erefore human) individuality is still further complicated by the
discovery of the amoeba in the bodies of the higher animals
constituting the white blood corpuscles. And these are just the things
which were considered polar opposites, irreconcilable and insoluble,
the fixed boundaries and differences of classification, which have
given modern theoretical science its limited and metaphysical
character. The knowledge that these distinctions and antagonisms
actually do occur in nature, but only relatively, and that on the
other hand that fixity and absoluteness are the products of our own
minds--this knowledge constitutes the kernel of the dialectic view of
nature. The view is reached under the compulsion of the mass of
scientific facts, and one reaches it the more easily by bringing to
the dialectic character of these facts a consciousness of the laws of
dialectic thought. At all events, the scope of science is now so great
that it no longer escapes the dialectic comprehension. But it will
simplify the process if it is remembered that the results in which
these discoveries are comprehended are ideas, that the art of
operating with ideas is not inborn, moreover, and is not vouchsafed
every day to the ordinary mind, but requires actual thought, and this
thought has a long history crammed with experiences, neither more nor
less than the accumulated experiences of investigation into nature. By
these means, then, it learns how to appropriate the results of fifteen
hundred years development of philosophy, it gets rid of any separate
natural philosophy which stands above or alongside of it and the
limited method of thought brought over from English empiricism.

_London, 22nd September, 1885._

III

The following new edition is, with the exception of a very few changes
in form of expression, a reproduction of the former. Only in one
chapter, namely in the Xth. of the Second Section (that on Critical
History) I have allowed some important emendations, for the following
reasons. As has been stated already in the preface to the second
edition, this chapter is in all its essentials, the work of Marx. In
its first form, which was intended as an article in a review, I was
compelled to abbreviate the manuscript of Marx very much, particularly
in those points in which the criticism of Herr Duehring's propositions
is subordinate to the particular development of the history of
economics. But these are just the portions of the manusc