Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

...to explain the details of which this overall picture is composed; and as long as we do not know these, we are also unclear about the overall picture. To recognize these details, we must take them out of their natural or historical context and examine them, each by itself, according to their nature, their specific causes and effects, etc. This is initially the task of natural science and historical research—branches of investigation which, for very good reasons, held only a subordinate rank among the Greeks of the classical period, because they first had to collect the material for it. Only after the natural and historical subject matter has been accumulated to a certain degree can the critical sifting, the comparison, or the classification into classes, orders, and species be undertaken. The beginnings of exact scientific research are therefore only developed further by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period, and later, in the Middle Ages, by the Arabs. However, a true natural science only dates from the second half of the 15th century, and from then on it has made progress with ever-increasing speed. The decomposition of nature into its individual parts, the grouping of different natural processes and objects into specific classes, the examination of the internal structure of organic bodies according to their various anatomical forms—these were the fundamental conditions for the giant strides that the last four hundred years have brought us in the knowledge of nature. But it has also left us with the habit of perceiving natural objects and processes in their isolation, outside the great overall connection; therefore not in their movement, but in their stillness; not as essentially changeable, but as fixed states; not in their life, but in their death. And as this way of looking at things—as occurred through Bacon and Locke—was transferred from natural science to philosophy, it created the specific narrow-mindedness of the last centuries: the metaphysical mode of thought.

For the metaphysician, things and their mental images, the concepts, are isolated, fixed, rigid objects of investigation, to be considered one after the other and without the other, once and for all given. He thinks in absolute, irreconcilable contrasts; his speech is "Yes, yes; No, no; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." For him, a thing either exists or it does not exist: a thing can no more be both itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude each other; cause and effect are likewise in rigid contrast to each other. At first glance, this mode of thought appears extremely...