esses like the above are so many attestations of its own method of
procedure. Nature furnishes the test to dialectics, and this much we
must say for modern natural science, that it has contributed towards
this test an extremely rich and daily increasing material, whereby it
has demonstrated that, in the last instance, nature proceeds upon
dialectical, not upon metaphysical methods, that it does not move upon
the eternal sameness of a perpetually recurring circle, but that it goes
through an actual historic evolution.

"This new German philosophy culminated in the system of Hegel. There
for the first time--and herein consists its merit--the whole natural,
historic, and intellectual world was presented as a process, i. e.,
engaged in perpetual motion, change, transformation and development.
Viewed from this standpoint, the history of mankind no longer appeared
as a wild tangle of senseless deeds of violence, all equally to be
rejected by a ripened philosophic judgment, and which it were best to
forget as soon as possible, but as the process of the development of
mankind itself--a development whose gradual march, through all its stray
paths, and its eternal law, through all its seeming fortuitousness, it
now became the task of the intellect to trace and to discover."

Kirkup, in his "History of Socialism," has this to say upon the
dialectic method of investigation as used by Marx: "In the system of
Marx, it means that the business of enquiry is to trace the connection
and concatenation in the links that make up the process of historic
evolution, to investigate how one stage succeeds another in the
development of society, the facts and forms of human life and history
not being stable and stereotyped things, but the ever-changing
manifestations of the fluent and unresting real, the course of which it
is the duty of science to reveal."

The translator has endeavored to render the meaning of the original in
as simple an English form as possible, and to, generally speaking, avoid
technical terms.

AUSTIN LEWIS.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

In the preface of the "Critique of Political Economy," published at
Berlin, in 1859, Marx explained how we two, in 1845, in Brussels,
intended to work out together the antagonism of our views--that is, the
materialistic philosophy of history, as developed by Marx--to the
ideological German philosophy, and, in fact, to compare it with our
present philosophic knowledge. The design was car