in the cosmic process."

This whole oracular utterance is again merely an outpouring of bad
science which very clearly perceives that it has got itself into a
place from which it cannot be saved by creating motion from a state of
absolute freedom from motion, and is ashamed to call upon its only
saviour, the Creator of heaven and earth. If in mechanics, heat
included, there is no bridge to be found from statics to dynamics,
from equipoise to motion, why should Herr Duehring be obliged to find
a bridge from his condition of absence of motion to motion? Thus he
would have the luck to escape from his dilemma.

In ordinary mechanics the bridge from statics to dynamics is--the push
from the outside. If a stone of the weight of a hundred grammes be
lifted ten meters high and then flung free so that it should remain
hanging in a self-contained condition and in a state of rest, you
would have to appeal to a public of sucking infants to declare that
the existing condition of that body represents no mechanical labor and
that its removal from its earlier condition has no measure in
mechanical work. Any passerby would tell Herr Duehring that the stone
did not come on the string by its own efforts and the first good hand
book in mechanics would inform him that if he let the stone fall
again, the latter in its fall does just as much mechanical work as is
necessary to lift it to the height of ten meters. The very simple fact
that the stone is suspended represents mechanical force in itself,
since if it remain long enough, the string breaks, as soon as it, as a
result of its chemical constitution, is no longer strong enough to
hold the stone. All mechanical phenomena, may, we must inform Herr
Duehring, be reduced to just such simple fundamental forms, and the
engineer is still unborn who cannot discover the bridge from statics
to dynamics as long as he has sufficient initial force at his
disposal.

It is quite a hard nut and bitter pill for our metaphysician that
motion should find its measure in its opposite rest. It is such a
glaring contradiction, and every contradiction is an absurdity in the
eyes of Herr Duehring. It is nevertheless true that the hanging stone
by reason of its weight and its distance from the ground represents a
means of mechanical movement sufficiently easily measured in different
ways, as for example through gravity direct, through glancing on an
incline or through the undulation of a wave--and it is just the