talism, but never as an overthrow, more or less sudden, more or less violent, physical, social or economic, as Marx imagined it.
Marx says that the centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist shell. This shell is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. "The expropriators are expropriated." This, says Struve, is too sudden, and is philosophically quite impossible. There is no philosophic way in which the sudden transformation of one social order into another could be explained, no logical method by which it could be reasoned out. Hence it could not take place. "The continuity of every change, even the most radical, is a necessary cognito-theoretic and psychological postulate of its comprehension. The evolutionary principle takes a position analogous to the law of causation: it is a universally valid form in which we must picture to ourselves the radical changes of things in order to comprehend them. Of the content and the causality of the change the evolutionary principle tells us nothing: it only gives us its form; and this form is—continuity. The old maxim: natura non facit saltus should, accordingly, be changed into: intellectus non potitur saltus."[1] All of which may or may not be true. We are not sufficiently conecfned in the subject to undertake to decide that question here. For ourselves we hope it is not true, but if it be true, let the theories of cognition and psychology look out for themselves. The maxim: natura non facit saltus, in so far as it is still part of our scientific apparatus, simply means that nothing happens without any cause, but when there is sufficient cause therefor nature does leap. As a matter of fact sudden leaps are almost as frequent in nature as are slow changes, and the figure used by Marx, that of a bursting shell, may be considered its most common and most perfect example. Fur-
- ↑ Peter von Struve, Die Marx'sche Theorie der sozialen Entwicklung. In Archiv für Soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik (1899).
