In summary, the view of development of so-called metaphysics and vulgar evolutionism is that development is a quantitative increase or decrease, that the motive force is external, involves a change in place in all things, and that the reflection of these things in man’s thought is eternally of this nature. The special characteristics of a thing are present in that thing from its beginning, and remain thus from its state of germination in inception right through to the zenith of its development. They ascribe social development to the growth and repetition of certain special characteristics, the nature of which remain forever unchanged. For example, capitalist exploitation and competition, individualism and so on, can all be found in ancient slave society or even in primitive savage society. They ascribe the causes of social development to factors external to society, such as geography and climate, [p. 242] This view of development searches[4-385] outside a thing for the causes of Its development, and opposes[4-386] the theory which holds that development arises from the contradictions inside a thing; it can thus explain neither the qualitative diversity of things, nor the phenomenon of one quality changing into another. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this mode of thinking existed as a theory of unchangeable natural absolutes[4-387] (mechanical materialism) – and in the twentieth century as vulgar evolutionism (the theory of equilibrium of Bukharin and others) and so on.[4-388]
This holds that in order to understand the development of a thing, we should study it internally and in its relationship with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal, necessary and independent selfmovement; that is, the automaticity of things.[4-389] The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development.