To begin with what is the simplest, most ordinary, common, etc., with any proposition : the leaves of a tree are green; John is a man; Fido is a dog, etc. The fragment "On the Question of Dialectics" is contained in a notebook between the conspectus of Lassalle's book on Heraclitus and the conspectus of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Written in 1915 in Bern. NOTES Idealism is clerical obscurantism.             And natural science shows us (and here again it must be demonstrated in any simple instance) objective nature with the same qualities, the transformation of the individual into the universal, of the contingent into the necessary, transitions, modulations, and the reciprocal connection of opposites. In physics: positive and negative electricity. opposite tendencies in a l l phenomena and processes of nature (including mind and society). Dialectics as living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical system growing into a whole out of each shade) -- here we have an immeasurably rich content as compared with "metaphysical" materialism, the fundamental misfortune of which is its inability to apply dialectics to the Bildertheorie,** to the process and development of knowledge.     Every universal only approximately embraces all the individual objects. Dialectics as living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical system growing into a whole out of each shade) -- here we have an immeasurably rich content as compared with "metaphysical" materialism, the fundamental misfortune of which is its inability to apply dialectics to the Bildertheorie,** to the process and development of knowledge. A transcript of JV Stalin's speech "In connection with the question of the film" The Law of Life ", Stalin on arrested counter revolutionaries, Stalin & the myth of the ”Old Bolsheviks”, Draft decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on the national economic plan for the third quarter of 1931, On increasing the salaries of teachers and other employees of primary and secondary schools, Transcript of JV Stalin's speech "on the study of the history of the CPSU (b). page 363   tics of Heraclitus.     ** theory of reflection --Ed. page 362               essential? Thus in any proposition we can (and must) disclose as in a "nucleus" ("cell") the germs of all the elements of dia- The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative.           From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated, überschwengliches (Dietzgen)[137] development (inflation, distention) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature, apotheosised.