Dialectics of Nature. Frederick Engels (1883)
1. INTRODUCTION
MODERN natural science, which alone has achieved an all-round systematic and scientific
development, as contrasted with the brilliant natural-philosophical intuitions of antiquity
and the extremely important but sporadic discoveries of the Arabs, which for the most part
vanished without results - this modern natural science dates, like all more recent history,
from that mighty epoch which we Germans term the Reformation, from the national misfortune
that overtook us at that time, and which the French term the Renaissance and the Italians the
Cinquecento, although it is not fully expressed by any of these names. It is the epoch which
had its rise in the last half of the fifteenth century. Royalty, with the support of the
burghers of the towns, broke the power of the feudal nobility and established the great
monarchies, based essentially on nationality, within which the modern European nations and
modern bourgeois society came to development. And while the burghers and nobles were still
fighting one another, the peasant war in Germany pointed prophetically to future class
struggles, not only by bringing on to the stage the peasants in revolt - that was no longer
anything new - but behind them the beginnings of the modern proletariat, with the red flag in
their hands and the demand for common ownership of goods on their lips. In the manuscripts
saved from the fall of Byzantium, in the antique statues dug out of the ruins of Rome, a new
world was revealed to the astonished West, that of ancient Greece: the ghosts of the Middle
Ages vanished before its shining forms; Italy rose to an undreamt-of flowering of art, which
seemed like a reflection of classical antiquity and was never attained again. In Italy,
France, and Germany a new literature arose, the first, modern literature; shortly afterwards
came the classical epochs of English and Spanish literature. The bounds of the old orbis
terrarum were pierced. Only now for the first time was the world really discovered and
the basis laid for subsequent world trade and the transition from handicraft to manufacture,
which in its turn formed the starting-point for modern large scale industry. The dictatorship
of the Church over men's minds was shattered; it was directly cast off by the majority of the
Germanic peoples, who adopted Protestantism, while among the Latins a cheerful spirit of free
thought, taken over from the Arabs and nourished by the newly-discovered Greek philosophy,
took root more and more and prepared the way for the materialism of the eighteenth
century.
It was the greatest progressive revolution that mankind has so far experienced, a time
which called for giants and produced giants - giants in power of thought, passion, and
character, in universality and learning. The men who founded the modern rule of the
bourgeoisie had anything but bourgeois limitations. On the contrary, the adventurous
character of the time inspired them to a greater or less degree. There was hardly any man of
importance then living who had not travelled extensively, who did not command four or five
languages, who did not shine in a number of fields. Leonardo da Vinci was not only a great
painter but also a great mathematician, mechanician, and engineer, to whom the most diverse
branches of physics are indebted for important discoveries. Albrecht Durer was painter,
engraver, sculptor, and architect, and in addition invented a system of fortification
embodying many of the ideas that much later were again taken up by Montalembert and the
modern German science of fortification. Machiavelli was statesman, historian, poet, and at
the same time the first notable military author of modern times. Luther not only cleaned the
Augean stable of the Church but also that of the German language; he created modern German
prose and composed the text and melody of that triumphal hymn which became the Marseillaise
of the sixteenth century. The heroes of that time had not yet come under the servitude of the
division of labour, the restricting effects of which, with its production of onesidedness, we
so often notice in their successors. But what is especially characteristic of them is that
they almost all pursue their lives and activities in the midst of the contemporary movements,
in the practical struggle; they take sides and join in the fight, one by speaking and
writing, another with the sword, many with both. Hence the fullness and force of character
that makes them r.omplete men. Men of the study are the exception - either persons of second
or third rank or cautious philistines who do not want to burn their fingers.
At that time natural science also developed in the midst of the general revolution and was
itself thoroughly revolutionary; it had to win in struggle its right of existence. Side by
side with the great Italians from whom modern philosophy dates, it provided its martyrs for
the stake and the prisons of the Inquisition. And it is characteristic that Protestants
outdid Catholics in persecuting the free investigation of nature. Calvin had Servetus burnt
at the stake when the latter was on the point of discovering the circulation of the blood,
and indeed he kept him roasting alive during two hours; for the Inquisition at least it
sufficed to have Giordano Bruno simply burnt alive.
The revolutionary act by which natural science declared its independence and, as it were,
repeated Luther's burning of the Papal Bull was the publication of the immortal work by which
Copernicus, though timidly and, so to speak, only from his deathbed, threw down the gauntlet
to ecclesiastical authority in the affairs of nature. The emancipation of natural science
from theology dates from this act, although the fighting out of the particular antagonistic
claims has dragged out up to our day and in many minds is still far from completion.
Thenceforward, however, the development of the sciences proceeded with giant strides, and, it
might be said, gained in force in proportion to the square of the distance (in time) from its
point of departure. It was as if the world were to be shown that henceforth the reciprocal
law of motion would be as valid for the highest product of organic matter, the human mind, as
for inorganic substance.
The main work in the first period of natural science that now opened lay in mastering the
material immediately at hand. In most fields a start had to be made from the very beginning.
Antiquity had bequeathed Euclid and the Ptolemaic solar system; the Arabs had left behind the
decimal notation, the beginnings of algebra, the modern numerals, and alchemy; the Christian
Middle Ages nothing at all. Of necessity, in this situation the most fundamental natural
science, the mechanics of terrestrial and heavenly bodies, occupied first place, and
alongside of it, as handmaiden to it, the discovery and perfecting of mathematical methods.
Great work was achieved here. At the end of the period characterised by Newton and Linnaus we
find these branches of science brought to a certain perfection. The basic features of the
most essential mathematical methods were established; analytical geometry by Descartes
especially, logarithms by Napier, and the differential and integral calculus by Leibniz and
perhaps Newton. The same holds good of the mechanics of rigid bodies, the main laws of which
were made clear once for all. Finally in the astronomy of the solar system Kepler discovered
the laws of planetary movement and Newton formulated them from the point of view of the
general laws of motion of matter. The other branches of natural science were far removed even
from this preliminary perfection. Only towards the end of the period did the mechanics of
fluid and gaseous bodies receive further treatment. Physics proper had still not gone beyond
its first beginnings, with the exception of optics, the exceptional progress of which was due
to the practical needs of astronomy. By the phlogistic theory, chemistry for the first time
emancipated itself from alchemy. Geology had not yet gone beyond the embryonic stage of
mineralogy; hence paleontology could not yet exist at all. Finally, in the field of biology
the essential preoccupation was still with the collection and first sifting of the immense
material, not only botanical and zoological but also anatomical and even physiological. There
could as yet be hardly any talk of the comparison of the various forms of life, of the
investigation of their geographical distribution and their climatic, etc., living conditions.
Here only botany and zoology arrived at an approximate completion owing to Linnæus.
But what especially characterises this period is the elaboration of a peculiar general
outlook, in which the central point is the view of the absolute immutability of
nature. In whatever way nature itself might have come into being, once present it
remained as it was as long as it continued to exist. The planets and their satellites, once
set in motion by the mysterious "first impulse", circled on and on in their predestined
ellipses for all eternity, or at any rate until the end of all things. The stars remained for
ever fixed and immovable in their places, keeping one another therein by "universal
gravitation". The earth had persisted without alteration from all eternity, or,
alternatively, from the first day of its creation. The "five continents" of the present day
had always existed, and they had always had the same mountains, valleys, and rivers, the same
climate, and the same flora and fauna, except in so far as change or cultivation had taken
place at the hand of man. The species of plants and animals had been established once for all
when they came into existence; like continually produced like, and it was already a good deal
for Linnaus to have conceded that possibly here and there new species could have arisen by
crossing. In contrast to the history of mankind, which develops in time, there was ascribed
to the history of nature only an unfolding in space. All change, all development in nature,
was denied. Natural science, so revolutionary at the outset, suddenly found itself confronted
by an out-and-out conservative nature in which even to-day everything was as it had been at
the beginning and in which - to the end of the world or for all eternity - everything would
remain as it had been since the beginning.
High as the natural science of the first half of the eighteenth century stood above Greek
antiquity in knowledge and even in the sifting of its material, it stood just as deeply below
Greek antiquity in the theoretical mastery of this material, in the general outlook on
nature. For the Greek philosophers the world was essentially something that had emerged from
chaos, something that had developed, that had come into being. For the natural scientists of
the period that we are dealing with it was something ossified, something immutable, and for
most of them something that had been created at one stroke. Science was still deeply enmeshed
in theology. Everywhere it sought and found its ultimate resort in an impulse from outside
that was not to be explained from nature itself. Even if attraction, by Newton pompously
baptised as "universal gravitation", was conceived as an essential property of matter, whence
comes the unexplained tangential force which first gives rise to the orbits of the planets?
How did the innumerable varieties of animals and plants arise? And how, above all, did man
arise, since after all it was certain that he was not present from all eternity? To such
questions natural science only too frequently answered by making the creator of all things
responsible. Copernicus, at the beginning of the period, writes a letter renouncing theology;
Newton closes the period with the postulate of a divine first impulse. The highest general
idea to which this natural science attained was that of the purposiveness of the arrangements
of nature, the shallow teleology of Wolff, according to which cats were created to eat mice,
mice to he eaten by cats, and the whole of nature to testify to the wisdom of the creator. It
is to the highest credit of the philosophy of the time that it did not let itself be led
astray by the restricted state of contemporary natural knowledge, and that - from Spinoza
right to the great French materialists - it insisted on explaining the world from the world
itself and left the justification in detail to the natural science of the future.
I include the materialists of the eighteenth century in this period because no natural
scientific material was available to them other than that above described. Kant's epoch-
making work remained a secret to them, and Laplace came long after them. We should not forget
that this obsolete outlook on nature, although riddled through and through by the progress of
science, dominated the entire first half of the nineteenth century, and in substance is even
now still taught in all schools. 1
The first breach in this petrified outlook on nature was made not by a natural scientist
but by a philosopher. In 1755 appeared Kant's Allgemeine Naturgesehichte und Theorie des
Himmels [General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens]. The question of the first
impulse was abolished; the earth and the whole solar system appeared as something that had
come into being in the course of time. If the great majority of the natural scientists had
had a little less of the repugnance to thinking that Newton expressed in the warning:
"Physics, beware of metaphysics!", they would have been compelled from this single brilliant
discovery of Kant's to draw conclusions that would have spared them endless deviations and
immeasurable amounts of time and labour wasted in false directions. For Kant's discovery
contained the point of departure for all further progress. If the earth were something that
had come into being, then its present geological, geographical, and climatic state, and its
plants and animals likewise, must be something that had come into being; it must have had a
history not only of co-existence in space but also of succession in time. If at once further
investigations had been resolutely pursued in this direction, natural science would now be
considerably further advanced than it is. Rut what good could come of philosophy? Kant's work
remained without immediate results, until many years later Laplace and Herschel expounded its
contents and gave them a deeper foundation, thereby gradually bringing the "nebular
hypothesis" into favour. Further discoveries finally brought it victory; the most important
of these were: the proper motion of the fixed stars, the demonstration of a resistant medium
in universal space, the proof furnished by spectral analysis of the chemical identity of the
matter of the universe and the existence of such glowing nebular masses as Kant had
postulated.
It is, however, permissible to doubt whether the majority of natural scientists would so
soon have become conscious of the contradiction of a changing earth that bore immutable
organisms, had not the dawning conception that nature does not just exist, but
comes into being and passes away, derived support from another quarter. Geology
arose and pointed out, not only the terrestrial strata formed one after another and deposited
one upon another, but also the shells and skeletons of extinct animals and the trunks,
leaves, and fruits of no longer existing plants contained in these strata. It had finally to
be acknowledged that not only the earth as a whole but also its present surface and the
plants and animals living on it possessed a history in time. At first the acknowledgement
occurred reluctantly enough. Cuvier's theory of the revolutions of the earth was
revolutionary in phrase and reactionary in substance. In place of a single divine creation,
he put a whole series of repeated acts of creation, making the miracle an essential natural
agent. Lyell first brought sense into geology by substituting for the sudden revolutions due
to the moods of the creator the gradual effects of a slow transformation of the earth. 2
Lyell's theory was even more incompatible than any of its predecessors with the assumption
of constant organic species. Gradual transformation of the earth's surface and of all
conditions of life led directly to gradual transformation of the organisms and their
adaptation to the changing environment, to the mutability of species. But tradition is a
power not only in the Catholic Church but also in natural science. For years, Lyell himself
did not see the contradiction, and his pupils still less. This is only to be explained by the
division of labour that had meanwhile become dominant in natural science, which more or less
restricted each person to his special sphere, there being only a few whom it did not rob of a
comprehensive view. Meanwhile physics had made mighty advances, the results of which were
summed up almost simultaneously by three different persons in the year 1842, an epoch-making
year for this branch of natural investigation. Mayer in Heilbronn and Joule in Manchester
demonstrated the transformation of heat into mechanical energy and of mechanical energy into
heat. The determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat put this result beyond question.
Simultaneously, by simply working up the separate physical results already arrived at, Grove
- not a natural scientist by profession, but an English lawyer - proved that all so-called
physical energy, mechanical energy, heat, light, electricity magnetism, indeed even so-called
chemical energy, become transformed into one another under definite conditions without any
loss of energy occurring, and so proved post factum along physical lines Descartes'
principle that the quantity of motion present in the world is constant. With that the special
physical energies, the as it were immutable "species" of physics, were resolved into
variously differentiated forms of the motion of matter, convertible into one another
according to definite laws. The fortuitousness of the existence of a number of physical
energies was abolished from science by the proof of their interconnections and transitions.
Physics, like astronomy before it, had arrived at a result that necessarily pointed to the
eternal cycle of matter in motion as the ultimate reality.
The wonderfully rapid development of chemistry, since Lavoisier, and especially since
Dalton, attacked the old ideas of nature from another aspect. The preparation by inorganic
means of compounds that hitherto had been produced only in the living organism proved that
the laws of chemistry have the same validity for organic as for inorganic bodies, and to a
large extent bridged the gulf between inorganic and organic nature, a gulf that even Kant
regarded as for ever impassable.
Finally, in the sphere of biological research also the scientific journeys and expeditions
that had been systematically organised since the middle of the previous century, the more
thorough exploration of the European colonies in all parts of the world by specialists living
there, and further the progress of paleontology, anatomy, and physiology in general,
particularly since the systematic use of the microscope and the discovery of the cell, had
ar.cumulated so much material that the application of the comparative method became possible
and at the same time indispensable. On the one hand the conditions of life of the various
floras and faunas were determined by means of comparative physical geography; on the other
hand the various organisms were compared with one another according to their homologous
organs, and this not only in the adult condition but at all stages of development. The more
deeply and exactly this research was carried on, the more did the rigid system of an
immutable, fixed organic nature crumble away at its touch. Not only did the separate species
of plants and animals become more and more inextricably intermingled, but animals turned up,
such as Amphioxus and Lepidosiren, that made a mockery of all previous
classification, and finally organisms were encountered of which it was not possible to say
whether they belonged to the plant or animal kingdom. More and more the gaps in the
paleontological record were filled up, compelling even the most reluctant to acknowledge the
striking parallelism between the evolutionary history of the organic world as a whole and
that of the individual organism, the Ariadne's thread that was to lead the way out of the
labyrinth in which botany and zoology appeared to have become more and more deeply lost. It
was characteristic that, almost simultaneously with Kant's attack on the eternity of the
solar system, C. F. Wolff in 1759 launched the first attack on the fixity of species and
proclaimed the theory of descent. But what in his case was still only a brilliant
anticipation took firm shape in the hands of Oken, Lamarck, Baer, and was victoriously
carried through by Darwin in 1859, exactly a hundred years later. Almost simultaneously it
was established that protoplasm and the cell, which had already been shown to be the ultimate
morphological constituents of all organisms, occurred independently as the lowest forms of
organic life. This not only reduced the gulf between inorganic and organic nature to a
minimum but removed one of the most essential difficulties that had previously stood in the
way of the theory of descent of organisms. The new conception of nature was complete in its
main features; all rigidity was dissolved, all fixity dissipated, all particularity that had
been regarded as eternal became transient, the whole of nature shown as moving in eternal
flux and cyclical course.
Thus we have once again returned to the point of view of the great founders of Greek
philosophy, the view that the whole of nature, from the smallest element to the greatest,
from grains of sand to suns, from protista to men, has its existence in eternal coming into
being and passing away, in ceaseless flux, in un-resting motion and change, only with the
essential difference that what for the Greeks was a brilliant intuition, is in our case the
result of strictly scientific research in accordance with experience, and hence also it
emerges in a much more definite and clear form. It is true that the empirical proof of this
motion is not wholly free from gaps, but these are insignificant in comparison with what has
already been firmly established, and with each year they become more and more filled up. And
how could the proof in detail be otherwise than defective when one bears in mind that the
most essential branches of science —trans-planetary astronomy, chemistry, geology— have a scientific existence of barely a hundred years, and the comparative method in physiology one
of barely fifty years, and that the basic form of almost all organic development, the cell,
is a discovery not yet forty years old?
The innumerable suns and solar systems of our island universe, bounded by the outermost
stellar rings of the Milky Way, developed from swirling, glowing masses of vapour, the laws
of motion of which will perhaps be disclosed after the observations of some centuries have
given us an insight into the proper motion of the stars. Obviously, this development did not
proceed everywhere at the same rate. Recognition of. the existence of dark bodies, not merely
planetary in nature, hence extinct suns in our stellar system, more and more forces itself on
astronomy (Mädler); on the other hand (according to Secchi) a part of the vaporous
nebular patches belong to our stellar system as suns not yet fully formed, whereby it is not
excluded that other nebulae, as Mädler maintains, are distant independent island
universes, the relative stage of development of which must be determined by the
spectroscope.
How a solar system develops from an individual nebular mass has been shown in detail by
Laplace in a manner still unsurpassed; subsequent science has more and more confirmed
him.
On the separate bodies so formed - suns as well as planets and satellites - the form of
motion of matter at first prevailing is that which we call heat. There can be no question of
chemical compounds of the elements even at a temperature like that still possessed by the
sun; the extent to which heat is transformed into electricity or magnetism under such
conditions, continued solar observations will show; it is already as good as proved that the
mechanical motion taking place in the sun arises solely from the conflict of heat with
gravity.
The smaller the individual bodies, the quicker they cool down, the satellites,
asteroids, and meteors first of all, just as our moon has long been extinct.
The planets cool more slowly, the central body slowest of all.
With progressive cooling the interplay of the physical forms of motion
which become transformed into one another comes more and more to the forefront
until finally a point is reached from when on chemical affinity begins
to make itself felt, the previously chemically indifferent elements become
differentiated chemically one after another, obtain chemical properties,
and enter into combination with one another. These compounds change continually
with the decreasing temperature, which affects differently not only each
element but also each separate compound of the elements, changing also
with the consequent passage of part of the gaseous matter first to the
liquid and then the solid state, and with the new conditions thus created.
The period when the planet has a firm shell and accumulations of water
on its surface coincides with that when its intrinsic heat diminishes more
and more in comparison to the heat emitted to it from the central body.
Its atmosphere becomes the arena of meteorological phenomena in the sense
in which we now understand the word; its surface becomes the arena of geological
changes in which the deposits resulting from atmospheric precipitation
become of ever greater importance in comparison to the slowly decreasing
external effects of the hot fluid interior.
If, finally, the temperature becomes so far equalised that over a considerable
portion of the surface at least it does not exceed the limits within which
protein is capable of life, then, if other chemical conditions are favourable,
living protoplasm is formed. What these conditions are, we do not yet know,
which is not to be wondered at since so far not even the chemical formula
of protein has been established - we do not even know how many chemically
different protein bodies there are - and since it is only about ten years
ago that the fact became known that completely structureless protein exercises
all the essential functions of life, digestion, excretion, movement, contraction,
reaction to stimuli, and reproduction.
Thousands of years may have passed before the conditions arose in which
the next advance could take place and this formless protein produce the
first cell by formation of nucleus and cell membrane. Rut this first cell
also provided the foundation for the morphological development of the whole
organic world; the first to develop, as it is permissible to assume from
the whole analogy of the palæontological record, were innumerable
species of non-cellular and cellular protista, of which Eozoon canadense
alone has come down to us, and of which some were gradually differentiated
into the first plants and others into the first animals. And from the first
animals were developed, essentially by further differentiation, the numerous
classes, orders, families, genera, and species of animals; and finally
mammals, the form in which the nervous system attains its fullest development;
and among these again finally that mammal in which nature attains consciousness
of itself - man.
Man too arises by differentiation. Not only individually, by differentiation
from a single egg cell to the most complicated organism that nature produces
- no, also historically. When after thousands of years of struggle the
differentiation of hand from foot, and erect gait, were finally established,
man became distinct from the monkey and the basis was laid for the development
of articulate speech and the mighty development of the brain that has since
made the gulf between man and monkey an unbridgeable one. The specialisation
of the hand - this implies the tool, and the tool implies specific human
activity, the transforming reaction of man on nature, production. Animals
in the narrower sense also have tools, but only as limbs of their bodies:
the ant, the bee, the beaver; animals also produce, but their productive
effect on surrounding nature in relation to the latter amounts to nothing
at all. Man alone has succeeded in impressing his stamp on nature, not
only by shifting the plant and animal world from one place to another,
but also by so altering the aspect and climate of his dwelling place, and
even the plants and animals themselves, that the consequences of his activity
can disappear only with the general extinction of the terrestrial globe.
And he has accomplished this primarily and essentially by means of the
hand. Even the steam engine, so far his most powerful tool for the transformation
of nature, depends, because it is a tool, in the last resort on the
hand. But step by step with the development of the hand went that of
the brain; first of all consciousness of the conditions for separate practically
useful actions, and later, among the more favoured peoples and arising
from the preceding, insight into the natural laws governing them. And with
the rapidly growing knowledge of the laws of nature the means for reacting
on nature also grew; the hand alone would never have achieved the steam
engine if the brain of man had not attained a correlative development with
it, and parallel to it, and partly owing to it.
With men we enter history. Animals also have a history, that
of their derivation and gradual evolution to their present position. This
history, however, is made for them, and in so far as they themselves take
part in it, this occurs without their knowledge or desire. On the other
hand, the more that human beings become removed from animals in the narrower
sense of the word, the more they make their own history consciously, the
less becomes the influence of unforeseen effects and uncontrolled forces
of this history, and the more accurately does the historical result correspond
to the aim laid down in advance. If, however, we apply this measure to
human history, to that of even the most developed peoples of the present
day, we find that there still exists here a colossal disproportion between
the proposed aims and the results arrived at, that unforeseen effects predominate,
and that the uncontrolled forces are far more powerful than those set into
motion according to plan. And this cannot be otherwise as long as the most
essential historical activity of men, the one which has raised them from
bestiality to humanity and which forms the material foundation of all their
other activities, namely the production of their requirements of life,
that is to-day social production, is above all subject to the interplay
of unintended effects from uncontrolled forces and achieves its desired
end only by way of exception and, much more frequently, the exact opposite.
In the most advanced industrial countries we have subdued the forces of
nature and pressed them into the service of mankind; we have thereby infinitely
multiplied production, so that a child now produces more than a hundred
adults previously did. And what is the result? Increasing overwork and
increasing misery of the masses, and every ten years a great collapse.
Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially
on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for
existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement,
is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organisation
of social production, in which production and distribution are carried
on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world
as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general
has done this for men in their aspect as species. Historical evolution
makes such an organisation daily more indispensable, but also with every
day more possible. From it will date a new epoch of history, in which mankind
itself, and with mankind all branches of its activity, and especially natural
science, will experience an advance that will put everything preceding
it in the deepest shade.
Nevertheless, "all that comes into being deserves to perish". Millions
of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die,
but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun
will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the
poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will
finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually
even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct
frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever
narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it.
Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of
the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members,
only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal
space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later
to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all
the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which
will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive
it.
And when such a solar system has completed its life history and succumbs
to the fate of all that is finite, death, what then? Will the sun's corpse
roll on for all eternity through infinite space, and all the once infinitely
diverse, differentiated natural forces pass for ever into one single form
of motion, attraction ? "Or" - as Secchi asks - "do forces exist in nature
which can re-convert the dead system into its original state of an incandescent
nebula and re-awake it to new life? We do not know".
At all events we do not know in the sense that we know that 2 × 2 =
4, or that the attraction of matter increases and decreases according to
the square of the distance. In theoretical natural science, however, which
as far as possible builds up its view of nature into a harmonious whole,
and without which nowadays even the most thoughtless empiricist cannot
get anywhere, we have very often to reckon with incompletely known magnitudes;
and logical consistency of thought must at all times help to get over defective
knowledge. Modern natural science has had to take over from philosophy
the principle of the indestructibility of motion; it cannot any longer
exist without this principle. But the motion of matter is not merely crude
mechanical motion, mere change of place, it is heat and light, electric
and magnetic stress, chemical combination and dissociation, life and, finally,
consciousness. To say that matter during the whole unlimited time of its
existence has only once, and for what is an infinitesimally short period
in comparison to its eternity, found itself able to differentiate its motion
and thereby to unfold the whole wealth of this motion, and that before
and a.fter this remains restricted for eternity to mere change of place
- this is equivalent to maintaining that matter is mortal and motion transitory.
The indestructibility of motion cannot be merely quantitative, it must
also be conceived qualitatively; matter whose purely mechanical change
of place includes indeed the possibility under favourable conditions of
being transformed into heat, electricity, chemical action, or life, but
which is not capable of producing these conditions from out of itself,
such matter has forfeited motion; motion which has lost the capacity
of being transformed into the various forms appropriate to it may indeed
still have dynamis but no longer energeia, and so has become
partially destroyed. Both, however, are unthinkable.
This much is certain: there was a time when the matter of our island
universe had transformed a quantity of motion - of what kind we
do not yet know - into heat, such that there could be developed from it
the solar systems appertaining to (according to Mädler) at least twenty
million stars, the gradual extinction of which is likewise certain. How
did this transformation take place? We know just as little as Father Secchi
knows whether the future caput mortuum of our solar system will
once again be converted into the raw material of a new solar system. But
here either we must have recourse to a creator, or we are forced to the
conclusion that the incandescent raw material for the solar system of our
universe was produced in a natural way by transformations of motion which
are by nature inherent in moving matter, and the conditions of which
therefore also must be reproduced by matter, even if only after millions
and millions of years and more or less by chance but with the necessity
that is also inherent in chance.
The possibility of such a transformation is more and more being conceded.
The view is being arrived at that the heavenly bodies are ultimately destined
to fall into one another, and one even calculates the amount of heat which
must be developed on such collisions. The sudden flaring up of new stars,
and the equally sudden increase in brightness of familiar ones, of which
we are informed by astronomy, is most easily explained by such collisions.
Not only does our group of planets move about the sun, and our sun within
our island universe, but our whole island universe also moves in space
in temporary, relative equilibrium with the other island universes, for
even the relative equilibrium of freely moving bodies can only exist where
the motion is reciprocally determined; and it is assumed by many that the
temperature in space is not everywhere the same. Finally, we know that,
with the exception of an infinitesimal portion, the heat of the innumerable
suns of our island universe vanishes into space and fails to raise the
temperature of space even by a millionth of a degree centigrade. What becomes
of all this enormous quantity of heat? Is it for ever dissipated in the
attempt to heat universal space, has it ceased to exist practically, and
does it only continue to exist theoretically, in the fact that universal
space has become warmer by a decimal fraction of a degree beginning with
ten or more noughts? The indestructibility of motion forbids such an assumption,
but it allows the possibility that by the successive falling into one another
of the bodies of the universe all existing mechanical motion will be converted
into heat and the latter radiated into space, so that in spite of all "indestructibility
of force" all motion in general would have ceased. (Incidentally it is
seen here how inaccurate is the term "indestructibility of force" instead
of "indestructibility of motion".) Hence we arrive at the conclusion that
in some way, which it will later be the task of scientific research to
demonstrate, the heat radiated into space must be able to become transformed
into another form of motion, in which it can once more be stored up and
rendered active. Thereby the chief difficulty in the way of the reconversion
of extinct suns into incandescent vapour disappears.
For the rest, the eternally repeated succession of worlds in infinite
time is only the logical complement to the co-existence of innumerable
worlds in infinite space - a principle the necessity of which has forced
itself even on the anti-theoretical Yankee brain of Draper.
3
It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly
only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year
is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development,
the time of organic life and still more that of the life of beings conscious
of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space
in which life and self-consciousness come into operation; a cycle in which
every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular
vapour, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation,
is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing,
eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes.
But however often, and however relentlessly, this cycle is completed in
time and space, however many millions of suns and earths may arise and
pass away, however long it may last before the conditions for organic life
develop, however innumerable the organic beings that have to arise and
to pass away before animals with a brain capable of thought are developed
from their midst, and for a short span of time find conditions suitable
for life, only to be exterminated later without mercy, we have the certainty
that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that
none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with
the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest
creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time
again produce it.
Notes
1.
How tenaciously even in 1861 this view could be held by a man whose scientific
achievements had provided highly important material for abolishing it is
shown by the following classic words: "All the arraignments of our solar
system, so far as we are capable of comprehending them, aim st preservation
of what exists and at unchanging continuance. Just as since the most ancient
times no animal and no plant on the earth has become more perfect or in
any way different, just as we find in all organisms only stages alongside
of one another and not following one another, just as our own race has
always remained the same in corporeal respects - so even the greatest diversity
in the co-existing heavenly bodies does not justify us in assuming that
these forms are merely different stages of development; it is rather that
everything created is equally perfect in itself." (Madler, Popular Astronomy
Berlin, 1881, 5th edition, p. 316.)
2. The defect
of Lyell's view - at least in its first form - lay in conceiving the forces
at work on the earth as constant, both in quality and quantity. The cooling
of the earth does not exist for him; the earth does not develop in a definite
direction but merely changes in an inconsequent fortuitous manner.
3. "The multiplicity
of worlds in infinite space leads to the conception of a succession of
worlds in infinite time." J. W. Draper, History of the Intellectual
Development of Europe, 1864. Vol. 2, p. 325.