Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow                               

PART ONE

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE MARXIST-LENINIST WORLD OUTLOOK

Chapter 1 - Philosophical Materialism

The indestructible foundation of the whole edifice of Marxism-Leninism is its philosophy - dialectical and historical materialism.

That philosophy regards the world as it actually is, views it in the light of the data provided by progressive science and social practice. Marxist philosophical materialism is the logical outcome of scientific knowledge gained over the centuries.

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Chapter One Contents

1. The Development of Progressive Materialist Science in Struggle against Reaction and Ignorance.

2. Materialism and Idealism

Spontaneous Materialism

Materialism - a Progressive Philosophy

Dialectical and Historical Materialism - the Highest Stage in the Development of  Philosophical Thought

3. The Philosophical Concept of Matter

4. Universal Forms of the Existence of the Material World

    Eternal Motion in Nature

    Forms of Motion of Matter

    Space and Time

5. Consciousness - a Property of Matter Organized in a Special Way

    Thinking - a Result of the Evolution of Living Matter

    The Role of Labour and Speech in the Development of Human Thought

    Consciousness Is a Property of the Brain

6. Opponents of Philosophical Materialism

    Objective Idealism

    Subjective Idealism

    The Attempt to Lay Down a “Third” Line in Philosophy

    Roots of Idealism

7. Contemporary Bourgeois Philosophy

    Philosophy Against Reason

    Pseudo-"Philosophy of Science"

    Revival of Medieval Scholasticism

1. The Development of Progressive Materialist Science in Struggle against Reaction and Ignorance

The history of science has been marked by the ceaseless struggle of progressive scientists and philosophers against ignorance and superstition, against political and ideological reaction. In every exploiting class society there are forces, the reactionary social classes, that stand to lose by the dissemination of progressive scientific views. In the past they either directly opposed science and persecuted progressive scientists and philosophers - even burning them at the stake or imprisoning them - or sought to distort scientific discoveries so as to deprive them of their progressive, materialistic implications.

In ancient Greece, the materialist philosopher Anaxagoras was banished from Athens as an atheist. The works of the outstanding materialist philosopher Democritus, one of the founders of the atomic theory of matter, who rejected divine intervention in nature and human affairs, were subjected to destruction during several centuries, as a result of which not one of them has come down to us.

The ancient Greek materialist philosopher Epicurus, a disciple of Democritus, who sought to liberate man from fear of God and to assert the validity of science, was for two thousand years anathematised by the leaders of the Church, who falsely depicted him as an enemy of morality and disseminator of vice.

After Christianity had been made the state religion of Rome, the memorials of ancient civilisation were ruthlessly wiped out by 22 the priests and monks. In particular, in 391 A. D. a horde of fanatical Christians tore down the ancient cathedral of Serapis and destroyed what was left of the greatest library of the ancient world, that of Alexandria. Pope Gregory I (590–604), an inveterate enemy of secular science and learning, destroyed many valuable works of ancient authors, notably the works of materialist philosophers.

The Inquisition, the papal invention for suppressing all opposition to the Catholic Church, savagely persecuted all progressive thinkers. In 1600, on the orders of the Inquisition, Giordano Bruno, the great philosopher and scientist who upheld the Copernican doctrine, was burnt at the stake. In 1619, another great thinker, Lucilio Vanini, was done to death in Toulouse, France - on the orders of the Inquisition, his tongue was torn out and he was then burnt at the stake. The Inquisition tried to force Galileo, the famous Italian astronomer who upheld the Copernican theory, to renounce his views. Voltaire, the great French philosopher of the Enlightenment, was imprisoned in the Bastille, and another eighteenth-century French materialist philosopher, Diderot, was also sent to prison.

It should not be imagined that the struggle of the reactionaries against science was confined to ancient or medieval times. It is being waged in the capitalist era too. The capitalist class is interested in promoting the natural sciences - physics, chemistry, mathematics, etc. - that are closely connected with technical advance, but it is not at all interested in spreading the materialist philosophy, the scientific world outlook that enables men correctly to apprehend reality and to know how to react to it in their activities. That is why bourgeois ideologists do everything they can to prevent people from drawing materialist and atheistic conclusions from scientific discoveries, for they consider such conclusions dangerous to capitalist domination.

Marxism-Leninism and its philosophy, dialectical and historical materialism, are especially hateful to the reactionary bourgeoisie. A veritable army of bourgeois professors specialise in “refuting” Marxism.

True, in our day the reactionary bourgeoisie does not burn progressive scientists and philosophers at the stake. But it has other means of exerting pressure on them: dismissal from universities and scientific institutions, factual deprival of opportunities to publish their works, moral and political discrediting, etc. In recent years, all these methods of combating "dangerous thoughts" have been widely employed in the United States and a number of other countries. By these methods and by the propaganda of reactionary ideology, the ruling class “conditions” people’s minds, instilling ideas it wants them to accept and obstructing the spread of progressive, materialist ideas.

But thorny as the path of science and materialist philosophy is, and despite the many ordeals they have to face in an exploiting 23 society, they are able, in the end, to surmount all obstacles and make steady headway.

The strength of progressive materialist science and philosophy resides in the fact that they reveal the laws of nature and society, teach us to apply these laws in the interests of mankind and dispel the darkness of ignorance with the light of genuine knowledge.

2. Materialism and Idealism

Philosophy deals with the most general features of the world outlook.

Materialist philosophy is based on recognition of the existence of nature - the stars, the sun, the earth with its mountains and valleys, seas and forests, animals, and human beings endowed with consciousness, with the ability to think. There are no supernatural phenomena or forces, nor can there be. Man is only a particle of multiform nature, and consciousness is a property, a faculty, of man. Nature exists objectively, that is, outside and independent of the human mind.

But there are philosophers who deny this. They assert that only mind, thought, spirit, or idea are primary, while the physical world is derived from and dependent on the spirit.

The question of the relation of the human mind to material being is the fundamental question of all varieties of philosophy, including the most recent. Which is primary - being or thinking? Philosophers are divided into two great camps according to how they answer this question.

Those who consider that the material basis - nature - is primary and regard thought, spirit, as a property of matter, belong to the camp of materialism. Those who maintain that thought, spirit or idea existed before nature and that nature is, in one way or another, the creation of spirit and dependent upon it, comprise the camp of idealism. That is the only philosophical meaning of the terms “idealism” and “materialism”.

From the most ancient times a fierce, undying struggle has been waged between the supporters of the materialist and idealist views. In fact, the whole history of philosophy is the history of the struggle between these two camps, these two parties in philosophy - - materialism and idealism.

Spontaneous Materialism

In their practical activities men do not doubt that the objects around them and the phenomena of nature exist independently of their consciousness. This means that spontaneously they adopt tho standpoint of materialism.

The spontaneous materialism "of any healthy person who has not been an inmate of a lunatic asylum or a pupil of the idealist philosophers,” Lenin wrote, "consists in the view that things, the environment, the world, exist independently of our sensations, of our consciousness, of our Self, and of man in general.”[2]

Man cannot live by ideas and concepts alone, cannot subsist on his own sensations, the products of his imagination. In practice this is perfectly well known to everyone, including the philosophers who invent idealistic theories inferring the existence of material things from sensations, concepts and ideas. Time and again they have had to acknowledge that they live in defiance of their own philosophy, and that if there were no material things in the world, people would die of starvation.

This spontaneous, unconscious materialism is characteristic of the vast majority of natural scientists. They do not as a rule delve into philosophical problems, but spontaneously follow the logic of the scientific facts with which they have to deal. Nature, the subject of their research, reveals at every step the materiality of the phenomena they investigate. For whatever the field of investigation -  celestial bodies or molecules and atoms, electricity and magnetism or plant and animal life - the scientist is always dealing with objective processes, with material things and their properties, with laws of nature that exist independently of the human mind.

In bourgeois society only the boldest and most consistent scientists openly proclaim themselves adherents of philosophical materialism. Most scientists are under such strong pressure from official bourgeois ideology, the Church, idealist philosophy and other environmental factors that they do not venture openly to side with materialism, waver and often make idealist statements or reservations. However, in their scientific studies they find themselves compelled, by the very character of the subject matter, to express what are basically materialist views.

There is the example of T. H. Huxley, the nineteenth-century English naturalist. He did not call himself a materialist, but in his studies in zoology, comparative anatomy, anthropology and evolution, he upheld materialist views, stating that philosophical idealism leads only to confusion and ignorance. Engels described scientists of this type as "shamefaced materialists”, and Lenin said that Huxley’s anti-materialist reservations were only a fig-leaf to cover up his spontaneous natural-scientific materialism.

Often enough, modern natural scientists who attempt a philosophical interpretation of their scientific discoveries arrive at idealistic conclusions. But as long as they keep to the scientific field, to practical work in the laboratory, factory or experimental farm - as long as they do not indulge in philosophical theorizing, but concern themselves with the natural phenomena they are investigating, they behave like spontaneous materialists.

One of the greatest physicists of our time, the late Albert Einstein, was influenced by idealism in some of his philosophical conceptions, but in the realm of science he is known for his theory of relativity, the real content of which is materialistic.

Another eminent scientist, Max Planck, founder of modern quantum physics, although he, too, did not call himself a materialist, in his work on physics and philosophy defended the idea of a "healthy world outlook" that recognizes the existence of nature independent of the human mind. Planck combated philosophical idealism and was, in fact if not in name, a materialist.

Not infrequently, however, idealism adversely affects the scientist’s interpretation of his scientific data. This makes it evident that spontaneous materialism is an inadequate defence against idealism. Only conscious acceptance of dialectical materialism is a reliable safeguard against idealist errors.

Materialism - a Progressive Philosophy

Unlike spontaneous or naive materialism, philosophical materialism scientifically substantiates, elaborates and consistently applies materialist conceptions based on the findings of progressive science and social practice.

Materialist philosophy is an effective weapon against the pernicious influence of spiritual reaction. It provides a guide throughout life, showing the correct way of solving the philosophical problems that agitate men’s minds.

For centuries the Church has tried to instil contempt for earthly life and fear of God. It taught people, and above all the mass of oppressed humanity, that their destiny was to toil and pray, that happiness was unattainable in this "vale of tears”, that it could be achieved only in the next world, as the reward for obedience and meekness. The Church threatened with the wrath of God and torment in hell those who dared rise against the divinely established rule of the exploiters.

The great historic service rendered by materialist philosophy is that it helped man to break free of all superstitions. Ever since ancient times it has taught him not to fear death, not to fear gods and other supernatural forces.

It teaches us not to hope for happiness beyond the grave, but to prize life on earth and strive to improve it. For the first time materialism gave man the realisation of his dignity and intellect, proclaiming that man was not a worm condemned to crawl in the dust, but nature’s supreme creation capable of mastering the forces of nature and making them serve him. Materialism is imbued with the utmost faith in the human intellect, in the power of knowledge, in man’s ability to fathom all the secrets of the world around him, and to create a social system based on reason and justice.

The idealists often calumniate materialism, presenting it as "an uncanny, a sinister, a nightmare view of life" (William James). Actually, it is idealism, especially its latter-day versions, that is a philosophy of gloom. It is idealism, not materialism that denies man’s ability to acquire knowledge and preaches distrust in science. It is idealism, not materialism that extols the cult of death. It is idealism that has always been the ideological source for the most abhorrent manifestations of anti-humanism - racist theories and fascist obscurantism.

Philosophical idealism refuses to recognise the reality of the external material world, repudiating it and proclaiming it unreal and advancing instead an imagined, non-material world.

In contrast, materialism gives us a true picture of the world without any superfluous additions in the shape of spirit, God, the creator of the world, etc. Materialists do not expect aid from supernatural forces. Their faith is in man, in his ability to transform the world by his own efforts and make it worthy of himself.

Materialism is in its very essence an optimistic, life-asserting and radiant philosophy, entirely alien to pessimism and Weltschmerz. That is why, as a rule, it is the world outlook of progressive social groups and classes. Its supporters fearlessly look ahead and are not tormented by doubts of the justice of their cause.

The advocates of idealism have always sought to slander materialism, maintaining that materialists have no moral values and lofty ideals, these being the prerogative only of supporters of idealist philosophy. In point of fact, the dialectical and historical materialism of Marx and Engels, far from rejecting progressive ideas, moral principles and lofty ideals, lays great emphasis on them. It considers that successful struggle for progress, for a progressive social system, is impossible without noble ideals that inspire men in struggle and bold creative work.

The struggle of the working class and the Communists convincingly refutes the stupid idealist lie that materialists are indifferent to ideals. For this struggle is being waged for the highest and noblest ideal of all, communism, and it produces legions of intrepid fighters supremely devoted to that ideal.

Dialectical and Historical Materialism - the Highest Stage in the Development of Philosophical Thought

Modern materialism is the dialectical and historical materialism created by Marx and Engels. It did not appear out of thin air, for the philosophy of Marx and Engels is the culmination of a long process of development of philosophical thought.

Materialism arose about 2,500 years ago in China, India and Greece. Materialist philosophical thought in these countries was 27 closely linked with the everyday experience of their peoples, with the first rudiments of the knowledge of nature. But science was only just coming into being then, and the ancient materialist philosophers’ conceptions of the world, though they contained many brilliant conjectures, lacked a solid scientific basis and remained extremely naive.

The materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was much more mature, for progress in the natural sciences and technology stimulated philosophical thought. At the same time, materialist philosophy stimulated the study of nature. For instance, the view of Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century English materialist, that experiment is the basis of knowledge, and his statement that knowledge is power, greatly stimulated the development of the natural sciences.

In this period the biggest advances were made in mathematics and the mechanics of terrestrial and celestial bodies. This laid its imprint on the philosophical generalisations of materialists, including their conception of matter and motion. A very important part in the development of the new form of materialism was played by the physics of the seventeenth century French philosopher Rene Descartes, who was a materialist as regards his conception of nature, the mechanistic theory of man advanced by the English materialist Thomas Hobbes, and, in particular, the mechanics of Isaac Newton. The materialist philosophers regarded all phenomena of nature and social life from the standpoint of mechanics and by its aid hoped to explain these phenomena. Hence their materialism came to be known as mechanical materialism. Its exponents in the eighteenth century were John Toland and Joseph Priestley in England, Julien la Mettrie, Paul Holbach, Claude-Adrien Helvetius and Denis Diderot in France.

This close connection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materialism with the natural sciences was its positive aspect. But it also had its defects. Engels pointed to three basic limitations.

First, its mechanistic approach. In those days mechanics was the model science for the materialist philosophers and this limited their field of vision. They tried to reduce all processes, all types of motion to mechanical motion, failing to understand the peculiarities of organic nature and the specific features and laws of social life.

Their second limitation was an inability to understand and explain development in nature, even when the facts of such development were noticed by them. Their vision of nature as a whole was of something immutable and unchangeable, eternally repeating the same cycle. That view of nature is called metaphysical and, consequently, mechanical materialism was a metaphysical doctrine.

Lastly, these materialists, like all the materialists before Marx, were unable to apply materialism in interpreting social affairs. 28 They failed to see its material basis and considered that the transition of society from lower to higher forms was due to progress in knowledge, a change in the views and ideas prevailing in the society. Such an explanation, however, is an idealist one.

Moreover, the pre-Marxian materialists did not understand the part played by the practical-critical, revolutionary activity of classes, of the masses, in changing reality, in refashioning social life. True, they insisted on the need for replacing the feudal system by the bourgeois system, but at the same time they rejected the struggle of the masses for a new social order. Their fear of mass struggle was indicative of their bourgeois class limitation.

A step forward was made by the early nineteenth-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and, more especially, by the Russian revolutionary democrats Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobrolyubov. Feuerbach was able, to a certain extent, to overcome the mechanistic limitations of his eighteenth-century predecessors, but shared their other defects. Furthermore his philosophy was divorced from practical social and political activity. The Russian materialists, on the other hand, endeavoured to combine their materialist understanding of nature with dialectics; that was their outstanding achievement.

More, as ideologists of the revolutionary Russian peasantry, they saw in philosophical theory not only an explanation of what exists, but a method of reforming, refashioning the existing for the benefit of the people.

Materialism reached a new, its highest, stage in the dialectical and historical materialism of Marx and Engels, the great teachers and leaders of the proletariat, the most progressive and revolutionary class of modern society. Marx and Engels achieved a veritable revolution in philosophy.

Conversant with the highest achievements of contemporary social and natural science, and having mastered and creatively interpreted everything of value in the preceding development of philosophical thought, Marx and Engels created dialectical and historical materialism, a new form of materialism free of the shortcomings of its forerunners.

In Marxist philosophy, materialism is combined with dialectics to form an organic unity. In their development of dialectics, Marx and Engels proceeded from the very rich heritage of social thought, including the achievements of German philosophy, especially the idealist dialectics of Hegel.

They took as their basis also a higher level of science, new discoveries in the natural sciences, of special importance among which were the law of conservation and transformation of energy, the discovery of the cell, and Darwin’s theory of the origin of species. The achievements of natural science provided a strictly scientific 29 foundation for the theory of development, and of the unity and universal interconnection of natural phenomena.

Instead of the one-sided mechanistic view of nature and man, Marx and Engels presented their theory of development, which embraces all spheres of reality and, at the same time, takes into account the specific character of each: inorganic nature, the organic world, Social life, and human consciousness.

Marx and Engels were the first to extend materialism to the understanding of social life. They discovered the material motive forces and laws of social development, thus converting the history of society into a science.

Lastly, they converted materialist philosophy from an abstract theory into an effective means for the transformation of society, into an ideological weapon of the working class in its struggle for socialism and communism.

The philosophical doctrine of Marx and Engels has won wide recognition among the working people in all countries. It is a genuine philosophy of the masses.

3. The Philosophical Concept of Matter

In Marxist philosophical materialism the concept “matter” is used in its broadest sense - to denote everything that exists objectively, that is, independent of our mind and reflected in our sensations. "Matter,” Lenin wrote, "is the objective reality given to us in sensation.”

It is very important to understand this broad meaning of the concept “matter”. Most of the old, pre-Marxian materialists regarded as matter only physical bodies and the tiny particles - atoms or corpuscles - of which these bodies are composed. Democritus and Epicurus, for instance, believed that the world consisted of atoms moving about in empty space, the Void; things were merely combinations of atoms. Subsequently, physics confirmed the ancient materialists’ brilliant conjecture of the atomic structure of matter. The concept of matter as confined only to atoms, however, was an oversimplification that led to an inadequate understanding of the material world. Yet this view of matter was revived in modern times and persisted in science up to the close of the nineteenth century.

The term “matter” as used in Marxist philosophical materialism designates objective reality in all its multiform manifestations. Matter is not only the tiny particles of which all things are composed. It is the infinite multitude of worlds in an infinite universe; the gaseous and dust clouds of the cosmos; our own solar system with its sun and planets; the earth and everything existing on it. It is, also, radiation, the physical fields that transfer the action of one body or particle to another and connect them; electro-magnetic, nuclear and 30 gravitational fields. Everything existing outside and independent of our mind is of a material nature.

All sciences devoted to the study of objective reality study matter, its different qualities and states.

The physical sciences deal with the physical states of matter. Modern physics has established that the atom is a complex structure, and by no means a simple, indivisible and immutable particle, as the old atomists believed. The scientists have also established that the atoms of one element can be converted into the atoms of another element by transformation of atomic nuclei. For instance, uranium atoms placed in a nuclear reactor are converted into plutonium atoms.

The new physical phenomena discovered in the opening years of the century (radioactivity, X-rays, etc.) proved the divisibility and highly complex structure of the atom, led to new theories of the structure of matter and demolished the old concepts of classical physics. On the ground that the atom could not be regarded as an immutable and indivisible particle of matter, many idealist philosophers and physicists who had succumbed to idealistic delusions drew the conclusion that science had refuted the materialist conception of nature. There was talk of the "disappearance of matter”. These assertions were profoundly erroneous. Marxist philosophical materialism has never committed itself to any one-sided theory of the structure of matter, and has never sought to reduce matter to some set of unchangeable "bricks of the universe”. It has always understood matter to mean one thing and one thing only, namely, objective reality existing outside the human mind and reflected in it. Materialism and idealism hold opposite views on the source of knowledge, on the relation of consciousness to the external world. Materialism teaches that the world exists objectively, and that consciousness is a reflection of the world. The philosophical concept of matter is used to designate the entire objective world. As for the physical structure of the world and its physical properties, these are studied by physics, and as science develops our views on the physical structure of matter change. But those changes, however great, cannot shake the proposition of philosophical materialism that there exists an objective world and that physics, like many other sciences, deals with this objective, material world. "For the sole ‘property’ of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up,” Lenin wrote, "is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside our mind."[3]

That understanding of matter is the only correct one. It embraces all the diversity of the material world, without however reducing it to any one form of matter. He who is guided by this Marxist conception will not be misled by the idealist philosophers who assert that the new discoveries in physics are proof of the disappearance of matter.

Matter is uncreatable and indestructible. It is eternally changing, but not a single particle can be reduced to nothingness by any physical, chemical or other processes.

Science provides ample corroboration of this thesis of philosophical materialism. Let us cite one example. Modern physics has established that, under definite conditions, such material particles as the positron and electron disappear to produce quanta (portions) of light, photons. Some physicists call this phenomenon the "annihilation of matter" which literally means complete destruction, transformation into nothingness. Idealist philosophers point to this phenomenon as a fresh “proof” of the disappearance of matter. Actually, there is no disappearance: conversion of positrons and electrons into photons is the transition of matter from one state to another, from a solid body to light. Nature knows also the reverse process - conversion of photons into positrons and electrons, that is, the conversion of light into solid matter. All these transformations conform to the law of conservation of mass and energy.

The world presents a picture of great diversity: inorganic nature, organic nature, physical phenomena, chemical processes, plant and animal life, social life. Science and materialist philosophy reveal the unity within this diversity. This unity consists in the fact that all these infinitely diverse processes and phenomena are different states of matter, its different properties and manifestations. Engels said: "The real unity of the world consists in its materiality."[4] It consists also in the fact that consciousness belongs to the same material world in which we live, and not to some other world of the hereafter, that consciousness is a property of matter organized in a special way.

The conviction of the unity of the material world was formed and strengthened in battle against the religious doctrine that divides the world into Earth and Heaven; in battle against dualism, which regards spirit and body, mind and matter, as separate and unconnected entities; in battle against philosophical idealism, which sees the unity of the world in its being a product of mind, of spirit.

4. Universal Forms of the Existence of the Material World

Eternal Motion in Nature

Nature and society do not know absolute rest, immobility, immutability. The world presents a picture of constant motion and change.

Motion, change, development is an eternal and inalienable property of matter. "Motion is the mode of existence of matter,” Engels said. "Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, nor can there be.”[5] Every material body, every material particle - the molecule, atom or its components - are by their very nature in a constant’state of motion and change.

The philosophical understanding of motion implies more than iho movement of a body in space. As a mode of existence of matter, motion embraces all the processes and changes taking place in the universe. Among these changes a specially important part is played by the processes of development of matter, the passage of matter from one state to another, higher state, marked by new features and properties.

There are no permanently fixed, ossified things in the world, only things undergoing change, processes. This means that nowhere is there absolute rest, a state that would preclude motion. There is only relative rest. A body may be in a state of rest only in relation to a definite point on the earth’s surface. But that body moves with the movement of the earth, with the movement of the entire solar system. Besides, its component parts, molecules and jttoms, are in motion too, and complex processes are at work within these components. In short, the state of rest is only relative. Only motion is absolute, without exceptions.

Forms of Motion of Matter

Corresponding to the diversity of matter is the diversity of its forms of motion. The simplest form of the motion of matter is mechanical movement of a body in space. A more complex form is thermal processes, the random motion of molecules that make up a physical body. Science has established that light, electro-magnetic radiation and intra-nuclear processes are also specific forms of matter in motion. Another form of motion is seen in chemical processes of the transformation of matter by combination and recombination of atoms and molecules. The life of organic nature, the physiological processes in plants and animals, the evolution of species - these too are specific manifestations of the universal property of matter, viz., motion.

A much more complex form of motion is seen in human social life: the development of material production, economic life, etc.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, scientists have discovered and successfully studied a number of new, previously unknown forms of matter in motion: motion of atomic particles around the nucleus, intricate transformation processes within the atomic nucleus, etc. It can be safely assumed that science will discover still more forms of matter in motion.

The various forms of motion are not isolated from one another, but are interconnected and become transformed one into another. Thus thermal processes can give rise to chemical transformations 33 and light phenomena. At a definite stage of development, chemical processes led to the formation of proteins and the enzyme systems associated with them. This was the basis of the origin of life, that is, of the biological form of the motion of matter.

One form of motion can pass into another and this has found expression notably in the fundamental law of natural science, viz., the law of transformation and conservation of energy.

Different forms of motion correspond to different stages in the development and complication of matter. The lower, simpler forms become constituent parts of the higher, more complex forms. Nevertheless, there is a qualitative difference between the different forms of motion, and the higher forms cannot be reduced to the lower forms. For instance, physiological processes include mechanical motion - the movement in space of elements taking part in these processes - but they cannot be reduced to, and are not exhausted by, the mechanical movement of these elements.

The old, pro-Marxian mechanistic materialists believed that all life, in nature and human society, could be reduced to the mechanical movement of bodies and particles in space. Marxist philosophical materialism, with its broad view of motion as change in general, overcomes the narrow and oversimplified mechanistic conception of the motion of matter.

Space and Time

Matter can move only in space and time. AH bodies, including man himself, and all material processes taking place in the objectively existing world, occupy a definite place in space. They are located near or far from one another; separated by distance; a moving body proceeds along a definite path. All this expresses the property of material things and processes known as extension.

Space is a universal mode of the existence of matter. There is riot and cannot be matter without space, just as there cannot be space without matter. The difference between the extension of an individual body and that of the whole material world is that the former is limited, finite, that is, has a beginning and end, whereas the material world is limitless, infinite.

Distances in the universe are incomparably greater than the distances we are accustomed to on the earth. Modern telescopes enable us to detect stellar systems the light from which takes hundreds of millions of years to reach the earth, though light travels at a speed of 300,000 kilometres a second. But even these magnitudes, being finite, do not give us a real picture of the vastness of the universe, which is infinite. Its infinitude lies beyond the bounds of imagination and can only be expressed as a scientific concept.

The existence of physical bodies and of man himself has duration in time - minutes, hours, days, etc. Everything in the world 34 undergoes change. Every body, every phenomenon of nature, has its past, present and future. These are expressions of time. Time, like space, is a universal mode of the existence of matter. Every individual thing, every process, and the material world as a whole, exist in time.

But again there is a difference between the duration of existence of an individual thing and of nature as a whole: the existence of individual things is restricted in time, while nature as a whole exists eternally. Everything arises, undergoes change and subsequently ceases to exist. Nature, on the other hand, has no beginning and no end. Individual things are transient, but the connected finite things constitute an eternal nature that knows neither beginning nor end.

The figures relating to the age of the earth and the development of life on earth strike the imagination. Man, as we know him today, appeared about 50,000 or 70,000 years ago. The transition forms from ape to man arose about a million years ago. The first primitive forms of plant and animal life appeared more than a thousand million years ago, and the earth itself several thousand million years ago. Such is the time scale of the earth’s history. But neither these figures, nor even bigger magnitudes, can give us a real conception of the eternity of nature, for that eternity impliestits infinite existence in time; it implies that nature has always existed and always will exist.

Space and time are interconnected as modes of the existence of the objective world and are inseparable from matter in motion.

That was convincingly demonstrated by one of the greatest scientific theories of our time, Einstein’s theory of relativity. It refuted the view previously prevailing in physics that space is independent of matter, an unchanging void into which material bodies had been inserted by some external force, and that time flows at a uniform rate and does not depend on the motion of matter.

Space and time, being universal modes of the existence of matter, are absolute; nothing can exist outside of time and space. But their properties are changeable: space and time relations depend on the speed of motion of matter; the properties of space and time change in various parts of the universe in accordance with the distribution and motion of material masses. In that sense, space and time are relative.

Attempts to Deny the Objective Existence of Space and Time

Man’s day-to-day experience over the centuries and scientific data prove that space and time exist objectively, though this is denied by many idealist philosophers.

The German idealist philosopher, Immanuel Kant, claimed there was no such thing as objective space and time existing independent 35 of our consciousness. In his view, space and time are merely modes of apprehending phenomena. He supposed that it is in the nature of human cognition to perceive all phenomena located in space and taking place in time: if there were no human consciousness, there would be no space or time.

The view of space and time as subjective methods of perceiving phenomena is current also in modern idealist philosophy, though it is contradictory to, and refuted by, science, experience and practice.

Let us take this example. If you have to travel from Paris to Moscow you know beforehand that the distance is 2,500 kilometres - a real, not imaginary distance. To traverse it you will need time, and the length of time will depend not on your imagination, but on the objectively existing distance between these two cities, and also on the means of transport. By rail, the journey will take not less than two days; by jet plane it can be covered in a matter of three or four hours.

Science tells us that the world existed prior to man and his consciousness. But if that is so, we must conclude that space and time are independent of human consciousness, because the material world cannot exist otherwise than in space and time.

In our day, when people scientifically and technically equipped are able to penetrate cosmic space, a new blow is being dealt to idealist views of the subjective character of space and time.

The teaching of philosophical materialism that the external world exists in space and time refutes the religious doctrine of a God existing outside of space and time. Theology asserts that God existed before there was a world, that he created nature but remains outside nature, in an incomprehensible, supernatural “somewhere”. The theologians assert that God alone is infinite and eternal, while nature has a beginning and an end, both in space and time.

Science has conclusively shown the untenability of such fantasies. There is no place for God. in the true, scientific conception of the world. The eighteenth-century French astronomer Joseph Lalande remarked that he had searched the skies but did not find any God there.

Nature is its own cause. That thought was expressed in the seventeenth century by the materialist philosopher Spinoza. That materialist formula signifies that nature is in no need of a creator standing above it, that nature itself possesses the attributes of ’infinity and eternity which the theologians falsely ascribe to God.

By proving the uncreatedness, eternity and infinity of nature, the Marxist materialist philosophy provides a firm basis for atheism.

5. Consciousness - a Property of Matter Organized in a Special Way

Thinking - a Result of the Evolution of Living Matter

The material basis of life is protein, a complex product of the development of matter. Protein compounds, especially in the form of enzyme systems, play a decisive part in metabolism, the basis of the vital activity of every organism. Associated with metabolism are other features of life: reproduction, irritability, etc. Irritability enables living beings to respond to influences oif the internal and external environment by adaptive reactions. This is an elementary form of reflex activity. In the higher stages of the development of the organic world, this property of irritability, which is characteristic of the simplest organisms, becomes the basis for higher nervous activity, and what is called psychic activity.

Even in unicellular organisms there is a differentiation of elements particularly sensitive to various external stimuli. With the appearance of multicellular animals, specialisation of the cells of the organism occurs, with the appearance of special groups of cells ( receptors) that are capable of receiving external stimuli and of converting the energy of stimulation into excitation. As the animal organism grows more complex, these cells gradually evolve into the nervous system and its central organ, the brain.

The nervous system is an organ which by its structures and processes reflects all the diverse energetic and spatial-temporal properties of the external world, at the same time co-ordinating the work of organs within the organism itself.

In vertebrates, the central nervous system is composed of the spinai cord and the brain with its various divisions. In most fish, the brain is relatively small, with hardly any development of the cerebral hemispheres. In amphibia, the brain is bigger and there are the beginnings of the forcbrain, the basis for the development of the cerebral hemispheres. In reptiles, the brain is still more developed and the surface of the hemispheres for the first time shows nerve cells from which the cortex is formed. In birds, the cerebral hemispheres are still bigger, but the cortex little developed. The hemispheres are much more developed in mammals, owing to the development and complexity of the cortex. The higher mammals have an extensive cortex with many irregular ridges and fissures, and the hemispheres cover all the other parts of the brain.

The highest development of the brain, and especially of its cortex, is to be found in man. The cerebral cortex constitutes an apparatus 37 in constant interaction with the entire nervous system and is the organ of higher nervous activity, of the highest and most complex forms of connection With the external environment. Ivan Pavlov, the great Russian physiologist, said: "Mental activity is the result of the physiological activity of a definite brain mass.”[6] This is the conclusion drawn by all modern natural science.

The excitation of the sensory nerve-endings resulting from external and internal stimuli is transmitted through the centripetal nerves to the appropriate parts of the brain. From there impulses are carried by the centrifugal nerves to various organs of the body, stimulating their activity. What we have is a reflex action of the given organ, and the whole organism, to one or another stimulus.

For example, when you draw your hand away from something hot, that is a reflex action. It is of the kind that psychologists call unconditioned reflexes. They are innate both in animals and man.

These unconditioned reflexes (defensive, food, etc.) are the basis for conditioned reflexes, which are formed in the course of individual experience. For instance, a dog secretes saliva when it grabs a piece of meat; that is an unconditioned reflex. But salivation can be caused by the sight or smell of meat, or even by the sight of a person who usually feeds the animal. Analysis of this and similar phenomena enabled Pavlov to prove that if feeding is accompanied by a flash of light or the sound of a bell, a new type of reflex response can be developed - the-dog will secrete saliva on seeing the light or hearing the bell. Pavlov called these conditioned reflexes, because they are produced by combining some conditional stimulus (light, sound, etc.) with an unconditioned stimulus that evokes a reflex action.

Conditioned reflexes are temporary nerve connections. They arise under definite conditions and last for a longer or shorter period without the aid of unconditioned stimuli. Their importance is due to the fact that they enable organisms to adapt themselves to changed conditions of their environment. It is well known, for in. stance, that many wild animals show no alarm on seeing human beings for the first time. Only when man begins to hunt thorn do they change their behaviour, hiding themselves as soon as they see or sense him. They have acquired a new, conditioned reflex, and a very useful one for them: the sight of a man immediately evokes an unconditioned defensive reflex, the signal for purposive adaptive reaction.

It has been found that any object or natural phenomenon, if combined with unconditioned reflexes, can serve as a signal for conditioned reflex activity. This system of signals, common to both animals and man, Pavlov called the first signalling system.

At the same time, Pavlov emphasised the specific character of the higher nervous activity of man as compared with animals, lie showed that speech is a new system of signals characteristic only of man, and one that becomes a source of conditioned reflex activity. This system, peculiar to man, Pavlov called the second signalling system.

A fundamental aspect of Pavlov’s discovery of signalling activity is that the adaptation. of living beings to impending, i.e., future, events, which had always been the prerogative of idealist psychology, henceforth became an object of materialist scientific investigation.

Pavlov discovered the physiological laws of higher nervous activity in animals and man, and he showed the features common to both and the fundamental difference between them. His work has laid a sound scientific basis for an understanding of human mental activity.

The Role of Labour and Speech in the Development of Human Thought

Mental activity in man has its precursor in the rudimentary forms of this activity in animals. But the qualitative differences between them must also be seen. The human mind, human thought, is the highest stage in the development of the mental activity. The labour activity of man as a social being has determined the extremely high level of his mental life, his thinking.

The great English scientist, Charles Darwin, proved that man and the anthropoid apes have common ancestors. In the distant past, man’s animal ancestors were marked by the high development of their fore limbs. They learned to walk erect and began to use natural objects as tools to procure food and to defend themselves. Subsequently, they proceeded to fashion tools, and this marked the gradual transformation of the animal to the human being. The use of tools enabled man to master such a natural force as fire and made it possible for him to improve and vary his food, which in turn helped to develop his brain.

The use of tools changed man’s relation to nature. The animal passively adapts itself to nature, making use of what nature itself provides. In contrast, man adapts himself to nature actively - he purposively changes nature, creating for himself conditions of existence that he does not find ready-made. Labour has played a decisive part in the development and perfection of man’s brain; in a certain sense, man and his brain have been created by labour.

The tremendous progress in man’s adaptation to the conditions of his environment, which took the form of changing the external world, only became possible through an extensive development of the human brain’s capacity to appraise the results of behaviour, of labour activity. A powerful impetus to the development of this capacity was given when the ancestor of modern man made the first tool. In its turn, the capacity of the brain to appreciate the results of the labour process served also as the physiological basis for a rapid improvement of the instruments of labour themselves.

This more complex interaction of man and nature led to more complex relationships between men themselves. For collective labour, men had to associate with one another, and for this the limited stock of sounds that had sufficed for animals was no longer adequate. In the course of labour activities, the human throat gradually developed and changed. Man learned to pronounce articulate sounds, which gradually developed into words, language. Joint labour would have been impossible without the faculty of speech.

Without words, concepts of things, and their relation to one another could not have arisen; human thought would have been impossible. The emergence and development of speech, in its turn, influenced the development of the brain.

Thus man’s social labour, and later, in association with it, speech, were the decisive factors influencing the development of the brain, the development of the capacity to think.

Consciousness Is a Property of the Brain

Consciousness is a product of the activity of the human brain, which is connected with the intricate complex of sensory organs. In essence, consciousness is a reflection of the material world. It is a manifold process that includes various types of mental activity, such as sensation, perception, conception, thought, feeling and will. Without the proper functioning of the brain there can be no normal mental activity. Derangement of this functioning by illness, say, or alcohol, impairs the capacity for sound mental activity. Sleep is a partial, temporary inhibition of the activity of the cerebral cortex as a whole - thinking ceases and consciousness is obscured. Recent achievements in influencing selectively and in any desired direction human mental states and pathological emotions by means of various drugs once again proves the primary character of the material cerebral processes underlying the formation of consciousness.

But from these correct materialist views it does not follow that thought is a substance secreted by the brain. The nineteenth-century German materialist Karl Vogt defined thought as a special substance secreted by the brain, just as our salivary glands secrete saliva or the liver bile. That was a vulgar conception of the nature of thought. Mental activity, consciousness, thought, is a special property of matter, but not a special kind of matter.

On the fundamental question of philosophy we counterpose consciousness and matter, spirit and nature. Matter is everything that exists independent and outside of our consciousness, and it is therefore a gross error to regard consciousness as part of matter. Lenin said: "To say that thought is material is to make a false step, a stop towards confusing materialism and idealism.”[7] And indeed, if thought is the same thing as matter, that removes all difference between matter and thinking) it makes them identical.

The idealist opponents of Marxism persist in ascribing to it the view that consciousness is of a material nature. They do so in order to make it easier to “refute” Marxist philosophical materialism. It is a time-honoured device - first to ascribe some absurdity to your opponent and then to subject it to “annihilating” criticism.

Actually, this identification of consciousness and matter belongs not to dialectical, but to the vulgar materialism. Marxist materialist philosophy has always combated this view, always drawing a distinction between consciousness - the reflection of the material world - and matter itself.

But this difference should not be exaggerated, not made into an absolute break. Such a break between consciousness and matter is characteristic of psychophysical parallelism, which maintains that thought, consciousness, are processes taking place parallel to, but independent of, material processes occurring in the brain. Science rejects that standpoint. It proves that human mental activity is only a special aspect of the vital activity of the organism, a special function of the brain.

Dialectical materialism rejects any break between consciousness and matter. For such a break would, in essence, signify a return to the primitive, ignorant views of early human history, when all the phenomena of life were explained as due to a soul that was supposed to enter the body and control it.

In solving the psychophysical problem, i.e., the problem of relation between man’s mental activity and its organ, the brain (as a material organ, a physical body), one must see both the difference and the connection between them. It is important to bear the difference in mind, because identifying consciousness with matter leads to a sheer absurdity. But neither should consciousness be separated from the brain, for consciousness is a function of the brain, i.e., of matter organised in a special way.

6. Opponents of Philosophical Materialism

By recognising the material unity of the world, Marxist philosophical materialism adopts the standpoint of philosophical monism (from the Greek monos, meaning one). Marxist philosophical materialism is a consistent and harmonious doctrine because its explanation of all phenomena proceeds from a single material basis.

But there are other philosophical doctrines that are not ready to admit either the primacy of matter or the primacy of spirit. Their underlying philosophical principle is dualism (from the Latin duo, meaning two), and they seek to prove that the world has two primary bases, independent of each other and absolutely different in nature - matter and spirit, body and consciousness, nature and idea. Such was the view of Descartes.

But dualism is incapable of explaining the well-known fact that influences affecting the human body cause changes in consciousness, and, conversely, that thought can result in bodily motion. The standpoint of philosophical dualism is inconsistent and half– hearted, and, as a rule, leads to idealism.

The idealist philosophers who seek to explain the world from a single but idealist basis are monists too. Their monism, however, rests on an erroneous, anti-scientific foundation, since it takes as its starting-point that idea, thought, consciousness are primary, and nature, physical things, the human body are secondary and derived from the spiritual basis. In their opinion, everything is consciousness or the product of consciousness.

Objective Idealism

The idealist view of the world in its most primitive, but still most widespread, form, finds expression in the religious doctrine of a non-material spirit, or deity, which is supposed to have existed before the physical universe and to have created it. The whole history of science refutes such views. For science has proved beyond doubt that mental phenomena and processes arise at a very high stage in the development of matter and are necessarily associated with definite material processes in the cerebral cortex and nervous system. There can be no mental phenomena without these material, physiological processes. Hence, the religious doctrine of mind existing prior to matter and nature is false and completely at variance with reality.

A more subtle and abstract form of these views is to be found in the idealist philosophical systems. The creators of these systems asserted that the basis of all things must be sought in spiritual or nonmaterial causes, elements or essences that existed before the appearance of material things. Such views were propounded by the great idealist philosophers, Plato, Leibniz and Hegel, who made a considerable contribution to the development of philosophical thought. Plato called these non-material causes “forms” or “ideas”. Leibniz considered that the ultimate basis of all things lay in a peculiar kind of spiritual “atoms” of being - spiritually active “units” (monads). Hegel saw the ultimate basis of all things in the “idea” as an objectively existing and self-developing concept. "The idea,” he wrote, "is the true primacy and things are what they are because of the activity of the concepts intrinsic to them and disclosed in them."[8] According to Hegel, nature as a whole is also the product of the concept, the idea - not an ordinary human idea, but one that exists independent of man, the Absolute Idea, which is equivalent to God.

The philosophy of Plato, Leibniz and Hegel is termed objective idealism because it recognises the existence of some “objective” spiritual basis, distinct from human consciousness and independent of it.

The views of the objective idealists will not stand criticism. Ideas, concepts exist only in human thought, they reflect the general features and properties of reality itself, they reflect generalised characteristics of the material world. Such, for instance, are the concepts man, society, socialism, nation, etc. Concepts, ideas that are supposed to have existed prior to nature and to have produced nature are simply a fantasy of the idealists. Lenin wrote: "... Everybody knows what a human idea is; but an idea independent of man and prior to man, an idea in the abstract, an Absolute Idea, is a theological invention of the idealist Hegel.”[9]

Subjective Idealism

Besides objective idealism, which derives nature from some divine idea, there is also subjective idealism, which asserts that material things are only the sum total of our sensations, thoughts. This philosophy makes the world part of the consciousness of the subject, i.e., of the cognising human being.

The subjective idealist asks: What do I know of the things around me? And his answer is: Only the sensations of colour, taste, odour, density, form, etc. I do not and cannot perceive in things anything more than the sum of these sensations; is it not, then, reasonable to suppose that things are only the sum total of my sensations, and that no things exist outside or independent of sensations?

From this reasoning of the subjective idealists, it follows that man is surrounded not by things, but by complexes of his own sensations, that the whole of nature is merely the sum total of sensations.

That view was expounded early in the eighteenth century by the English bishop Berkeley. He frankly stated that the sole object of his idealist philosophy was to refute materialism and atheism and substantiate the existence of God.

Subjective idealism is a crude distortion of the actual relation between our perceptions and things. It identifies human perception with the things perceived.

The logical conclusion to be drawn from the basic tenet of subjective idealism is this: things and the perception of them are one and the same. But in that case we must conclude that the whole world is created by myself, by my consciousness, and that all other individuals, including my parents, are only perceptions of my mind and do not exist objectively. Hence, subjective idealism inevitably leads to solipsism (from the Latin words solus meaning alone and ipse meaning self), an absurd philosophy which asserts that only I myself exist, and that the whole world, including all other people, are merely figments of my imagination.

Every form of subjective idealism is bound to lead to solipsistic conclusions, and this is convincing proof of ils falseness.

The Attempt to Lay Down a “Third” Line in Philosophy

Besides idealist doctrines that frankly make consciousness the basis of the world, there are doctrines that seek to conceal their idealism and create the impression that they stand above both materialism and idealism and represent a “third” line in philosophy. One such trend is positivism.

Positivism arose in the first half of the last century. It has now become one of the most influential philosophical trends in the bourgeois world and has gained currency among natural scientists.

The positivists denounce all preceding philosophy as metaphysics, understanding the term to mean futile, scholastic discussion of problems that are beyond the scope of experience and incapable of scientific solution. This, they say, applies above all to the fundamental question of philosophy: which is primary, nature or consciousness? Science, the positivists tell us, must confine itself to such facts as lend themselves to observation and not seek for an underlying basis of them, whether material or spiritual. Any philosophy that seeks for such a basis is useless. Science can get along very well without philosophy; science is its own philosophy.

The positivists claim they are neither materialists nor idealists, but investigators of empirical facts, men of science. Behind that facade, however, there lurks in fact the philosophy of idealism. For by refusing to answer the fundamental question of philosophy and affirming that it cannot be answered by science, the positivists seal themselves off from the material world, isolate themselves within the framework of their own consciousness and thus slide into the position of subjective idealism.

That is apparent also because by “facts” - a word much bandied about by them - they understand our perceptions. The positivists maintain that only our sensations and perceptions are immediately given to us, and we should limit ourselves to the study of them.

The bourgeois positivist philosophers insist that they stand “above” materialism and idealism. Actually, they combat materialism together with the idealists, in whose camp they belong. They denounce materialism as metaphysics although Marxist philosophical materialism is irreconcilably opposed to all metaphysics,*  including the metaphysics that talks of non-existent “substance”. It rejects both the metaphysics of idealism with its invented “ideal” basis of the world, and the metaphysics of religion with its preaching of a divine being and immortal soul. But Marxist materialism also resolutely rejects the positivists’ attempt to describe as metaphysics 44 the doctrine of a material world existing outside our mind. Positivism ascribes its own sins to others. Under cover of its verbal attacks against an imaginary "materialist metaphysics" it, in effect, propagates the metaphysics of subjective idealism.

The whole history of philosophy demonstrates that there is not and cannot be any “third” line in philosophy besides materialism and idealism. The sooner that is realised by the adherents of positivism among Western scientists and technologists, the sooner will they be free from positivist confusion and base themselves on the firm, scientific ground of materialist philosophy.

At the turn of the century, positivism manifested itself as Mackism after Ernst Mach, the Austrian physicist and philosopher, also known as empirio-criticism (the criticism of experience).

Mach and his followers, notably his Russian disciple A. JBogdanov, claimed to have overcome the “one-sidedness” of materialism and idealism. But in actual fact Mach’s philosophy was basically a variety of subjective idealism.

Mach affirmed that the primary “elements” of the universe were sense impressions. Every thing is a "complex of elements" (or sense impressions) and the whole of nature, the sum total of "sequences of elements" which are “arranged” by man in thinking about the world. Everything that surrounds us can be reduced to our sense impressions - such is the essence of the Machian understanding of the world. However, the Machians were careful to conceal the subjectiveidealist essence of their views by claiming that these elements (sense impressions) were “neutral”, neither materialist nor idealist, and were neither of a physical nor of a mental character.

The same purpose of masking idealism was served by the claim that their philosophy was based entirely on “experience”, and that experience was the source of all knowledge.

The reactionary philosophy of Machism was criticised by Lenin in his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Lenin pointed out that the Machians’ reference lo “experience” does not make their philosophy a scientific one. For “experience” can be interpreted in a materialist and an idealist way. The materialist recognises that all our knowledge derives from experience, but, at the same time, ho emphasises that this experience deals with the external objective world, in other words, our experience has an objective content. The Machian, while agreeing that our knowledge derives from experience, denies the existence of objective reality, given in experience.Instead., he maintains that experience is concerned not with the objective world, but merely with our sensations, perceptions and conceptions and our investigation must be confined to these. In short,the Machian in reality adopts the standpoint of subjective idealism.

Lenin also denounced as philosophical trickery the Machian attempt to rise above materialism and idealism by means of such a term as "neutral element”, lie wrote:

“Everybody knows what human sensation is; but sensation independent of man, sensation prior to man, is nonsense, a lifeless abstraction, an idealist artifice.”[10] Lenin showed that these "neutral elements" were in reality sensations, and that a doctrine which sought to make them the basis of the world was subjective idealism.

Did nature exist prior to man, Lenin asked the Machians. If nature is the creation of the human mind, if it can be reduced to sensation, then, consequently, man made nature, and not the other way round. Yet we know from the natural sciences that nature existed long before man.

Does man think with the aid of the brain, Lenin asked the Machians. From their doctrine it follows that the human brain is itself a "complex of elements”, of sensations, that is, a product of man’s mental activity. But in that case we must infer that man thinks without the help of the brain, that the brain is only a “construction” of thought invented in order to provide a better explanation of mental activity.

Do other people exist besides myself, Lenin asked the Machians. The inescapable inference of Machian philosophy is that all other people are merely complexes of sensations, that is, the product of my brain.

The Machian philosophy led to solipsism, and this was conclusive proof of its untenability. It enjoyed wide influence at the beginning of the century. In the twenties it gave way to new forms of positivism.

Roots of Idealism

Idealist philosophy gives us an incorrect, distorted view of the world. It misrepresents the real relation between thought and its material basis. In some cases it is a result of a deliberate desire to distort or conceal the truth. That is frequently the object in our time, when bourgeois philosophers are eager to curry favour with the ruling class by preaching idealism. But the history of philosophy knows many instances of idealist doctrines resulting from the "honest error" of philosophers who were sincerely seeking the truth.

The process of cognition (as the reader will learn from Chapter 3) is very complex and has many aspects. Hence, there is always the possibility of a one-sided approach to it, the tendency to exaggerate and absolutise the significance of one or another of its aspects, making it independent of everything else. That is the procedure of the idealist philosophers. The Machians and other subjective idealists, for instance, absolutise the fact that all our knowledge of the surrounding world is derived from sensations, which they divorce from the material things that give rise to the sensations and then draw the idealist conclusion that the world consists of nothing but sensations.

Lenin pointed out that cognition always contains the possibility of deviation from reality into fantasy, of the substitution of 46 imaginary interconnections for real ones. Narrowness and onesidedness, subjectivism and subjective blindness - such are the epistemological roots of idealism, that is, its roots in the very process of cognition.

But for these roots to produce a “plant”, for the errors of cognition to be embodied in an idealist philosophical system opposed to materialism and materialist natural science, requires definite social conditions and, moreover, that these erroneous views should be to the advantage of definite social forces and enjoy their support. A one-sided and subjectivist approach to cognition of the world leads to the swamp of idealism where, Lenin wrote, it is "consolidated by the class interests of the ruling classes" - slave-owners, feudalists or bourgeoisie. In this lie the class roots of idealism.

The reactionary nature of philosophical idealism is clearly apparent from its ties with theology, religion. Lenin pointed out that every variety of philosophical idealism is, in the final analysis, subtle defence of theology, of clericalism. Even when it does not openly announce its leaning towards religion, philosophical idealism, in actual fact, has the same basis as religion. That is why the Church has always zealously supported it and has been hostile to philosophical materialism, persecuting its exponents whenever possible.

7. Contemporary Bourgeois Philosophy

Recent philosophy, Lenin pointed out, is as partisan as philosophy was two thousand years ago. In other words, today as in the past, the philosophers are divided into two mutually opposed camps, materialism and idealism. In the final analysis, the struggle between them is an expression of the tendencies and ideologies of opposed social classes and groups. In the modern world a grim struggle is going on between the communist and bourgeois ideologies. The Programme of the C.P.S.U. appraises this struggle as "a reflection, in the intellectual life of mankind, of the historic process of transition from capitalism to socialism".[11]  The reactionary bourgeoisie, of course, wages war not only against the ideas but also against the practice of scientific communism.

The philosophy of dialectical materialism is the ideology of the working class, of the progressive social forces of our time. On the other hand, the different trends in idealist philosophy express the world outlook of the reactionary forces, the imperialist bourgeoisie. Anti-communism more and more becomes an inseparable feature of all modern bourgeois ideology. In the philosophical field it finds expression in endless but ineffective attempts to refute the teachings of Marx, Engels and Lenin, to uphold the position of bourgeois philosophy in the struggle against these teachings, and to defend the capitalist order of things.

Modern bourgeois philosophy is split into a multitude of trends and schools, but basically they are merely different variants of open or camouflaged idealism, that is, variants of a false and illusory world outlook.

In our day, philosophical idealism has become even more reactionary and decadent than at the close of the last century. Irrationalism has become a fashionable trend; it holds that the universe and life have no rational meaning, and that the human mind is incapable of apprehending reality. Also widespread are diverse doctrines that exploit scientific discoveries for the perversion of science. Lastly, there is the growing influence of outspoken theological doctrines.

Intellectual life in the capitalist countries is characterised by this paradox: science is irresistibly advancing, deepening our knowledge of the material world, and, in co-operation with technology, indefinitely increasing man’s mastery over nature. A genuinely scientific explanation of phenomena in nature and society is offered by dialectical and historical materialism, the progressive materialist philosophy that has been developing for more than a century. But many philosophers - and sometimes even scientists - continue to insist that the external world has no objective existence, that the statements of science do not contain objective truth, that man cannot know the real nature of things, so that the wisest course is to place one’s trust in the supernatural and accept the teachings of the Church.

Why is this? How can intelligent men, including honest-minded scientists, hold idealist views that run counter to science and social practice?

The decisive obstacle to acceptance of materialism is the class interest of the bourgeoisie and the anti-communist prejudices of bourgeois intellectuals. If consistently applied, modern scientific materialism, i.e., dialectical and historical materialism, logically leads one to the position of the working class and acceptance of scientific socialism. That is one of the reasons why those who are reluctant to break with the bourgeoisie - and they include scientists - are afraid to adopt materialism. The outspoken, active defenders and ideologists of imperialism see in dialectical materialism their relentless theoretical opponent and have made it their aim to refute it by any means. They employ all the media of ideological and moral pressure for this purpose: the press, radio, television, the class-room and pulpit, learned treatises and journalism. This propaganda is kept up day after day, year after year, and is naturally bound to have its effect.

An examination of the basic trends in modern bourgeois philosophy will reveal some of the other reasons why idealism has proved so tenacious.

Philosophy Against Reason

The pessimism, irrationalism and hostility to a scientific world outlook characteristic of the ideology of the present-day bourgeoisie are very clearly seen in one of the most fashionable philosophical doctrines of the bourgeois world, viz., existentialism. Its founder, the German idealist philosopher Martin Heidegger, borrowed much from the doctrine of Soren Aabye Kierkegaard, the early nineteenth century Danish mystic. Among other German existentialists, Karl Jaspers is prominent on account of his reactionary, pessimist views. In France existentialism does not constitute an integral trend. Its left tendency is linked with the name of Jean-Paul Sartre (“atheistic existentialism”), and the right tendency with Gabriel Marcel (“ Christian existentialism”).

The most general problem raised by the existentialists is that of the meaning of life, of man’s place in the universe, and the path he chooses in life. It is an old problem, but at the present time it has acquired special importance for the many people who feel they must determine their place in the complex and contradictory conditions of bourgeois society and express their attitude to the worldwide struggle between progressive and reactionary forces.

Existentialism, therefore, touches on one of the burning questions of the time, but the solution it offers is based on a decadent, idealist world outlook. Its starting-point is the consciousness of the individual isolated from and standing opposed to society and living by his own thoughts and feelings. That wrong starting-point predetermines the fallacy of the whole doctrine.

The adherents of existentialism claim that it is a doctrine of being in general; actually, it deals exclusively with the “existence” of the individual. Disregarding the arguments of some existentialists about the “hereafter”, or, in other words, about God, the sole reality they recognise is the consciousness that "I exist”. The external world is depicted as a mystery inaccessible to reason and logical thought. Like all subjective idealists, the existentialists deny the objective reality of nature, space and time. According to Heidegger, the world exists only inasmuch as man exists: "If there is no existence, neither can the universe exist.”

By contending that the most important thing for man is the fact of his existence, the existentialists indulge in fine-spun reasoning about human existence having an end and man’s whole life being lived in fear of death. The function of philosophy, in their view, is to awaken and keep alive this fear. To philosophise, says Jaspers, is to learn to die.

The existentialists realise, of course, that the easiest way to indoctrinate this feeling of fear is to sever the individual from society, make him feel isolated and helpless. Accordingly, they seek to instill the idea that the individual is “alone” in an alien and 49 hostile world, that in relation to other men his is an “unreal” existence, that society robs him of his individuality.

The existentialists adroitly exploit the indubitable fact, tragically felt by many people, that capitalist society does oppress the individual, that it does suppress his personality. But the feeling of protest against the oppressive capitalist system arising among a section of the intellectuals is directed by this philosophy along the false path of protest against society as such. For, in the existentialist view, although the individual cannot exist without intercourse with other individuals, he nevertheless remains in complete solitude, and only by withdrawing into himself can he acquire freedom. The existentialists do not recognise obligations imposed on the individual by the community or generally accepted ethical standards: the hero of existentialist plays and novels is usually a person without firm convictions and often of an amoral nature. All human activity and struggle are futile, the world is a kingdom of absurdity, and all history meaningless.

The subjective-idealist philosophy of existentialism is above all false because it reduces all reality to the existence of man and his emotions and, at the same time, completely distorts the very nature of man. For man’s life is bound up with society. What has raised him high above the level of the animal world? His life and labour as a member of society. It is in society that man develops his mind and emotions, will and conscience, acquires a meaning and purpose in life. He who lives a full social life and is inspired by progressive ideas, is concerned with the problem of life, not death - how to shape his life as a useful member of society, what contribution he can make to its progress. But once a person is artificially severed from society, he becomes a trembling, frightened being, always in fear of death and not knowing what to do with his life.

Existentialism involuntarily demonstrates the degree of spiritual emptiness and moral degradation resulting from bourgeois individualism.

The decadent "philosophy of existence" is profoundly reactionary. It has a demoralising effect on those who have succumbed to its influence, especially the youth. Its preaching of fear, hopelessness, and the meaninglessness of existence fosters anti-social inclinations and justifies amorality and lack of principle. In certain situations, the existentialist can easily become a pawn of the most reactionary forces and be converted from an hysterical malcontent into a fascist thug. In Germany, existentialism, along with some other reactionary doctrines (neo-Hegelianism, the "philosophy of life”, etc.), played a definite part in the preparation of fascism. In France the political positions of the existentialists were of a different nature. During the war, Sartre and some other existentialists actively participated in the Resistance movement, and in the post-war period they repeatedly came forward as supporters of peace and as opponents of the 50 French government’s war in Algeria. However, continuing to be adherents of extreme individualism, they counterposed the latter to the principles of class solidarity and organisation of the proletariat and its Communist Party.

Pseudo -"Philosophy of Science"

Another philosophical trend that enjoys wide currency in the capitalist world is neo-positivism, or "logical positivism”. In recent times it has most often made its appearance under the name of " analytical philosophy" and it is vociferously advertised by its supporters as the "philosophy of science”. At first sight it might appear to be the antithesis of the irrational philosophy of existentialism, but actually it is an idealist doctrine definitely related to existentialism, and shares its pessimism, disbelief in human reason and capacity for cognition.

The basic tenets of neo-positivism were formulated by Bertrand Russell and the Austrian philosophers Wittgenstein, Schlick and Carnap. Its most prominent exponents today are Quain and Pape in the U.S.A. and Ryle and Ayer in Britain. The neo-positivists tried to answer certain questions raised by the rapid development of science and new methods of research, by the appearance of new fields of mathematics and the rise of such an important subject as mathematical logic. They set out to find a reliable criterion of the scientific authenticity of every theory, to apply it to philosophy itself, and to analyse thoroughly the epistemological and logical bases of mathematics, etc. But the neo-positivists formulated these important philosophical and logical problems in such a way as to preclude in advance a materialist solution of them, for from the outset the founders of neo-positivism were convinced opponents of materialism, and especially of Marxist materialism. In the final analysis neo-positivism proved to be nothing but a renovated variety of subjective-idealist philosophy, in particular of Machism, more or less adapted to the modern level of physics, mathematics and logic.

Its underlying idea is that the basic problems of world outlook have no place in philosophy, which should deal solely with "logical analysis of language”. These problems, and above all the fundamental problem of philosophy, we are told, are only “pseudo-problems” from the scientific point of view. Philosophy cannot give us any knowledge of the external world and its laws; it should confine itself exclusively to logical analysis of the language of science, that is, analysis of the rules for applying scientific concepts and symbols, the combination of words in sentences, the deduction of one proposition from another, etc., and "semantic analysis"* of the meaning of scientific terms and concepts. But though logical analysis of the 51 language of science may be important, reducing all philosophy to such analysis is tantamount to abolishing it altogether.

The neo-positivists are right when they argue that science must be based on the data of experience, on facts. But like the Machians, they refuse to admit the validity of the facts of experience. In their judgement, for instance, the question whether a rose exists objectively is absurd: all that can be said is that I see the red colour of the rose and smell its perfume. Only that fact, they allege, is scientifically valid. In other words, they interpret facts to mean not objective things, events or phenomena in the objective world, but sensations, impressions, perceptions and other phenomena of our consciousness. In spite of their own assertion that inquiry into the essence of reality is meaningless, they in fact deny only the material character of the world, thereby, in effect, ascribing to it a spiritual character.

What, then, is the function of science? Its primary function, they assert, is only to describe “facts”, i.e., human sensations, for science cannot know the objective world, and knowledge based on experience can have no objective authenticity.

This description of facts, arbitrarily selected, furnishes the material for scientific theories constructed with the aid of logic and mathematics. The neo-positivists assert that in contrast to the empirical sciences, which are based on the data of experience, logic and mathematics rely on a system of axioms and arbitrarily selected rules that are just as conventional as the rules of chess or a game of cards.

The conceptual elements of a theory must not contradict these conventional rules, and that is all that is required for the theory to be accepted as true. In applying this to concrete problems the neopositivists arrive, for instance, at the anti-scientific conclusion that to take the sun, and not the earth, as the centre of the solar system is purely conventional.

Needless to say, such an interpretation of scientific theory deprives science of all value as a method of objective cognition and turns it into a sort of parlour game.

Paradoxical though it may seem, these absurd views, which to all intents and purposes negate science, are held by eminent scientists who have made significant contributions to modern learning. The intricate methods employed in modern science, the complexity of the phenomena it studies, and the difficulties that arise in explaining some of these phenomena, create the possibility of idealist waverings among scientists, and bourgeois environment helps to turn this possibility into reality.

Thus, the discovery of non-Euclidian geometry (by Lobachevsky, Riemann and others) reflecting the objective laws of space in conditions different from those we are accustomed to, led some scientists to conclude that no geometry can be regarded as true and that its basic principles are merely conventional.

The abstract mathematical nature of physical theory, tho impossibility of constructing graphic models of microparticles, or of directly observing them, are chiefly responsible for idealistic interpretations of physical phenomena.

For the physicist cannot observe the microparticles (electrons, protons, mesons, etc.) he studies even with the most powerful optical instruments, nor reproduce them in a model. All the experimental physicist can see is the recordings of his instruments, flashes on the screen, etc. His conclusions about the existence of microparticles and their properties are founded on complex theoretical arguments and mathematical calculations. When the physicist experiments, he acts as a spontaneous materialist. But his reflections on the general problems of science, in the absence of clear-cut philosophical views, might well lead him to the distorted opinion that the microparticles, with all their properties, do not exist in reality, but are merely a theoretical concept, a “logical” or “semantic” construction, or a complex aggregate of symbols created for the express purpose of co-ordinating and predicting the recordings of his instruments.

One of the greatest physicists of our day, Werner Heisenberg, has expressed the opinion that the elementary particle "is not a material particle in space and time but, in a way, only a symbol on whose introduction the laws of nature assume an especially simple form".[12]

As for the theoretical physicist, who is concerned with mathematical treatment of the results of observation obtained by other investigators, the very nature of his work, and the constant replacement of one scientific theory by another, might lead him, if he does not understand dialectics, to the erroneous conclusion that his hypotheses and theories are arbitrary and their underlying principles purely subjective. James Jeans, the distinguished astronomer, held the idealist view that the "objective and material universe is proved to consist of little more than constructs of our own minds".[13]

However, though we cannot build models of microparticles, or observe them directly, this in no way refutes their materiality, which consists in the fact of their existence outside and independent of human consciousness. That has been proved by the progress of science and by the technical application of data obtained from the study of microparticles.

Today, as fifty years ago when Lenin wrote his Materialism and Empiric-Criticism, the idealist philosophers play on these difficulties encountered by science, on the vacillation of scientists, on their hesitation to uphold and apply the materialist standpoint. That is why the battle against idealism requires knowledge of modern science and ability to solve its problems in the light of dialectical materialism.

Modern positivism has found its way also into the social sciences - sociology, philology, psychology. Its adherents, exponents of what is termed "universal semantics”, claim that social reality depends 53 on what people say about it, and that social evils arrive from wrong conceptions and wrong usage of words. Hence, to change social life one has only to change language, the significance attributed to words. Stuart Chase, an American semanticist, even suggests that words like “capital” and “unemployment”, etc., are meaningless, and that if there were no such “evil” word in our vocabulary as “exploitation”, there would be no exploitation.

The neo-positivists reject as unscientific not only “metaphysical” judgements, but also ethical and moral valuations and judgements. Any ethical judgement, they say, is necessarily subjective, that is, is only a personal view, an expression of the emotional outlook of the speaker. From that standpoint, the judgement that aggressive wars are unjust would have to be regarded merely as a subjective opinion, and no more valid than the opposite opinion that aggressive wars are just. Thus, neo-positivism, which is seemingly far removed from politics, proves to be a very suitable instrument for justifying reactionary policies. At the same time, it invites people who are unwilling to abandon ethical principles having objective validity to seek such permanent standards outside the realm of science, primarily in religion.

By disparaging science as incapable of giving us an objective and true picture of the world, the neo-positivists play into the hands of the theologians and fideists, who preach implicit faith in religion. Nor is that denied by the neo-positivists themselves. The wellknown idealist physicist, Pascual Jordan, says that "the positivist conception offers new possibilities of granting living space to religion without contradiction from scientific thought"[14]

Lenin wrote: "The objective, class role of empirio-criticism consists entirely in rendering faithful service to the fideists in their struggle against materialism.”[15]  These words fully apply to the neo-positivists.

Revival of Medieval Scholasticism

Fideism is being widely and vigorously disseminated in contemporary bourgeois society. The Church and its diverse organisations have also become more active. Clericalism acquires ever greater importance in the political and ideological arsenal of imperialism. Ruling class ideologists harp on the argument that "only religion is the serious business of the human race"[16] and that the only solution of pressing social issues "lies in a more effective infusion into our lives of the spirit of Christianity".[17]

Intensified religious propaganda is attended by the spread among bourgeois intellectuals, and the bourgeoisie generally, of all manner of mystical doctrines - spiritualism, astrology, chiromancy and other types of superstition.

The class implications of this were revealed by Lenin: "The bourgeoisie, out of fear of the growth and increasing strength of the proletariat, Is supporting everything backward, moribund and medieval.”[18]

Medieval philosophy is being revived in the literal sense: the doctrines of Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic philosopher of the Middle Ages, have been resurrected in neo-Thomism, which the Vatican has officially recognised as the philosophy of the Catholic Church.

It might be thought that this preaching of a frankly religious philosophy that attempts to re-establish medieval scholastic doctrines as "eternal philosophy”, would have little or no appeal to the scientist. That is not so. Neo-Thomism is a subtle and crafty doctrine and, in the capitalist world, often misleads not only ordinary people, but men of science.

The fundamental basis of neo-Thomist doctrine is recognition of God as the creator and omnipotent ruler of the world. Nature is the "realisation of divine ideas”, and history the "realisation of a divine plan”. But unlike the neo-positivists, existentialists and similar .subjective idealist schools, the neo-Thomists recognise that the external world, being a world created by God, has a real existence independent of man and his consciousness and can be known through feeling and reason. In fact, they even criticise existentialist irrationalism and are loud in defending reason, with which, they affirm, God endowed man in order that he might aspire to know truth.

Such views are readily accepted by people who are not satisfied with the sophistry of positivism and irrationalism, but who are unwilling or unable to accept philosophical materialism. They consider that neo-Thomism successfully blends a correct, healthy attitude to scientific cognition with a faith in God that satisfies the religious needs of the individual.

That, however, is entirely erroneous. For neo-Thomism cannot be reconciled with reason and science. Its fundamental idea is that science is subordinate to religion, and knowledge to faith. The neo-Thomists interpret “reason” to mean a mode of thinking that does not transcend the teachings of the Church, and, conversely, denounce as unreasonable, as a "revolt against reason”, defence of scientific propositions that contradict religious dogma.

They indicate three ways of arriving at truth: science, philosophy and religion. The lowest of them is science, and the knowledge it provides, we are told, is untrustworthy and restricted to the corporal shell that conceals the genuine spiritual truth of the world, the latter being inaccessible to science though it is partially accessible to philosophy, or “metaphysics”. In contrast to science, philosophy deals with the primary cause of the world, and reaches the conclusion that this first cause is a supreme spiritual principle or divine creator. But supreme truth is reached only through revelation, religious faith, with which all the fundamental conclusions 55 of science and philosophy of importance for a world outlook have to accord.

The ultimate object of theoretical science, according to the neo-Thomists, is to furnish evidence of the existence of God, evidence that "Catholicism and science were made for each other”. All the difficulties confronting science, all its unsolved problems, are exploited for the benefit of the dogmas of the Church.

One of the favourite proofs of the divine creation of the world that Catholic philosophers put forward is the theory of the " expanding universe”. It is based on the discovery in 1919 of the displacement of the lines towards the red end of the spectrum in the case of radiation reaching us from the very distant galaxies. Science has not yet fully established the cause of this, but the most probable explanation - the rapid recession of the galaxies from our solar system - was immediately seized on by idealist philosophers as proof that the universe began from a God-created "primordial atom" in which at one time all matter and energy were concentrated.

There is absolutely no scientific justification for that conclusion, if only because we are not justified in extending conclusions based on facts observed now, and confined to a limited portion of the universe, to the whole infinite universe and to a time separated from us by thousands of millions of years.

Nonetheless, this and similar “theories” were used by Pope Pius XII in his address of November 22,1951, "Proofs of the Existence of God in the Light of Modern Science" for the statement: "Thus, creation in time; and hence a creator, and, consequently, God! That is the admission ... we demand of science, the admission our generation expects from it.”[19]

That example is typical of how the idealist philosophers and theologians utilise incompletely explained scientific data for idealist and fideist conclusions. Only by firmly adhering to philosophical materialism and consistently applying the dialectical method can the scientist avoid vacillation and steer clear of the traps the idealists set at each difficult point in the advance of science.

The neo-Thomists often claim that unlike the subjective idealists, they lay great stress on moral questions. But the morality they preach is one of meek submission, the doctrine that man should be concerned not so much with life on this earth and his sinful body as with his "immortal soul”, "eternal life”, and God. It is a Morality of passive acceptance and, consequently, justification of the existing social evils, exploitation and inequality; a morality that substitutes prayer and appeal to God in place of protest and struggle against social injustice; hence a morality of advantage only to the ruling exploiter class.

As regards their social and political doctrine, the neo-Thomists combine attacks on socialism with “criticism” of some of the defects of capitalism. The existing evils of society, the Catholic philosophers 56 argue, are due to the fact that many people, among them capitalists, have forgotten their religious beliefs and ceased to he good Christians. That type of “criticism” shows that the neo-Thomists have no intention of combating capitalism and are, in effect, its defenders.

There are many other philosophical trends and schools in the capitalist world - instrumentalism,* neo-realism, phenomenology, personalism, etc. - but all of them come within the framework of idealism and possess the same reactionary features and tendencies that are more clearly expressed in the typical idealist doctrines discussed above.

Idealist philosophy cannot give us a correct answer to scientific and social problems. Imbued with hostility to the scientific, Marxist world outlook and social progress, it is an expression of the deepening decline of capitalism and the crisis of capitalist culture.

8. Towards a Scientific World Outlook

Bourgeois ideology is in a state of profound crisis. More and more people in the capitalist countries are becoming convinced that bourgeois theories and schools are incapable of providing a scientific answer to the questions that life raises and they are abandoning the bourgeois world outlook.

Idealist philosophy too is in the grip of a crisis. More and more it runs counter to both the development of science and progressive social movements. It arouses the protest of conscientious, honestminded scientists, as indeed of all those who put the interests of the people and a radiant future for mankind above those of the capitalists.

In the countries which the apologists of imperialism hypocritically call the "free World”, the ideological struggle between the progressive and reactionary world outlooks, between materialism and idealism, is becoming more and more intense. The Marxists organised in the Communist Parties are in the vanguard of this struggle. Even many bourgeois intellectuals realise the reactionary role of philosophical idealism and have come out in opposition to it.

One example is the progressive American philosopher Barrows Dunham, a courageous fighter against spiritual and political reaction and a trenchant critic of retrograde philosophical doctrines and social myths. Dunham exposes the disparagement and degradation of philosophy by the pragmatists and positivists and upholds the dignity of philosophy, which he regards as the expression of the interests and aspirations of the people. "To my mind the most endearing thing about philosophy is its source in people,” he writes in his book Giant in Chains. For Dunham, philosophy is riot a scholastic "analysis of language”, but "the guide of life”, "philosophy is the theory of human deliverance".[20]

The Japanese philosopher Yanagida Kenjuro, who joined the struggle for peace, for the democratic rights of his people and their liberation from foreign dependence, came to the conclusion that idealist philosophy weakens man and dupes his mind with illusions. Kenjuro had the courage to abandon this deceptive philosophy, criticise it and embrace the scientific materialistic outlook. In his book, My Voyage to Truth, he writes:

“The ruins of idealist philosophy have given way to the new, Marxist materialist philosophy, which has gripped the minds of our youth. That is understandable, for the more acute social contradictions become in our occupied country, the clearer do the broad masses see the truth of dialectical materialism.”[21]

Dunham and Kenjuro are not isolated cases. Many other progressive philosophers and scientists are combating philosophical idealism and defend and propagate dialectical materialism.

Among prominent champions of materialism in the United States are Harry Wells, Howard Selsam, and other Marxists. The wellknown progressive philosopher, John Somerville, has done much to acquaint Americans with the Marxist-Leninist world outlook. Other Americans who have helped to expose idealist doctrines and are closely associated with materialist philosophy are Roy Wood Sellars, Corliss Lamont and Paul Grosser. Among British materialists who have earned wide recognition are Maurice Cornforth, John Lewis, Arthur Henry Robertson and such eminent scientists as J. D. Bernal and J. B. S. Haldane, who have made a considerable contribution to the advance of a progressive world outlook. The French and Italian Marxists Roger Garaudy, Jean Canapa, Mario Spinella, Cesare Luporini and many more have rendered valuable services in disseminating progressive philosophical ideas. The works of Eli de Gortari (Mexico) and H. Theodoridis (Greece) show that in other countries, too, the materialist philosophy is gaining ever increasing support.

Materialism is not only being defended by those who came to adopt it through active social activity and philosophical reflection. It is also winning increasing support among leading representatives of contemporary natural science, for many important discoveries in recent decades have furnished convincing proof of the truth of Marxist philosophical materialism.

Einstein’s theory of relativity demonstrated the inseparable link between space and time and moving matter and confirmed the dialectical-materialistic view of space and time as modes of the existence of matter. Modern physics, by its disclosure of the intricate structure of the atomic nucleus and its discovery of new elementary material particles, provided fresh confirmation of the 58 Marxist materialist theses that matter is inexhaustible and its forms infinite. Gradually, physicists came to accept the dialectical view of the microparticle as the unity of corpuscular and wave properties.

Progress in physics has been accompanied by progress in chemistry, biology and physiology. Achievements in theoretical natural science have led to immense advances in technology. Three great scientific and technical discoveries - atomic energy, electronics and rocket techniques - have ushered in a new era in the history of the productive forces of mankind and have immensely increased man’s power over nature. Artificial earth satellites and man’s travel beyond the bounds of the earth’s atmosphere have ushered in a new era, that of the conquest of illimitable cosmic space. The application of the latest physical and chemical methods in biology has made it possible to obtain a deeper insight into the structure of proteins and to come closer towards solving the riddle of life, and in particular towards elucidating the problem of the origin of living beings.

These and other discoveries and achievements confirm the truth of dialectical materialism and often compel positivist-minded scientists to revise their views. This is indicated, for example, by the fact that in the closing years of his life Einstein more and more frequently made statements that supported materialism, and that such distinguished scientists as Leopold Infeld and Louis de Broglie, former adherents of positivism, have finally come over to materialism.

Some world-renowned scientists (Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg), for many years the recognised leaders of positivist physics, later began to reject and criticise many of the theses of positivism. Among the scientists and philosophers who support positivism, there are already a number who have begun to waver and are gradually turning to materialism.

The recent discoveries in natural science are of specially great importance because they undermine the old metaphysical world outlook and bring to the fore the dialectical conception of the world. V. I. Lenin, summarising in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism the new developments in physics in the early years of the century, had every justification to state: "Modern physics is in travail; it is giving birth to dialectical materialism.”[22] The development of modern physics confirms the correctness of Lenin’s forecast.

By its very development, contemporary natural science leads to the acceptance of materialist dialectics. This was realised by such outstanding physicists of our time as Paul Langevin, Frederic Joliot-Curie and many others. They became determined exponents of dialectical materialism.

Ours is a time when successful struggle against reactionary philosophy and ability to defend the materialist world outlook require more than acceptance of materialism) they require that one be an enlightened exponent of dialectical materialism.

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