e.

Mathematics itself enters the realm of the dialectic and significantly
enough it was a dialectic philosopher, Descartes, who introduced this
progressiveness into mathematics. As is the relation of the
mathematics of variable magnitudes to that of invariable quantities,
so is the relation of the dialectic method of thought to the
metaphysical. This does not prevent the great majority of
mathematicians from only recognising the dialectic in the realms of
mathematics, a condition of things satisfactory to those who operate
in the antiquated, limited, metaphysical fashion by methods attained
by means of the dialectic.

* * * * *

(Duehring having made an attack upon Marx's "Capital" because of its
reliance upon the dialectic, and having indulged in the epithets to
which he is too prone with respect to this work, Engels takes up its
defence in that respect as follows):

It is not our business to concern ourselves at this point with the
correctness or incorrectness of the investigations of Marx as regards
economics, but only with the application which he makes of the
dialectic method. So much is certain, that it is only now that the
readers of "Capital" will by the aid of Herr Duehring understand what
they have read properly, and among them Herr Duehring himself, who in
the year 1867 was still in a position, as far as possible to a man of
his calibre, to review the book rationally. He did not then, it may be
noted, first translate the arguments of Marx into Duehringese, as now
seems indispensable to him. Even if he at that time made the blunder
of identifying the Marxian dialectic with that of Hegel he had not
altogether lost the ability to distinguish methods from the results
attained by them and to comprehend that an abuse of the former is no
contradiction of the latter.

Herr Duehring's most astonishing observation is that from the Marxian
standpoint, "in the last analysis everything is identical," that
therefore in the eyes of Marx, for example, capitalists and wage
workers, feudal, capitalistic and social methods of production are
"all one." In order to show the possibility of such sheer stupidity it
only remains to point out that the mere word "dialectic" makes Herr
Duehring mentally irresponsible and makes what he says and does so
inaccurate and confused as to be in the last analysis "all one."

* * * * *

(Herr Duehring remarks, "How comical fo