time: the refreshing river 



tended to retain Hegel's metaphysical idealism, they "turned it right 

 side up" and while keeping Hegel's dialectical account of change 

 and process, in which a synthesis arises out of the deadlock of the 

 thesis and the antithesis, they adopted a realist metaphysics. Their 

 materialism, however, was to be known as "dialectical materialism" 

 as opposed to the old mechanical materialism, in order to show its 

 naturalistic character, its determination to account for all the highest 

 phenomena of mind and social organisation without leaving the firm 

 basis of the real objective existence of matter. Something of this kind 

 was meant by Marx's saying that materialism must cease to be "mis- 

 anthropic." Of course, the only way in which such a naturalism could 

 account for the highest phenomena of mind and social organisation, 

 love and comradeship, justice and mercy, was by admitting a series 

 of levels of organisation, arranged in the successions and envelopes 

 of which we have already spoken. And so from this standpoint also 

 there came a doctrine of levels of organisation. It had, however, the 

 cardinal virtue, which not many other naturalisms have had, of 

 emphasising the transitory character of human institutions. It showed 

 that evolution of social systems continued from that of biological 

 systems, and urged the optimistic but tolerably convincing view that 

 human misery is essentially connected with a low and inferior stage 

 of social organisation, that it had in the past been much worse than 

 it is now, and that in the future it ought to be greatly decreased. 

 This is not the place to discuss Marx's theory of history, but if history 

 is the history of class-struggles (and to some extent it undeniably is), 

 there is room for hope that when mankind has united in a world 

 co-operative commonwealth unmarked by social classes, a good 

 many of the more unpleasant features of life in a semi-barbarous state 

 will have ceased to exist. And indeed this is not a hope at all, but a 

 prediction based on that guiding thread of rise in level of organisation, 

 which we have seen running throughout the evolution of our world; 

 and hence a scientific prediction. It was for this reason that the kind 

 of socialism advocated by Marx and Engels received the name which 

 it bears to this day, "scientific" socialism, as opposed to the Utopian 

 varieties, which based their hopes only on the goodness of human 

 nature or similar more or less reliable factors. 



Dialectical materialism has been called the theory of transformations, 

 of the way in which the qualitatively new arises, of the nature of 

 change in the natural world. Its outcome in biology — to return to 

 our main theme — was certainly beneficial. In 1931 a Russian biologist, 



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