usly, while, in nature, and up to now, in
human history, for the most part they accomplish themselves,
unconsciously in the form of external necessity, through an endless
succession of apparent accidents. Hereupon the dialectic of the Idea
became itself merely the conscious reflex of the dialectic evolution of
the real world, and therefore, the dialectic of Hegel was turned upside
down or rather it was placed upon its feet instead of on its head, where
it was standing before. And this materialistic dialectic which since
that time has been our best tool and our sharpest weapon was discovered,
not by us alone, but by a German workman, Joseph Dietzgen, in a
remarkable manner and utterly independent of us.

But just here the revolutionary side of Hegel's philosophy was again
taken up, and at the same time freed from the idealistic frippery which
had in Hegel's hands interfered with its necessary conclusions. The
great fundamental thought, namely, that the world is not to be
considered as a complexity of ready-made things, but as a complexity
made up of processes in which the apparently stable things, no less than
the thought pictures in the brain--the idea, cause an unbroken chain of
coming into being and passing away, in which, by means of all sorts of
seeming accidents, and in spite of all momentary setbacks, there is
carried out in the end a progressive development--this great foundation
thought has, particularly since the time of Hegel, so dominated the
thoughts of the mass of men that, generally speaking, it is now hardly
denied. But to acknowledge it in phrases, and to apply it in reality to
each particular set of conditions which come up for examination, are two
different matters. But if one proceeds steadily in his investigations
from this historic point, then a stop is put, once and for all, to the
demand for final solutions and for eternal truths; one is firmly
conscious of the necessary limitations of all acquired knowledge, of its
hypothetical nature, owing to the circumstances under which it has been
gained. One cannot be imposed upon any longer by the inflated
insubstantial antitheses of the older metaphysics of true and false,
good and evil, identical and differentiated, necessary and accidental;
one knows that these antitheses have only a relative significance, that
that which is recognized as true now, has its concealed and
later-developing false side, just as that which is recognized as false,
its true sid