time: the refreshing river 



the process. The French Revolution shows a very similar develop- 

 ment. The feudal monarchy was opposed by the revolutionary 

 Jacobins, but the eventual outcome was the rule of the post-Napoleonic 

 bourgeoisie. This dialectical process is the explanation of the feature 

 so characteristic of revolutions, that they move (in common parlance), 

 two steps forward and one step back.^ 



A Reconsideration of Beliefs. 



In the light of what has now been said, it may be of interest to 

 reconsider some of the points of view in my two previous books of 

 essays. In the first place the attack on vitalism in all its forms^ was 

 abundantly justified; there is no ptace whatever in biology for traces 

 of animism, but we must seek to understand the biological level side 

 by side with the physico-chemical level and the psychological level. 

 In saying that living things differ from dead things in degree and not 

 in kind, and are, as it were, extrapolations from the inorganic,^ I was 

 explicitly adumbrating the scheme of successive levels of complexity 

 and organisation. The essay "Lucretius Redivivus"^ was sound in 

 that it emphasised a coming connection bet^^een chemical science 

 and mental science, and I look back with pleasure on my enthusiasm 

 for Epicurus and Lucretius, from which I have never seen any reason 

 to depart, and which has since been publicly shared by others in some 

 extremely valuable books. ^ My dislike of fixed boundary-lines in 

 nature^ was, I found, in agreement with what Engels says on the 

 question in that great but unfortimately named work the Anti- 

 Diihringy^ At that time, much influenced by Lotze, whom I still 

 consider a remarkable thinker, I emphasised that mechanism was to 

 be considered applicable everywhere, but final nowhere.^ This was 

 an inadequate way of saying that the scientific method is applicable 

 at all levels but that mechanical explanations are inadequate to deal 

 with the phenomena of organisms. There was a similar confusion 

 between "scientific naturalism" and "mechanical materialism"; I often 

 wrote the former when, as I think now, I should have written the 



1 The examples given above show the dialectical process at work in the history 

 of human society and of scientific thought. But it is embodied also in non-human 

 evolution, see p. 190. 



2 SB, pp. 89 ff.; GA, pp. 95 ff. 3 SB, p. 247. * SB, p. 133. 

 ^ Such as B. Farrington's Science and Politics in the Ancient World (London, 1939). 



^ SB, p. 16. 



' Also in Dialectics of Nature (Gesamtausgabe edition, Moscow, 1935, p. 629). 



^ SB, pp. 28, 136. 



20 



