The first of Engel\'s laws or expressions was seen by Hegel...

The first of Engel\'s laws or expressions was seen by Hegel as the central feature of a dialectical understanding of things. Hegel wrote: "It is in this dialectic as it is here understood, that is, in the grasping of oppositions in their unity, or of the positive in the negative, that speculative thought consists.

It is the most important aspect of dialectic." This principle may be easily acceptable as Muslim social philosophers have repeatedly emphasized this very point; however, astute thinkers may distinguish between various groups co-existing within a society, and reach different conclusions regarding each individual community. We cannot, therefore, accept this principle in its vague formulation. Nature - the natural world or cosmos - is in a state of constant motion.

Some have formulated these changes to occur either generally or in the particular form of quantitative into qualitative.

Friedrich Engels, the German philosopher, wrote in his \'Dialectics of Nature\': "All nature, from the smallest thing to the biggest, from a grain of sand to the sun, from the protista to man, is in a constant state of coming into being and going out of being, in a constant flux, in a ceaseless state of movement and change." While the second principle is widely accepted within the milieu of Muslim philosophers - in particular the Sadrian (Al-Harakah Al-Jawhariyyah), it is nevertheless unclear how this could be applied within the social field.

The exception is where it could be used to prove the need for Divine power and guidance, something which the materialistic dialectic has rejected since its establishment. We find ourselves forced to discuss the other part of this principle as a separate issue. Development is a process whereby insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes lead to fundamental, qualitative changes. The latter occur not gradually, but rapidly and abruptly, in the form of a leap from one state to another.

A simple example from the physical world might be the heating of water: a one degree increase in temperature is a quantitive change, but at 100 degrees there is a qualitative change - water to steam. This principle is probably taken by Hegel from Aristotle, and is equated with what scientists call "phase transitions". In each case, the phase transition of water is one of the main expositions of quantity into quality and vice versa. Karl Marx has also emphasized this law in his Capital.