SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION 



of the 1 9th century, such as Treviranus and 

 Lamarck, or which would even indicate the prog- 

 ress made by these men. Nor does it explain the 

 hidden springs of the human faculty of thought. 

 Even a metaphysical thinker like Leibniz, who 

 tried as hard as Spinoza to find a monistic clue 

 to the world, had given a better foundation for 

 the study of this faculty by suggesting that so- 

 called innate ideas might be acquired by the hered- 

 itary transmission of ideas derived from experi- 

 enced perceptions. And those who went back to 

 Kant for an improvement of the Hegelian system, 

 for instance Schopenhauer, landed logically in 

 the swamp of reactionary obscurantism. With 

 all its undeniable brilliancy, Hegelian idealist 

 monism was, therefore, a step away from a 

 scientific understanding of the world. 



Not so the Hegelian dialectic. This method de- 

 veloped all the hidden value of the Kantian philos- 

 ophy. And when the Hegelian system failed, the 

 dialectic survived and prepared, with the down- 

 fall of idealist monism, the ascendency and vic- 

 tory of materialistic monism. Jt is the evolution- 

 ary thread, which runs through all of Hegel's 

 writings, that renders a study of his works bene- 

 ficial for the socialist thinker, who has learned to 



106 



