Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

plausible because it is the mode of "so-called healthy human reason." However, healthy human reason—a respectable fellow in the homely realm of his own four walls—encounters quite wonderful adventures as soon as he ventures into the wide world of research. The metaphysical view, as justified and even necessary as it is in wide areas depending on the nature of the object, nonetheless always hits a barrier sooner or later beyond which it becomes one-sided, narrow, abstract, and loses itself in insoluble contradictions. It forgets the connection between individual things, forgets their coming-to-be and passing-away in favor of their being, and forgets their motion in favor of their rest, because it cannot see the forest for the trees. For everyday cases, we know, for example, and can say with certainty whether an animal exists or not. But upon closer investigation, we find that this is sometimes a highly complex matter, as lawyers know very well, who have struggled in vain to discover a rational limit from which point the killing of a child in the womb is murder. It is equally impossible to determine the moment of death, as physiology proves that death is not a one-time, instantaneous event, but a very lengthy process. Likewise, every organic being is, at every moment, both the same and not the same. At every moment, it assimilates substances supplied from the outside and excretes others; at every moment, cells of its body die and new ones are formed; after a longer or shorter time, the substance of this body has been completely renewed and replaced by other atoms, so that every organized being is always the same and yet another. Furthermore, upon closer observation, we find that the two poles of an opposition, such as positive and negative, are just as inseparable as they are opposite, and that despite all their opposition, they permeate one another. Likewise, we find that cause and effect are conceptions which only have validity as such when applied to an individual case, but that as soon as we consider the individual case in its general connection with the world as a whole, they merge and dissolve into the view of universal interaction, where causes and effects continually change places, and what is effect here or now becomes cause there or then, and vice-versa.

All these processes and methods of thought do not fit into the framework of metaphysical thinking. For dialectics, on the other hand, which perceives things and their conceptual images essentially in their connection, their concatenation, their movement, their coming-into-being, and their passing-away, processes like the above...