SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION 



all unknown phenomena by attributing them to 

 some force or to some substance. 



Thanks to this scientific application of dialectic 

 reasoning, at which Engels and Marx arrived in- 

 dependently of one another, they were spared the 

 mistakes of the other Young-Hegelians and the 

 aimless wanderings of the bourgeois scientists and 

 philosophers after them. It was due to the mis- 

 erable political conditions of Germany that both 

 of them applied their philosophical minds, not 

 to purely academic studies, but to a deeper pene- 

 tration of the sociological problems which con- 

 fronted them. Marx took up the study of the 

 French, Engels that of the English socialists. A 

 comprehensive grasp of history, economics, phi- 

 losophy and natural science was the result. 

 Marx was the first to bring order out of that 

 tangle of blunders known as political economy. 

 Thanks to him, we have a complete survey of 

 the evolution of economics as a science from 

 Aristotle down to Petty, North, Locke, Hume, 

 Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Quesnay. 



The central fact, which impressed itself 

 especially on Marx, was that " legal relations and 

 state institutions can neither be understood of 

 themselves, nor as results of the so-called general 

 development of the human mind, but that, they are 



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