The start of the natural sciences begins, then, Engels says, with the Greeks in the Alexandrian period, being developed by the Arabs in The Middle Ages. We now know, also, the role of India and China in the process of development, for example, with the development of zero, as a concept, indispensable in mathematics.
“Genuine natural science dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, and from then on it has advanced with ever increasing rapidity. The analysis of nature into its individual parts, the division of the different natural processes and objects into definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions for the gigantic strides in our knowledge of nature that have been made during the last four hundred years. But this has bequeathed us the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, detached from the general context; of observing them not in motion, but in their state of rest; not as essentially variable elements, but as constant ones; not in their life but in their death,. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last centuries.” (p 25)
As I have set out, elsewhere, this is also the difference of the TSSI, which operates on the basis of this metaphysical rather than dialectical method of thought. It divides capitalist production into separate discrete periods, rather than as being continuous, and consequently simultaneous. It finds the concept of simultaneity, inherent to understanding continuity, anathema. Yet, as Marx sets out, you cannot understand capitalist production without understanding that simultaneity, which, as he shows, occurs repeatedly throughout it.
“To the metaphysician, things and their mental images, ideas, are isolated, to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, fixed, rigid objects of investigation, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely unmediated antitheses. "His communication is 'yea, yea; nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another, cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other.” (p 26)
The metaphysical mode of thought is easily adopted, because it seems eminently reasonable, conforming with our everyday observation and experience of the world. It seems to be common sense. Everything has its place, and can be placed in a discrete box, whether it be time (a minute, day, month or year), or space (an inch, foot, yard or mile), a dog or a cat, mammals or reptiles, or, indeed, social classes.
Except that Einstein showed that there is no separation between space and time (space-time), and nor are they absolutes. Darwin had shown that no such fixed categories existed in biology either, and so it was no surprise that no such absolutes and fixed categories exist in social organisms either.
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