Frederick Engels'
Dialectics of Nature
1. INTRODUCTION
MODERN natural science, which alone has achieved an all-round systematic and
scientific development, as contrasted with the brilliant natural-philosophical
intuitions of antiquity and the extremely important but sporadic discoveries of
the Arabs, which for the most part vanished without results - this modern
natural science dates, like all more recent history, from that mighty epoch
which we Germans term the Reformation, from the national misfortune that
overtook us at that time, and which the French term the Renaissance and the
Italians the Cinquecento, although it is not fully expressed by any of these
names. It is the epoch which had its rise in the last half of the fifteenth
century. Royalty, with the support of the burghers of the towns, broke the power
of the feudal nobility and established the great monarchies, based essentially
on nationality, within which the modern European nations and modern bourgeois
society came to development. And while the burghers and nobles were still
fighting one another, the peasant war in Germany pointed prophetically to future
class struggles, not only by bringing on to the stage the peasants in revolt -
that was no longer anything new - but behind them the beginnings of the modern
proletariat, with the red flag in their hands and the demand for common
ownership of goods on their lips. In the manuscripts saved from the fall of
Byzantium, in the antique statues dug out of the ruins of Rome, a new world was
revealed to the astonished West, that of ancient Greece: the ghosts of the
Middle Ages vanished before its shining forms; Italy rose to an undreamt-of
flowering of art, which seemed like a reflection of classical antiquity and was
never attained again. In Italy, France, and Germany a new literature arose, the
first, modern literature; shortly afterwards came the classical epochs of
English and Spanish literature. The bounds of the old orbis terrarum
were pierced. Only now for the first time was the world really discovered and
the basis laid for subsequent world trade and the transition from handicraft to
manufacture, which in its turn formed the starting-point for modern large scale
industry. The dictatorship of the Church over men's minds was shattered; it was
directly cast off by the majority of the Germanic peoples, who adopted
Protestantism, while among the Latins a cheerful spirit of free thought, taken
over from the Arabs and nourished by the newly-discovered Greek philosophy, took
root more and more and prepared the way for the materialism of the eighteenth
century.
It was the greatest progressive revolution that mankind has so far
experienced, a time which called for giants and produced giants - giants in
power of thought, passion, and character, in universality and learning. The men
who founded the modern rule of the bourgeoisie had anything but bourgeois
limitations. On the contrary, the adventurous character of the time inspired
them to a greater or less degree. There was hardly any man of importance then
living who had not travelled extensively, who did not command four or five
languages, who did not shine in a number of fields. Leonardo da Vinci was not
only a great painter but also a great mathematician, mechanician, and engineer,
to whom the most diverse branches of physics are indebted for important
discoveries. Albrecht Durer was painter, engraver, sculptor, and architect, and
in addition invented a system of fortification embodying many of the ideas that
much later were again taken up by Montalembert and the modern German science of
fortification. Machiavelli was statesman, historian, poet, and at the same time
the first notable military author of modern times. Luther not only cleaned the
Augean stable of the Church but also that of the German language; he created
modern German prose and composed the text and melody of that triumphal hymn
which became the Marseillaise of the sixteenth century. The heroes of that time
had not yet come under the servitude of the division of labour, the restricting
effects of which, with its production of onesidedness, we so often notice in
their successors. But what is especially characteristic of them is that they
almost all pursue their lives and activities in the midst of the contemporary
movements, in the practical struggle; they take sides and join in the fight, one
by speaking and writing, another with the sword, many with both. Hence the
fullness and force of character that makes them r.omplete men. Men of the study
are the exception - either persons of second or third rank or cautious
philistines who do not want to burn their fingers.
At that time natural science also developed in the midst of the general
revolution and was itself thoroughly revolutionary; it had to win in struggle
its right of existence. Side by side with the great Italians from whom modern
philosophy dates, it provided its martyrs for the stake and the prisons of the
Inquisition. And it is characteristic that Protestants outdid Catholics in
persecuting the free investigation of nature. Calvin had Servetus burnt at the
stake when the latter was on the point of discovering the circulation of the
blood, and indeed he kept him roasting alive during two hours; for the
Inquisition at least it sufficed to have Giordano Bruno simply burnt
alive.
The revolutionary act by which natural science declared its independence and,
as it were, repeated Luther's burning of the Papal Bull was the publication of
the immortal work by which Copernicus, though timidly and, so to speak, only
from his deathbed, threw down the gauntlet to ecclesiastical authority in the
affairs of nature. The emancipation of natural science from theology dates from
this act, although the fighting out of the particular antagonistic claims has
dragged out up to our day and in many minds is still far from completion.
Thenceforward, however, the development of the sciences proceeded with giant
strides, and, it might be said, gained in force in proportion to the square of
the distance (in time) from its point of departure. It was as if the world were
to be shown that henceforth the reciprocal law of motion would be as valid for
the highest product of organic matter, the human mind, as for inorganic
substance.
The main work in the first period of natural science that now opened lay in
mastering the material immediately at hand. In most fields a start had to be
made from the very beginning. Antiquity had bequeathed Euclid and the Ptolemaic
solar system; the Arabs had left behind the decimal notation, the beginnings of
algebra, the modern numerals, and alchemy; the Christian Middle Ages nothing at
all. Of necessity, in this situation the most fundamental natural science, the
mechanics of terrestrial and heavenly bodies, occupied first place, and
alongside of it, as handmaiden to it, the discovery and perfecting of
mathematical methods. Great work was achieved here. At the end of the period
characterised by Newton and Linnaus we find these branches of science brought to
a certain perfection. The basic features of the most essential mathematical
methods were established; analytical geometry by Descartes especially,
logarithms by Napier, and the differential and integral calculus by Leibniz and
perhaps Newton. The same holds good of the mechanics of rigid bodies, the main
laws of which were made clear once for all. Finally in the astronomy of the
solar system Kepler discovered the laws of planetary movement and Newton
formulated them from the point of view of the general laws of motion of matter.
The other branches of natural science were far removed even from this
preliminary perfection. Only towards the end of the period did the mechanics of
fluid and gaseous bodies receive further treatment. Physics proper had still not
gone beyond its first beginnings, with the exception of optics, the exceptional
progress of which was due to the practical needs of astronomy. By the phlogistic
theory, chemistry for the first time emancipated itself from alchemy. Geology
had not yet gone beyond the embryonic stage of mineralogy; hence paleontology
could not yet exist at all. Finally, in the field of biology the essential
preoccupation was still with the collection and first sifting of the immense
material, not only botanical and zoological but also anatomical and even
physiological. There could as yet be hardly any talk of the comparison of the
various forms of life, of the investigation of their geographical distribution
and their climatic, etc., living conditions. Here only botany and zoology
arrived at an approximate completion owing to Linnæus.
But what especially characterises this period is the elaboration of a
peculiar general outlook, in which the central point is the view of the
absolute immutability of nature. In whatever way nature itself might
have come into being, once present it remained as it was as long as it continued
to exist. The planets and their satellites, once set in motion by the mysterious
"first impulse", circled on and on in their predestined ellipses for all
eternity, or at any rate until the end of all things. The stars remained for
ever fixed and immovable in their places, keeping one another therein by
"universal gravitation". The earth had persisted without alteration from all
eternity, or, alternatively, from the first day of its creation. The "five
continents" of the present day had always existed, and they had always had the
same mountains, valleys, and rivers, the same climate, and the same flora and
fauna, except in so far as change or cultivation had taken place at the hand of
man. The species of plants and animals had been established once for all when
they came into existence; like continually produced like, and it was already a
good deal for Linnaus to have conceded that possibly here and there new species
could have arisen by crossing. In contrast to the history of mankind, which
develops in time, there was ascribed to the history of nature only an unfolding
in space. All change, all development in nature, was denied. Natural science, so
revolutionary at the outset, suddenly found itself confronted by an out-and-out
conservative nature in which even to-day everything was as it had been at the
beginning and in which - to the end of the world or for all eternity -
everything would remain as it had been since the beginning.
High as the natural science of the first half of the eighteenth century stood
above Greek antiquity in knowledge and even in the sifting of its material, it
stood just as deeply below Greek antiquity in the theoretical mastery of this
material, in the general outlook on nature. For the Greek philosophers the world
was essentially something that had emerged from chaos, something that had
developed, that had come into being. For the natural scientists of the period
that we are dealing with it was something ossified, something immutable, and for
most of them something that had been created at one stroke. Science was still
deeply enmeshed in theology. Everywhere it sought and found its ultimate resort
in an impulse from outside that was not to be explained from nature itself. Even
if attraction, by Newton pompously baptised as "universal gravitation", was
conceived as an essential property of matter, whence comes the unexplained
tangential force which first gives rise to the orbits of the planets? How did
the innumerable varieties of animals and plants arise? And how, above all, did
man arise, since after all it was certain that he was not present from all
eternity? To such questions natural science only too frequently answered by
making the creator of all things responsible. Copernicus, at the beginning of
the period, writes a letter renouncing theology; Newton closes the period with
the postulate of a divine first impulse. The highest general idea to which this
natural science attained was that of the purposiveness of the arrangements of
nature, the shallow teleology of Wolff, according to which cats were created to
eat mice, mice to he eaten by cats, and the whole of nature to testify to the
wisdom of the creator. It is to the highest credit of the philosophy of the time
that it did not let itself be led astray by the restricted state of contemporary
natural knowledge, and that - from Spinoza right to the great French
materialists - it insisted on explaining the world from the world itself and
left the justification in detail to the natural science of the future.
I include the materialists of the eighteenth century in this period because
no natural scientific material was available to them other than that above
described. Kant's epoch- making work remained a secret to them, and Laplace came
long after them. We should not forget that this obsolete outlook on nature,
although riddled through and through by the progress of science, dominated the
entire first half of the nineteenth century, and in substance is even now still
taught in all schools. 1
The first breach in this petrified outlook on nature was made not by a
natural scientist but by a philosopher. In 1755 appeared Kant's Allgemeine
Naturgesehichte und Theorie des Himmels [General Natural History and Theory of
the Heavens]. The question of the first impulse was abolished; the earth
and the whole solar system appeared as something that had come into being in the
course of time. If the great majority of the natural scientists had had a little
less of the repugnance to thinking that Newton expressed in the warning:
"Physics, beware of metaphysics!", they would have been compelled from this
single brilliant discovery of Kant's to draw conclusions that would have spared
them endless deviations and immeasurable amounts of time and labour wasted in
false directions. For Kant's discovery contained the point of departure for all
further progress. If the earth were something that had come into being, then its
present geological, geographical, and climatic state, and its plants and animals
likewise, must be something that had come into being; it must have had a history
not only of co-existence in space but also of succession in time. If st once
further investigations had been resolutely pursued in this direction, natural
science would now be considerably further advanced than it is. Rut what good
could come of philosophy? Kant's work remained without immediate results, until
many years later Laplace and Herschel expounded its contents and gave them a
deeper foundation, thereby gradually bringing the "nebular hypothesis" into
favour. Further discoveries finally brought it victory; the most important of
these were: the proper motion of the fixed stars, the demonstration of a
resistant medium in universal space, the proof furnished by spectral analysis of
the chemical identity of the matter of the universe and the existence of such
glowing nebular masses as Kant had postulated.
It is, however, permissible to doubt whether the majority of natural
scientists would so soon have become conscious of the contradiction of a
changing earth that bore immutable organisms, had not the dawning conception
that nature does not just exist, but comes into being and passes
away, derived support from another quarter. Geology arose and pointed out,
not only the terrestrial strata formed one after another and deposited one upon
another, but also the shells and skeletons of extinct animals and the trunks,
leaves, and fruits of no longer existing plants contained in these strata. It
had finally to be acknowledged that not only the earth as a whole but also its
present surface and the plants and animals living on it possessed a history in
time. At first the acknowledgement occurred reluctantly enough. Cuvier's theory
of the revolutions of the earth was revolutionary in phrase and reactionary in
substance. In place of a single divine creation, he put a whole series of
repeated acts of creation, making the miracle an essential natural agent. Lyell
first brought sense into geology by substituting for the sudden revolutions due
to the moods of the creator the gradual effects of a slow transformation of the
earth. 2
Lyell's theory was even more incompatible than any of its predecessors with
the assumption of constant organic species. Gradual transformation of the
earth's surface and of all conditions of life led directly to gradual
transformation of the organisms and their adaptation to the changing
environment, to the mutability of species. But tradition is a power not only in
the Catholic Church but also in natural science. For years, Lyell himself did
not see the contradiction, and his pupils still less. This is only to be
explained by the division of labour that had meanwhile become dominant in
natural science, which more or less restricted each person to his special
sphere, there being only a few whom it did not rob of a comprehensive view.
Meanwhile physics had made mighty advances, the results of which were summed up
almost simultaneously by three different persons in the year 1842, an
epoch-making year for this branch of natural investigation. Mayer in Heilbronn
and Joule in Manchester demonstrated the transformation of heat into mechanical
energy and of mechanical energy into heat. The determination of the mechanical
equivalent of heat put this result beyond question. Simultaneously, by simply
working up the separate physical results already arrived at, Grove - not a
natural scientist by profession, but an English lawyer - proved that all
so-called physical energy, mechanical energy, heat, light, electricity
magnetism, indeed even so-called chemical energy, become transformed into one
another under definite conditions without any loss of energy occurring, and so
proved post factum along physical lines Descartes' principle that the
quantity of motion present in the world is constant. With that the special
physical energies, the as it were immutable "species" of physics, were resolved
into variously differentiated forms of the motion of matter, convertible into
one another according to definite laws. The fortuitousness of the existence of a
number of physical energies was abolished from science by the proof of their
interconnections and transitions. Physics, like astronomy before it, had arrived
at a result that necessarily pointed to the eternal cycle of matter in motion as
the ultimate reality.
The wonderfully rapid development of chemistry, since Lavoisier, and
especially since Dalton, attacked the old ideas of nature from another aspect.
The preparation by inorganic means of compounds that hitherto had been produced
only in the living organism proved that the laws of chemistry have the same
validity for organic as for inorganic bodies, and to a large extent bridged the
gulf between inorganic and organic nature, a gulf that even Kant regarded as for
ever impassable.
Finally, in the sphere of biological research also the scientific journeys
and expeditions that had been systematically organised since the middle of the
previous century, the more thorough exploration of the European colonies in all
parts of the world by specialists living there, and further the progress of
paleontology, anatomy, and physiology in general, particularly since the
systematic use of the microscope and the discovery of the cell, had ar.cumulated
so much material that the application of the comparative method became possible
and at the same time indispensable. On the one hand the conditions of life of
the various floras and faunas were determined by means of comparative physical
geography; on the other hand the various organisms were compared with one
another according to their homologous organs, and this not only in the adult
condition but at all stages of development. The more deeply and exactly this
research was carried on, the more did the rigid system of an 
immutable, fixed organic nature crumble away at its touch. Not only
did the separate species of plants and animals become more and more inextricably
intermingled, but animals turned up, such as Amphioxus and
Lepidosiren, that made a mockery of all previous classification, and
finally organisms were encountered of which it was not possible to say whether
they belonged to the plant or animal kingdom. More and more the gaps in the 
paleontological record were filled up, compelling even the most
reluctant to acknowledge the striking parallelism between the evolutionary
history of the organic world as a whole and that of the individual organism, the
Ariadne's thread that was to lead the way out of the labyrinth in which botany
and zoology appeared to have become more and more deeply lost. It was
characteristic that, almost simultaneously with Kant's attack on the eternity of
the solar system, C. F. Wolff in 1759 launched the first attack on the fixity of
species and proclaimed the theory of descent. But what in his case was still
only a brilliant anticipation took firm shape in the hands of Oken, Lamarck,
Baer, and was victoriously carried through by Darwin in 1859, exactly a hundred
years later. Almost simultaneously it was established that protoplasm and the
cell, which had already been shown to be the ultimate morphological constituents
of all organisms, occurred independently as the lowest forms of organic life.
This not only reduced the gulf between inorganic and organic nature to a minimum
but removed one of the most essential difficulties that had previously stood in
the way of the theory of descent of organisms. The new conception of nature was
complete in its main features; all rigidity was dissolved, all fixity
dissipated, all particularity that had been regarded as eternal became
transient, the whole of nature shown as moving in eternal flux and cyclical
course.
Thus we have once again returned to the point of view of the great founders
of Greek philosophy, the view that the whole of nature, from the smallest
element to the greatest, 
from grains of sand to suns, from protista to men, has its existence
in eternal coming into being and passing away, in ceaseless flux, in un-resting
motion and change, only with the essential difference that what for the Greeks
was a brilliant intuition, is in our case the result of strictly scientific
research in accordance with experience, and hence also it emerges in a much more
definite and clear form. It is true that the empirical proof of this motion is
not wholly free from gaps, but these are insignificant in comparison with what
has already been firmly established, and with each year they become more and
more filled up. And how could the proof in detail be otherwise than defective
when one bears in mind that the most essential branches of science
—trans-planetary astronomy, chemistry', geology— have a scientific existence of
barely a hundred years, and the comparative method in physiology one of barely
fifty years, and that the basic form of almost all organic development, the
cell, is a discovery not yet forty years old?
The innumerable suns and solar systems of our island universe, bounded by the
outermost stellar rings of the Milky Way, developed from swirling, glowing
masses of vapour, the laws of motion of which will perhaps be disclosed after
the observations of some centuries have given us an insight into the proper
motion of the stars. Obviously, this development did not proceed everywhere at
the same rate. Recognition of. the existence of dark bodies, not merely
planetary in nature, hence extinct suns in our stellar system, more and more
forces itself on astronomy (Mädler); on the other hand (according to Secchi) a
part of the vaporous nebular patches belong to our stellar system as suns not
yet fully formed, whereby it is not excluded that other nebulae, as Mädler
maintains, are distant independent island universes, the relative stage of
development of which must be determined by the spectroscope.
How a solar system develops from an individual nebular mass has been shown in
detail by Laplace in a manner still unsurpassed; subsequent science has more and
more confirmed him.
On the separate bodies so formed - suns as well as planets and satellites -
the form of motion of matter at first prevailing is that which we call heat.
There can be no question of chemical compounds of the elements even at a
temperature like that still possessed by the sun; the extent to which heat is
transformed into electricity or magnetism under such conditions, continued solar
observations will show; it is already as good as proved that the mechanical
motion taking place in the sun arises solely from the conflict of heat with
gravity.
The smaller the individual bodies, the quicker they cool down, the
satellites, asteroids, and meteors first of all, just as our moon has long been
extinct. The planets cool more slowly, the central body slowest of all.
With progressive cooling the interplay of the physical forms of motion which
become transformed into one another comes more and more to the forefront until
finally a point is reached from when on chemical affinity begins to make itself
felt, the previously chemically indifferent elements become differentiated
chemically one after another, obtain chemical properties, and enter into
combination with one another. These compounds change continually with the
decreasing temperature, which affects differently not only each element but also
each separate compound of the elements, changing also with the consequent
passage of part of the gaseous matter first to the liquid and then the solid
state, and with the new conditions thus created.
The period when the planet has a firm shell and accumulations of water on its
surface coincides with that when its intrinsic heat diminishes more and more in
comparison to the heat emitted to it from the central body. Its atmosphere
becomes the arena of meteorological phenomena in the sense in which we now
understand the word; its surface becomes the arena of geological changes in
which the deposits resulting from atmospheric precipitation become of ever
greater importance in comparison to the slowly decreasing external effects of
the hot fluid interior.
If, finally, the temperature becomes so far equalised that over a
considerable portion of the surface at least it does not exceed the limits
within which protein is capable of life, then, if other chemical conditions are
favourable, living protoplasm is formed. What these conditions are, we do not
yet know, which is not to be wondered at since so far not even the chemical
formula of protein has been established - we do not even know how many
chemically different protein bodies there are - and since it is only about ten
years ago that the fact became known that completely structureless protein
exercises all the essential functions of life, digestion, excretion, movement,
contraction, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction.
Thousands of years may have passed before the conditions arose in which the
next advance could take place and this formless protein produce the first cell
by formation of nucleus and cell membrane. Rut this first cell also provided the
foundation for the morphological development of the whole organic world; the
first to develop, as it is permissible to assume from the whole analogy of the
palæontological record, were innumerable species of non-cellular and cellular
protista, of which Eozoon canadense alone has come down to us, and of
which some were gradually differentiated into the first plants and others into
the first animals. And from the first animals were developed, essentially by
further differentiation, the numerous classes, orders, families, genera, and
species of animals; and finally mammals, the form in which the nervous system
attains its fullest development; and among these again finally that mammal in
which nature attains consciousness of itself - man.
Man too arises by differentiation. Not only individually, by differentiation
from a single egg cell to the most complicated organism that nature produces -
no, also historically. When after thousands of years of struggle the
differentiation of hand from foot, and erect gait, were finally established, man
became distinct from the monkey and the basis was laid for the development of
articulate speech and the mighty development of the brain that has since made
the gulf between man and monkey an unbridgeable one. The specialisation of the
hand - this implies the tool, and the tool implies specific human activity, the
transforming reaction of man on nature, production. Animals in the narrower
sense also have tools, but only as limbs of their bodies: the ant, the bee, the
beaver; animals also produce, but their productive effect on surrounding nature
in relation to the latter amounts to nothing at all. Man alone has succeeded in
impressing his stamp on nature, not only by shifting the plant and animal world
from one place to another, but also by so altering the aspect and climate of his
dwelling place, and even the plants and animals themselves, that the
consequences of his activity can disappear only with the general extinction of
the terrestrial globe. And he has accomplished this primarily and essentially by
means of the hand. Even the steam engine, so far his most powerful tool for the
transformation of nature, depends, because it is a tool, in the last resort on
the hand. But step by step with the development of the hand went that
of the brain; first of all consciousness of the conditions for separate
practically useful actions, and later, among the more favoured peoples and
arising from the preceding, insight into the natural laws governing them. And
with the rapidly growing knowledge of the laws of nature the means for reacting
on nature also grew; the hand alone would never have achieved the steam engine
if the brain of man had not attained a correlative development with it, and
parallel to it, and partly owing to it.
With men we enter history. Animals also have a history, that of
their derivation and gradual evolution to their present position. This history,
however, is made for them, and in so far as they themselves take part in it,
this occurs without their knowledge or desire. On the other hand, the more that
human beings become removed from animals in the narrower sense of the word, the
more they make their own history consciously, the less becomes the influence of
unforeseen effects and uncontrolled forces of this history, and the more
accurately does the historical result correspond to the aim laid down in
advance. If, however, we apply this measure to human history, to that of even
the most developed peoples of the present day, we find that there still exists
here a colossal disproportion between the proposed aims and the results arrived
at, that unforeseen effects predominate, and that the uncontrolled forces are
far more powerful than those set into motion according to plan. And this cannot
be otherwise as long as the most essential historical activity of men, the one
which has raised them from bestiality to humanity and which forms the material
foundation of all their other activities, namely the production of their
requirements of life, that is to-day social production, is above all subject to
the interplay of unintended effects from uncontrolled forces and achieves its
desired end only by way of exception and, much more frequently, the exact
opposite. In the most advanced industrial countries we have subdued the forces
of nature and pressed them into the service of mankind; we have thereby
infinitely multiplied production, so that a child now produces more than a
hundred adults previously did. And what is the result? Increasing overwork and
increasing misery of the masses, and every ten years a great collapse. Darwin
did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his
countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence,
which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the
normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organisation of
social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a
planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the
social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for men
in their aspect as species. Historical evolution makes such an organisation
daily more indispensable, but also with every day more possible. From it will
date a new epoch of history, in which mankind itself, and with mankind all
branches of its activity, and especially natural science, will experience an
advance that will put everything preceding it in the deepest shade.
Nevertheless, "all that comes into being deserves to perish". Millions of
years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but
inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no
longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the
human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer
find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of
organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon,
will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally
extinct sun, and at last fall into it. Other planets will have preceded it,
others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its
harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue
its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar
system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island
universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to
those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living
human eye to receive it.
And when such a solar system has completed its life history and succumbs to
the fate of all that is finite, death, what then? Will the sun's corpse roll on
for all eternity through infinite space, and all the once infinitely diverse,
differentiated natural forces pass for ever into one single form of motion,
attraction ? "Or" - as Secchi asks - "do forces exist in nature which can
re-convert the dead system into its original state of an incandescent nebula and
re-awake it to new life? We do not know".
At all events we do not know in the sense that we know that 2 x 2 = 4, or
that the attraction of matter increases and decreases according to the square of
the distance. In theoretical natural science, however, which as far as possible
builds up its view of nature into a harmonious whole, and without which nowadays
even the most thoughtless empiricist cannot get anywhere, we have very often to
reckon with incompletely known magnitudes; and logical consistency of thought
must at all times help to get over defective knowledge. Modern natural science
has had to take over from philosophy the principle of the indestructibility of
motion; it cannot any longer exist without this principle. But the motion of
matter is not merely crude mechanical motion, mere change of place, it is heat
and light, electric and magnetic stress, chemical combination and dissociation,
life and, finally, consciousness. To say that matter during the whole unlimited
time of its existence has only once, and for what is an infinitesimally short
period in comparison to its eternity, found itself able to differentiate its
motion and thereby to unfold the whole wealth of this motion, and that before
and a.fter this remains restricted for eternity to mere change of place - this
is equivalent to maintaining that matter is mortal and motion transitory. The
indestructibility of motion cannot be merely quantitative, it must also be
conceived qualitatively; matter whose purely mechanical change of place includes
indeed the possibility under favourable conditions of being transformed into
heat, electricity, chemical action, or life, but which is not capable of
producing these conditions from out of itself, such matter has forfeited
motion; motion which has lost the capacity of being transformed into the
various forms appropriate to it may indeed still have dynamis but no
longer energeia, and so has become partially destroyed. Both, however,
are unthinkable.
This much is certain: there was a time when the matter of our island universe
had transformed a quantity of motion - of what kind we do not yet know
- into heat, such that there could be developed from it the solar systems
appertaining to (according to Mädler) at least twenty million stars, the gradual
extinction of which is likewise certain. How did this transformation take place?
We know just as little as Father Secchi knows whether the future caput
mortuum of our solar system will once again be converted into the raw
material of a new solar system. But here either we must have recourse to a
creator, or we are forced to the conclusion that the incandescent raw material
for the solar system of our universe was produced in a natural way by
transformations of motion which are by nature inherent in moving
matter, and the conditions of which therefore also must be reproduced by matter,
even if only after millions and millions of years and more or less by chance but
with the necessity that is also inherent in chance.
The possibility of such a transformation is more and more being conceded. The
view is being arrived at that the heavenly bodies are ultimately destined to
fall into one another, and one even calculates the amount of heat which must be
developed on such collisions. The sudden flaring up of new stars, and the
equally sudden increase in brightness of familiar ones, of which we are informed
by astronomy, is most easily explained by such collisions. Not only does our
group of planets move about the sun, and our sun within our island universe, but
our whole island universe also moves in space in temporary, relative equilibrium
with the other island universes, for even the relative equilibrium of freely
moving bodies can only exist where the motion is reciprocally determined; and it
is assumed by many that the temperature in space is not everywhere the same.
Finally, we know that, with the exception of an infinitesimal portion, the heat
of the innumerable suns of our island universe vanishes into space and fails to
raise the temperature of space even by a millionth of a degree centigrade. What
becomes of all this enormous quantity of heat? Is it for ever dissipated in the
attempt to heat universal space, has it ceased to exist practically, and does it
only continue to exist theoretically, in the fact that universal space has
become warmer by a decimal fraction of a degree beginning with ten or more
noughts? The indestructibility of motion forbids such an assumption, but it
allows the possibility that by the successive falling into one another of the
bodies of the universe all existing mechanical motion will be converted into
heat and the latter radiated into space, so that in spite of all
"indestructibility of force" all motion in general would have ceased.
(Incidentally it is seen here how inaccurate is the term "indestructibility of
force" instead of "indestructibility of motion".) Hence we arrive at the
conclusion that in some way, which it will later be the task of scientific
research to demonstrate, the heat radiated into space must be able to become
transformed into another form of motion, in which it can once more be stored up
and rendered active. Thereby the chief difficulty in the way of the reconversion
of extinct suns into incandescent vapour disappears.
For the rest, the eternally repeated succession of worlds in infinite time is
only the logical complement to the co-existence of innumerable worlds in
infinite space - a principle the necessity of which has forced itself even on
the anti-theoretical Yankee brain of Draper. 3
It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only
completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no
adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of
organic life and still more that of the life of beings conscious of nature and
of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and
self-consciousness come into operation; a cycle in which every finite mode of
existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapour, single animal or genus
of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, and
wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and
the laws according to which it moves and changes. But however often, and however
relentlessly, this cycle is completed in time and space, however many millions
of suns and earths may arise and pass away, however long it may last before the
conditions for organic life develop, however innumerable the organic beings that
have to arise and to pass away before animals with a brain capable of thought
are developed from their midst, and for a short span of time find conditions
suitable for life, only to be exterminated later without mercy, we have the
certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations,
that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the
same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation,
the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce
it.
Notes
1.
How tenaciously even in 1861 this view could be held by a man whose scientific
achievements had provided highly important material for abolishing it is shown
by the following classic words: "All the arraignments of our solar system, so
far as we are capable of comprehending them, aim st preservation of what exists
and at unchanging continuance. Just as since the most ancient times no animal
and no plant on the earth has become more perfect or in any way different, just
as we find in all organisms only stages alongside of one another and not
following one another, just as our own race has always remained the same in
corporeal respects - so even the greatest diversity in the co-existing heavenly
bodies does not justify us in assuming that these forms are merely different
stages of development; it is rather that everything created is equally perfect
in itself." (Madler, Popular Astronomy Berlin, 1881, 5th edition, p.
316.)
2.
The defect of Lyell's view - at least in its first form - lay in conceiving the
forces at work on the earth as constant, both in quality and quantity. The
cooling of the earth does not exist for him; the earth does not develop in a
definite direction but merely changes in an inconsequent fortuitous
manner.
3.
"The multiplicity of worlds in infinite space leads to the conception of a
succession of worlds in infinite time." J. W. Draper, History of the
Intellectual Development of Europe, 1864. Vol. 2, p. 325.