Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

are just as many confirmations of their own method of procedure. Nature is the test of dialectics, and we must admit to modern natural science that it has provided an extremely abundant and daily increasing material for this test, thereby proving that in nature, in the final analysis, things proceed dialectically and not metaphysically. Nature does not move in the eternal sameness of a constantly repeated circle, but undergoes a real history. Here, above all, we must name Darwin, who struck the most powerful blow against the metaphysical view of nature by demonstrating that the entire organic nature of today, plants and animals, and thus also man, is the product of a process of development that has continued for millions of years. But because natural scientists who have learned to think dialectically can still be counted on one's fingers, the limitless confusion that now prevails in theoretical natural science—driving teachers and students, writers and readers, to despair—is explained by this conflict between discovered results and the traditional way of thinking.

An exact representation of the universe, its development, and that of humanity, as well as the reflection of this development in the minds of people, can therefore only come about through dialectical means, with constant attention to the general interactions of coming-to-be and passing-away, of progressive or regressive changes. And it was in this sense that the newer German philosophy immediately appeared. Kant began his career by dissolving the stable Newtonian solar system—and its eternal duration, once the famous "first impulse" was given—into a historical process: the origin of the sun and all planets from a rotating nebula. In doing so, he already drew the conclusion that the future destruction of the solar system was necessarily given with this origin. His view was mathematically substantiated half a century later by Laplace, and another half-century later, the spectroscope proved the existence of such glowing gas masses in various stages of condensation in outer space.

This newer German philosophy found its completion in the Hegelian system, in which for the first time—and this is its great merit—the entire natural, historical, and intellectual world was represented as a process, that is, as engaged in constant motion, change, transformation, and development, and an attempt was made to demonstrate the inner connection in this motion and development. From this point of view, the history of humanity no longer appeared as a wild tangle of senseless acts of violence, which before the judgment seat of