ar condition of Kant is supposed to be the original vapor-form of
matter, this is to be understood merely relatively. It is to be
understood on the one hand as the original vapor form of the heavenly
bodies, as they are at present, and on the other hand as the earliest
form of matter to which we have been able to trace our way backwards.
The fact that matter passed through an endless series of other forms
before arriving at the nebular state is not excluded from this
conception but is on the other hand rather included in it.

Herr Duehring is at an advantage here. Whereas science comes to a halt
at the existence of the nebulous state his quack science carries him
back to that "Condition of the development of the world which cannot
be called actually static in the present sense of the word but most
emphatically cannot be called dynamic. The unity of matter and
mechanical force which we call the world is, so to speak, a formula
of pure logic, to signify the self-contained condition of matter as
the point of departure of all enumerable stages of material progress."

We have obviously not yet got away from the original self-contained
condition of matter. Here it is explained as consisting of mechanical
force and matter, and this as a formula of pure logic, etc. As soon
then as the unity of matter and mechanical force is at an end
evolution proceeds.

The formula of pure logic is nothing but a lame attempt to make the
Hegelian categories "an Sich and fuer Sich" of use in a philosophy of
realism. In "an Sich" according to Hegel the original unity of a thing
consists; in "fuer Sich" begins the differentiation and movement of
the concealed elements, the active antithesis. We shall therefore
depict the original condition as one in which there is a unity of
matter and mechanical force and the transition to movement as the
separation and antithesis of these two elements. But we have not
thereby established the proof of the real existence of the fantastic
original condition but only this much that it exists according to the
Hegelian category "an Sich" and just as fantastically disappears
according to the Hegelian category "fuer Sich."

Matter, says Duehring, implies all that is real, therefore there is no
mechanical force outside of matter. Mechanical force is furthermore a
condition of matter. In the original condition where no change
occurred matter and its mechanical force were a unity. Afterwards when
the change commenced t