HKB
the work before us and wait for a later opportunity to correct and publish the results obtained, probably together with the most important manuscripts on mathematics left behind by Marx.
But the advance of theoretical science makes my work in all probability, in a great measure, or altogether, superfluous. Since the revolution which overturned theoretical science the necessity of arranging the accumulation of purely empirical discoveries has caused the opposing empiricists to pay more and more attention to the dialectical character of the operations of nature. The old stiff antagonisms, the sharp impassable frontier lines are becoming more and more abolished. Since the last "true" gases have been liquefied, since the proof that a body can be put in a condition in which liquid and gaseous forms cannot be differentiated, aggregate conditions have to the last remnant lost their earlier absolute character. With the statement of the kinetic theory of gases that, in gases, the squares of the speeds with which the separate gas molecules move are in inverse ratio to the molecular weights, under the same temperature, heat takes its place directly in the series of such measurable forms of motion. Ten years ago the newly discovered great fundamental law of motion was still understood as a mere law of the conservation of energy, as a mere expression of the indestructibility and uncreatibility of motion, and therefore merely on its quantitative side. That narrow negative expression has been more and more subordinated to the transformation of energy, in which the qualitative content of the process is duly recognised and the last notion of an extramundane Creator is destroyed. That the quantity of motion (of energy, so called) is not changed when it is transformed into kinetic energy (mechanical force, so called), into electricity, heat, potential static energy need not now be preached any longer as something new, it served as the foundation, once attained, of many valuable investigations of the process of transformation itself, of the great fundamental process, in the knowledge of which is comprehended the knowledge of all nature. And since biology has been treated in the light of the theory of evolution it has abolished one stiff line of classification after another in the realm of organic nature. The entirely unclassified intermediate conditions increase in number every day. Later investigations throw organisms out of one class into another, and marks of distinction which have become articles of faith lose their individual reality. We have now mammals which lay eggs and, if the news is established, birds also which go on all fours. It was already observed, before the time of Virchow, as a conclusion of the discovery of the cell, that the identity of the individual creature is lost, scientifically and dialectically speaking, in a federation of cells, so the idea of animal (and therefore human) individuality is still further complicated by the discovery of the amoeba in the bodies of the higher animals constituting the white blood corpuscles. And these are just the things which were considered polar opposites, irreconcilable and insoluble, the fixed boundaries and differences of classification, which have given modern theoretical science its limited and metaphysical character. The knowledge that these distinctions and antagonisms actually do occur in nature, but only relatively, and that on the other hand that fixity and absoluteness are the products of our own minds--this knowledge constitutes the kernel of the dialectic view of nature. The view is reached under the compulsion of the mass of scientific facts, and one reaches it the more easily by bringing to the dialectic character of these facts a consciousness of the laws of dialectic thought. At all events, the scope of science is now so great that it no longer escapes the dialectic comprehension. But it will simplify the process if it is remembered that the results in which these discoveries are comprehended are ideas, that the art of operating with ideas is not inborn, moreover, and is not vouchsafed every day to the ordinary mind, but requires actual thought, and this thought has a long history crammed with experiences, neither more nor less than the accumulated experiences of investigation into nature. By these means, then, it learns how to appropriate the results of fifteen hundred years development of philosophy, it gets rid of any separate natural philosophy which stands above or alongside of it and the limited method of thought brought over from English empiricism.