THE OFFSPRING OF SCIENCE 



the dialectic process pervaded society and nature, 

 and the socialist Josef Dietzgen, who in his 

 ' Outcome of Philosophy " perfected his mate- 

 rialist monism by demonstrating that the universe 

 is an organism and the infinite cause and effect 

 of everything, including itself and the human 

 faculty of thought, or " soul." 



But bourgeois minds will as soon accept the 

 socialist philosophy as a camel will go through 

 a needle's eye, or a rich man go to jail. So the 

 bourgeois science gropes along as best it may 

 in its half-hearted monism which is not monism, 

 continues the fruitless discussion of semi-meta- 

 physical functions, forces, or faculties, and leaves 

 much room for the speculations of pseudo-scien- 

 tific occultism. With functions, forces, and fac- 

 ulties, all manner of miracles are performed by 

 spiritualists, mental scientists, theosophists, and 

 other votaries of the mystic. But what do these 

 terms signify? What is, for instance, the faculty 

 (function, force) of thought? 



Labor is a function of labor-power. Labor- 

 power is the latent (potential) energy of the 

 human body, and it performs its function by 

 converting this potential energy into kinetic en- 

 ergy, or motion. Quite analogically, thinking is 

 a function of the faculty of thought. This fac- 



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