THE MYTH OF THE MARXIST DIALECTIC
75
him
all
his
life. It formed his technique of thought and with it
his
literary style. His method of stating ideas was a dialectical sequence
of paradoxes, of concepts turning into their opposites; and it con–
tains
a large element of pure incantation. It is most obvious in his
earlier writings, where it is sometimes extremely effective, sometimes
artificial and tiresome: "Luther vanquished servility based upon
devotion, because he replaced it by servility based upon conviction.
He shattered faith in authority, because he restored the authority
of faith. He transformed parsons into laymen, because he trans–
formed laymen into parsons. He liberated men from outward reli–
giosity, because he made religiosity an inward affair of the heart.
He emancipated the body from chains, because he laid chains upon
the heart." But it continued to figure in his writing up to the time
when he brought "Capital" to its climax with
his
phrase about ex–
propriating the expropriators.
In later life, he devoted much time to the study of higher math–
ematics, in which; as he told Lafargue, he "found the dialectical
movement again in its most logical as well as its simplest form."
And Engels worked at mathematics and physics, chemistry and
zoology,
in
an effort to prove that the dialectical process governed
the natural world. The Russians since the Revolution have carried
on these researches and speculations; and with the spread of political
Marxism, they have been cropping up in other countries. Recent ex–
amples are the distinguished British scientists,
J.
D. Bernal and
J.
B. S. Haldane, who have been trying to show the workings of the
Dialectic in physics and chemistry and in biology, respectively. One's
attitude toward
this
sort of thinking is naturally determined by one's
appetite for pure metaphysics. To anyone who has always found it
difficult to feel the inevitability of any metaphysical system and who
tends to regard metaphysics in general as the poetry of imaginative
people who think in abstractions instead of in images, the concep–
tions of the dialectical materialists recommend themselves only mod–
erately. They do provide a dramatic formula for the dynamics of
certain social changes; but they are obviously impossible to apply
to others.
It has not been difficult for the critics of Engels-who took
certain of
his
examples straight from Hegel's "Logic"-to show
that
he was straining a point when he asserted that the "negation
of the negation" (that is, the action of the antithesis against the
thesis) was demonstrated in mathematics by the fact that the negation
of
the negation of
a
was
+a',
"the original positive magnitude, but
at a higher level." The negation of
-a
is obviously not
a',
but
a;
and
if
you want to get
a•,
you do not have to negate at all: you can
