76
PARTISAN REVIEW
simply multiply
a plus
by
a plus.
Engels did, to
be
sure, admit that
one has so to construct the first negation that the second "remains
or becomes possible." But since in that case the dialectical materialist
has always to provide
his
own conditions in order to arrive at dia–
lectical results, what becomes of his claim that the Dialectic is inher–
ent in all the processes of nature? And so with the "transition
cf
quantity into quality" (the final emergence of the synthesis) : Pro–
fessor Hook,
in
his
paper on "Dialectic and Nature" in the second
number of the
Marxist Quarter[
y,
has pointed out that, in the case
of such an example of Engels' as the sudden transformation at cer–
tain temperatures of water into steam or ice, the transformation for
a different observer would take place at a different moment and
would be a different transformation: for a person from whose point
of view the water was concealed in a radiator, the sudden transition
of which he would be aware would be that, perhaps II\arked by a
sneeze, of the dropping of the temperature of the room from a com–
fortable warmth to distinct chilliness. And who knows but that the
application to water of a microscope which would disclose its com–
ponent electrons would banish the illusion that, at the point of boil–
ing, it begins to change from a liquid to a vapor?
And so with the examples given by Bernal and Haldane. After
all, the various discoveries invoked by Bernal were arrived at quite
without the intervention of dialectical thinking-just as Mendeleyev's
Periodic Table, which so much impressed Engels as an instance of
quality determined by quantity, owed nothing to the antithesis and
the synthesis; and it is difficult to see how they are improved
by
being fitted into the Dialectic. In the case of one of them, the Rela–
tivity Theory of Einstein, the discoverer has himself gone on record
as of the opinion that the writings of Engels did not have "any
special interest either from the point of view of present-day physics
or from that of the history of physics." In the case of another of
Bernal's examples, the Freudian theory of repressed desires, the dia·
lectical cycle is certainly- far from inevitable. The instinct is
the
thesis; the repression is the antithesis; the sublimation is the syn–
thesis: good! But suppose the patient goes insane instead of being
able to sublimate; suppose he kills himself: where is the reconciliation
of opposites
in
the synthesis? Where is the progression from the lower
to the higher? Certainly it is true in various fields that changes occur
through accumulation w?ich look to us like changes in kind. It may
be true, as
J.
B. S. Haldane says, that the transformation of ice into
water is still a mysterious phenomenon. But in what way does
this
prove the dialectical Trinity? In what way is that Trinity proved
when Professor Haldane maps out the processes of mutation and
