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The methodological significance of the Law of Negation. The progressive nature of development.

The development of matter does not follow a single path but a countless multitude of directions. It is an error to present it either as a straight line or as a circle: it is a spiral with an infinite number of turns. In this form, for­ward movement is strangely combined with circular movement. De­velopment leads to a return, as it were, to previous stages, when some features of already outlived forms replaced by others are re­peated in the new forms. This, however, is not a simple return to the original form but a qualitatively new level of development. History is a series of turns of an expanding spiral moving outwards and up­wards. No subsequent cycle of development repeats the previous one —it is a new and higher level. Such is the objective orientation in the infinite succession of phenomena and processes, in the incessant struggle between the new and the old, the nascent and the withering away, such is the dialectical path of the forward movement of being. Are there any objective criteria of development, and if there are, what are they? In the first place, a general criterion of progress is perfection, differentiation and integration of the elements of a sys­tem: elementary particles, atoms, molecules, and macromolecules. Other objective criteria are a growing complexity of connections within a system and of relations between systems; a growing infor­mation content of the system in question; and an expanding range of the real possibilities of further development. All this leads to the systems' growing stability and vital capacity. These criteria are com­mon to any level of the organization of matter, and they are concret­ized at these levels in accordance with their specificity. Thus the criterion of progress of biological forms is the level of development of organization, above all the nervous system, its adaptation abilities expressed in the wealth of interrelationships between the organism and the environment, as well as the level of development of the psyche, reflection and behavioral acts. For society, this criterion is the level of development of productive forces and labour productiv­ity, as well as the character of social relations, all of which is con­centrated in a single criterion: the level of society's development is determined by the extent to which man is raised to a higher level in this society.

Yet another universal criterion of progressive development is its accelerated rate. Referring to social life, Engels compared the pro­gressive development with "a free hand-drawn spiral, the turns of which are not too precisely executed. History begins its course slow­ly from an invisible point, languidly making its turns around it, but its circles become ever larger, the flight becomes ever swifter and more lively, until at last history shoots like a flaming comet from star to star, often skimming its old paths, often intersecting them, and with every turn it approaches closer to infinity."¹ With transition from the lower forms of organization of matter to the higher ones, the rate of development grows.

The methodological significance of the law of negation consists in the fact that it offers an understanding of the direction of the de­velopment of systems and objects both of the social and the natural world, permitting a correct evaluation of the scope, possibilities and rate of that development