matic knowledge of the entire
external world may from age to age make giant strides.

The total perversion of modern German idealism of necessity drove men
to materialism, but not, and this is well worth noting, to the mere
metaphysical mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century. In
contradiction to the naively simple revolutionary pushing on one side
of all earlier history, modern materialism sees in history the process
of the development of society, to discover the laws of whose
development is its task. In contradistinction to the conception of
nature which prevailed among the French philosophers, as well as with
Hegel, as something moving in a narrow circle with an eternal and
unchangeable substantial form, as Newton conceived it, and with
invariable species of organic beings, as Linnaeus thought, materialism
embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to
which nature has also a history in time. For the forms of the worlds,
like the species of organisms by which they are inhabited under
suitable conditions, come into being and pass away, and the cycles of
their progress, in so far as it is permissible to use the term, take
on eternally more magnificent dimensions. In either case it is
entirely dialectic and no longer forces a static philosophy upon the
other sciences. As soon as the demand is made upon each separate
branch of science that it make clear its relation to things in
general, and science as a whole, the individual science thereupon
becomes superfluous. Of all philosophy up to the present time the only
peculiar property which remains as its characteristic is the study of
thought and the formal laws of thought--logic and the dialectic. All
else belongs to the positive sciences of nature and history.

While the revolution in natural science was only able to be completely
carried out in proportion as investigation furnished the necessary
positive material, there were known a multitude of earlier historical
facts which gave a distinct bias to the philosophy of history. In 1831
in Lyons the first purely working class revolt occurred. The first
national working class movement, that of the English Chartists,
reached its height between 1838 and 1842. The class war between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie proceeded historically in the most
advanced European countries just in proportion as the newly developed
greater industry has progressed, on the one hand, and the political
power o