7. The Organic World¶
Core Argument¶
Herr Dühring attempts to impose a uniform ladder of steps from mechanics to the realm of sensation and ideas, thereby sidestepping any serious discussion of life’s origin. Engels counters that transitions between forms of motion are never smooth; they are decisive leaps, as Hegel’s nodal line of measure relations demonstrates. The passage from chemistry to the chemism of albumen—that is, to life itself—is precisely such a leap. Dühring, borrowing the concept of purpose from Hegel to bridge the inorganic and organic worlds, ends up ascribing conscious, purposive activity to nature itself, attributing to it will and subtlety. This, Engels notes, is a slide from pantheism into deism.
Dühring’s principal attack is reserved for Darwinism. He accuses Darwin of transferring Malthus’s population theory to nature, of pursuing unscientific semi-poetry, and of producing brutality. Engels retorts that the struggle for existence is observable without Malthusian spectacles, manifesting as the contradiction between the host of germs produced and the few that reach maturity. Dühring restricts this struggle to brutal predation only to condemn it. Moreover, Darwin did not trace all organisms to a single primordial being; he wrote of descent from “some few beings,” and Haeckel posited independent stocks. Dühring’s claim that Darwin made sexual composition the fundamental principle of variation is false; Darwin held that natural selection merely preserves variations, not that it originates them. Where the thread of descent breaks off, Dühring’s alternative—independent parallel lines of products—implies separate acts of creation, a return to deism.
Engels defends Darwin and his followers, noting they restored Lamarck’s reputation. In Lamarck’s time, science lacked the material to answer the origin of species except prophetically. Since then, embryology and palaeontology have arisen, and the correspondence between embryonic development and the fossil succession gives the theory of evolution its most secure basis. The theory remains in an early stage, so future research will modify current conceptions, including strictly Darwinian ones.
Turning to Dühring’s positive claims, Engels finds him accepting species variability but insisting on “independent parallel lines of homogeneous products of nature, not mediated by common descent.” Dühring then admits common descent as a “secondary act of nature” and natural selection as a “secondary factor,” alongside the struggle for existence and Malthusian overpopulation. For the rest, he refers to Lamarck. Finally, Dühring warns against using “metamorphosis” and “development,” proposing “composition” instead. Engels mocks this as mere renaming: saying a child is “composing itself” rather than developing.