ABSTRACT

The state of the sciences, as referred to by F. Engels, actually presented a whole order of problems that could not but reflect themselves in the terms of his theoretical elaboration. The ladder of historical continuity was lacking one rung: the explanation of the “origin of life from inorganic nature”; but Engels had no doubt that progress in physics and chemistry would provide the solution to the problem. The nexuses shifted the problem of continuity onto a plane strikingly different from that of the Engelsian conception. The very man-nature dualism—in every one of its formulations of subject-object distinction, in the cognitive process and as regards the process of natural evolution—is completely overridden and either subjectivist or objectivist. In connexion with a new historical and unitary conception of reality which aimed at destroying the static contiguity of the various levels of reality, there arose the problem of the continuity of the history of nature and the history of man.