Publication Details

Abstract

New scientific discoveries, i. e. the discoveries of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries gradually bring facts, unknown up to that time, that unambiguously confirm the correctness of many ideas of dialectics, especially of those by which dialectics differs from the preceding approaches to reality. From among these discoveries, on behalf of a scientific substantion of dialectics, first of all those are actually important that confirm the idea of an interrupted, disconnected character of development and of changes of objective material wholes; from the point of view of verification of dialectics — entirely new facts from the sphere of natural sciences. After the generalization of these facts and after the extrapolation of the achieved results on the (Darwinist) problem of species a really adequate and permanent solution is presented. At the same time the metaphysical thesis of the utterly unconditioned, eternal and unchangeable foundations of the world is discredited, but on the other hand the idea of an incessant penetration towards new levels of reality is substantiated. in spite of the dialectical (non-static) character of material objects an adequate stability can be observed in them. In science it is expressed by the category of quality, or more precisely by the category of structure. But a particular thing is, besides the qualitative aspect, more closely defined by its quantitative aspect, ft is well-known that their mutual development is distinctly revealed in the periods of metamorphoses of objective wholes. But it is just in this context that it is to be stated that not every quantitative change conditions a principal re-organization of the developing or changing wholes. Thus from this point of view we can speak about essential and non-essential quantities. To the latter, of course, even those changes realized in the framework of measure of the phenomena in question can be attached. It is more disputable whether we can speak about an upper and a lower limit of the measure, similarly as (secondarily) an exclusiveness of the linear progredience of the development and thus about two junctional points in the framework of the measure of the phenomenon in question in which complicated processes and tensions occur. From the point of view of the resultant process also the uneven time dimensions of changes in particular natural and social phenomena are to be noticed in dialectics, the mode of realization of these phenomena and also of their transformations, their mutual operation in the limited spheres. But in dialectics it must not be neglected that the process of cumulation of quantities in the object at a certain stage is closed up by the form of development and changes — a jump, by means of which the process of development (of the changes) is realized either intensively or by a gradual realization of partial changes (of tiny steps). Besides this we can speak about a jump even as far as perception of various colours is concerned, even if from the point of view of the percipient. When analyzing all these questions it is problematic, though, whether a „big jump" is not realized by means of small jumps; further — what passes from the old, original object into the new one and in what quantity, what kind of interaction occurs between the positive and negative components of the thing to be investigated.