ut the truth of the general proposition--that in
nature the same dialectic laws of progress fulfill themselves amid all
the apparent confusion of innumerable changes as dominate the
apparently accidental in nature; the same laws whose threads traverse
the progressive history of human thought, and little by little come to
the consciousness of thinking men. These were first developed by Hegel
in a comprehensive fashion but in a mystical form. Our efforts were
directed towards stripping away this mystical form and making them
evident in their full simplicity and universal reality. It was self
evident that the old philosophies of nature--in spite of all their
actual value and fruitful suggestiveness--could be of no value to us.
There was an error in the Hegelian form, as shown in this book, in
that it recognised no progression of nature in time, no "one after
another" (Nacheinander) but merely "one besides another"
(Nebeneinander). This was due on the one hand to the Hegelian system
itself which ascribed to the Spirit (Geist) alone a progressive
historical development, but on the other hand, the general attitude of
the natural sciences was responsible. So Hegel fell far behind Kant in
this respect for the latter had already by his nebular hypothesis
proclaimed the origin and, by his discovery of the stoppage of the
rotation of the earth through the tides, the destruction of the solar
system. And finally, I could not undertake to construct the
dialectical laws of nature but to discover them in it and to develop
them from it.

To do this entirely and in each separate division is a colossal task.
Not only is the ground to be covered almost immeasurable but on this
entire ground natural science is involved in such tremendous changes
that even those who have all their time to give can hardly keep up
with it. Since the death of Marx however my mind has been occupied by
more pressing duties and so I had to interrupt my work. I must, for
the moment, confine myself to the hints in the work before us and wait
for a later opportunity to correct and publish the results obtained,
probably together with the most important manuscripts on mathematics
left behind by Marx.

But the advance of theoretical science makes my work in all
probability, in a great measure, or altogether, superfluous. Since the
revolution which overturned theoretical science the necessity of
arranging the accumulation of purely empirical discoveries has caused
the