time: the refreshing river 



the dialectical character of human thought and discovery than in 

 elucidating the dialectical character of the transitions between the 

 natural levels.^ There have, however, been some interesting sug- 

 gestions. J. D. BernaP has pointed out that natural processes are 

 never loo per cent efficient. Besides the main process or reaction, 

 there are always residual processes or side-reactions, which, if cyclic 

 or if adjuvant to the main reaction, will not matter very much. But 

 they may be opposing and cumulative, so that after some time a new 

 situation will arise in which such opposing processes may make an 

 antithesis to the main reaction's thesis. This situation may be unstable, 

 and wherever instability occurs, one of the possible resulting syntheses 

 may be a level of higher organisation. Such a scheme can be worked 

 out for the aggregation of particles in planets, the formation of 

 hydrosphere and atmosphere, and the development of economic 

 processes since the renaissance. J. B. S. Haldane,^ too, has discussed 

 evolution theory from this viewpoint, distinguishing three Hegelian 

 triads: — 



Thesis Antithesis Synthesis 



(i) Heredity Mutation Variation 



(2) Variation Selection Evolution 



(3) Selection of the fit- Consequent loss of Survival of those 



test individuals fitness in the species species showing 



little intraspecific 

 competition. 



The early conviction of Engels that Nature is through and through 

 dialectical was rightly directed against the static conceptions of irhe 

 scientists of his time, who were unprepared for the mass of contra- 

 dictions that science was about to have to deal with, and who did not 

 appreciate that Nature is full of apparently irreconcilable antagonisms 

 and distinctions which are reconciled at higher organisational levels. 

 The well-known rules of the passing of quantity into quality, the 

 unity of opposites and the negation of negations, have all become 

 commonplaces of scientific thought.* What has not yet been done, 

 however, is to elucidate the way in which each of the new great 



^ Cf. F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Gesamtausgabe edn., Moscow, 1935), p. 640. 

 ^ J. D. Bernal, essay in Aspects of Dialectical Materialism (London, 1934). 

 ^ J. B. S. Haldane, Science and Society, 1937, 1, 473. 

 J. B. S. Haldane, Marxism and the Sciences (London, 1938), and a series of articles 

 in Labour Monthly, 1941, 23, 266, 327, 400 and 430. 



190 



