THE OFFSPRING OF SCIENCE 



XV. THE OFFSPRING OF SCIENCE AND NAT- 

 URAL PHILOSOPHY 



Materialist monism had enabled Marx, Engels, 

 and Dietzgen to find a general key for the solution 

 of all the riddles of the universe by means of 

 inductive reasoning from experienced facts. The 

 conscious and consistent application of this 

 method on the part of Marx and Engels permitted 

 them to realize the general evolution of nature 

 and society by dialectic processes, to make a 

 scientific forecast of industrial and political evolu- 

 tion, and to lay bare the mechanism of social 

 evolution under capitalism by the discovery of 

 the origin of surplus-value and the function of 

 class-struggles. In the hands of Dietzgen, the 

 same method produced a theory of understand- 

 ing which established harmony between the hu- 

 man mind and the universe and solved all the 

 difficulties, which had been the stumbling blocks 

 of scholastic and metaphysical philosophy for 

 centuries, and which have remained insuperable 

 obstacles for nearly every bourgeois scientist and 

 philosopher until this day. 



The vital truth and strength of dialectic ma- 

 terialism was quickly demonstrated by the fact 



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