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CHAPTER II
PREFACES
I
The following work is by no means the fruit of some "inward compulsion," quite the contrary.
When three years ago, Herr Duehring suddenly challenged the world, as a scholar and reformer of socialism, friends in Germany frequently expressed the wish that I should throw a critical light upon these new socialist doctrines, in the central organ of the Social Democratic Party, at that time the "Volkstaat." They held it as very necessary that new opportunity for division and confusion should not be afforded in a party so young and so recently definitely united. They were in a better condition than myself to comprehend the condition of affairs in Germany, so that I was compelled to trust to their judgment. It appeared furthermore that the proselyte was welcomed by a certain portion of the socialist press, with a warmth, which meant nothing more than kindliness to Herr Duehring, but it was seen by a portion of the party press that a result of this kindly feeling towards Herr Duehring was the introduction unperceived of the Duehring doctrine. People were found who were soon ready to spread his doctrine in a popular form among the workingmen, and finally Herr Duehring and his little sect employed all the arts of advertisement and intrigue to compel the "Volksblatt" to change its attitude respecting the new teachings which put forth such tremendous claims.
However, a year elapsed before I could make up my mind to engage in so disagreeable a business to the neglect of my other labors. It was the sort of thing one had to get through as quickly as possible, once it was begun. And it was not only unpleasant but quite a task. The new socialist theory appeared as the last practical result of a new philosophic system. It therefore involved an investigation of it in connection with this system and therefore of the system itself. It was necessary to follow Herr Duehring over a wide expanse of country where he had dealt with everything under the sun, yea, and more also. So there came into existence a series of articles which appeared from the beginning of 1877 in the successor of the "Volkstaat," the "Vorwaerts" of Leipsic, and are collected here.
It was my object which extended the criticism to a length out of all proportion to the scientific value of the matter and, therefore, of Herr Duehring's writings. There are two further reasons in extenuation of this lengthiness. In the first place it gave me an opportunity of developing my views, in a positive fashion, with respect to matters which are connected with this, though very different, and which are of more general scientific and practical interest to-day. I have taken the opportunity to do so in every chapter, and, as this book cannot undertake to set up a system in opposition to that of Herr Duehring, it is to be hoped that the reader will not overlook the real significance of the views which I have set forth. I have already had sufficient proof that my labors have not been altogether in vain in this regard.
On the other hand the "system-shaping" Herr Duehring is by no means an exceptional phenomenon in Germany these days. Nowadays in Germany systems of cosmogony, of natural philosophy in particular, of politics, of economics, etc., are in the habit of shooting up over night like mushrooms. The most insignificant Doctor of Philosophy, nay, even the student, has no further use for a complete "system." In the modern state, it is predicated that every citizen is able to pass judgment on all the questions upon which he is called upon to vote; in political economy it is assumed that every consumer is thoroughly acquainted with all commodities, which he has occasion to buy to maintain himself withal, and the same idea is also held as regards knowledge. Freedom of knowledge demands that a person write of that which he has not learned and proclaim this as the only sound scientific method. But Herr Duehring is one of the most conspicuous types of those absurd pseudo-scientists, who to-day occupy so conspicuous a place in Germany and drown everything with their noisy nonsense. Noisy nonsense in poetry, in philosophy, in political economy, in writing history: noisy nonsense in the professor's chair and tribune; noisy nonsense too in the claims to superiority and intellectuality above the vulgar noisy nonsense of other nations, noisy nonsense the most characteristic and mightiest product of German intellectual activity, cheap and bad, like other German products, along with which, I regret to say, they were not exhibited at Philadelphia.
So, German socialism, particularly since Herr Duehring set the example, beats the drum, and produces here and there one who prides himself upon a "science" of which he knows nothing. It is this, a sort of child's disease which marks the first conversion of the German university man to social democracy and is inseparable from him, but it will soon be thrust aside by the remarkable sound sense of our working class.
It is not my fault that I am obliged to follow Herr Duehring into a realm in which I can at the very most only claim to be a dilettante. On such occasions I have for the most part limited myself to placing the plain incontrovertible facts in contrast with the false or crooked assertions of my opponent, as in relation to jurisprudence and many instances with regard to natural science. In other places he indulges in universal views on the subject of natural science theories and therefore on a field where the professional naturalist must range out of his own particular specialty to neighboring regions, where he, according to Herr Virchow's confessions is just as good a "half-knower" as the rest of us. For slight deficiencies and unavoidable errors in the publication I hope that the same indulgence will be extended to me as has been shown the other side of the controversy.
Just as I was completing this preface I received the publishers' notice of a new important book by Herr Duehring. "New Foundations for rational Physics and Chemistry." Although I am very well aware of my deficiencies in physics and chemistry I still believe that I know my Duehring well enough, without having read the book, to venture to say that the laws of physics and chemistry there set forth are worthy of being placed alongside of Herr Duehring's former discoveries and the laws of economics, scheme of the universe, etc., examined in my writings and proved to be misunderstood or commonplace, and that the rhigometer, an instrument constructed by Herr Duehring for measuring temperature will be found to serve not only as a measure for high or low temperature but of the ignorance and arrogance of Herr Duehring. London, 11 June, 1878.
II
It came to me as quite a surprise that a new edition of this work was called for. The special views which it criticised are practically forgotten to-day. The work itself has not only been placed before many thousands of readers by its serial publication in "Vorwaerts" of Leipsic in 1877 and 1878, but it has also been published in large editions in its entirety. How then can there be any further interest in what I have to say about Herr Duehring?
In the first place, I fancy, that it is owing to the fact that this book, as indeed, all my writings at that time, was prohibited in Germany soon after the publication of the anti-Socialist laws. Whosoever was not fettered by the inherited officialdom of the countries of the Holy Alliance should have clearly seen the effect of this measure – the double and treble sale of the prohibited books, and the advertisement of the impotence of the gentlemen in Berlin, who issued injunctions and could not make them effective. Indeed the amiability of the Government was the cause of the publication of several new editions of my shorter writings, as I am able to affirm. I have no time for a proper revision of the text and so allow it to go to press, just as it is.
But there is still an additional circumstance. The "system" of Herr Duehring here criticised spreads over a very extensive theoretical ground and I was compelled to pursue him all over it and to place my ideas in antagonism to his. Negative criticism thereupon became positive; the polemic developed into a more or less connected exposition of dialectic methods and the socialist philosophy, of which Marx and myself are representative, and this in quite a number of places. These our philosophic ideas have had an incubation period of about twenty years since they were first given to the world in Marx's "Misère de la Philosophie" and the Communist Manifesto until they obtained a wider and wider influence through the publication of "Capital" and now find recognition and support far beyond the limits of Europe in all lands where a proletariat exists together with progressive scientific thinkers. It seems that there is also a public whose interests in this matter are sufficient to induce them to purchase the polemic against Duehring's opinions, in spite of the fact that it is now without an object, and who evidently derive pleasure from the positive development.
I must call attention to the fact, by the way, that the views here set out were, for by far the most part, developed and established by Marx, and only to a very slight degree by myself, so that it is understood that I have not represented them without his knowledge. I read the entire manuscript to him before sending it to press and the tenth chapter of the section on Political Economy was written by Marx and unfortunately had to be somewhat abbreviated by me.
It was our wont to mutually assist each other in special branches of work.
The present edition is with the exception of one chapter an unchanged edition of the former. I had no time for revision although there was much in the mode of presentation which I wanted altered. But there is incumbent upon me the duty of preparing for publication the manuscripts which Marx left, and this is much more important than anything else. Then my conscience rebels against making any changes. The book is controversial and I have an idea that it is unfair to my antagonist for me to alter anything when he cannot do so. I could only claim the right to reply to Herr Duehring's answer. But what Herr Duehring has written with respect to my attack I have not read and shall not do so, unless obliged. I am theoretically done with him. Besides I must observe the rules of literary warfare all the more closely as a despicable wrong has since been inflicted upon him by the University of Berlin. It has been chastised for this, indeed. A university which so degrades itself as to refuse permission to Herr Duehring to teach under the known circumstances should not be surprised if a Herr Schwenninger is forced upon it under circumstances just as well known.
The one chapter in which I have permitted myself any explanations is the Second of the Third Section "Theory." Here where the sole concern is the presentation of a most important part of the philosophy which I represent, my antagonist cannot complain if I put myself to some trouble to speak popularly and to generalise. This was undoubtedly a special occasion. I had made a French translation of three chapters of the book (the First of the Introduction and the First and Second of the Third Section) into a separate pamphlet for my friend Lafargue, and the French edition afterwards served as a basis for one in Italian and one in Polish. A German edition was provided under the title "The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science." The latter has exhausted three editions in a few months and has also made its appearance translated into Russian and Danish. In all these publications only the chapter in question was added to and it would have been pedantic in me if I had confined myself to the actual wording of the original in the new edition in spite of the later and international form which it had assumed.
Where I wished to make changes had particular reference to two points. In the first place with regard to primitive history, as far as known, to which Morgan was the first to give us the key in 1877. In my book "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State," Zurich, 1884, I have since had an opportunity of working up material more lately accessible which I employed in this later work. In the second place, as far as that portion which is concerned with theoretical science is concerned, the presentation of the subject is very defective and a much more definite one could now be given. If I did not allow myself the right of improving it now, I should be in duty bound to pass criticism on myself instead of the other.
Marx and I were probably the first to import the well known dialectic of the German idealistic philosophy into the materialistic view of nature and history. But to a dialectical and at the same time materialistic view of nature there pertains an acquaintance with mathematics and natural science. Marx was a sound mathematician but the sciences we only knew in part, by fits and starts, sporadically. After I retired from mercantile pursuits and went to London and had time, I made as far as possible a complete mathematical and scientific "molting," as Liebig calls it, and spent the best part of eight years on it. I was occupied with this molting process when it chanced that I was called upon to busy myself with Herr Duehring's so-called philosophy. If, therefore, I often fail to find the correct technical expression, and am a little awkward in the field of natural science it is only too natural. On the other hand the consciousness of insecurity which I have not yet got over has made me cautious. Actual blunders respecting facts up to the present known, and incorrect presentations of theories thus far recognised cannot be proved against me. In this relation just one great mathematician, who is laboring under a mistake, has complained to Marx in a letter that I have made a mischievous attack upon the honor of the square root of minus one.
As regards my review of mathematics and the natural science it was necessary for me to reassure myself on some special points – since I had no doubts about the truth of the general proposition – that in nature the same dialectic laws of progress fulfill themselves amid all the apparent confusion of innumerable changes as dominate the apparently accidental in nature; the same laws whose threads traverse the progressive history of human thought, and little by little come to the consciousness of thinking men. These were first developed by Hegel in a comprehensive fashion but in a mystical form. Our efforts were directed towards stripping away this mystical form and making them evident in their full simplicity and universal reality. It was self evident that the old philosophies of nature – in spite of all their actual value and fruitful suggestiveness – could be of no value to us. There was an error in the Hegelian form, as shown in this book, in that it recognised no progression of nature in time, no "one after another" (Nacheinander) but merely "one besides another" (Nebeneinander). This was due on the one hand to the Hegelian system itself which ascribed to the Spirit (Geist) alone a progressive historical development, but on the other hand, the general attitude of the natural sciences was responsible. So Hegel fell far behind Kant in this respect for the latter had already by his nebular hypothesis proclaimed the origin and, by his discovery of the stoppage of the rotation of the earth through the tides, the destruction of the solar system. And finally, I could not undertake to construct the dialectical laws of nature but to discover them in it and to develop them from it.
To do this entirely and in each separate division is a colossal task. Not only is the ground to be covered almost immeasurable but on this entire ground natural science is involved in such tremendous changes that even those who have all their time to give can hardly keep up with it. Since the death of Marx however my mind has been occupied by more pressing duties and so I had to interrupt my work. I must, for the moment, confine myself to the hints in 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 amœba 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.
London, 22nd September, 1885.
III
The following new edition is, with the exception of a very few changes in form of expression, a reproduction of the former. Only in one chapter, namely in the Xth. of the Second Section (that on Critical History) I have allowed some important emendations, for the following reasons. As has been stated already in the preface to the second edition, this chapter is in all its essentials, the work of Marx. In its first form, which was intended as an article in a review, I was compelled to abbreviate the manuscript of Marx very much, particularly in those points in which the criticism of Herr Duehring's propositions is subordinate to the particular development of the history of economics. But these are just the portions of the manuscript which constitute the greatest and most important of, as regards its permanent interest, part of the work. The places in which Marx gives their appropriate place in the genesis of political economy to such writers as Petty, North, Locke and Hume, I consider myself obliged to give as literally and completely as possible, and still more so, his explanation of the "economic tableaux" by Quesnay, the insoluble riddle of the sphinx to all economists. I have omitted however that part which dealt solely with the writings of Herr Duehring as far as the connection permitted. For the rest, I am perfectly well satisfied with the extent to which the views represented in this work, have made their way into the minds of the working class and the scientists throughout the world since the publication of the former edition.
F. Engels.London, 23d May, 1894.
