Abstract: Alfred Schmidt’s critique of Engels’s dialectics of nature is a microcosm of the “opposition between Marx and Engels” created by Western Marxists in their view of nature. Both Lukach and Frankfurt School believed that dialectics only showed itself in the process of Marx’s analysis and study of capitalist society. If dialectics is “applied” or “extended” to the natural field, it is a misunderstanding of Marx’s dialectics. Following the path of dialectical criticism opened up by Lukacs and Frankfurt School, Schmidt also advocated the social practicality of dialectics and proposed a unique idea of “two-way intermediary” between society and nature. In Schmidt’s view, Engels’s dialectic of nature is a kind of “arbitrary metaphysics” and “simple realism”, a return to the “ontology” of nature. In fact, Schmidt made such a philosophical judgment on Engels’s dialectics of nature in that he ignored the historical connotation of “the concept of nature”, the two-way role of the relationship between “human and nature” and the profound practical background in the dialectics of nature. That is to say, Engels and Marx are consistent in understanding the connotation and essence of the dialectics of nature.