint-Simon -- saint (holy); Fourier -- fou (crazy); Enfantin -- enfant (childish); he only need add: Owen -- o woe! and a whole important period in the history of socialism has been condemned -- in four words,

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too, and anyone who has any doubts about it "should himself be classed under some category of idiot".

    As for Dühring's opinions on the later socialists, for the sake of brevity we will only cite those on Lassalle and Marx:

    Lassalle : "Pedantic, hair-splitting efforts at popularization . . . rampant scholasticism . . . a monstrous hash of general theories and paltry trash . . . senseless and formless Hegel-superstition . . . a horrifying example . . . peculiarly limited . . . pompousness combined with the most pettifogging trifles . . . our Jewish hero . . . pamphleteer . . . vulgar . . . inherent instability in his view of life and of the world."

    Marx : "Narrowness of conception . . . his works and achievements in and by themselves, that is, regarded from a purely theoretical standpoint, are without any permanent significance in our domain" (the critical history of socialism), "and in the general history of intellectual tendencies they are to be cited at most as symptoms of the influence of one branch of modern sectarian scholastics . . . impotence of the faculties of concentration and organization . . . deformity of thought and style, undignified affectation of language . . . Anglicized vanity . . . duping . . . barren conceptions which in fact are only bastards of historical and logical fantasy . . . deceptive twisting . . . personal vanity . . . scurrilous ways . . . scurvy . . . buffoonery passing for wit . . . Chinese erudition . . . philosophical and scientific backwardness."

    And so on and so forth -- for this too is only a small bouquet superficially culled from the Dühring rose garden. It must be understood that, at the moment, we are not in the least concerned whether these amiable expressions of abuse, which, if he had any education, should forbid Herr Dühring from finding anything scurrilous and scurvy, are also final and ultimate truths. For the moment we will guard against voicing any doubt about their deep-rootedness, as we might otherwise be prohibited from trying to find out the category of idiot to which we belong. We only thought it was our duty, on the one hand, to give an example of what Herr Dühring calls

"the select language of the considerate and, in the real sense of the word moderate mode of expression",

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and on the other, to make it clear that to Herr Dühring the worthlessness of his predecessors is no less established a fact than his own infallibility. Whereupon we sink to the ground in deepest reverence before the mightiest genius of all time -- if that is how things really stand.




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PART I

PHILOSOPHY


III

CLASSIFICATION. APRIORISM


    According to Herr Dühring, philosophy is the development of the highest form of consciousness of the world and of life, and in a wider sense embraces the principles of all knowledge and volition. Wherever a series of cognitions or stimuli or a group of forms of being come to be examined by human consciousness, the principles of these configurations are necessarily the object of philosophy. These principles are the simple, or the hitherto supposedly simple, constituents of which the manifold of knowledge and volition is composed. Like the chemical composition of bodies, the general constitution of things can also be reduced to basic forms and basic elements. These ultimate constituents or principles, once they have been discovered are valid not only for the immediately known and accessible, but also for the world which is unknown and inaccessible to us. Philosophical principles consequently provide the final complement required by the sciences in order to become a uniform system by which nature and human life can be explained. Apart from the fundamental forms of all existence, properly speaking, philosophy has only two subjects for investigation -- nature and the world of man. Thus we find our material quite spontaneously arranged in three groups, namely, the general schematism of the universe, the science of the principles of nature, and finally the science of mankind. At the same time, this succession contains an inner logical sequence, for

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the formal principles which are valid for all being take precedence, and the objective realms to which they are to be applied then follow in the degree of their subordination.

    So far Herr Dühring, and almost entirely word for word.

    What he is dealing with are therefore principles, formal basic principles derived from thought and not from the external world, which are to be applied to nature and the realm of man, and to which therefore nature and man have to conform. But whence does thought obtain these principles? From itself? No, for Herr Dühring himself says the realm of pure thought is limited to logical schemata and mathematical forms (the latter is wrong, as we shall see). Logical schemata can only relate to forms of thought ; but what we are dealing with here are only forms of being, of the external world, and these forms can never be created and derived by thought out of itself, but only from the external world. But with this the whole relationship is inverted: the principles are not the starting point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them; it is not nature and the realm of humanity which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialist conception of the question, and Herr Dühring's contrary conception is idealistic, makes things stand completely on their heads, and fashions the real world out of the Idea, out of schemata, schemes or categories existing somewhere prior to the world, from eternity, just like -- a Hegel.

    In fact, let us compare Hegel's Encyclopaedia and all its delirious fantasies with Herr Dühring's final and ultimate truths. With Herr Dühring we have in the first place general world schematism, which Hegel calls Logic. Then with both of them we have the application of these schemata or logical cate-

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gories to nature, the philosophy of nature; and finally their application to the realm of man, which Hegel calls the philosophy of mind. The "inner logical sequence" of the Dühring succession therefore leads us "quite spontaneously" back to Hegel's Encyclopaedia, from which it has been taken with a fidelity which would bring tears to the eyes of that wandering Jew of the Hegelian school, Professor Michelet of Berlin.

    That is what comes of accepting "consciousness", "thought", quite naturalistically as something given, something opposed to being, to nature, from the outset. If this were so, it must seem most odd that consciousness and nature, thinking and being, the laws of thought and the laws of nature, should so closely correspond. But if we then ask what thought and consciousness are and whence they come, we find that they are products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of nature, who has developed in and along with his environment; whence it is self-evident that the products of the human brain, which in the last analysis are also products of nature, do not contradict the rest of nature's interconnections but correspond to them.[21]

    But Herr Dühring cannot permit himself such a simple treatment of the subject. He thinks not only in the name of humanity -- in itself no small achievement -- but in the name of conscious and reasoning beings on all celestial bodies.

    Indeed, it would be "a degradation of the basic forms of consciousness and knowledge to attempt to rule out or even to put under suspicion their sovereign validity and their unconditional claim to truth by applying the epithet 'human' to them".

    Hence, in order that no suspicion may arise that twice two may make five on some celestial body or other, Herr Dühring cannot designate thought as human, and so he has to cut it off from the only real foundation on which we find it, namely,

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man and nature; and with that he tumbles hopelessly into an ideology which reveals him as the epigone of the "epigone", Hegel. In passing, we shall often meet Herr Dühring again on other celestial bodies.

    It goes without saying that no materialist doctrine can be founded on such an ideological basis. We shall see later that Herr Dühring is forced more than once to endow nature with conscious activity, with, therefore, what in plain language is called God.

    But our philosopher of reality also had other motives for shifting the basis of all reality from the real world to the world of thought. The science of this general world schematism, of these formal basic principles of being, is indeed precisely the foundation of Herr Dühring's philosophy. If we deduce this world schematism not from our minds, but only through our minds from the real world, if we deduce the basic principles of being from what is, we need no philosophy for this purpose, but positive knowledge of the world and of what happens in it; and what this yields is not philosophy either, but positive science. But in that case Herr Dühring's whole volume would be nothing but love's labour lost.

    Further, if no philosophy as such is needed any longer, then no system, not even a natural system of philosophy, is needed any longer either. The recognition of the fact that all the processes of nature are systematically interconnected drives science on to prove this systematic interconnection throughout, both in general and in detail. But an adequate, exhaustive scientific exposition of this interconnection, the formation of an exact mental image of the world system in which we live, remains impossible for us, as it does for all times. If at any epoch in the development of mankind such a final, definitive system of the interconnections within the world -- physical

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as well as mental and historical -- were constructed, this would mean that the realm of human knowledge had reached its limit, and that further historical development would be cut short from the moment when society had been brought into accord with that system -- which would be an absurdity, pure nonsense. Mankind therefore finds itself faced with a contradiction: on the one hand, it has to gain an exhaustive knowledge of the world system in all its interconnections, and on the other hand, this task can never be completely fulfilled because of the nature both of men and of the world system. But this contradiction not only lies in the nature of the two factors -- the world and man -- it is also the main lever of all intellectual advance, and constantly finds its solution, day by day, in the endless progressive development of humanity, just as for example mathematical problems find their solution in an infinite series or continued fractions. Actually, each mental image of the world system is and remains limited, objectively by the historical situation and subjectively by its author's physical and mental constitution. But Herr Dühring explains in advance that his mode of reasoning is such that it excludes any disposition to take a subjectively limited view of the world. We saw above that he was omnipresent -- on all possible celestial bodies. We now see that he is omniscient, too. He has solved the ultimate problems of science and so nailed boards across the future of all science.

    As with the basic forms of being, so also Herr Dühring thinks he can produce out of his head the whole of pure mathematics a priori, that is, without making use of the experiences offered us by the external world.

    In pure mathematics, in his view, the mind deals "with its own free creations and imaginations"; the concepts of number and form are "its

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adequate object, which it itself creates", hence mathematics has "a validity which is independent of particular experience and of the real content of the world".

    To be sure, it is correct that pure mathematics has a validity which is independent of the particular experience of each individual, and this is true of all established facts in every science and indeed of all facts whatsoever. The magnetic poles, the fact that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, the fact that Hegel is dead and that Herr Dühring is alive, are valid independently of my own experience or of that of any other individual, and even independently of Herr Dühring's experience, when he begins to sleep the sleep of the just. But it is not at all true that in pure mathematics the mind deals only with its own creations and imaginations. The concepts of number and form have been derived from no source other than the world of reality. The ten fingers on which men learnt to count, that is, to carry out the first arithmetical operation, are anything but a free creation of the mind. Counting requires not only objects that can be counted, but also the ability to abstract from all properties of the objects being considered except their number -- and this ability is the product of a long historical development based on experience. Like the concept of number, so the concept of form is derived exclusively from the external world and does not arise in the mind as a product of pure thought. There must have been things which had shape and whose shapes were compared before anyone could arrive at the concept of form. Pure mathematics deals with the spatial forms and quantitative relations of the real world -- that is, with material which is very real indeed. The fact that this material appears in an extremely abstract form can only superficially conceal its origin in the external world. But in

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order to make it possible to investigate these forms and relations in their pure state, it is necessary to separate them entirely from their content, to put the content aside as irrelevant; hence we get points without dimensions, lines without breadth and thickness, a 's and b 's and x 's and y 's, constants and variables, and only at the very end do we for the first time reach the mind's own free creations and imaginations, that is to say, imaginary magnitudes. Even the apparent derivation of mathematical magnitudes from each other does not prove their a priori origin, but only their rational interconnection. Before the idea was arrived at of deducing the form of a cylinder from the rotation of a rectangle about one of its sides, a number of real rectangles and cylinders, in however imperfect a form, must have been examined. Like all other sciences, mathematics arose out of the needs of men, from the measurement of land and of the content of vessels, from the computation of time and from mechanics. But, as in every department of thought, at a certain stage of development the laws abstracted from the real world become divorced from the real world and are set over against it as something independent, as laws coming from outside, to which the world has to conform. This is how things happened in society and the state, and in this way, and not otherwise, pure mathematics is subsequently applied to the world, although it is borrowed from this same world and represents only one part of its forms of interconnection -- and it is precisely only because of this that it can be applied at all.

    But just as Herr Dühring imagines that he can deduce the whole of pure mathematics without any empirical ingredients out of the axioms of mathematics, which "in accordance with

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pure logic are neither capable nor in need of proof", and then apply it to the world, so he imagines that he can first produce out of his head the basic forms of being, the simple elements of all knowledge, the axioms of philosophy, that he can deduce the whole of philosophy or the world schematism from them, and then, by sovereign decree, impose this constitution of his on nature and humanity. Unfortunately nature is not at all, and humanity only to an infinitesimal degree, composed of Manteuffel's Prussians of 1850.[22]

    Mathematical axioms are expressions of the scantiest thought content, which mathematics is obliged to borrow from logic. They can be reduced to two.

    1) The whole is greater than the part. This statement is a pure tautology, as the quantitatively conceived idea "part" is in advance related to the idea "whole" in a definite way, and particularly in such a way that "part" announces without further ado that the quantitative "whole" consists of several quantitative "parts". In stating this explicitly, the so-called axiom does not take us a step further. This tautology can to a certain degree even be proved by saying: a whole is that which consists of many parts; a part is that of which many make a whole, therefore the part is less than the whole -- in which the emptiness of repetition brings out even more clearly the emptiness of content.

    2) If two magnitudes are equal to a third, then they are equal to one another. This statement, as Hegel has already shown, is a conclusion, the correctness of which is guaranteed by logic, and which is therefore proved, although outside of pure mathematics.[23] The remaining axioms relating to equality and inequality are merely logical extensions of this conclusion.

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    These meagre principles could not cut much ice, either in mathematics or anywhere else. In order to get any further, we are obliged to import real relations, relations and spatial forms which are taken from real bodies. The ideas of lines, planes, angles, polygons, cubes, spheres, etc., are all taken from reality, and it requires a pretty good portion of naive ideology to believe the mathematicians -- that the first line came into existence through the movement of a point in space, the first plane through the movement of a line, the first solid through the movement of a plane, and so on. Even language rebels against such a conception. A mathematical figure of three dimensions is called a solid body, corpus solidum, hence even in Latin, a tangible object; it therefore has a name derived from sturdy reality and not at all from the free imagination of the mind.

    But why all this prolixity? After Herr Dühring has enthusiastically sung the independence of pure mathematics from the world of experience, its a priori nature, its preoccupation with its own free mental creations and imaginations of the mind on pages 42 and 43, he says on page 63:[24]

    "It is, of course, easy to overlook that these mathematical elements" (number, magnitude, time, space and geometric motion) "are ideal only in their form . . . absolute magnitudes are therefore something completely empirical, no matter to what species they belong", but "mathematical schemata are capable of being described in a way which is adequate even though divorced from actual experience".

This last statement is more or less true of every abstraction, but in no way proves that it is not abstracted from reality. In the world schematism pure mathematics arose out of pure thought -- in the philosophy of nature it is something completely empirical, taken from the external world and then divorced from it. Which are we to believe?

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IV

WORLD SCHEMATISM


    "All-embracing being is one. In its self-sufficiency it has nothing alongside of it or over it. To associate a second being with it would be to make it something that it is not, namely, a part or constituent of a more comprehensive whole. Since we extend our undivided thought like a framework, nothing that should be comprised in this unity of thought can contain a duality within itself. Nor again can anything escape this unity of thought. . . . The essence of all thinking consists in the union of the elements of consciousness into a unity. . . . It is the point of unity of the synthesis which gave rise to the indivisible concept of the world, and the universe, as the name itself implies, is apprehended as something in which everything is united into a unity."

    Thus far Herr Dühring. This is the first example of the application of the mathematical method:

    "Every question is to be decided axiomatically in accordance with simple basic forms, as if simple . . . basic principles of mathematics were being dealt with."

    "All-embracing being is one." If tautology, the simple repetition in the predicate of what is already expressed in the subject -- if that makes an axiom, then we have one of the purest water here. Herr Dühring tells us in the subject that being embraces everything, and he intrepidly declares in the predicate that in that case there is nothing outside it. What colossal "system-creating thought"!

    System-creating indeed! Within the space of the next six lines, Herr Dühring has transformed the oneness of being, by means of our undivided thought, into its unity. As the essence of all thinking consists in bringing things together into a unity, so being, as soon as it is conceived, is conceived as undivided, and the concept of the world as indivisible, and because being

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as conceived, the concept of the world, is undivided, therefore real being, the real universe, is also an indivisible unity. Thus

"there is no longer any room for things beyond, once the mind has learnt to conceive being in its homogeneous universality".

    Here is a campaign which puts Austerlitz and Jena, Königgratz and Sedan completely in the shade.[25] In a few sentences, hardly a page after we have mobilized the first axiom, we have already abolished, eliminated, annihilated, everything beyond the world -- God and the heavenly hosts, heaven, hell and purgatory, along with the immortality of the soul.

    How do we get from the oneness of being to its unity? By the very act of conceiving it. In so far as we spread our undivided thought around being like a frame, individual being becomes undivided, a unity of thought; for the essence of all thinking consists in bringing together the elements of consciousness into a unity.

    This last statement is simply untrue. In the first place, thinking consists just as much in the splitting up of objects of consciousness into their elements as in the union of related elements into a unity. Without analysis, no synthesis. Secondly, without committing blunders thinking can bring together into a unity only those elements of consciousness in which or in whose real prototypes this unity already existed before. If I include a shoe brush in the unity of mammals, this does not help it to get mammary glands. The unity of being, or rather, the legitimacy of its conception as a unity, is therefore precisely what was to be proved, and when Herr Dühring assures us that he conceives being as undivided and not perchance as a duality, he tells us nothing more than his own humble opinion.

    If we try to state his process of thought in unalloyed form, we get the following: 'I begin with being. I therefore conceive

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being. The thought of being is undivided. But thinking and being must be in agreement, they correspond to each other, they 'coincide'. Therefore being is undivided in reality also. Therefore there cannot be anything 'beyond'." But if Herr Dühring had spoken openly in this way, instead of treating us to the above-cited oracular passages, the ideology would have been clearly visible. To attempt to prove the reality of any product of thinking by the identity of thinking and being, that was indeed one of the wildest delirious fantasies of -- a Hegel.

    Even if his whole method of proof had been correct, Herr Dühring would still not have won an inch of ground from the spiritualists. The latter would reply briefly: to us, too, the universe is simple; the cleavage between the here below and the beyond exists only from our specifically earthly standpoint which is imbued with original sin; in and for itself, that is in God, all being is a unity. And they would accompany Herr Dühring to his other beloved celestial bodies and show him one or more on which there had been no original sin, where therefore no opposition exists between the here below and the beyond, and where the unity of the universe is a requirement of faith.

    The most comical part of the business is that Herr Dühring uses the ontological proof for the existence of God in order to prove the non-existence of God from the concept of being. This runs: when we think of God, we conceive him as the sum total of all perfections. But the sum total of all perfections includes existence above all, since a non-existent being is necessarily imperfect. We must therefore include existence among the perfections of God. Therefore God must exist. Herr Dühring reasons in exactly the same way: if we think of being, we think of it as one concept. Whatever is included in one

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concept is undivided. Being would not correspond to the concept of being if it were not undivided. Therefore it must be undivided. Therefore there is no God, and so on.

    When we speak of being, and purely of being, unity can only consist in this, that all the objects to which we are referring -- are, exist. They are included in the unity of this being, and in no other unity, and the general statement that they all are not only cannot give them any additional qualities, whether common or not, but for the time being excludes all such qualities from consideration. For as soon as we stray even a millimetre from the simple basic fact that being is common to all these things, the differences between these things begin to emerge before our eyes, and we cannot decide from the fact that mere existence is in equal manner ascribed to them all whether these differences consist in some being white and the others black, some being animate and the others inanimate, some being perhaps here below and the others perhaps beyond.

    The unity of the world does not consist in its being, although its being is a precondition of its unity, since it must surely first be before it can be one. Indeed, being is always an open question beyond the point where our sphere of observation ends. The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proved not by a few juggling phrases, but by a long and laborious development of philosophy and natural science.

    To return to the text. The being which Herr Dühring is telling us about is

"not that pure being which is self-identical, lacks all special determinations, and in fact represents only the counterpart of the thought of nothing or of the absence of thought".

    But we shall see very soon that Herr Dühring's universe starts with a being which lacks all internal differentiation, all

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motion and change, and is therefore in fact only a counterpart of the thought of nothing, and is therefore really nothing. Only out of this being-nothing does the present differentiated, variable state of the world develop, representing a development, a becoming ; and only after we have grasped this are we able "to hold fast to the concept of universal self-identical being", even within this perpetual variation.

    Thus we now have the concept of being at a higher plane, where it includes in itself both constancy and change, both being and becoming. Having reached this point, we find that

"genus and species, or generally speaking the general and the particular are the simplest means of differentiation, without which the constitution of things cannot be understood".

    But these are means of differentiation of quality; and after these have been dealt with, we proceed:

    "The concept of magnitude stands in opposition to genus as that homogeneity in which no further differences of kind exist";

and so from quality we pass to quantity, and this is always "measurable ".

    Let us now compare this "acute sifting of these general schemata of effects" and its "genuinely critical standpoint" with the crudities, ravings and delirious fantasies of a Hegel. We find that Hegel's logic starts from being -- as with Herr Dühring; that being turns out to be nothing, as with Herr Dühring; that from this being-nothing there is a transition to becoming, the result of which is determinate being (Dasein ), i.e., a higher, more replete form of being (Sein ) -- just as with Herr Dühring. Determinate being leads on to quality, and quality on to quantity -- just as with Herr Dühring. And so that no essential feature may be missing, Herr Dühring tells us on another occasion:

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    "From the realm of non-sensation man enters that of sensation, in spite of all quantitative gradualness, only through a qualitative leap, of which we can say that it is infinitely different from the mere gradation of one and the same quality."

    This is precisely the Hegelian nodal line of measure relations, in which, at certain definite nodal points, the purely quantitative increase or decrease gives rise to a qualitative leap ; for example, in the case of water which is heated or cooled, where boiling-point and freezing-point are the nodes at which -- under normal pressure -- the transition to a new state of aggregation takes place, where therefore quantity changes into quality.

    Our investigation has likewise tried to reach down to the roots, and it finds the roots of Herr Dühring's deep-rooted basic schemata to be -- the "delirious fantasies" of a Hegel, the Categories of Hegel's Logic, Part I, the Doctrine of Being, in strictly old-Hegelian "succession" and with hardly any attempt to cloak the plagiarism!

    Not content with pilfering from his worst-slandered predecessor the latter's whole scheme of being, Herr Dühring, after he himself has given the above example of the sudden leap from quantity into quality, has the effrontery to say of Marx:

    "How ridiculous, for example, is the reference" (Marx's) "to Hegel's confused and nebulous notion that quality changes into quantity !"

    Confused and nebulous notion! Who has changed here, and who is ridiculous here, Herr Dühring?

    Thus all these pretty knicknacks are not only not "axiomatically decided" as prescribed, but are merely imported from outside, that is to say, from Hegel's Logic. And in such a form that in the whole chapter there is not even the semblance of any internal coherence except in so far as it is borrowed from

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Hegel, and that it all finally trickles out in empty logic-chopping about space and time, constancy and change.

    From being Hegel passes to essence, to dialectics. Here he is dealing with the determinations of reflections, their internal opposites and contradictions, as for example, positive and negative; he then comes to causality or the relation of cause and effect, and ends with necessity. Not otherwise Herr Dühring. What Hegel calls the doctrine of essence Herr Dühring translates into "logical properties of being". But these consist above all of the "antagonism of forces", of opposites. On the other hand, Herr Dühring absolutely denies contradiction; we will return to this topic later. Then he passes over to causality, and from this to necessity. Therefore, when Herr Dühring says of himself, "We, who do not philosophize out of a cage," he apparently means that he philosophizes in a cage, namely, the cage of the Hegelian schema of categories.




V

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. TIME AND SPACE


    We now come to natural philosophy. Here again Herr Dühring has every cause for dissatisfaction with his predecessors.

    Natural philosophy "sank so low that it became a chaotic doggerel founded on ignorance", and "fell to the lot of the prostituted philosophistics of a Schelling and others of that ilk rummaging in the priesthood of the Absolute and hoodwinking the public". Fatigue has saved us from these "deformities", but up to now it has only given place to "instability"; "and as far as the public at large is concerned, it is well known that the disappearance of a great charlatan is often only the opportunity for a lesser but commercially more experienced successor to put out the products of his

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predecessor under another sign-board again". Natural scientists themselves feel little "inclination to make excursions into the realm of world-encompassing ideas", and consequently jump to "incoherent and hasty conclusions" in the theoretical sphere.

    The need for deliverance is therefore urgent, and by a stroke of good luck Herr Dühring is at hand.

    In order correctly to appreciate the revelations which now follow on the development of the world in time and its limitation in space, we must turn back again to certain passages in World Schematism.

    Infinity -- which Hegel calls bad infinity -- is attributed to being, also in accordance with Hegel (Encyclopaedia §93),[26] and then this infinity is investigated.

    "The clearest form of an infinity which can be conceived without contradiction is the unlimited accumulation of numbers in a numerical series. . . . Just as we can add yet another unit to any number without ever exhausting the possibility of further numbers, so also a further state aligns itself to every state of being, and infinity consists in the unlimited begetting of these states. This exactly conceived infinity has consequently only one single basic form with one single direction. For although it is immaterial to our thinking whether or not it conceives an opposite direction in the accumulation of states, this retrogressing infinity is nevertheless only a rash mental product. Indeed, since in reality this infinity would have to be traversed in the reverse direction, in each of its states it would have an infinite succession of numbers behind it. But this would involve the impermissible contradiction of a counted infinite numerical series, and so it turns out to be contrary to reason to postulate any second direction in infinity."

    The first conclusion drawn from this conception of infinity is that the chain of causes and effects in the world must at some time have had a beginning:

"an infinite number of causes which should have already fallen into line one behind the other is inconceivable, just because it presupposes that the uncountable has been counted."

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Thus a final cause is proved.

    The second conclusion is

"the Law of Determinate Number: the accumulation of identities of any actual species of independent things is only conceivable as forming a determinate number". Not only must the number of celestial bodies existing at any point of time be in itself determinate, the total number of all the tiniest independent particles of matter existing in the universe must also be determinate. This latter requisite is the real reason why no combination can be conceived without atoms. Every actual state of being divided invariably has a finite determinateness, and must do so if the contradiction of the counted uncountable is to be avoided. For the same reason, not only must the number of the earth's revolutions round the sun up to the present time be finite though unstatable, but all periodical processes of nature must have had some beginning, and all differentiation, all the successive manifold elements of nature must have their roots in one self-identical state. This state may have existed from eternity without contradiction; but even this idea would be excluded if time in itself were composed of real parts instead of being merely arbitrarily divided up by our minds through the positioning of possibilities. The case is quite different with the real and intrinsically differentiated content of time; this real filling of time with differentiable facts of a certain kind and the forms of being of this sphere are countable precisely because of their differentiation. If we imagine a state in which no change occurs and which in its self-identity offers no differences whatever in the order of succession, the more specialized idea of time is transformed into the more general idea of being. What the accumulation of empty duration would mean is quite unimaginable."

    Thus far Herr Dühring, and he is not a little edified by the significance of these discoveries. At first he hopes that they will "at least not be regarded as paltry truths"; but later we find:

    "If the extremely simple methods by which we helped procure a hitherto unknown scope for the concepts of infinity and their critique are recalled . . . the elements of the universal conception of space and time, which have been given so simple a form by their present sharpening and deepening."

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    We helped! Their present deepening and sharpening! Who are "we", and what time is our "present"? Who is deepening and sharpening?

    "Thesis: The world has a beginning in time, and is also limited as regards space.
    "Proof: If we assume that the world has no beginning in time, then up to every given moment an eternity has elapsed, and there has passed away in the world an infinite series of successive states of things. Now the infinity of a series consists in the fact that it can never be completed through successive synthesis. It thus follows that it is impossible for an infinite world-series to have passed away, and that a beginning of the world is therefore a necessary condition of the world's existence. This was the first point that called for proof.
    "As regards the second point, let us again assume the opposite, namely, that the world is an infinite given whole of co-existing things. Now the magnitude of a quantum which is not given in intuition as within certain limits, can be thought only through the synthesis of its parts, and the totality of such a quantum only through a synthesis that is brought to completion through repeated addition of unit to unit. In order, therefore, to think, as a whole, the world which fills all spaces, the successive synthesis of the parts of an infinite world must be viewed as completed, that is, an infinite time must be viewed as having elapsed in the enumeration of all co-existing things. This, however, is impossible. An infinite aggregate of actual things cannot therefore be viewed ns a given whole, nor consequently as simultaneously given. The world is, therefore, as regards extension in space, not infinite, but is enclosed within limits. This was the second point in dispute."

    These sentences are copied word for word from a celebrated book which first appeared in 178I and is called Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant, where all and sundry can read them in the first part, Second Division, Book II, Chapter II, Section II: The First Antinomy of Pure Reason.[27] So that Herr Dühring's fame rests solely on his having tacked on the title -- Law of Determinate Number -- to an idea expressed by Kant, and on having made the discovery that there was once a time when as yet there was no time, though there was

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a world. As for all the rest, that is, anything at all meaningful in Herr Dühring's exegesis, "we" -- is Immanuel Kant, and the "present" is only ninety-five years ago. Certainly "extremely simple"! Remarkable "hitherto unknown scope"!

    But Kant makes absolutely no claim that the above propositions are established by his proof. On the contrary; he states and proves the opposite in a parallel column: that the world has no beginning in time and no end in space; and it is precisely in this that he places the antinomy, the insoluble contradiction, that the one is just as demonstrable as the other. People of smaller calibre might perhaps feel a little doubt here on account of "a Kant" having found an insoluble difficulty. But not our valiant fabricator of "fundamentally original conclusions and views"; he cheerfully copies down as much of Kant's antinomy as suits his purpose and throws the rest aside.

    The problem itself has a very simple solution. Eternity in time, infinity in space, signify from the start, and in the simple meaning of the words, that there is no end in any direction, neither forwards nor backwards, upwards or downwards, to the right or to the left. This infinity is something quite different from that of an infinite series, for the latter always starts from one, with a first term. The inapplicability of this idea of a series to our object becomes clear directly we apply it to space. The infinite series, transferred to the sphere of space, is the line drawn from a definite point in a definite direction to infinity. Is the infinity of space expressed in this even in the remotest way? On the contrary, it requires at least six lines drawn from this one point in three opposite directions to conceive the dimensions of space; and consequently we would have six of these dimensions. Kant saw this so clearly that he transferred his numerical series only indirectly,

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in a roundabout way, to the spatiality of the world. Herr Dühring, on the other hand, compels us to accept six dimensions in space, and immediately afterwards can find no words adequate to express his indignation at the mathematical mysticism of Gauss, who would not rest content with the usual three dimensions of space.

    As applied to time, the line or series of units which is infinite in both directions has a certain metaphorical meaning. But if we think of time as a series counted from one forward, or as a line starting from a definite point, we imply in advance that time has a beginning: we assume precisely what we are to prove. We give the infinity of time a one-sided, halved character; but a one-sided, halved infinity is also a contradiction in itself, the exact opposite of an "infinity conceived without contradiction". We can only get past this contradiction if we assume that the one from which we begin to count the series, the point from which we proceed to measure the line, is any one in the series, is any one of the points in the line, and that it is a matter of indifference to the series or to the line where we place them.

    But what of the contradiction of "the counted infinite numerical series"? We shall be in a position to examine it more closely as soon as Herr Dühring has performed the clever trick of counting it for us. When he has completed the task of counting from (minus infinity) to 0, let him come again. It is certainly obvious that, wherever he begins to count, he will leave behind him an infinite series and, with it, the task which he has to fulfil. Just let him invert his own infinite series 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 . . . and try to count from the infinite end back to 1; it would obviously only be attempted by a man who has not the faintest understanding of what the problem is. Still more. When Herr Dühring asserts that the

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infinite series of lapsed time has been counted, he is thereby asserting that time has a beginning; for otherwise he would have been unable to start "counting" at all. Once again, therefore, he smuggles into the argument, as a premise, what he has to prove. The idea of an infinite series which has been counted, in other words, the world-encompassing Dühringian Law of Determinate Number, is therefore a contradiction in adjecto,[*] contains within itself a contradiction, and indeed an absurd contradiction.

    It is clear tha