evolution. It is in this passage
from the criticism of subjective thought, which examines things outside
and imagines it can correct them at once, to the understanding of the
self-criticism exercised by society over itself in the immanence of its
own _processus_--it is in this only that the dialectic of history
consists, which Marx and Engels, in so far as they were materialists,
drew from the idealism of Hegel. But on the final reckoning it matters
little whether the literary men, who knew no other meaning for
dialectics than that of an artificial sophistry nor whether the doctors
and scholars who are never apt to go beyond the knowledge of particular
facts can ever account themselves for these hidden and complicated forms
of thought.

But the great economic transformation, which has furnished the materials
composing modern society, in which the empire of capitalism has arrived
at the limit of its complete development, would not have been so
immediately and so suggestively instructive, if it had not been
luminously illustrated by the bewildering and catastrophic movement of
the French Revolution. This put in evidence, like a tragedy on the
stage, all the antagonistic forces of modern society, because this
society has developed on the ruins of previous forms, and because, in so
short a time and with so hasty a march, it has traversed the phases of
its birth and its establishment.

The revolution ensued from the obstacles which the bourgeoisie had to
overcome by violence, since it appeared from evidence that the passage
from the old forms to the new forms of production--or of property, if we
borrow the language of jurists--could not be realized by the quieter
ways of successive and gradual reforms. It brought in its train the
upheaval, the friction and the intermingling of all the old classes of
the Ancient Regime, and the rapid and bewildering formation at the same
time of new classes, in the very rapid but very intensive period of ten
years, which, compared with the ordinary history of other times and
other countries, seems to us like centuries. This rapid succession of
monumental events brought to light the most characteristic moments and
aspects of the new or modern society, and that so much the more clearly
since the militant bourgeoisie had already created for itself
intellectual means and organs which had given it with the theory of its
own work the reflex consciousness of its movement.

The violent expropria