|
V. I. LENIN MATERIALISM
|
.GIF)
|
Prepared © for the Internet by David J. Romagnolo, djr@cruzio.com (August 1997)
Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy
[Part II]
C O N T E N T S
|
Chapter Three |
| |
|
What Is Matter? What Is Experience? |
163 | |
|
Chapter Four |
| |
|
The Criticism of Kantianism from the Left and from the Right |
| |
|
| ||
page 163
<"c3">
THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE OF DIALECTICAL
MATERIALISM AND OF EMPIRIO-CRITICISM. III
<"c3s1">
1. WHAT IS MATTER? WHAT IS EXPERIENCE?
The first of these questions is constantly being hurled by the idealists and agnostics, including the Machians, at the materialists; the second question by the materialists at the Machians. Let us try to make the point at issue clear.
Avenarius says on the subject of matter:
"Within the purified, 'complete experience' there is nothing 'physical' -- 'matter' in the metaphysical absolute conception -- for 'matter' according to this conception is only an abstraction; it would be the total of the counter-terms abstracted from every central term. Just as in the principal co-ordination, that is, 'complete experience,' a counter-term is inconceivable (undenkbar ) without a central term, so 'matter' in the metaphysical absolute conception is a complete chimera (Unding )" (Bemerkungen [Notes ], S. 2, in the journal cited, § 119).
page 164
In all this gibberish one thing is evident, namely, that Avenarius designates the physical or matter by the terms absolute and metaphysics, for, according to his theory of the principal co-ordination (or, in the new way, "complete expcrience"), the counter-term is inseparable from the central term, the environment from the self ; the non-self is inseparable from the self (as J. G. Fichte said). That this theory is disguised subjective idealism we have already shown, and the nature of Avenarius' attacks on "matter" is quite obvious: the idealist denies physical being that is independent of the mind and therefore rejects the concept elaborated by philosophy for such being. That matter is "physical" (i.e., that which is most familiar and immediately given to man, and the existence of which no one save an inmate of a lunatic asylum can doubt) is not denied by Avenarius; he only insists on the acceptance of "his " theory of the indissoluble connection between the environment and the self.
Mach expresses the same thought more simply, without philosophical flourishes: "What we call matter is a certain systematic combination of the elements (sensations)" (Analysis of Sensations, p. 265). Mach thinks that by this assertion he is effecting a "radical change" in the usual world outlook. In reality this is the old, old subjective idealism, the nakedness of which is concealed by the word "element."
And lastly, the English Machian, Pearson, a rabid antagonist of materialism, says: "Now there can be no scientific objection to our classifying certain more or less permanent groups of sense-impressions together and terming them matter, -- to do so indeed leads us very near to John Stuart Mill's definition of matter as a 'permanent possibility of sensation,' -- but this definition of matter then leads us
page 165
entirely away from matter as the thing which moves" (The Grammar of Science, 2nd ed., 1900, p. 249). Here there is not even the fig-leaf of the "elements," and the idealist openly stretches out a hand to the agnostic.
As the reader sees, all these arguments of the founders of empirio-criticism entirely and exclusively revolve around the old epistemological question of the relation of thinking to being, of sensation to the physical. It required the extreme naïveté of the Russian Machians to discern anything here that is even remotely related to "recent science," or "recent positivism." All the philosophers mentioned by us, some frankly, others guardedly, replace the fundamental philosophical line of materialism (from being to thinking, from matter to sensation) by the reverse line of idealism. Their denial of matter is the old answer to epistemological problems, which consists in denying the existence of an external, objective source of our sensations, of an objective reality corresponding to our sensations. On the other hand, the recognition of the philosophical line denied by the idealists and agnostics is expressed in the definitions: matter is that which, acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensation; matter is the objective reality given to us in sensation, and so forth.
Bogdanov, pretending to argue only against Beltov and cravenly ignoring Engels, is indignant at such definitions, which, don't you see, "prove to be simple repetitions" (Empirio-Monism, Bk. III, p. xvi) of the "formula" (of Engels, our "Marxist" forgets to add) that for one trend in philosophy matter is primary and spirit secondary, while for the other trend the reverse is the case. All the Russian Machians exultantly echo Bogdanov's "refutation"! But the slightest reflection could have shown these people that it is impos-
page 166
sible, in the very nature of the case, to give any definition of these two ultimate concepts of epistemology save one that indicates which of them is taken as primary. What is meant by giving a "definition"? It means essentially to bring a given concept within a more comprehensive concept. For example, when I give the definition "an ass is an animal," I am bringing the concept "ass" within a more comprehensive concept. The question then is, are there more comprehensive concepts, with which the theory of knowledge could operate, than those of being and thinking, matter and sensation, physical and mental? No. These are the ultimate concepts, the most comprehensive concepts which epistemology has in point of fact so far not surpassed (apart from changes in nomenclature, which are always possible). One must be a charlatan or an utter blockhead to demand a "definition" of these two "series" of concepts of ultimate comprehensiveness which would not be a "mere repetition": one or the other must be taken as the primary. Take the three afore-mentioned arguments on matter. What do they all amount to? To this, that these philosophers proceed from the mental or the self, to the physical, or environment, as from the central term to the counter-term -- or from sensation to matter, or from sense-perception to matter. Could Avenarius, Mach and Pearson in fact have given any other "definition" of these fundamental concepts, save by pointing to the trend of their philosophical line? Could they have defined in any other way, in any specific way, what the self is, what sensation is, what sense-perception is? One has only to formulate the question clearly to realise what utter non-sense the Machians are talking when they demand that the materialists give a definition of matter which would not amount to a repetition of the proposition that matter, nature,
page 167
being, the physical -- is primary, and spirit, consciousness, sensation, the psychical -- is secondary.
One expression of the genius of Marx and Engels was that they despised pedantic playing with new words, erudite terms, and subtle "isms," and said simply and plainly: there is a materialist line and an idealist line in philosophy, and between them there are various shades of agnosticism. The painful quest for a "new" point of view in philosophy betrays the same poverty of mind that is revealed in the painful effort to create a "new" theory of value, or a "new" theory of rent, and so forth.
Of Avenarius, his disciple Carstanjen says that he once expressed himself in private conversation as follows: "I know neither the physical nor the mental, but only some third." To the remark of one writer that the concept of this third was not given by Avenarius, Petzoldt replied: "We know why he could not advance such a concept. The third lacks a counter-concept (Gegenbegriff ). . . . The question, what is the third? is illogically put" (Einf. i.d. Ph. d. r. E., II, 329).* Petzoldt understands that an ultimate concept cannot be defined. But he does not understand that the resort to a "third" is a mere subterfuge, for every one of us knows what is physical and what is mental, but none of us knows at present what that "third" is. Avenarius was merely covering up his tracks by this subterfuge and actually was declaring that the self is the primary (central term) and nature (environment) the secondary (counter-term).
Of course, even the antithesis of matter and mind has absolute significance only within the bounds of a very lim-
* Einführung in die Philosophie der reinen Erfahrung [Introduction to the Philosophy of Pure Experience ], Vol. II, p. 329. --Ed.
page 168
ited field -- in this case exclusively within the bounds of the fundamental epistemological problem of what is to be regarded as primary and what as secondary. Beyond these bounds the relative character of this antithesis is indubitable.
Let us now examine how the word "experience" is used in empirio-critical philosophy. The first paragraph of The Critique of Pure Experience expounds the following "assumption": "Any part of our environment stands in relation to human individuals in such a way that, the former having been given, the latter speak of their experience as follows: 'this is experienced,' 'this is an experience'; or 'it followed from experience,' or 'it depends upon experience.'" (Russ. trans., p. 1.) Thus experience is defined in terms of these same concepts: self and environment; while the "doctrine" of their "indissoluble" connection is for the time being tucked out of the way. Further: "The synthetic concept of pure experience" -- namely, experience "as a predication for which, in all its components, only parts of the environment serve as a premise" (pp. 1 and 2). If we assume that the environment exists independently of "declarations" and "predications" of man, then it becomes possible to interpret experience in a materialist way! "The analytical concept of pure experience" -- "namely, as a predication to which noth ing is admixed that would not be in its turn experience and which, therefore, in itself is nothing but experience" (p. 2). Experience is experience. And there are people who take this quasi-erudite rigmarole for true wisdom!
It is essential to add that in the second volume of The Critique of Pure Experience Avenarius regards "experience" as a "special case" of the mental ; that he divides experience into sachhafte Werte (thing-values) and gedankenhafte Werte
page 169
(thought-values); that "experience in the broad sense" includes the latter; that "complete experience" is<"p169"> identified with the principal co-ordination (Bemerkungen )[67]. In short, you pay your money and take your choice. "Experience" embraces both the materialist and the idealist line in philosophy and sanctifies the muddling of them. But while our Machians confidingly accept "pure experience" as pure coin of the realm, in philosophical literature the representatives of the various trends are alike in pointing to Avenarius' abuse of this concept. "What pure experience is," A. Riehl writes, "remains vague with Avenarius, and his explanation that 'pure experience is experience to which nothing is admixed that is not in its turn experience' obviously revolves in a circle" (Systematische Philosophie [Systematic Philosopby ], Leipzig, 1907, S. 102). Pure experience for Avenarius, writes Wundt, is at times any kind of fantasy, and at others, a pre dication with the character of "corporeality" (Philosophische Studien, XIII. Band, S. 92-93). Avenarius stretches the concept experience (S. 382). "On the precise definition of the terms experience and pure experience," writes Cauwelaert, "depends the meaning of the whole of this philosophy. Avenarius does not give a precise definition" (Revue néo-scolastique, fevrier 1907, p. 61). "The vagueness of the term 'experience' stands him in good stead, and so in the end Avenarius falls back on the timeworn argument of subjective idealism" (under the pretence of combating it), says Norman Smith (Mind, Vol. XV, p. 29).
"I openly declare that the inner sense, the soul of my philosophy consists in this that a human being possesses nothing save experience; a human being comes to everything to which he comes only through experience. . . ." A zealous philosopher of pure experience, is he not? The author of these
page 170
words is the subjective idealist Fichte (Sonnenklarer Bericht, usw., S. 12). We know from the history of philosophy that the interpretation of the concept experience divided the classical materialists from the idealists. Today professorial philosophy of all shades disguises its reactionary nature by declaiming on the subject of "experience." All the immanentists fall back on experience. In the preface to the second edition of his Knowledge and Error, Mach praises a book by Professor Wilhelm Jerusalem in which we read: "The acceptance of a divine original being is not contradictory to experience" (Der kritische Idealismus und die reine Logik [Critical Idealism and Pure Logic ], S. 222).
One can only commiserate with people who believed Avenarius and Co. that the "obsolete" distinction between materialism and idealism can be surmounted by the word "experience." When Valentinov and Yushkevich accuse Bogdanov, who departed somewhat from pure Machism, of abusing the word experience, these gentlemen are only betraying their ignorance. Bogdanov is "not guilty" in this case; he only slavishly borrowed the muddle of Mach and Avenarius. When Bogdanov says that "consciousness and immediate mental experience are identical concepts" (Empirio-Monism, Bk. II, p. 53) while matter is "not experience" but "the unknown which evokes everything known" (Empirio-Monism, Bk. III, p. xiii), he is interpreting experience idealistically. And, of course, he is not the first* nor the
* In England Comrade Belfort Bax has been exercising himsclf in this way for a long time. A French reviewer of his book, The Roots of Reality, rather bitingly remarked: experience is only another word for consciousness"; then come forth as an open idealist! (Revue de philosophie,[68] 1907, No. 10, p. 399).
page 171
last to build petty idealist systems on the word experience. When he replies to the reactionary philosophers by declaring that attempts to transcend the boundaries of experience lead in fact "only to empty abstractions and contradictory images, all the elements of which have nevertheless been taken from experience" (Bk. I, p. 48), he is drawing a contrast between the empty abstractions of the human mind and that which exists outside of man and independently of his mind, in other words, he is interpreting experience as a materialist.
Similarly, even Mach, although he makes idealism his starting point (bodies are complexes of sensations or "elements") frequently strays into a materialist interpretation of the word experience. "We must not philosophise out of ourselves (nicht aus uns herausphilosophieren ), but must take<"p171"> from experience," he says in the Mechanik [69] (3rd Germ. ed., 1897, p. 14). Here a contrast is drawn between experience and philosophising out of ourselves, in other words, experience is regarded as something objective, something given to man from the outside; it is interpreted materialistically. Here is another example: "What we observe in nature is imprinted, although uncomprehended and unanalysed, upon our ideas, which, then, in their most general and strongest (stärksten ) features imitate (nachahmen ) the processes of nature. In these experiences we possess a treasure-store (Schatz ) which is ever to hand. . ." (op. cit., p. 27). Here nature is taken as primary and sensation and experience as products. Had Mach consistently adhered to this point of view in the fundamental questions of epistemology, he would have spared humanity many foolish idealist "complexes." A third example: "The close connection of thought and experience creates modern natural science. Experience gives rise to a thought. The latter is further elaborated and is again
page 172
compared with experience" (Erkenntnis und Irrtum, S. 200). Mach's special "philosophy" is here thrown overboard, and the author instinctively accepts the customary standpoint of the scientists, who regard experience materialistically.
To summarise: the word "experience," on which the Machians build their systems, has long been serving as a shield for idealist systems, and is now serving Avenarius and Co. in eclectically passing to and fro between the idealist position and the materialist position. The various "definitions" of this concept are only expressions of those two fundamental lines in philosophy which were so strikingly revealed by Engels.
<"c3s2">
CONCEPT "EXPERIENCE"
On pages x-xi of his introduction to L. Feuerbach (1905 ed.) Plekhanov says:
"One German writer has remarked that for empirio-criticism experience is only an object of investigation, and not a means of knowledge. If that is so, then the distinction between empirio-criticism and materialism loses all meaning, and discussion of the question whether or not empirio-criticism is destined to replace materialism is absolutely shallow and idle."
This is one complete muddle.
Fr. Carstanjen, one of the most "orthodox" followers of Avenarius, says in his article on empirio-criticism (a reply to Wundt), that "for The Critique of Pure Experience experience is not a means of knowledge but only an object of
page 173
investigation."[*] It follows that according to Plekhanov any distinction between the views of Fr. Carstanjen and materialism is meaningless!
Fr. Carstanjen is almost literally quoting Avenarius,<"p173"> who in his Notes [70] emphatically contrasts his conception of experience as that which is given us, that which we find (das Vorgefundene ), with the conception of experience as a "means of knowledge" in "the sense of the prevailing theories of knowledge, which essentially are fully metaphysical" (op. cit., p. 401). Petzoldt, following Avenarius, says the same thing in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Pure Experience (Bd. I, S. 170). Thus, according to Plekhanov, the distinction between the views of Carstanjen, Avenarius, Petzoldt and materialism is meaningless! Either Plekhanov has not read Carstanjen and Co. as thoroughly as he should, or he has taken his reference to "a German writer" at fifth hand.
What then does this statement, uttered by some of the most prominent empirio-criticists and not understood by Plekhanov, mean? Carstanjen wishes to say that Avenarius in his The Critique of Pure Experience takes experience, i.e., all "human predications," as the object of investigation. Avenarius does not investigate here, says Carstanjen (op. cit., p. 50), whether these predications are real, or whether they relate, for example, to ghosts; he merely arranges, systematises, formally classifies all possible human predications, both idealist and materialist (p. 53), without going into the essence of the question. Carstanjen is absolutely right when he characterises this point of view as "scepticism par excel- <"fnp173">
* Vierteljabrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, Jahrg. 22, 1898, S. 45.
page 174
lence" (p. 213). In this article, by the way, Carstanjen defends his beloved master from the ignominious (for a German professor) charge of materialism levelled against him by Wundt. Why are we materialists, pray? -- such is the burden of Carstanjen's objections -- when we speak of "experience" we do not mean it in the ordinary current sense, which leads or might lead to materialism, but in the sense that we investigate everything that men "predicate" as experience. Carstanjen and Avenarius regard the view that experience is a means of knowledge as materialistic (that, perhaps, is the most common opinion, but nevertheless, untrue, as we have seen in the case of Fichte). Avenarius entrenches himself against the "prevailing" "metaphysics" which persists in regarding the brain as the organ of thought and which ignores the theories of introjection and co-ordination. By the given or the found (das Vorgefundene ), Avenarius means the indissoluble connection between the self and the environment, which leads to a confused idealist interpretation of "experience."
Hence, both the materialist and the idealist, as well as the Humean and the Kantian lines in philosophy may unquestionably be concealed beneath the word "experience"; but neither the definition of experience as an object of investigation,* nor its definition as a means of knowledge is decisive in this respect. Carstanjen's remarks against Wundt especially have no relation whatever to the question of the distinction between empirio-criticism and materialism.
* Plekhanov perhaps thought that Carstanjen had said, "an object of knowledge independent of knowledge," and not an "object of investigation"? This would indeed be materialism. But neither Carstanjen, nor anybody else acquainted with empirio-criticism, said or could have said, any such thing.
page 175
As a curiosity let us note that on this point Bogdanov and Valentinov, in their reply to Plekhanov, revealed no greater knowledge of the subject. Bogdanov declared: "It is not quite clear" (Bk. III, p. xi). -- "It is the task of empirio-criticists to examine this formulation and to accept or reject the condition." A very convenient position: I, forsooth, am not a Machian and am not therefore obliged to find out in what sense a certain Avenarius or Carstanjen speaks of experience! Bogdanov wants to make use of Machism (and of the Machian confusion regarding "experience"), but he does not want to be held responsible for it.
The "pure" empirio-criticist Valentinov transcribed Plekhanov's remark and publicly danced the cancan; he sneered at Plekhanov for not naming the author and for not explaining what the matter was all about (op. cit., pp. 108-09). But at the same time this empirio-critical philosopher in his answer said not a single word on the substance of the matter, although acknowledging that he had read Plekhanov's remark "three times or more" (and had apparently not under stood it). Oh, those Machians!
<"c3s3">
The question of causality is particularly important in determining the philosophical line of any new "ism," and we must therefore dwell on it in some detail.
Let us begin with an exposition of the materialist theory of knowledge on this point. L. Feuerbach's views are expounded with particular clarity in his reply to R. Haym already referred to.
page 176
"'Nature and human reason,' says Haym, 'are for him (Feuerbach) completely divorced, and between them a gulf is formed which cannot be spanned from one side or the other.' Haym grounds this reproach on § 48 of my Essence of Religion where it is said that 'nature may be conceived only through nature itself, that its necessity is neither human nor logical, neither metaphysical nor mathematical, that nature alone is the being to which it is impossible to apply any human measure, although we compare and give names to its phenomena, in order to make them comprehensible to us, and in general apply human expressions and conceptions to them, as for example: order, purpose, law; and are obliged to do so because of the character of our language.' What does this mean? Does it mean that there is no order in nature, so that, for example, autumn may be succeeded by summer, spring by winter, winter by autumn? That there is no purpose, so that, for example, there is no co-ordination between the lungs and the air, between light and the eye, between sound and the ear? That there is no law, so that, for example, the earth may move now in an ellipse, now in a circle, that it may revolve around the sun now in a year, now in a quarter of an hour? What nonsense! What then is meant by this passage? Nothing more than to distinguish between that which belongs to nature and that which be longs to man; it does not assert that there is actually nothing in nature corresponding to the words or ideas of order, purpose, law. All that it does is to deny the identity between thought and being; it denies that they exist in nature exactly as they do in the head or mind of man. Order, purpose, law are words used by man to translate the acts of nature into his own language in order that he may understand them. These words are not devoid of meaning or of objective con-
page 177
tent (nicht sinn-, d. h. gegenstandslose Worte ); nevertheless, a distinction must be made between the original and the translation. Order, purpose, law in the human sense express something arbitrary.
"From the contingency of order, purpose and law in nature, theism expressly infers their arbitrary origin; it infers the existence of a being distinct from nature which brings order, purpose, law into a nature that is in itself (an sich ) chaotic (dissolute ) and indifferent to all determination. The reason of the theists . . . is reason contradictory to nature, reason absolutely devoid of understanding of the essence of nature. The reason of the theists splits nature into two beings -- one material, and the other formal or spiritual" (Werke, VII. Band, 1903, S. 518-20).
Thus Feuerbach recognises objective law in nature and objective causality, which are reflected only with approximate fidelity by human ideas of order, law and so forth. With Feuerbach the recognition of objective law in nature is inseparably connected with the recognition of the objective reality of the external world, of objects, bodies, things, reflected by our mind. Feuerbach's views are consistently materialistic. All other views, or rather, any other philosophical line on the question of causality, the denial of objective law, causality and necessity in nature, are justly regarded by Feuerbach as belonging to the fideist trend. For it is, indeed, clear that the subjectivist line on the question of causality, the deduction of the order and necessity of nature not from the external objective world, but from consciousness, reason, logic, and so forth, not only cuts human reason off from nature, not only opposes the former to the latter, but makes nature a part of reason, instead of regarding reason as a part of nature. The subjectivist line on the ques-
page 178
tion of causality is philosophical idealism (varieties of which are the theories of causality of Hume and Kant), i.e., fideism, more or less weakened and diluted. The recognition of objective law in nature and the recognition that this law is reflected with approximate fidelity in the mind of man is materialism.
As regards Engels, he had, if I am not mistaken, no occasion to contrast his materialist view with other trends on the particular question of causality. He had no need to do so, since he had definitely dissociated himself from all the agnostics on the more fundamental question of the objective reality of the external world in general. But to anyone who has read his philosophical works at all attentively it must be clear that Engels does not admit even the shadow of a doubt as to the existence of objective law, causality and necessity in nature. We shall confine ourselves to a few examples<"p178">. In the first section of Anti-Dühring [71] Engels says: "In order to understand these details [of the general picture of the world phenomena], we must detach them from their natural (natürlich ) or historical connection and examine each one separately, its nature, special causes, effects, etc." (pp. 5-6). That this natural connection, the connection between natural phenomena, exists objectively, is obvious. Engels particularly emphasises the dialectical view of cause and effect: "And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases, but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there
page 179
and then, and vice versa " (p. 8). Hence, the human conception of cause and effect always somewhat simplifies the objective connection of the phenomena of nature, reflecting it only approximately, artificially isolating one or another aspect of a single world process. If we find that the laws of thought correspond with the laws of nature, says Engels, this becomes quite conceivable when we take into account that reason and consciousness are "products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of nature." Of course, "the products of the human brain, being in the last analysis also products of nature, do not contradict the rest of nature's interconnections (Naturzusammenhang )<"p179"> but are in correspondence with them (p. 22).[72] There is no doubt that there exists a natural, objective interconnection between the phenomena of the world. Engels constantly speaks of the "laws of nature," of the "necessities of nature" (Naturnotwendigkeiten ), without considering it necessary to explain the generally known propositions of materialism.
In Ludwig Feuerbach also we read that "the general laws of motion -- both of the external world and of human thought -- [are] two sets of laws which are identical in substance but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously in the form of external necessity in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents" (p. 38). And Engels reproaches the old natural philosophy for having replaced "the real but as yet unknown interconnections" (of the phenomena of nature)<"p179a"> by "ideal and imaginary ones" (p. 42).[73] Engels' recognition of objective law, causality and necessity in nature is absolutely clear, as is his emphasis on the relative character of our,
page 180
i.e., man's approximate reflections of this law in various concepts.
Passing to Joseph Dietzgen, we must first note one of the innumerable distortions committed by our Machians. One of the authors of the Studies "in" the Philosophy of Marxism, Mr. Helfond, tells us: "The basic points of Dietzgen's world outlook may be summarised in the following propositions: . . . (9) The causal dependence which we ascribe to things is in reality not contained in the things themselves" (p. 248). This is sheer nonsense. Mr. Helfond, whose own views represent a veritable hash of materialism and agnosticism, has outrageously falsified J. Dietzgen. Of course, we can find plenty of confusion, inexactnesses and errors in Dietzgen, such as gladden the hearts of the Machians and oblige materialists to regard Dietzgen as a philosopher who is not entirely consistent. But to attribute to the materialist J. Dietzgen a direct denial of the materialist view of causality -- only a Helfond, only the Russian Machians are capable of that.
"Objective scientific knowledge," says Dietzgen in his The Nature of the Workings of the Human Mind (German ed. 1903), "seeks for causes not by faith or speculation, but by experience and induction, not a priori, but a posteriori. Natural science looks for causes not outside or back of phenomena, but within or by means of them" (pp. 94-95). "Causes are the products of the faculty of thought. They are, however, not its pure products, but are produced by it in conjunction with sense material. This sense material gives the causes thus derived their objective existence. Just as we demand that a truth should be the truth of an objective phenomenon, so we demand that a cause should be real, that it should be the cause of some objective effect" (pp. 98-99). "The cause of the thing is its connection" (p. 100).
page 181
It is clear from this that Mr. Helfond has made a statement which is directly contrary to fact. The world outlook of materialism expounded by J. Dietzgen recognises that "the causal dependence" is contained "in the things themselves." It was necessary for the Machian hash that Mr. Helfond should confuse the materialist line with the idealist line on the question of causality.
Let us now proceed to the latter line.
A clear statement of the starting point of Avenarius' philosophy on this question is to be found in his first work, Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäss dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmasses. In § 81 we read: "Just as we do not experience (erfahren ) force as causing motion, so we do not experience the necessity for any motion. . . . All we experience (erfahren ) is that the one follows the other." This is the Humean standpoint in its purest form: sensation, experience tell us nothing of any necessity. A philosopher who asserts (on the principle of "the economy of thought") that only sensation exists could not have come to any other conclusion. "Since the idea of causality," we read further, "demands force and necessity or constraint as integral parts of the effect, so it falls together with the latter" (§ 82). "Necessity therefore expresses a particular degree of probability with which the effect is, or may be, expected" (§ 83, thesis).
This is outspoken subjectivism on the question of causality. And if one is at all consistent one cannot come to any other conclusion unless one recognises objective reality as the source of our sensations.
Let us turn to Mach.<"p181"> In a special chapter, "Causality and Explanation" (Wärmelehre,[74] 2. Auflage, 1900, S. 432-39), we
page 182
read: "The Humean criticism (of the conception of causality) nevertheless retains its validity." Kant and Hume (Mach does not trouble to deal with other philosophers) solve the problem of causality differently. "We prefer" Hume's solution. "Apart from logical necessity [Mach's italics] no other necessity, for instance physical necessity, exists." This is exactly the view which was so vigorously combated by Feuerbach. It never even occurs to Mach to deny his kinship with Hume. Only the Russian Machians could go so far as to assert that Hume's agnosticism could be "combined" with Marx's and Engels' materialism. In Mach's Mechanik, we read: "In nature there is neither cause nor effect" (S. 474, 3. Auflage, 1897). "I have repeatedly demonstrated that all forms of the law of causality spring from subjective motives (Trieben ) and that there is no necessity for nature to correspond with them" (p. 495).
We must here note that our Russian Machians with amazing naïveté replace the question of the materialist or idealist trend of all arguments on the law of causality by the question of one or another formulation of this law. They believed the German empirio-critical professors that merely to say "functional correlation" was to make a discovery in "recent positivism" and to release one from the "fetishism" of expressions like "necessity," "law," and so forth. This of course is utterly absurd, and Wundt was fully justified in ridiculing such a change of words (in the article, quoted above, in Philosophische Studien, S. 383, 388), which in fact changes nothing. Mach himself speaks of "all forms" of the law of causality and in his Knowledge and Error (2. Auflage, S. 278) makes the self-evident reservation that the concept function can express the "dependence of elements" more precisely only when the possibility is achieved of expressing
page 183
the results of investigation in measurable quantities, which even in sciences like chemistry has only partly been achieved. Apparently, in the opinion of our Machians, who are so credulous as to professorial discoveries, Feuerbach (not to mention Engels) did not know that the concepts order, law, and so forth, can under certain conditions be expressed as a mathematically defined functional relation!
The really important epistemological question that divides the philosophical trends is not the degree of precision attained by our descriptions of causal connections, or whether these descriptions can be expressed in exact mathematical formulas, but whether the source of our knowledge of these connections is objective natural law or properties of our mind, its innate faculty of apprehending certain a priori truths, and so forth. This is what so irrevocably divides the materialists Feuerbach, Marx and Engels from the agnostics (Humeans) Avenarius and Mach.
In certain parts of his works, Mach, whom it would be a sin to accuse of consistency, frequently "forgets" his agreement with Hume and his own subjectivist theory of causality and argues "simply" as a natural scientist, i.e., from the instinctive materialist standpoint. For instance, in his Mechanik, we read of "the uniformity which nature teaches us to find in its phenomena" (French ed., p. 182). But if we do find uniformity in the phenomena of nature, does this mean that uniformity exists objectively outside our mind? No. On the question of the uniformity of nature Mach also delivers himself thus: "The power that prompts us to complete in thought facts only partially observed is the power of association. It is greatly strengthened by repetition. It then appears to us to be a power which is independent of our will and of individual facts, a power which directs
page 184
thoughts and [Mach's italics] facts, which keeps both in mutual correspondence as a law governing both. That we consider ourselves capable of making predictions with the help of such a law only [!] proves that there is sufficient uniformity in our environment, but it does not prove the necessity of the success of our predictions" (Wärmelehre, S. 383).
It follows that we may and ought to look for a necessity apart from the uniformity of our environment, i.e., of nature! Where to look for it is the secret of idealist philosophy which is afraid to recognise man's perceptive faculty as a simple reflection of nature. In his last work, Knowledge and Error Mach even defines a law of nature as a "limitation of expectation" (2. Auflage, S. 450 ff.)! Solipsism claims its own.
Let us examine the position of other writers of the same philosophical trend. The Englishman, Karl Pearson, expresses himself with characteristic precision (The Grammar of Science, 2nd ed.): "The laws of science are products of the human mind rather than factors of the external world" (p. 36). "Those, whether poets or materialists, who do homage to nature, as the sovereign of man, too often forget that the order and complexity they admire are at least as much a product of man's perceptive and reasoning faculties as are their own memories and thoughts" (p. 185). "The comprehensive character of natural law is due to the ingenuity of the human mind" (ibid.). "Man is the maker of natural law," it is stated in Chapter III, § 4. "There is more meaning in the statement that man gives laws to nature than in its converse that nature gives laws to man," although the worthy professor is regretfully obliged to admit, the latter (materialist) view is "unfortunately far too common today" (p. 87). In the fourth chapter, which is devoted to the ques-
page 185
tion of causality, Pearson formulates the following thesis (§ 11): "The necessity lies in the world of conceptions and not in the world of perceptions." It should be noted that for Pearson perceptions or sense-impressions are the reality existing outside us. "In the uniformity with which sequences of perception are repeated (the routine of perceptions) there is also no inherent necessity, but it is a necessary condition for the existence of thinking beings that there should be a routine in the perceptions. The necessity thus lies in the nature of the thinking being and not in the perceptions themselves; thus it is conceivably a product of the perceptive faculty (p. 139)
Our Machian, with whom Mach himself frequently expresses complete solidarity, thus arrives safely and soundly at pure Kantian idealism: it is man who dictates laws to nature and not nature that dictates laws to man! The important thing is not the repetition of Kant's doctrine of apriorism -- which does not define the idealist line in philosophy as such, but only a particular formulation of this line -- but the fact that reason, mind, consciousness are here primary, and nature secondary. It is not reason that is a part of nature, one of its highest products, the reflection of its processes, but nature that is a part of reason, which thereby is stretched from the ordinary, simple human reason known to us all to a "stupendous," as Dietzgen puts it, mysterious, divine reason. The Kantian-Machian formula, that "man gives laws to nature," is a fideist formula. If our Machians stare wide-eyed on reading Engels' statement that the fundamental characteristic of materialism is the acceptance of nature and not spirit as primary, it only shows how incapable they are of distinguishing the really impor-
page 186
tant philosophical trends from the mock erudition and sage jargon of the professors.
J. Petzoldt, who in his two-volume work analysed and developed Avenarius, may serve as an excellent example of reactionary Machian scholasticism. "Even to this day," says he, "one hundred and fifty years after Hume, substantiality and causality paralyse the daring of the thinker" (Introduction to the Philosophy of Pure Experience, Bd. I, S. 31). It goes without saying that those who are most "daring" are the solipsists who discovered sensation without organic matter, thought without brain, nature without objective law! "And the last formulation of causality, which we have not yet mentioned, necessity, or necessity in nature, contains something vague and mystical" -- (the idea of "fetishism," "anthropomorphism," etc.) (pp. 32, 34). Oh, the poor mystics, Feuerbach, Marx and Engels! They have been talking all the time of necessity in nature, and have even been calling those who hold the Humean position theoretical reactionaries! Petzoldt rises above all "anthropomorphism." He has discovered the great "law of unique determination," which eliminates every obscurity, every trace of "fetishism," etc., etc., etc. For example, the parallelogram of forces (p. 35). This cannot be "proven"; it must be accepted as a "fact of experience." It cannot be conceded that a body under like impulses will move in different ways. "We cannot concede nature such indefiniteness and arbitrariness; we must demand from it definiteness and law" (p. 35). Well, well! We demand of nature obedience to law. The bourgeoisie demands reaction of its professors. "Our thought demands definiteness from nature, and nature always conforms to this demand; we shall even see that in a certain sense it is compelled to conform to it" (p. 36). Why, having
page 187
received an impulse in the direction of the line AB, does a body move towards C and not towards D or F, etc.?
"Why does nature not choose any of the countless other directions?" (p. 37). Because that would be "multiple determination," and the great empirio-critical discovery of Joseph Petzoldt demands unique determination.
The "empirio-criticists" fill scores of pages with such unutterable trash!
". . . We have remarked more than once that our thesis does not derive its force from a sum of separate experiences, but that, on the contrary, we demand that nature should recognise its validity (seine Geltung ). Indeed, even before it becomes a law it has already become for us a principle with which we approach reality, a postulate. It is valid, so to speak, a priori, independently of all separate experiences. It would, indeed, be unbefitting for a philosophy of pure experience to preach a priori truths and thus relapse into the most sterile metaphysics. Its apriorism can only be a logical one, never a psychological, or metaphysical one" (p. 40). Of course, if we call apriorism logical, then the reactionary nature of the idea disappears and it becomes elevated to the level of "recent positivism"!
There can be no unique determination of psychical phenomena, Petzoldt further teaches us; the role of imagination, the significance of great inventions, etc., here create excep-
page 188
tions, while the law of nature, or the law of spirit, tolerates "no exceptions" (p. 65). We have before us a pure metaphysician, who has not the slightest inkling of the relativity of the difference between the contingent and the necessary.
I may, perhaps, be reminded -- continues Petzoldt -- of the motivation of historical events or of the development of character in poetry. "If we examine the matter carefully we shall find that there is no such unique determination. There is not a single historical event or a single drama in which we could not imagine the participants acting differently under similar psychical conditions. . ." (p. 73). "Unique determination is not only absent in the realm of the psychical, but we are also entitled to demand its absence from reality [Petzoldt's italics]. Our doctrine is thus elevated to the rank of a postulate, i.e., to the rank of a fact, which we regard as a necessary condition of a much earlier experience, as its logical a priori " (Petzoldt's italics, p. 76).
And Petzoldt continues to operate with this "logical a priori " in both volumes of his Introduction, and in the booklet issued in 1906, The World Problem from the Positivist Standpoint.* Here is a second instance of a noted empirio-criticist who has imperceptibly slipped into Kantianism and who serves up the most reactionary doctrines with a somewhat different sauce. And this is not fortuitous, for at the very foundations of Mach's and Avenarius' teachings on causality there lies an idealist falsehood, which no highflown talk of "positivism" can cover up. The distinction between the Humean and the Kantian theories of causality
* J. Petzoldt, Das Weltproblem von positivistischein Standpunkte aus, Leipzig, 1906, S. 130: "Also from the empirical standpoint there can be a logical a priori ; causality is the logical a priori of the experienced (erfahrungsmässige ) permanence of our environment."
page 189
is only a secondary difference of opinion between agnostics who are basically at one, viz., in their denial of objective law in nature, and who thus inevitably condemn themselves to idealist conclusions of one kind or another. A rather more "scrupulous" empirio-criticist than J. Petzoldt, Rudolf Willy, who is ashamed of his kinship with the immanentists, rejects, for example, Petzoldt's whole theory of "unique determination" as leading to nothing but "logical formalism." But does Willy improve his position by disavowing Petzoldt? Not in the least, for he disavows Kantian agnosticism solely for the sake of Humean agnosticism. "We have known from the time of Hume," he writes, "that 'necessity' is a purely logical (not a 'transcendental') characteristic (Merkmal ), or, as I would rather say and have already said, a purely verbal (sprachlich ) characteristic" (R. Willy, Gegen die Schulweisheit, München, 1905, S. 91; cf. S. 173, 175).
The agnostic calls our materialist view of necessity "transcendental," for from the standpoint of Kantian and Humean "school wisdom," which Willy does not reject but only furbishes up, any recognition of objective reality given us in experience is an illicit "transcendence."
Among the French writers of the philosophical trend we are analysing, we find Henri Poincaré constantly straying into this same path of agnosticism. Henri Poincaré is an eminent physicist but a poor philosopher, whose errors Yushkevich, of course, declared to be the last word of recent positivism, so "recent," indeed, that it even required a new "ism," viz., empirio-symbolism. For Poincaré (with whose views as a whole we shall deal in the chapter on the new physics), the laws of nature are symbols, conventions, which man creates for the sake of "convenience." "The only true objective reality is the internal harmony of the world." By
page 190
"objective," Poincaré means that which is generally regarded as valid, that which is accepted by the majority of men, or by all;[*] that is to say, in a purely subjectivist manner he destroys objective truth, as do all the Machians. And as regards "harmony," he categorically declares in answer to the question whether it exists outside of us -- "undoubtedly, no." It is perfectly obvious that the new terms do not in the least change the ancient philosophical position of agnosticism, for the essence of Poincaré's "original" theory amounts to a denial (although he is far from consistent) of objective reality and of objective law in nature. It is, therefore, perfectly natural that in contradistinction to the Russian Machians, who accept new formulations of old errors as the latest discoveries, the German Kantians greeted such views as a conversion to their own views, i.e., to agnosticism, on a fundamental question of philosophy. "The French mathematician Henri Poincaré," we read in the work of the Kantian, Philipp Frank, "holds the point of view that many of the most general laws of theoretical natural science (e.g., the law of inertia, the law of the conservation of energy, etc.), of which it is so often difficult to say whether they are of empirical or of a priori origin, are, in fact, neither one nor the other, but are purely conventional propositions depending upon human discretion. . . ." "Thus [exults the Kantian] the latest Naturphilosophie unexpectedly renews the fundamental idea of critical idealism, namely, that experience merely fills in a framework which man brings with him from nature. . . ."** <"fnp190">
* Henri Poincaré, La valeur de la science [The Value of Science ], Paris, 1905, pp. 7, 9. There is a Russian translation.
** Annalen der Naturphilosophie,[75] VI. B., 1907, S. 443, 447.
page 191
We quote this example in order to give the reader a clear idea of the degree of naïveté of our Yushkeviches, who take a "theory of symbolism" for something genuinely new, whereas philosophers in the least versed in their subject say plainly and explicitly: he has become converted to the standpoint of critical idealism! For the essence of this point of view does not necessarily lie in the repetition of Kant's formulations, but in the recognition of the fundamental idea common to both Hume and Kant, viz., the denial of objective law in nature and the deduction of particular "conditions of experience," particular principles, postulates and propositions from the subject, from human consciousness, and not from nature. Engels was right when he said that it is not important to which of the numerous schools of materialism or idealism a particular philosopher belongs, but rather whether he takes nature, the external world, matter in motion, or spirit, reason, consciousness, etc., as primary.
Another characterisation of Machism on this question, in contrast to the other philosophical lines, is given by the expert Kantian, E. Lucka. On the question of causality "Mach entirely agrees with Hume."* "P. Volkmann derives the necessity of thought from the necessity of the processes of nature -- a standpoint that, in contradistinction to Mach and in agreement with Kant, recognises the fact of necessity; but contrary to Kant, it seeks the source of necessity not in thought, but in the processes of nature" (p. 424).
Volkmann is a physicist who writes fairly extensively on epistemological questions, and who tends, as do the vast
* E. Lucka, Das Erkenntnisproblem und Machs "Analyse der Empfindungen" [The Problem of Knowledge and Mach's "Analysis of Sensations"] in Kantstudien, VIII. Bd.. S. 409.
page 192
majority of scientists, to materialism, albeit an inconsistent, timid, and incoherent materialism. The recognition of necessity in nature and the derivation from it of necessity in thought is materialism. The derivation of necessity, causality, law, etc., from thought is idealism. The only inaccuracy in the passage quoted is that a total denial of all necessity is attributed to Mach. We have already seen that this is not true either of Mach or of the empirio-critical trend generally, which, having definitely departed from materialism, is inevitably sliding into idealism.
It remains for us to say a few words about the Russian Machians in particular. They would like to be Marxists; they have all "read" Engels' decisive demarcation of materialism from the Humean trend; they could not have failed to learn both from Mach himself and from everybody in the least acquainted with his philosophy that Mach and Avenarius follow the line of Hume. Yet they are all careful not to say a single word about Humism and materialism on the question of causality! Their confusion is utter. Let us give a few examples. Mr. P. Yushkevich preaches the "new" empirio-symbolism. The "sensations of blue, hard, etc. -- these supposed data of pure experience" and "the creations supposedly of pure reason,<"p192"> such as a chimera or a chess game" -- all these are "empirio-symbols" (Studies,[76] etc., p. 179). "Knowledge is empirio-symbolic, and as it develops leads to empirio-symbols of a greatet degree of symbolisation. . . . The so-called laws of nature . . . are these empirio-symbols. . ." (ibid.). "The so-called true reality, being in itself,<"p192a"> is that infinite [a terribly learned fellow, this Mr. Yushkevich!][77] ultimate system of symbols to which all our knowledge is striving" (p. 188). "The stream of experience . . . which lies at the foundation of our knowledge is . . . irrational . . .
page 193
illogical" (pp. 187, 194). Energy "is just as little a thing, a substance, as time, space, mass and the other fundamental concepts of science: energy is a constancy, an empirio-symbol, like other empirio-symbols that for a time satisfy the fundamental human need of introducing reason, Logos, into the irrational stream of experience" (p. 209).
Clad like a harlequin in a garish motley of shreds of the "latest" terminology, there stands before us a subjective idealist, for whom the external world, nature and its laws are all symbols of our knowledge. The stream of experience is devoid of reason, order and law: our knowledge brings reason into it. The celestial bodies are symbols of human knowledge, and so is the earth. If science teaches us that the earth existed long before it was possible for man and organic matter to have appeared, we, you see, have changed all that! The order of the motion of the planets is brought about by us, it is a product of our knowledge. And sensing that human reason is being inflated by such a philosophy into the author and founder of nature, Mr. Yushkevich puts alongside of reason the word Logos, that is, reason in the abstract, not reason, but Reason, not a function of the human brain, but something existing prior to any brain, something divine. The last word of "recent positivism" is that old formula of fideism which Feuerbach had already exposed.
Let us take A. Bogdanov. In 1899, when he was still a semi-materialist and had only just begun to go astray under the influence of a very great chemist and very muddled philosopher, Wilhelm Ostwald, he wrote: "The general causal connection of phenomena is the last and best child of human knowledge; it is the universal law, the highest of those laws which, to express it in the words of a philosopher,
page 194
human reason dictates to nature" (Fundamental Elements, etc., p. 41).
Allah alone knows from what source Bogdanov took this reference. But the fact is that "the words of a philosopher" trustingly repeated by the "Marxist" -- are the words of Kant. An unpleasant event! And all the more unpleasant in that it cannot even be explained by the "mere" influence of Ostwald.
In 1904, having already managed to discard both natural-historical materialism and Ostwald, Bogdanov wrote: ". . . Modern positivism regards the law of causality only as a means of cognitively connecting phenomena into a continuous series, only as a form of co-ordinating experience" (From the Psychology of Society, p. 207). Bogdanov either did not know, or would not admit, that this modern positivism is agnosticism and that it denies the objective necessity of nature, which existed prior to, and outside of, "knowledge" and man. He accepted on faith what the German professors called "modern positivism." Finally, in 1905, having passed through all the previous stages and the stage of empirio-criticism, and being already in the stage of "empirio-monism," Bogdanov wrote: "Laws do not belong to the sphere of experience . . . they are not given in it, but are created by thought as a means of organising experience, of harmoniously co-ordinating it into a symmetrical whole" (Empirio-Monism, I, p. 40). "Laws are abstractions of knowledge; and physical laws possess physical properties just as little as psychological laws possess psychical properties" (ibid.).
And so, the law that winter succeeds autumn and the spring winter is not given us in experience but is created by
page 195
thought as a means of organising, harmonising, co-ordinating. . . what with what, Comrade Bogdanov?
"Empirio-monism is possible only because knowledge actively harmonises experience, eliminating its infinite contradictions, creating for it universal organising forms, replacing the primeval chaotic world of elements by a derivative, ordered world of relations" (p. 57). That is not true. The idea that knowledge can "create" universal forms, replace the primeval chaos by order, etc., is the idea of idealist philosophy. The world is matter moving in conformity to law, and our knowledge, being the highest product of nature, is in a position only to reflect this conformity to law.
In brief, our Machians, blindly believing the "recent" reactionary professors, repeat the mistakes of Kantian and Humean agnosticism on the question of causality and fail to notice either that these doctrines are in absolute contradiction to Marxism, i.e., materialism, or that they themselves are rolling down an inclined plane towards idealism.
<"c3s4">
THOUGHT" AND THE PROBLEM OF THE
"UNITY OF THE WORLD"
"The principle of 'the least expenditure of energy,' which Mach, Avenarius and many others made the basis of the theory of knowledge, is . . . unquestionably a 'Marxist' tendency in epistemology."
So Bazarov asserts in the Studies, etc., page 69.
There is "economy" in Marx; there is "economy" in Mach. But is it indeed "unquestionable" that there is even a shadow of resemblance between the two?
page 196
Avenarius' work, Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäss dem Prinzip des Kleinsten Kraftmasses (1876), as we have seen, applies this "principle" in such a way that in the name of "economy of thought" sensation alone is declared to exist. Both causality and "substance" (a word which the professorial gentlemen, "for the sake of importance," prefer to the clearer and more exact word: matter) are declared "eliminated" on the same plea of economy. Thus we get sensation without matter and thought without brain. This utter nonsense is an attempt to smuggle in subjective idealism under a new guise. That such precisely is the character of this basic work on the celebrated "economy of thought" is, as we have seen, generally acknowledged in philosophical literature. That our Machians did not notice the subjective idealism under the "new" flag is a fact belonging to the realm of curiosities.
In the Analysis of Sensations (Russ. trans., p. 49), Mach refers incidentally to his work of 1872 on this question. And this work, as we have seen, propounds the standpoint of pure subjectivism and reduces the world to sensations. Thus, both the fundamental works which introduce this famous "principle" into philosophy expound idealism! What is the reason for this? The reason is that if the principle of economy of thought is really made "the basis of the theory of knowledge," it can lead to nothing but subjective idealism. That it is more "economical" to "think" that only I and my sensations exist is unquestionable, provided we want to introduce such an absurd conception into epistemology.
Is it "more economical" to "think" of the atom as indivisible, or as composed of positive and negative electrons? Is it "more economical" to think of the Russian bourgeois revolution as being conducted by the liberals or as being conducted against the liberals? One has only to put the ques-
page 197
tion in order to see the absurdity, the subjectivism of applying the category of "the economy of thought" here. Human thought is "economical" only when it correctly reflects objective truth, and the criterion of this correctness is practice, experiment and industry. Only by denying objective reality, that is, by denying the foundations of Marxism, can one seriously speak of economy of thought in the theory of knowledge.
If we turn to Mach's later works, we shall find in them an interpretation of the celebrated principle which frequently amounts to its complete denial. For instance, in the Wärmelehre Mach returns to his favourite idea of "the economical nature" of science (2nd German ed., p. 366). But there he adds that we engage in an activity not for the sake of the activity (p. 366; repeated on p. 391): "the purpose of scientific activity is to present the fullest . . . most tranquil . . . picture possible of the world" (p. 366). If this is the case, the "principle of economy" is banished not only from the basis of epistemology, but virtually from epistemology generally. When one says that the purpose of science is to present a the picture of the world (tranquillity is entirely beside the point here), one is repeating the materialist point of view. When one says this, one is admitting the objective reality of the world in relation to our knowledge, of the model in relation to the picture. To talk of economy of thought in such a connection is merely to use a clumsy and ridiculously pretentious word in place of the word "correctness." Mach is muddled here, as usua], and the Machians behold the muddle and worship it!
In Knowledge and Error, in the chapter entitled "Illustrations of Methods of Investigation," we read the following:
page 198
"The 'complete and simplest description' (Kirchhoff, 1874), the 'economical presentation of the factual' (Mach, 1872), the 'concordance of thinking and being and the mutual concordance of the processes of thought' (Grassmann, 1844) -- all these, with slight variations, express one and the same thought."
Is this not a model of confusion? "Economy of thought," from which Mach in 1872 inferred that sensations alone exist (a point of view which he himself subsequently was obliged to acknowledge an idealist one), is declared to be equivalent to the purely materialist dictum of the mathematician Grassmann regarding the necessity of co-ordinating thinking and being, equivalent to the simplest description (of an objective reality, the existence of which it never occurred to Kirchhoff to doubtl).
Such an application of the principle of "economy of thought" is but an example of Mach's curious philosophical waverings. And if such curiosities and lapses are eliminated, the idealist character of "the principle of the economy of thought" becomes unquestionable. For example, the Kantian Hönigswald, controverting the philosophy of Mach, greets his "principle of economy" as an approach to the "Kantian circle of ideas" (Dr. Richard Hönigswald, Zur Kritik der Machschen Philosophie [A Critique of Mach's Philosophy ], Berlin, 1903, S. 27). And, in truth, if we do not recognise the objective reality given us in our sensations, whence are we to derive the "principle of economy" if not from the subject ? Sensations, of course, do not contain any "economy." Hence, thought gives us something which is not contained in sensations! Hence, the "principle of economy" is not taken from experience (i.e., sensations), but precedes all experience and, like a Kantian category, constitutes a logical condition of experience. Hönigswald quotes the
page 199
following passage from the Analysis of Sensations : "We can from our bodily and spiritual stability infer the stability, the uniqueness of determination and the uniformity of the processes of nature" (Russ. trans., p. 281). And, indeed, the subjective-idealist character of such propositions and the kinship of Mach to Petzoldt, who has gone to the length of apriorism, are beyond all shadow of doubt.
In connection with "the principle of the economy of thought," the idealist Wundt very aptly characterised Mach as "Kant turned inside out" (Systematische Philosophie, Leipzig, 1907, S. 128). Kant has a priori and experience, Mach has experience and a priori, for Mach's principle of the econ omy of thought is essentially apriorism (p. 130). The con nection (Verknüpfung ) is either in things, as an "objective law of nature [and this Mach emphatically rejects], or else it is a subjective principle of description" (p. 130). The principle of economy with Mach is subjective and kommt wie aus der Pistole geschossen -- appears nobody knows whence -- as a teleological principle which may have a diversity of meanings (p. 131). As you see, experts in philosophical terminology are not as naïve as our Machians, who are blindly prepared to believe that a "new" term can eliminate the contrast between subjectivism and objectivism, between idealism and materialism.
Finally, let us turn to the English philosopher James Ward, who without circumlocution calls himself a spiritualist monist. He does not controvert Mach, but, as we shall see later, utilises the entire Machian trend in physics in his fight against materialism. And he definitely declares that with Mach "the criterion of simplicity . . . is in the main subjective, not objective" (Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. I, 3rd ed., p. 82).
page 200
That the principle of the economy of thought as the basis of epistemology pleased the German Kantians and English spiritualists will not seem strange after all that has been said above. That people who are desirous of being Marxists should link the political economy of the materialist Marx with the epistemological economy of Mach is simply ludicrous.
It would be appropriate here to say a few words about "the unity of the world." On this question Mr. P. Yushkevich strikingly exemplifies -- for the thousandth time perhaps -- the abysmal confusion created by our Machians. Engels, in his Anti-Dühring, replies to Dühring, who had deduced the unity of the world from the unity of thought, as follows: "The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proved not by a few juggling phrases, but by a long and protracted development<"p200"> of philosophy and natural science" (p. 31)[78] Mr. Yushkevich cites this passage and retorts: "First of all it is not clear what is meant here by the assertion that 'the unity of the world consists in its materiality'" (op. cit., p. 52).
Charming, is it not? This individual undertakes publicly to prate about the philosophy of Marxism, and then declares that the most elementary propositions of materialism are "not clear" to him! Engels showed, using Dühring as an example, that any philosophy that claims to be consistent can deduce the unity of the world either from thought -- in which case it is helpless against spiritualism and fideism (Anti-Dühring, p. 30), and its arguments inevitably become mere phrase-juggling -- or from the objective reality which exists outside us, which in the theory of knowledge has long gone under the name of matter, and which is studied by natural science. It is useless to speak seriously to an individual to whom such a thing is "not
page 201
clear," for he says it is "not clear" in order fraudulently to evade giving a genuine answer to Engels' clear materialist proposition. And, doing so, he talks pure Dühringian nonsense about "the cardinal postulate of the fundamental homogeneity and connection of being" (Yushkevich, op. cit., p. 51), about postulates being "propositions" of which "it would not be exact to say that they have been deduced from expericnce, since scientific experience is possible only because they are made the basis of investigation" (ibid.). This is nothing but twaddle, for if this individual had the slightest respect for the printed word he would detect the idealist character in general, and the Kantian character in particular of the idea that there can be postulates which are not taken from experience and without which experience is impossible. A jumble of words culled from diverse books and coupled with the obvious errors of the materialist Dietzgen -- such is the "philosophy" of Mr. Yushkevich and his like.
Let us rather examine the argument for the unity of the world expounded by a serious empirio-criticist, Joseph Petzoldt. Section 29, Vol. II, of his Introduction is termed: "The Tendency to a Uniform (einheitlich ) Conception of the Realm of Knowledge; the Postulate of the Unique Determination of All That Happens." And here are a few samples of his line of reasoning: ". . . Only in unity can one find that natural end beyond which no thought can go and in which, consequently, thought, if it takes into consideration all the facts of the given sphere, can reach quiescence" (p. 79). ". . . It is beyond doubt that nature does not always respond to the demand for unity, but it is equally beyond doubt that in many cases it already satisfies the demand for quiescence and it must be held, in accordance with all our previous investigations, that nature in all probability
page 202
will satisfy this demand in the future in all cases. Hence, it would be more correct to describe the actual soul behaviour as a striving for states of stability rather than as a striving for unity. . . . The principle of the states of stability goes farther and deeper. . . . Haeckel's proposal to put the kingdom of the protista alongside the plant and animal kingdom is an untenable solution for it creates two new difficulties in place of the former one difficulty: while formerly the boundary between the plants and animals was doubtful, now it becomes impossible to demarcate the protista from both plants and animals. . . . Obviously, such a state is not final (endgültig ). Such ambiguity of concepts must in one way or another be eliminated, if only, should there be no other means, by an agreement between the specialists, or by a majority vote" (pp. 80-81).
Enough, I think? It is evident that the ernpirio-criticist Petzoldt is not one whit better than Dühring. But we must be fair even to an adversary; Petzoldt at least has sufficient scientific integrity to reject materialism as a philosophical trend unflinchingly and decisively in all his works. At least, he does not humiliate himself to the extent of posing as a materialist and declaring that the most elementary distinction between the fundamental philosophical trends is "not clear."
<"c3s5">
Recognising the existence of objective reality, i.e., matter in motion, independently of our mind, materialism must also inevitably recognise the objective reality of time and space, in contrast above all to Kantianism, which in this
page 203
question sides with idealism and regards time and space not as objective realities but as forms of human understanding. The basic difference between the two fundamental philosophical lines on this question is also quite clearly recognised by writers of the most diverse trends who are in any way consistent thinkers. Let us begin with the materialists.
"Space and time," says Feuerbach, "are not mere forms of phenomena but essential conditions (Wesensbedingungen ) . . . of being" (Werke, II, S. 332). Regarding the sensible world we know through sensations as objective reality, Feuerbach naturally also rejects the phenomenalist (as Mach would call his own conception) or the agnostic (as Engels calls it) conception of space and time. Just as things or bodies are not mere phenomena, not complexes of sensations, but objective realities acting on our senses, so space and time are not mere forms of phenomena, but objectively real forms of being. There is nothing in the world but matter in motion, and matter in motion cannot move otherwise than in space and time. Human conceptions of space and time are relative, but these relative conceptions go to compound absolute truth. These relative conceptions, in their development, move towards absolute truth and approach nearer and nearer to it. The mutability of human conceptions of space and time no more refutes the objective reality of space and time than the mutability of scientific knowledge of the structure and forms of matter in motion refutes the objective reality of the external world.
Engels, exposing the inconsistent and muddled materialist Dühring, catches him on the very point where he speaks of the change in the idea of time (a question beyond controversy for contemporary philosophers of any importance even of the most diverse philosophical trends) but evades a direct
page 204
answer to the question: are space and time real or ideal, and are our relative conceptions of space and time approximations to objectively real forms of being, or are they only products of the developing, organising, harmonising, etc., human mind? This and this alone is the basic epistemological problem on which the truly fundamental philosophical trends are divided. Engels, in Anti-Dühring, says: "We are here not in the least concerned with what ideas change in Herr Dühring's head. The subject at issue is not the idea of time, but real time, which Herr Dühring cannot rid him self of so cheaply [i.e., by the use of such phrases as the mutability<"p204"> of our conceptions]" (Anti-Dühring, 5th Germ. ed., S. 41).[79]
This would seem so clear that even the Yushkeviches should be able to grasp the essence of the matter! Engels sets up against Dühring the proposition of the reality, i.e., objective reality, of time which is generally accepted by and obvious to every materialist, and says that one cannot escape a direct affirmation or denial of this proposition merely by talking of the change in the ideas of time and space. The point is not that Engels denies the necessity and scientific value of investigations into the change and development of our ideas of time and space, but that we should give a consistent answer to the epistemological question, viz., the question of the source and significance of human knowledge in general. Any moderately intelligent philosophical idealist -- and Engels when he speaks of idealists has in mind the great consistent idealists of classical philosophy -- will readily admit the development of our ideas of time and space; he would not cease to be an idealist for thinking, for example, that our developing ideas of time and space are approaching towards the absolute idea of time and space, and
page 205
so forth. It is impossible to hold consistently to a standpoint in philosophy which is inimical to all forms of fideism and idealism if we do not definitely and resolutely recognise that our developing notions of time and space reflect an objectively real time and space; that here, too, as in general, they are approaching objective truth.
"The basic forms of all being," Engels admonishes Dühring, "are space and time, and existence out of time is just as gross an absurdity as existence out of space" (op. cit.).
Why was it necessary for Engels, in the first half of the quotation, to repeat Feuerbach almost literally and, in the second, to recall the struggle which Feuerbach fought so successfully against the gross absurdities of theism? Because Dühring, as one sees from this same chapter of Engels', could not get the ends of his philosophy to meet without resorting now to the "final cause" of the world, now to the "initial impulse" (which is another expression for the concept "God," Engels says). Dühring no doubt wanted to be a materialist and atheist no less sincerely than our Machians want to be Marxists, but he was unable consistently to develop the philosophical point of view that would really cut the ground from under the idealist and theist absurdity. Since he did not recognise, or, at least, did not recognise clearly and distinctly (for he wavered and was muddled on this question), the objective reality of time and space, it was not accidental but inevitable that Dühring should slide down an inclined plane to "final causes" and "initial impulses"; for he had deprived himself of the objective criterion which prevents one going beyond the bounds of time and space. If time and space are only concepts, man, who created them is justified in going beyond their bounds, and bourgeois professors are justified in receiving salaries from reactionary
page 206
governments for defending the right to go beyond these bounds, for directly or indirectly defending medieal "absurdity."
Engels pointed out to Dühring that denial of the objective reality of time-and space is theoretically philosophical confusion, while practically it is capitulation to, or impotence in face of, fideism.
Behold now the "teachings" of "recent positivism" on this subject. We read in Mach: "Space and time are well ordered (wohlgeordnete ) systems of series of sensations" (Mechanik, 3. Auflage, S. 498). This is palpable idealist nonsense, such as inevitably follows from the doctrine that bodies are complexes of sensations. According to Mach, it is not man with his sensations that exists in space and time, but space and time that exist in man, that depend upon man and are generated by man. He feels that he is falling into idealism, and "resists" by making a host of reservations and, like Dühring, burying the question under lengthy disquisitions (see especially Knowledge and Error ) on the mutability of our conceptions of space and time, their relativity, and so forth. But this does not save him, and cannot save him, for one can really overcome the idealist position on this question only by recognising the objective reality of space and time. And this Mach will not do at any price. He constructs his epistemological theory of time and space on the principle of relativism, and that is all. In the very nature of things such a construction can lead to nothing but subjective idealism, as we have already made clear when speaking of absolute and relative truth.
Resisting the idealist conclusions which inevitably follow from his premises, Mach argues against Kant and insists that our notion of space is derived from experience (Knowledge
page 207
and Error, 2nd Germ. ed., pp. 350, 385). But if objective reality is not given us in experience (as Mach teaches), such an objection to Kant does not in the least destroy the general position of agnosticism in the case either of Kant or of Mach. If our notion of space is taken from experience without being a reflection of objective reality outside us, Mach's theory remains idealistic. The existence of nature in time, measured in millions of years, prior to the appearance of man and human experience, shows how absurd this idealist theory is.
"In the physiological respect," writes Mach, "time and space are systems of sensations of orientation which together with sense-perceptions determine the discharge (Auslösung ) of biologically purposive reactions of adaptation. In the physical respect, time and space are interdependencies of physical elements" (ibid., p. 434).
The relativist Mach confines himself to an examination of the concept of time in its various aspects! And like Dühring he gets nowhere. If "elements" are sensations, then the dependence of physical elements upon each other cannot exist outside of man, and could not have existed prior to man and prior to organic matter. If the sensations of time and space can give man a biologically purposive orientation, this can only be so on the condition that these sensations reflect an objective reality outside man: man could never have adapted himself biologically to the environment if his sensations had not given him an objectively correct presentation of that environment. The theory of space and time is inseparably connected with the answer to the fundamental question of epistemology: are our sensations images of bodies ancl things, or are bodies complexes of our sensations? Mach merely blunders about beiween t'ne two answers.
page 208
In modern physics, he says, Newton's idea of absolute time and space prevails (pp. 442-44), of time and space as such. This idea seems "to us" senseless, Mach continues -- apparently not suspecting the existence of materialists and of a materialist theory of knowledge. But in practice, he claims, this view was harmless (unschädlich, p. 442) and therefore for a long time escaped criticism.
This naïve remark regarding the harmlessness of the materialist view betrays Mach completely. Firstly, it is not true that for a "long time" the idealists did not criticise this view. Mach simply ignores the struggle between the idealist and materialist theories of knowledge on this question; he evades giving a plain and direct statement of these two views. Secondly, by recognising "the harmlessness" of the materialist views he contests, Mach thereby in fact admits their correctness. For if they were incorrect, how could they have remained harmless throughout the course of centuries? What has become of the criterion of practice with which Mach attempted to flirt? The materialist view of the objective reality of time and space can be "harmless" only because natural science does not transcend the bounds of time and space, the bounds of the material world, leaving this occupation to the professors of reactionary philosophy. Such "harmlessness" is equivalent to correctness.
It is Mach's idealist view of space and time that is "harmful," for, in the first place, it opens the door wide for fideism and, in the second place, seduces Mach himself into drawing reactionary conclusions. For instance, in 1872 Mach wrote that "one does not have to conceive of the chemical elements in a space of three dimensions" (Erhaltung der Arbeit, S. 29, repeated on S. 55). To do so would be "to impose an unnecessary restriction upon ourselves. There
page 209
is no more necessity to think of what is mere thought (das bloss Gedachte ) spatially, that is to say, in relation to the visible and tangible, than there is to think of it in a definite pitch" (p. 27). "The reason why a satisfactory theory of electricity has not yet been established is perhaps because we have insisted on explaining electrical phenomena in terms of molecular processes in a three-dimensional space" (p. 30).
From the standpoint of the straightforward and unmuddled Machism which Mach openly advocated in 1872, it is indisputable that if molecules, atoms, in a word, chemical elements, cannot be perceived, they are "mere thought" (das bloss Gedachte ). If so, and if space and time have no objective reality, it is obvious that it is not essential to think of atoms spatially ! Let physics and chemistry "restrict themselves" to a three-dimensional space in which matter moves; for the explanation of electricity, however, we may seck its elements in a space which is not three-dimensional!
That our Machians should circumspectly avoid all reference to this absurdity of Mach's, although he repeats it in 1906 (Knowledge and Error, 2. Auflage, S. 418), is understandable, for otherwise they would have to raise the question of the idealist and materialist views of space point-blank, without evasions and without attempting to "reconcile" these antagonistic positions. It is likewise understandable that in the 'seventies, when Mach was still entirely unknown and when "orthodox physicists" even refused to publish his articles, one of the chiefs of the immanentist school, Anton von Leclair, should eagerly have seized upon precisely this argument of Mach's as a noteworthy renunciation of materialism and recognition of idealism! For at that time Leclair had not yet invented, or had not yet borrowed from Schuppe
page 210
and Schubert-Soldern, or J. Rehmke, the "new" sobriquet, "immanentist school," but plainly called himself a critical idealist.[*] This unequivocal advocate of fideism, who openly preached it in his philosophical works, immediately proclaimed Mach a great philosopher because of these statements, a "revolutionary in the best sense of the word" (p. 252); and he was absolutely right. Mach's argument amounts to deserting science for fideism. Science was seeking, both in 1872 and in 1906, is now seeking, and is discovering -- at least it is groping its way towards -- the atom of electricity, the electron, in three-dimensional space. Science does not doubt that the substance it is investigating exists in three-dimensional space and, hence, that the particles of that substance, although they be so small that we cannot see them, must also "necessarily" exist in this three-dimensional space. Since 1872, during the course of three decades of stupendous and dazzling scientific successes in the problem of the structure of matter, the materialist view of space and time has remained "harmless," i.e., compatible, as heretofore, with science, while the contrary view of Mach and Co. was a "harmful" capitulation to the position of fideism.
In his Mechanik, Mach defends the mathematicians who are investigating the problem of conceivable spaces with n dimensions; he defends them against the charge of drawing "preposterous" conclusions from their investigations. The defence is absolutely and undoubtedly just, but see the epistemological position Mach takes up in this defence. Re- <"fnp210">
* Anton von Leclair, Der Realismus der modernen Naturwissenschaft im Lichte der von Berkeley und Kant angebahnten Erkenntniskritik [The Realism of Modern Science in the Light of Berkeley's and Kant's Critique of Knowledge ], Prag, 1879.
page 211
cent mathematics, Mach says, has raised the very important and useful question of a space of n dimensions as a conceivable space; nevertheless, three-dimensional space remains the only "real case" (ein wirklicher Fall ) (3rd German ed., pp. 483-85). In vain, therefore, "have many theologians, who experience difficulty in deciding where to place hell," as well as the spiritualists, sought to derive advantage from the fourth dimension (ibid.).
Very good! Mach refuses to join company with the theologians and the spiritualists. But how does he dissociate himself from them in his theory of knowledge ? By stating that three-dimensional space alone is real! But what sort of defence is it against the theologians and their like when you deny objective reality to space and time? Why, it comes to this, that when you have to dissociate yourself from the spiritualists you resort to tacit borrowings from the materialists. For the materialists, by recognising the real world, the matter we perceive, as an objective reality, have the right to conclude therefrom that no human concept, whatever its purpose, is valid if it goes beyond the bounds of time and space. But you Machian gentlemen deny the objective validity of "reality" when you combat materialism, yet secretly introduce it again when you have to combat an idealism that is consistent, fearless and frank throughout! If in the relative conception of time and space there is nothing but relativity, if there is no objective reality (i.e., reality independent of man and mankind) reflected by these relative concepts, why should mankind, why should the majority of mankind, not be entitled to conceive of beings outside time and space? If Mach is entitled to seek atoms of electricity, or atoms in general, outside three-dimensional space, why should the majority of mankind not be entitled to seek the
page 212
atoms, or the foundations of morals, outside three-dimensional space?
"There has never been an accoucheur who has helped a delivery by means of the fourth dimension," Mach goes on to say.
An excellent argument -- but only for those who regard the criterion of practice as a confirmation of the objective truth and objective reality of our perceptual world. If our sensations give us an objectively true image of the external world, existing independently of us, the argument based on the accoucheur, on human practice generally, is valid. But if so, Machism as a philosophical trend is not valid.
"I hope, however," Mach continues, referring to his work of 1872, "that nobody will defend ghost-stories (die Kosten einer Spukgeschichte bestreiten ) with the help of what I have said and written on this subject." One cannot hope that Napoleon did not die on May 5, 1821.
One cannot hope that Machism will not be used in the service of "ghost-stories" when it has already served and continues to serve the immanentists!
And not only the immanentists, as we shall see later. Philosophical idealism is nothing but a disguised and embellished ghost-story. Look at the French and English representatives of empirio-criticism, who are less flowery than the German representatives of this philosophical trend. Poincaré says that the concepts space and time are relative and that it follows (for non-materialists "it follows" indeed) that "nature does not impose them upon us, but we impose them upon nature, for we find them convenient" (op. cit., p. 6). Does this not justify the exultation of the German Kantians? Does this not confirm Engels' statement that
page 213
consistent philosophical doctrines must take either nature or human thought as primary?
The views of the English Machist Karl Pearson are quite definite. He says: "Of time as of space we cannot assert a real existence: it is not in things but in our mode of perceiving them" (op. cit., p. 184). This is idealism, pure and simple. "Like space, it [time] appears to us as one of the plans on which that great sorting-machine, the human perceptive faculty, arranges its material" (ibid.). Pearson's final conclusion, expounded as usual in clear and precise theses, is as follows: "Space and time are not realities of the phenomenal world, but the modes under which we perceive things apart. They are not infinitely large nor infinitely divisible, but are essentially limited by the contents of our perception" (p. 191, summary of Chapter V on Space and Time).
This conscientious and scrupulous foe of materialism, with whom, we repeat, Mach frequently expresses his complete agreement and who in his turn explicitly expresses his agreement with Mach, invents no special signboard for his philosophy, and without the least ambiguity names Hume and Kant as the classics from whom he derives his philosophical trend! (p. 192).
And while in Russia there are naïve people who believe that Machism has provided a "new" solution of the problem of space and time, in English writings we find that scientists, on the one hand, and idealist philosophers, on the other, at once took up a definite position in regard to Karl Pearson the Machian. Here, for example, is the opinion of Lloyd Morgan, the biologist: "Physics as such accepts the phenomenal world as external to, and for its purposes independent of, the mind of the investigator. . . . He [Professor Pearson]
page 214
is forced to a position which is largely idealistic. . . ."[*] "Physics, as a science, is wise, I take it, in dealing with space and time in frankly objective terms, and I think the biologist may still discuss the distribution of organisms in space and the geologist their distribution in time, without pausing to remind their readers that after all they are only dealing with sense-impressions and stored sense-impressions and certain forms of perception. . . . All this may be true enough, but it is out of place either in physics or biology" (p. 304). Lloyd Morgan is a representative of the kind of agnosticism that Engels calls "shamefaced materialism," and however "conciliatory" the tendencies of such a philosophy are, nevertheless it proved impossible to reconcile Pearson's views with science. With Pearson "the mind is first in space, and then space in it," says another critic.[**] "There can be no doubt," remarked a defender of Pearson, R. J. Ryle, "that the doctrine as to the nature of space and time which is associated with the name of Kant is the most important positive addition which has been made to the idealistic theory of human knowledge since the days of Bishop Berkeley; and it is one of the noteworthy features of the Grammar of Science that here, perhaps for the first time in the writings of English men of science, we find at once a full recognition of the general truth of Kant's doctrine, a short but clear exposition of it. . . ."***
Thus we find that in England the Machians themselves, their adversaries among the scientists, and their adherents <"fnp214">
* Natural Science,[80] Vol. I, 1892, p. 300.
** J. M. Bentley, The Philosophical Review,[81] Vol. VI, 5, Sept. 1897, p. 523.
*** R. J. Ryle, Natural Science, Aug. 1892, p. 454.
page 215
among the professional philosophers do not entertain even a shadow of doubt as to the idealistic character of Mach's doctrine of time and space. Only a few Russian writers, would-be Marxists, failed "to notice" it.
"Many of Engels' particular views," V. Bazarov, for instance, writes, in the Studies (p. 67), "as for example, his conception of 'pure' time and space, are now obsolete."
Yes, indeed! The views of the materialist Engels are now obsolete, but the views of the idealist Pearson and the muddled idealist Mach are very modern! The most curious thing of all is that Bazarov does not even doubt that the views of space and time, viz., the recognition or denial of their objective reality, can be classed among "particular views," in contradistinction to the "starting point of the world outlook " spoken of by this author in his next sentence. Here you have a glaring example of that "eclectic pauper's broth" of which Engels was wont to speak in reference to German philosophy of the 'eighties. For to contrast the "starting point" of Marx's and Engels' materialist world out look with their "particular view" of the objective reality of time and space is as utterly nonsensical as though you were to contrast the "starting point" of Marx's economic theory with his "particular view" of surplus value. To sever Engels' doctrine of the objective reality of time and space from his doctrine of the transformation of "things-in-themselves" into "things-for-us," from his recognition of objective and absolute truth, viz., the objective reality given us in our sensations, and from his recognition of objective law, causality and necessity in nature -- is to reduce an integral philosophy to an utter jumble. Like all the Machians, Bazarov erred in confounding the mutability of human conceptions of time and space, their exclusively relative character, with the immutabil-
page 216
ity of the fact that man and nature exist only in time and space, and that beings outside time and space, as invented by the priests and maintained by the imagination of the ignorant and downtrodden mass of humanity, are disordered fantasies, the artifices of philosophical idealism -- rotten products of a rotten social system. The teachings of science on the structure of matter, on the chemical composition of food, on the atom and the electron, may and constantly do become obsolete, but the truth that man is unable to subsist on ideas and to beget children by platonic love alone never becomes obsolete. And a philosophy that denies the objective reality of time and space is as absurd, as intrinsically rotten and false as is the denial of these latter truths. The artifices of the idealists and the agnostics are on the whole as hypocritical as the sermons on platonic love of the pharisees!
In order to illustrate this distinction between the relativity of our concepts of time and space and the absolute opposition, within the bounds of epistemology, between the materialist and idealist lines on this question, I shall further quote a characteristic passage from a very old and very pure "empirio-criticist," namely, the Humean Schulze-Aenesidemus who wrote in 1792:
"If we infer 'things outside us' from ideas and thoughts within us, [then] space and time are something real and actually existing outside us, for the existence of bodies can be conceived only in an existing (vorhandenen ) space, and the existence of changes only in an existing time" (op. cit., p. 100).
Exactly! While firmly rejecting materialism, and even the slightest concession to materialism, Schulze, the follower of Hume, described in 1792 the relation between the question of space and time and the question of an objective reality out-
page 217
side us just as the materialist Engels described it in 1894 (the last preface to Anti-Dühring is dated May 23,1894). This does not mean that during these hundred years our ideas of time and space have undergone no change, or that a vast amount of new material has not been gathered on the development of these ideas (material to which both Voroshilov-Chernov and Voroshilov-Valentinov refer as supposedly refuting Engels). This does mean that the relation between materialism and agnosticism, as the fundamental lines in philosophy, could not have changed, in spite of all the "new" names paraded by our Machians.
And Bogdanov too contributes absolutely nothing but "new" names to the old philosophy of idealism and agnosticism. When he repeats the arguments of Hering and Mach on the difference between physiological and geometrical space, or between perceptual and abstract space (Empirio-Monism, Bk. I, p. 26), he is fully repeating the mistake of Dühring. It is one thing, how, with the help of various sensc organs, man perceives space, and how, in the course of a long historical development, abstract ideas of space are derived from these perceptions; it is an entirely different thing whether there is an objective reality independent of mankind which corresponds to these perceptions and conceptions of mankind. This latter question, although it is the only philosophical question, Bogdanov "did not notice" beneath the mass of detailed investigations on the former question, and he was therefore unable clearly to distinguish between Engels' materialism and Mach's confusion.
Time, like space, is "a form of social co-ordination of the experiences of different people," their "objectivity" lies in their "general significance" (ibid., p. 34).
page 218
This is absolutely false. Religion also has general significance as expressing the social co-ordination of the experience of the larger section of humanity. But there is no objective reality that corresponds to the teachings of religion, for example, on the past of the earth and the creation of the world. There is an objective reality that corresponds to the teaching of science (although it is as relative at every stage in the development of science as every stage in the development of religion is relative) that the earth existed prior to any society, prior to man, prior to organic matter, and that it bas existed for a definite time and in a definite space in relation to the other planets. According to Bogdanov, various forms of space and time adapt themselves to man's experience and his perceptive faculty. As a matter of fact, just the reverse is true: our "experience" and our perception adapt themselves more and more to objective space and time, and reflect them ever more correctly and profoundly.
<"c3s6">
On pages 140-41 of the Studies, A. Lunacharsky quotes the argument given by Engels in Anti-Dühring on this question and fully endorses the "remarkably precise and apt" statement of the problem made by Engels in that "wonderful page" of the work mentioned.*
There is, indeed, much that is wonderful here. And even more "wonderful" is the fact that neither Lunacharsky, nor <"fnp218">
* Lunacharsky says: ". . . a wonderful page of religious economics. I say this at the risk of provoking a smile from the irreligious reader." However good your intentions may be, Comrade Lunacharsky, it is not a smile, but disgust your flirtation with religion provokes.[82]
page 219
the whole crowd of other Machian would-be Marxists, "noticed" the epistemological significance of Engels' discussion of freedom and necessity. They read it and they copied it, but they did not make head or tail of it.
Engels says: "Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the appreciation of necessity. 'Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood.' Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves -- two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man's judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined. . . . Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge<"p219"> of natural necessity (Naturnotwendigkeiten )." (5th Germ. ed., pp. 112-13.)[83]
Let us examine the epistemological premises upon which this argument is based.
Firstly, Engels at the very outset of his argument recognises laws of nature, laws of external nature, the necessity of nature -- i.e., all that Mach, Avenarius, Petzoldt and Co. characterise as "metaphysics." If Lunacharsky had really wanted to reflect on Engels' "wonderful" argument he could not have helped noticing the fundamental difference between the materialist theory of knowledge and agnosticism and
page 220
idealism, which deny law in nature or declare it to be only "logical," etc., etc.
Secondly, Engels does not attempt to contrive "definitions" of freedom and necessity, the kind of scholastic definition with which the reactionary professors (like Avenarius) and their disciples (like Bogdanov) are most concerned. Engels takes the knowledge and will of man, on the one hand, and the necessity of nature, on the other, and instead of giving definitions, simply says that the necessity of nature is primary, and human will and mind secondary. The latter must necessarily and inevitably adapt themselves to the former. Engels regards this as so obvious that he does not waste words explaining his view. It needs the Russian Machians to complain of Engels' general definition of materialism (that nature is primary and mind secondary; remember Bogdanov's "perplexity" on this point!), and at the same time to regard one of the particular applications by Engels of this general and fundamental definition as "wonderful" and "remarkably apt"!
Thirdly, Engels does not doubt the existence of "blind necessity." He admits the existence of a necessity unknown to man. This is quite obvious from the passage just quoted. But how, from the standpoint of the Machians, can man know of the existence of what he does not know ? Is it not "mysticism," "metaphysics," the admission of "fetishes" and "idols," is it not the "Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself" to say that we know of the existence of an unknown necessity? Had the Machians given the matter any thought they could not have failed to observe the complete identity between Engels' argument on the knowability of the objective nature of things and on the transformation of "things-in-themselves" into "things-for-us," on the one hand, and his argument on a blind, unknown necessity, on the other. The development of con-
page 221
sciousness in each human individual and the development of the collective knowledge of humanity at large presents us at every step with examples of the transformation of the unknown "thing-in-itself" into the known "thing-for-us," of the transformation of blind, unknown necessity, "necessity-in-itself," into the known "necessity-for-us." Epistemologically, there is no difference whatever between these two transformations, for the basic point of view in both cases is the same, viz., materialistic, the recognition of the objective reality of the external world and of the laws of external nature, and of the fact that this world and these laws are fully knowable to man but can never be known to him with finality. We do not know the necessity of nature in the phenomena of the weather, and to that extent we are inevitably slaves of the weather. But while we do not know this necessity, we do know that it exists. Whence this knowledge? From the very source whence comes the knowledge that things exist outside our mind and independently of it, namely, from the development of our knowledge, which provides millions of examples to every individual of knowledge replacing ignorance when an object acts upon our sense-organs, and conversely of ignorance replacing knowledge when the possibility of such action is eliminated.
Fourthly, in the above-mentioned argument Engels plainly employs the salto vitale method in philosophy, that is to say, he makes a leap from theory to practice. Not a single one of the learned (and stupid) professors of philosophy, in whose footsteps our Machians follow, would permit himself to make such a leap, for this would be a disgraceful thing for a devotee of "pure science" to do. For them the theory of knowledge, which demands the cunning concoction of "definitions," is one thing, while practice is another. For Engels all living human
page 222
practice permeates the theory of knowledge itself and provides an objective criterion of truth. For until we know a law of nature, it, existing and acting independently and outside our mind, makes us slaves of "blind necessity." But once we come to know this law, which acts (as Marx pointed out a thousand times) independently of our will and our mind, we become the masters of nature. The mastery of nature manifested in human practice is a result of an objectively correct reflection within the human head of the phenomena and processes of nature, and is proof of the fact that this reflection (within the limits of what is revealed by practice) is objective, absolute, and eternal truth.
What is the result? Every step in Engels' argument, literally almost every phrase, every proposition, is constructed entirely and exclusively upon the epistemology of dialectical materialism, upon premises which stand out in striking contrast to the Machian nonsense about bodies being complexes of sensations, about "elements," "the coincidence of sense-perceptions with the reality that exists outside us," etc., etc., etc. Without being the least deterred by this, the Machians abandon materialism and repeat (à la Berman) the vulgar banalities about dialectics, and at the same time welcome with open arms one of the applications of dialectical materialism! They have taken their philosophy from an eclectic pauper's broth and are continuing to offer this hotchpotch to the reader. They take a bit of agnosticism and a morsel of idealism from Mach, add to it slices of dialectical materialism from Marx, and call this hash a development of Marxism. They imagine that if Mach, Avenarius, Petzoldt, and all the authorities of theirs have not the slightest inkling of how Hegel and Marx solved the problem (of freedom and necessity), this is purely acci-
page 223
dental: why, it was simply because they overlooked a certain page in a certain book, and not because these "authorities" were and are utter ignoramuses on the subject of the real progress made by philosophy in the nineteenth century and because they were and are philosophical obscurantists.
Here is the argument of one such obscurantist, the philosophy professor-in-ordinary at the University of Vienna, Ernst Mach:
"The correctness of the position of determinism or indeterminism cannot be demonstrated. Only a perfect science or a provedly impossible science could decide this question. It is a matter of the presuppositions which we bring (man heranbringt ) to the consideration of things, depending upon whether we ascribe to previous successes or failures of the investigation a greater or lesser subjective weight (subjektives Gewicht ). But during the investigation every thinker is of necessity a theoretical determinist" (Knowledge and Error, 2nd Germ. ed., pp. 282-83).
Is this not obscurantism, when pure theory is carefully partitioned off from practice; when determinism is confined to the field of "investigation," while in the field of morality, social activity, and all fields other than "investigation" the question is left to a "subjective" estimate? In my workroom, says the learned pedant, I am a determinist; but that the philosopher should seek to obtain an integral conception of the world based on determinism, embracing both theory and practice -- of that there is no mention. Mach utters banalities because on the theoretical problem of freedom and necessity he is entirely at sea.
". . . Every new discovery discloses the defects of our knowledge, reveals a residue of dependencies hitherto un-
page 224
heeded. . ." (p. 283). Excellent! And is this "residue" the "thing-in-itself," which our knowledge reflects ever more deeply? Not at all: ". . . Thus, he also who in theory defends extreme determinism, must nevertheless in practice remain an indeterminist. . ." (p. 283). And so things have been amicably divided:[*] theory for the professors, practice for the theologians! Or, objectivism (i.e., "shamefaced" materialism) in theory and the "subjective method in sociology" in practice. No wonder the Russian ideologists of philistinism, the Narodniks, from Lessevich to Chernov, sympathise with this banal philosophy. But it is very sad that would-be Marxists have been captivated by such nonsense and are embarrassedly covering up the more absurd of Mach's conclusions.
But on the question of the will Mach is not content with confusion and half-hearted agnosticism: he goes much further. ". . . Our sensation of hunger," we read in the Mechenik, "is not so essentially different from the affinity of sulphuric acid for zinc, and our will is not so very different from the pressure of the stone on its support. . . . We shall thus find ourselves [that is, if we hold such a view] nearer to nature without it being necessary to resolve ourselves into an incomprehensible nebula of atoms, or to resolve nature into a system of phantoms" (French trans., p. 434). Thus there is no need for materialism ("nebula of atoms" or electrons, i.e., the recognition of the objective reality of the material world), there is no need for an idealism which would recognise the world as "the otherness" of spirit; but there is a possible <"fnp224">
* Mach in the Mechanik says: "Religious opinions are people's strictly private affair as long as they do not obtrude them on others and do not apply them to things which belong to another sphere" (French trans., p. 434).
page 225
idealism which recognises the world as will ! We are superior not only to materialism, but also to the idealism of a Hegel; but we are not averse to coquetting with an idealism like Schopenhauer's! Our Machians, who assume an air of injured innocence at every reminder of Mach's kinship to philosophical idealism, preferred to keep silent on this delicate question too. Yet it is difficult to find in philosophical writings an exposition of Mach's views which does not mention his tendency towards Willensmetaphysik, i.e., voluntaristic idealism. This was pointed out by J. Baumann,[*] and in replying to him the Machian Kleinpeter does not take exception to this point, but declares that Mach is, of course, "nearer to Kant and Berkeley than to the metaphysical empiricism prevailing in science" (i.e., instinctive materialism; ibid., Bd. 6, S. 87). This is also pointed out by E. Becher, who remarks that if Mach in some places advocates voluntaristic metaphysics, and in others renounces it, it only testifies to the arbitrariness of his terminology; in fact, Mach's kinship to voluntarist metaphysics is beyond doubt.** Even Lucka admits the admixture of this metaphysics (i.e., idealism) to "phenomenalism" (i.e., agnosticism).*** W. Wundt also points this out.**** That Mach is a phenomenalist who is "not averse to voluntaristic <"fnp225">
* Archiv für systemetische Philosophie, 1898, II, Bd, IV, S. 63, article on Mach's philosophical views.
** Erich Becher, "The Philosophical Views of Ernst Mach," The Philosophical Review, Vol. XIV, 5, 1905, pp. 536, 546, 547, 548.
*** E. Lucka, "Das Erkenntnisproblem und Machs 'Analyse der Empfindungen'" [The Problem of Knowledge and Mach's "Analysis of Sensations"], in Kantstudien, Bd. VIII, 1903, S. 400.
**** Systematische Philosophie [Systeznatic Philosophy ], Leipzig, 1907, S. 131.
page 226
idealism" is attested also in Ueberweg-Heinze's textbook on the history of modern philosophy.*
In short, Mach's eclecticism and his tendency to idealism are clear to everyone except perhaps the Russian Machians.
<"fnp226">
* Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie [Outline of the History of Philosophy ], Bd. IV, 9. Aufl., Berlin, 1903, S. 250.
page 227
<"c4">
THE PHILOSOPHICAL IDEALISTS
AS COMRADES-IN-ARMS AND SUCCESSORS
OF EMPIRIO-CRITICISM
So far we have examined empirio-criticism taken by itself. We must now examine it in its historical development and in its connection and relation with other philosophical trends. First comes the question of the relation of Mach and Avenarius to Kant.
<"c4s1">
LEFT AND FROM THE RIGHT
Both Mach and Avenarius began their philosophical careers in the 'seventies, when the fashionable cry<"p227"> in German professorial circles was "Back to Kant"[84] And, indeed, both founders of empirio-criticism in their philosophical development started from Kant. "His [Kant's] critical idealism," says Mach, "was, as I acknowledge with the dcepest gratitude, the starting point of all my critical thought. But I found
page 228
it impossible to remain faithful to it. Very soon I began to return to the views of Berkeley . . . [and then] arrived at views akin to those of Hume. . . . And even today I cannot help regarding Berkeley and Hume as far more consistent thinkers than Kant" (Analysis of Sensations, p. 292).
Thus Mach quite definitely admits that having begun with Kant he soon followed the line of Berkeley and Hume. Let us turn to Avenarius.
In his Prolegomena to a "Critique of Pure Experience " (1876), Avenarius already in the foreword states that the words Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Critique of Pure Experience ) are indicative of his attitude towards Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," and "of course, of an antagonistic attitude" towards Kant (1876 ed., p. iv). In what does Avenarius' antagonism to Kant consist? In the fact that Kant, in Avenarius' opinion, had not sufficiently "purified experience." It is with this "purification of experience" that Avenarius deals in his Prolegomena (§§ 56, 72 and many other places). Of what does Avenarius "purify" the Kantian doctrine of experience? In the first place, of apriorism. In § 56 he says: "The question as to whether the superfluous 'a priori conceptions of reason' should and could be eliminated from the content of experience and thereby pure experience par excellence established is, as far as I know, raised here, as such, for the first time." We have already seen that Avenarius in this way "purified" Kantianism of the recognition of necessity and causality.
Secondly, he purifies Kantianism of the assumption of substance (§ 95), i.e., the thing-in-itself, which, in Avenarius' opinion "is not given in the stuff of actual experience but is imported into it by thought."
We shall presently see that Avenarius' definition of his philosophical line entirely coincides with that of Mach, dif-
page 229
fering only in pompousness of formulation. But we must first note that Avenarius is telling a plain untruth when he asserts that it was he who in 1876 for the first time raised the question of "purifying experience," i.e., of purifying the Kantian doctrine of apriorism and the assumption of the thing-in-itself. As a matter of fact, the development of German classical philosophy immediately after Kant gave rise to a criticism of Kantianism exactly along the very line followed by Avenarius. This line is represented in German classical philosophy by Schulze-Aenesidemus, an adherent of Humean agnosticism, and by J. G. Fichte, an adherent of Berkeleianism, i.e., of subjective idealism. In 1792 Schulze-Aenesidemus criticised Kant for this very recognition of apriorism (op. cit., pp. 56,141, etc.) and of the thing-in-itself. We sceptics, or followers of Hume, says Schulze, reject the thing-in-itself as being "beyond the bounds of all experience" (p. 57). We reject objective knowledge (p. 25); we deny that space and time really exist outside us (p. 100); we reject the presence in our experience of necessity (p. 112), causality, force, etc. (p. 113). One cannot attribute to them any "reality outside our conceptions" (p. 114). Kant proves apriority "dogmatically," saying that since we cannot think otherwise there is therefore an a priori law of thought. "This argument," Schulze replies to Kant, "has long been utilised in philosophy to prove the objective nature of what lies outside our ideas" (p. 141), Arguing thus, we may attribute causality to things in-themselves (p. 142). "Experience never tells us (wir erfahren niemals ) that the action on us of objective things produces ideas," and Kant by no means proved that "this something (which lies outside our reason) must be regarded as a thing in-itself, distinct from our sensation (Gemut ). But sensation also may be thought of as the sole basis of all our knowledge"
page 230
(p. 265). The Kantian critique of pure reason "bases its argument on the proposition that every act of cognition begins with the action of objective things on our organs of sensation (Gemüt ), but it then disputes the truth and reality of this proposition" (p. 266). Kant in no way refuted the idealist Berkeley (pp. 268-72).
It is evident from this that the Humean Schulze rejects Kant's doctrine of the thing-in-itself as an inconsistent concession to materialism, i.e., to the "dogmatic" assertion that in our sensations we are given objective reality, or, in other words, that our ideas are caused by the action of objective things (independent of our mind) on our sense-organs. The agnostic Schulze reproaches the agnostic Kant on the grounds that the latter's assumption of the thing-in-itself contradicts agnosticism and leads to materialism. In the same way, but even more vigorously, Kant is criticised by the subjective idealist Fichte, who maintains that Kant's assumption of the thing-in-itself independent of the self is "realism " (Werke, I, S. 483), and that Kant makes "no clear" distinction between "realism" and "idealism." Fichte sees a crying inconsistency in the assumption of Kant and the Kantians that the thing-in-itself is the "basis of objective reality" (p. 480), for this is in contradiction to critical idealism. "With you," exclaims Fichte, addressing the realist expositors of Kant, "the earth rests on the great elephant, and the great elephant rests on the earth. Your thing-in-itself, which is only thought, acts on the self !" ( p. 483).
Thus Avenarius was profoundly mistaken in imagining that he "for the first time" undertook a "purification of the experience" of Kant from apriorism and from the thing-in-itself and that he was thereby giving rise to a "new" trend in philosophy. In reality he was continuing the old line of Hume and
page 231
Berkeley, Schulze-Aenesidemus and J. G. Fichte. Avenarius imagined that he was "purifying experience" in general. In reality he was only purifying agnosticism of Kantianism. He fought not against the agnosticism of Kant (agnosticism is a denial of objective reality given in sensation), but for a purer agnosticism, for the elimination of Kant's assumption, which is contradictory to agnosticism, that there is a thing-in itself, albeit unknowable, noumenal and other-sided, that there is necessity and causality, albeit a priori, given in our understanding, and not in objective reality. He fought Kant not from the Left, as the materialists fought Kant, but from the Right, as the sceptics and idealists fought Kant. He imagined that he was advancing, when in reality he was retreating to the programme of criticising Kant which Kuno Fischer, speaking of Schulze-Aenesidemus, aptly characterised in the following words: "The critique of pure reason with pure reason [i.e., apriorism] left out is scepticism. The critique of pure reason with the thing-in-itself left out is Berkeleian idealism" (History of Modern Philosophy, German ed., 1869, Vol. V, p. 115).
This brings us to one of the most curious episodes in our whole "Machiad," in the whole campaign of the Russian Machians against Engels and Marx. The latest discovery by Bogdanov and Bazarov, Yushkevich and Valentinov, trumpeted by them in a thousand different keys, is that Plekhanov is making a "luckless attempt to reconcile Engels with Kant by the aid of a compromise<"p231"> -- a thing-in-itself which is just a wee bit knowable" (Studies,[85] etc., p. 67 and many other places). This discovery of our Machians discloses a veritable bottomless pit of utter confusion and monstrous misunderstanding both of Kant and of the whole course of development of German classical philosophy.
page 232
The principal feature of Kant's philosophy is the reconciliation of materialism with idealism, a compromise between the two, the combination within one system of heterogeneous and contrary philosophical trends. When Kant assumes that something outside us, a thing-in-itself, corresponds to our ideas, he is a materialist. When he declares this thing-in-itself to be unknowable, transcendental, other-sided, he is an idealist. Recognising experience, sensations, as the only source of our knowledge, Kant is directing his philosophy towards sensationalism, and via sensationalism, under certain conditions, towards materialism. Recognising the apriority of space, time, causality, etc., Kant is directing his philosophy towards idealism. Both consistent materialists and consistent idealists (as well as the "pure" agnostics, the Humeans) have mercilessly criticised Kant for this inconsistency. The materialists blamed Kant for his idealism, rejected the idealist features of his system, demonstrated the knowability, the this-sidedness of the thing-in-itself, the absence of a fundamental difference between the thing-in-itself and the phenomenon, the need of deducing causality, etc., not from a priori laws of thought, but from objective reality. The agnostics and idealists blamed Kant for his assumption of the thing-in-itself as a concession to materialism, "realism" or "naïve realism." Thc agnostics, moreover, rejected not only the thing-in-itself, but apriorism as well; while the idealists demanded the consistent deduction from pure thought not only of the a priori forms of the under standing, but of the world as a whole (by magnifying human thought to an abstract Self or to an "Absolute Idea," or to a "Universal Will," etc., etc.). And here our Machians, "without noticing" that they had taken as their teachers men who had criticised Kant from the standpoint or scepticism and idealism, began to rend their clothes and to cover their
page 233
heads with ashes at the sight of monstrous people who criticised Kant from a diametrically opposite point of view, who rejected the slightest element of agnosticism (scepticism) and idealism in his system, who argued that the thing-in-ittelf is objectively real, fully knowable and this-sided, that it does not differ fundamentally from appearances that it becomes transformed into appearance at every step in the development of the individual consciousness of man and the collective consciousness of mankind. Help, they cried, this is an illegitimate mixture of materialism and Kantianism!
When I read the assurances of our Machians that they criticise Kant far more consistently and thoroughly<"p233"> than any of the antiquated materialists, it always seems to me as though Purishkevich[86] had joined our company and was shouting: I criticised the Constitutional-Democrats far more consistently and thoroughly than you Marxist gentlemen! There is no question about it, Mr. Purishkevich, politically consistent people can and always will criticise the Constitutional-Democrats from diametrically opposite points of view, but after all it must not be forgotten that you criticised the Constitutional-Democrats for being excessively democratic, while we criticised them for being insufficiently democratic! The Machians criticise Kant for being too much of a materialist, while we criticise him for not being enough of a materialist. The Machians criticise Kant frorn the Right, we from the Left.
The Humean Schulze and the subjective idealist Fichte may be taken as examples of the former category of critics in the history of classical German philosophy. As we have already seen, they try to obliterate the "realistic" elements of Kantianism. Just as Schulze and Fichte criticised Kant himself, so the Humean empirio-criticists and the subjective idealist-immanentists criticised the German Neo-Kantians of the
page 234
second half of the nineteenth century. The line of Hume and Berkeley reappeared in a slightly renovated verbal garb. Mach and Avenarius reproached Kant not because his treatment of the thing-in-itself was not sufficiently realistic, not sufficiently materialistic, but because he assumed its existence; not because he refused to deduce causality and necessity in nature from objective reality, but because he assumed causality and necessity at all (except perhaps purely "logical" necessity). The immanentists were at one with the empirio-criticists, also criticising Kant from the Humean and Berkeleian standpoint. For instance, Leclair in 1879, in the work in which he praised Mach as a remarkable philosopher, reproached Kant for his "inconsistency and connivance at realism" as expressed in the concept of the "thing-in-itself " -- that "nominal residuum of vulgar realism" (Der Realismus der modernen Naturwissenschaft, usw., S. 9). Leclair calls materialism "vulgar realism" -- in order "to make it stronger." "In our opinion," writes Leclair, "all those parts of the Kantian theory which gravitate towards realismus vulgaris should be vanquished and eliminated as being inconsistencies and bastard (zwitterhaft ) products from the idealist point of view" (p. 41). "The inconsistencies and contradictions in the Kantian theory of knowledge [arise from] the amalgamation (Verquickung ) of idealist criticism with still unvanquished remnants of realistic dogmatism" (p. 170). By realistic dogmatism Leclair means materialism.
Another immanentist, Johannes Rehmke, reproached Kant because he realistically walled himself off from Berkeley with the thing-in-itself (Johannes Rehmke, Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff, Berlin, 1880, S. 9). "The philosophical activity of Kant bore an essentially polemical character: with the thing-in-itself he turned against German rationalism [i.e.,
page 235
the old fideism of the eighteenth century], and with pure contemplation against English empiricism" (p. 25). "I would compare the Kantian thing-in-itself with a movable lid placed over a pit: the thing looks so innocent and safe; one steps on it and suddenly falls into . . . the 'world-in-itself '" (p. 27). That is why Kant is not liked by the associates of Mach and Avenarius, the immanentists; they do not like him because in some respects he approaches the "pit" of materialism!
And here are some examples of the criticism of Kant from the Left. Feuerbach reproaches Kant not for his "realism," but for his idealism, and describes his system as "idealism based on empiricism" (Werke, II, 296).
Here is a particularly important remark on Kant by Feuerbach. "Kant says: If we regard -- as we should -- the objects of our perceptions as mere appearances, we thereby admit that at the bottom of appearances is a thing-in-itself, although we do not know how it is actually constructed, but only know its appearance, i.e., the manner in which our senses are affected (affiziert ) by this unknown something. Hence, our reason, by the very fact that it accepts appearances, also admits the existence of things-in-themselves; and to that extent we can say that to entertain an idea of such entities which lie at the bottom of appearances, and consequently are but thought entities, is not only permissible, but unavoidable. . . ." Having selected a passage from Kant where the thing-in-itself is regarded merely as a mental thing, a thought entity, and not a real thing, Feuerbach directs his whole criticism against it. ". . . Therefore," he says, "the objects of the senses [the objects of experience] are for the mind only appearances, and not truth. . . . Yet the thought entities are not actual objects for the mind! The Kantian philosophy is a contradiction between subject and object, between entity and existence, thinking and
page 236
being. Entity is left to the mind, existence to the senses. Existence without entity [i.e., the existence of appearances without objective reality] is mere appearance -- the sensible things -- while entity without existence is mere thought -- the thought entities, the noumena; they are thought of, but they lack existence -- at least for us -- and objectivity; they are the things-in-themselves, the true things, but they are not real things. . . . But what a contradiction, to sever truth from reality, reality from truth!" (Werke, II, S. 302-03). Feuerbach reproaches Kant not because he assumes things-in-themselves, but because he does not grant them reality, i.e., objective reality, because he regards them as mere thought, "thought entities," and not as "entities possessing existence," i.e., real and actually existing. Feuerbach rebukes Kant for deviating from materialism.
"The Kantian philosophy is a contradiction," Feuerbach wrote to Bolin on March 26, 1858, "it inevitably leads either to Fichtean idealism or to sensationalism." The former conclusion "belongs to the past," the latter "to the present and the future" (Grün, op. cit., II, 49). We have already seen that Feuerbach advocates objective sensationalism, i.e., materialism. The new turn from Kant to agnosticism and idealism, to Hume and Berkeley, is undoubtedly reactionary, even from Feuerbach's standpoint. And his ardent follower, Albrecht Rau, who together with the merits of Feuerbach also adopted his faults, which were eliminated by Marx and Engels, criticised Kant wholly in the spirit of his teacher: "The Kantian philosophy is an amphibole [ambiguity]; it is both materialism and idealism, and the key to its essence lies in its dual nature. As a materialist or an empiricist, Kant cannot help conceding things an existence (Wesenheit ) outside us. But as an idealist he could not rid himself of the
page 237
prejudice that the soul is an entity totally different from sensible things. Hence there are real things and a human mind which apprehends those things. But how can the mind approach things totally different from itself? The way out adopted by Kant is as follows: the mind possesses certain a priori knowledge, in virtue of which things must appear to it as they do. Hence, the fact that we understand things as we do is a fact of our creation. For the mind which lives within us is nothing but the divine mind, and just as God created the world out of nothing, so the human mind creates out of things something which they are not in themselves. Thus Kant guarantees real things their existence as 'things-in-themselves.' Kant, however, needed the soul, because immortality was for him a moral postulate. The 'thing-in-itself,' gentle men [says Rau, addressing the Neo-Kantians in general and the muddleheaded A. Lange in particular, who falsified the History of Materialism ], is what separates the idealism of Kant from the idealism of Berkeley; it spans the gap between materialism and idealism. Such is my criticism of the Kantian philosophy, and let those who can refute it. . . ." "For the materialist a distinction between a priori knowledge and the 'thing-in-itself' is absolutely superfluous, for since he nowhere breaks the continuity of nature, since he does not regard matter and mind as two fundamentally different things, but as two aspects of one and the same thing, he need not resort to artifice in order to bring the mind and the thing into conjunction."*
* Albrecht Rau, Ludwig Feuerbachs Philosophie, die Naturforschung und die philosophische Kritik der Gegenwart [Ludwig Feuerbach's Philosophy, Natural Science and the Modern Philosophical Critique ], Leipzig, 1882, S. 87-89.
page 238
Further, Engels as we have seen, rebuked Kant for being an agnostic, but not for his deviation from consistent agnosticism. Lafargue, Engels' disciple, argued in 1900 against the Kantians (amongst whom at that time was Charles Rappoport) as follows:
". . . At the beginning of the nineteenth century our bourgeoisie, having completed its task of revolutionary destruction, began to repudiate its Voltairean and free-thinking philosophy. Catholicism, which the master decorator Chateaubriand painted in romantic colours (peinturlurait ), was restored to fashion, and Sebastian Mercier imported the idealism of Kant in order to give the coup de grâce to the materialism of the Encyclopaedists, whose protagonists had been guillotined by Robespierre.
"At the end of the nineteenth century, which will go down in history as the 'bourgeois century,' the intellectuals attempted to crush the materialism of Marx and Engels beneath the philosophy of Kant. The reactionary movement started in Germany<"p238"> -- without offence to the socialist integralistes [87] who would like to ascribe the honour to their chief, Malon. But Malon himself had been to the school of Höchberg, Bernstein and the other disciples of Dühring, who were reforming Marxism in Zurich. [Lafargue is referring to the ideological movement in German socialism in the later 'seventies.] It is to be expected that Jaurès, Fournière and our other intellectuals will also treat us to Kant as soon as they have mastered his terminology. . . . Rappoport is mistaken when he assures us that for Marx the 'ideal and the real are identical.' In the first place we never employ such metaphysical phraseology. An idea is as real as the object of which it is the reflection in the brain. . . . To provide a little
page 239
recreation for the comrades who have to acquaint themselves with bourgeois philosophy, I shall explain the substance of this famous problem which has so much exercised spiritualist minds.
"The workingman who eats sausage and receives a hundred sous a day knows very well that he is robbed by the employer and is nourished by pork meat, that the employer is a robber and that the sausage is pleasant to the taste and nourishing to the body. Not at all, say the bourgeois sophists, whether they are called Pyrrho, Hume or Kant. His opinion is personal, an entirely subjective opinion; he might with equal reason maintain that the employer is his benefactor and that the sausage consists of chopped leather, for he cannot know things-in-themselves.
"The question is not properly put, that is the whole trouble. . . . In order to know an object, man must first verify whether his senses deceive him or not. . . . The chemists have gone still further -- they have penetrated into bodies, they have analysed them, decomposed them into their elements, and then performed the reverse procedure, they have recomposed them from their elements. And from the moment that man is able to produce things for his own use from these elements, he may, as Engels says, assert that he knows the things-in-themselves. The God of the Christians, if he existed and if he created the world, could do no more."*
We have taken the liberty of making this long quotation in order to show how Lafargue understood Engels and how he criticised Kant from the Left, not for those aspects of
* Paul Lafargue, "Le materialisme de Marx et l'idealisme de Kant" [Marx's Materialism and Kant's Idealism ], Le Socialiste,[88] February 25, 1900.
page 240
Kantianism which distinguish it from Humism, but for those which are common to both Kant and Hume; not for his assumption of the thing-in-itself, but for his inadequately materialist view of it.
And lastly, Karl Kautsky in his Ethics also criticises Kant from a standpoint diametrically opposed to that of Hume and Berkeley. "That I see green, red and white," he writes, arguing against Kant's epistemology, "is grounded in my faculty of sight. But that green is something different from red testifies to something that lies outside of me, to real differences between the things. . . . The relations and differences between the things themselves revealed to me by the individual space and time concepts . . . are real relations and differences of the external world, not conditioned by the nature of my perceptive faculty. . . . If this were really so [if Kant's doctrine of the ideality of time and space were true], we could know nothing about the world outside us, not even that it exists." (Russ. trans., pp. 33-34.)
Thus the entire school of Feuerbach, Marx and Engels turned from Kant to the Left, to a complete rejection of all idealism and of all agnosticism. But our Machians followed the reactionary trend in philosophy, Mach and Avenarius, who criticised Kant from the standpoint of Hume and Berkeley. Of course, it is the sacred right of every citizen, and particularly of every intellectual, to follow any ideological reactionary he likes. But when people who have radically severed relations with the very foundations of Marxism in philosophy begin to dodge, confuse matters, hedge and assure us that they "too" are Marxists in philosophy, that they are "almost" in agreement with Marx, and have only slightly "supplemented" him -- the spectacle is a far from pleasant one.
page 241
<"c4s2">
RIDICULED THE "EMPIRIO-CRITICIST" CHERNOV
"It is, of course, amusing," writes Mr. P. Yushkevich, "to see how Mr. Chernov tries to make the agnostic positivist Comtean and Spencerian, Mikhailovsky, a forerunner of Mach and Avenarius" (op. cit., p. 73).
First of all, what is amusing here is Mr. Yushkevich's astonishing ignorance. Like all Voroshilovs, he conceals this ignorance under a display of erudite words and names. The passage quoted is from a paragraph devoted to the relation between Machism and Marxism. And although he undertakes to treat of this subject, Mr. Yushkevich does not know that for Engels (as for every materialist) the adherents of the Humean line and the adherents of the Kantian line are equally agnostics. Therefore, to contrast agnosticism generally with Machism, when even Mach himself confesses to being a follower of Hume, is simply to prove oneself an ignoramus in philosophy. The phrase "agnostic positivism" is also absurd, for the adherents of Hume in fact call themselves positivists. Mr. Yushkevich, who has taken Petzoldt as his teacher, should have known that Petzoldt definitely regards empirio-criticism as positivism. And finally, to drag in the names of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer is again absurd, for Marxism rejects not what distinguishes one positivist from another, but what is common to both and what makes a philosopher a positivist instead of a materialist.
Our Voroshilov needed this display of words so as to "mesmerise" his reader, to stun him with a cacophony of words, to distract his attention away from the essence of the matter to empty trifles. And the essence of the matter is the
page 242
radical difference between materialism and the broad current of positivism, which includes Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Mikhailovsky, a number of Neo-Kantians, and Mach and Avenarius. The essence of the matter has been very accurately expressed by Engels in his Ludwig Feuerbach, where he places all the Kantians and Humeans of that period (i.e., the 'eighties of the last century) in the camp of wretched eclectics, pettifoggers (<"p242">Flohknacker : literally, flea-crackers), and so on.[89] To whom this characterisation can and must apply is a question on which our Voroshilovs did not wish to reflect. And since they are incapable of reflecting, we shall cite one illuminating comparison. Engels,<"p242a"> speaking both in 1888 and 1892 of the Kantians and Humeans in general, mentions no names.[90] The only reference Engels makes to a book is his reference to the work of Starcke on Feuerbach, which Engels analysed. "Starcke," says Engels, "takes great pains to defend Feuerbach against the attacks and doctrines of the vociferous lecturers who today go by the name of philosophers in Germany. For people who are interested in this afterbirth of German classical philosophy this is a matter of importance; for Starcke himself it may have appeared necessary. We, however, will spare the reader this" (<"p242b">Ludwig Feuerbach, S. 25).[91]
Engels wanted to "spare the reader," that is, to save the Social-Democrats from a pleasant acquaintance with the degenerate chatterboxes who call themselves philosophers. And who are implied by this "afterbirth"?
We open Starcke's book (C. N. Starcke, Ludwig Feuerbach, Stuttgart, 1885), and find constant references to the adherents of Hume and Kant. Starcke dissociates Feuerbach from these two trends. Starcke quotes in this connection
page 243
A. Riehl, Windelband and A. Lange (pp. 3, 18-19, 127, etc., in Starcke).
We open Avenarius' The Human Concept of the World, which appeared in 1891, and on page 120 of the first German edition we read: "The final result of our analysis concurs -- although not absolutely (durchgehend ) in the measure of the various points of view -- with that reached by other investigators, for example, E. Laas, E. Mach, A. Riehl, W. Wundt. See also Schopenhauer."
Whom was our Voroshilov-Yushkevich jeering at?
Avenarius has not the slightest doubt as to his kinship in principle -- not regarding any particular question, but regard ing the "final result" of empirio-criticism -- to the Kantians Riehl and Laas and to the idealist Wundt. He mentions Mach between the two Kantians. And, indeed, are they not all one company, since Riehl and Laas purified Kant à la Hume, and Mach and Avenarius purified Hume à la Berkeley?
Is it surprising that Engels wished to "spare" the German workers, to save them from a close acquaintance with this whole company of "flea-cracking" university lecturers?
Engels could spare the German workers, but the Voroshilovs do not spare the Russian reader.
It should be noted that an essentially eclectic combination of Kant and Hume, or Hume and Berkeley, is possible, so to speak, in varying proportions, by laying principal stress now on one, now on another element of the mixture. We saw above, for instance, that only one Machian, H. Kleinpeter, openly admits that he and Mach are solipsists (i.e., consistent Berkeleians). On the other hand, the Humean trend in the views of Mach and Avenarius is emphasised by many of their disciples and followers: Petzoldt, Willy, Pearson, the Russian empirio-criticist Lessevich, the Frenchman Henri Dela-
page 244
croix[*] and others. We shall cite one example -- an especially emincllt scientist who in philosophy also combined Hume with Berkeley, but who emphasised the materialist elements of this mixture. He is Thomas Huxley, the famous English scientist, who gave currency to the term "agnostic" and whom Engels undoubtedly had chiefly and primarily in mind when he spoke of English agnosticism.<"p244"> Engels in 1892 called this type of agnostics "shamefaced materialists."[92] James Ward, the English spiritualist, in his book Naturalism and Agnosticism, wherein he chiefly attacks the "scientific champion of agnosticism," Huxley (Vol. II, p. 229), bears out Engels' opinion when he says: "In Huxley's case indeed the leaning towards the primacy of the physical side ["series of elements" Mach calls it] is often so pronounced that it can hardly be called parallelism at all. In spite of his vehement repudiation of the title of materialist as an affront to his untarnished agnosticism, I know of few recent writers who on occasion better deserve the title" (Vol. II, pp. 30-3l). And James Ward quotes the following statements by Huxley in confirmation of his opinion: "'Anyone who is acquainted with the history of science will admit, that its progress has, in all ages, meant, and now more than ever means, the extension of the province of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity.'" Or: "'It is in itself of little moment whether we express the phenomena of matter in terms of spirit, or the phenomena of spirit in terms of <"fnp244">
* Bibliotheque du congrès international de philosophie, Vol. IV, Henri Delacroix, David Hume et la philosophie critique [David Hume and Critical Philosophy ]. Among the followers of Hume the author includes Avenarius and the immanentists in Germany, Ch. Renouvier and his school (the neo-criticists) in France.
page 245
matter -- each statement has a certain relative truth ["relatively stable complexes of elements," according to Mach]. But with a view to the progress of science, the materialistic terminology is in every way to be preferred. For it connects thought with the other phenomena of the universe. . . whereas the alternative, or spiritualistic, terminology is utterly barren, and leads to nothing but obscurity and confusion of ideas. . . . Thus there can be little doubt, that the further science advances, the more extensively and consistently will all the phenomena of Nature be represented by materialistic formulae and symbols'" (Vol. I, p. 17-19).
So argued the "shamefaced materialist" Huxley, who refused to accept materialism, regarding it as "metaphysics" that illegitimately goes beyond "groups of sensations." And this same Huxley wrote: "'If I were obliged to choose between absolute materialism and absolute idealism I should feel compelled to accept the latter alternative. . . . Our one certainty is the existence of the mental world'" (J. Ward, Vol. II, p. 216).
Huxley's philosophy is as much a mixture of Hume and Berkeley as is Mach's philosophy. But in Huxley's case the Berkeleian streaks are incidental, and agnosticism serves as a fig-leaf for materialism. With Mach the "colouring" of the mixture is a different one, and Ward, the spiritualist, while bitterly combating Huxley, pats Avenarius and Mach affectionately on the back.
<"c4s3">
OF MACH AND AVENARIUS
In speaking of empirio-criticism we could not avoid repeatedly mentioning the philosophers of the so-called im-
page 246
manentist school, the principal representatives of which are Schuppe, Leclair, Rehmke, and Schubert-Soldern. It is now necessary to examine the relation of empirio-criticism to the immanentists and the nature of the philosophy preached by the latter.
In 1902 Mach wrote: ". . . Today I see that a host of philosophers -- positivists, empirio-criticists, adherents of the immanentist philosophy -- as well as a very few scientists, have all, without knowing anything of each other, entered on new paths which, in spite of their individual differences, converge almost towards one point" (Analysis of Sensations, p. 9). Here we must first note Mach's unusually frank admission that very few scientists are followers of the supposedly "new," but in truth very old, Humean-Berkeleian philosophy. Secondly, extremely important is Mach's opinion that this "new" philosophy is a broad current in which the immanentists are on the same footing as the empirio-criticists and the positivists. "Thus" -- repeats Mach in the introduction to the Russian translation of the Analysis of Sensations (1906) -- "there is a common movement. . ." (p. 4). "My position [Mach says in another place], moreover, borders closely on that of the representatives of the immanentist philosophy. . . . I found hardly anything in this book [i.e., W. Schuppe, Outline of the Theory of Knowledge and Logic ] with which, with perhaps a very slight change, I would not gladly agree" (p. 46). Mach considers that Schubert-Soldern is also "following close paths" (p. 4), and as to Wilhelm Schuppe, Mach even dedicates to him his latest work, the summary so to speak of his philosophical labours, Knowledge and Error.
Avenarius, the other founder of empirio-criticism, wrote in 1894 that he was "gladdened" and "encouraged" by
page 247
Schuppe's sympathy for empirio-criticism, and that the "differences" between him and Schuppe "exist, perhaps, only temporarily" (vielleicht nur einstweilen noch bestehend ).[*] And, finally, J. Petzoldt, whose teachings Lessevich regards as the last word in empirio-criticism, openly acclaims the trio -- Schuppe, Mach and Avenarius -- as the leaders of the "new" trend. (Einführung in die Philosophie der reinen Erfahrung, Bd. II, 1904, S. 295; Das Weltproblem, 1906, S. v. und 146). On this point Petzoldt is definitely opposed to Willy (Einf., II, 321), probably the only outstanding Machian who felt ashamed of such a kinship as Schuppe's and who tried to dissociate himself from him fundamentally, for which this disciple was reprimanded by his beloved teacher Avenarius. Avenarius wrote the words about Schuppe above quoted in a comment on Willy's article against Schuppe, adding that Willy's criticism perhaps "was put more strongly than was really necessary" (Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 18. Jahrg., 1894, S. 29; which also contains Willy's article against Schuppe).
Having acquainted ourselves with the empirio-criticists' opinion of the immanentists, let us examine the immanentists' opinion of the empirio-criticists. We have already mentioned the opinion uttered by Leclair in 1879. Schubert-Soldern in 1882 explicitly expressed his "agreement" "in part with the elder Fichte" (i.e., the distinguished representative of subjective idealism, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose son was as inept in philosophy as was the son of Joseph Dietzgen), and "with Schuppe, Leclair, Avenarius and partly with Rehmke," while Mach (Die Geschichte und die Wurzel des <"fnp247">
* Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 1894, 18. Jahrg., Heft I, S. 29.
page 248
Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit ) is cited with particular gusto in opposition to "natural-historical metaphysics"[*] -- the term given to natural-historical materialism by all the reactionary university lecturers and professors in Germany. In 1893, after the appearance of Avenarius' The Human Concept of the World, W. Schuppe hailed this work in An Open Letter to Prof. Avenarius as a "confirmation of the naïve realism" which he (Schuppe) himself advocated. "My conception of thought," Schuppe wrote, "excellently harmonises with your [Avenarius'] pure experience."[**] Then, in 1896, Schubert-Soldern, summarising the "methodological trend in philosophy" on which he "bases himself," traces his genealogy from Berkeley and Hume down through F. A. Lange ("the real beginning of our movement in Germany dates from Lange"), and then through Laas, Schuppe and Co., Avennrius and Mach, Riehl (among the Neo-Kantians), Ch. Renouvier (among the Frenchmen), etc.*** Finally, in their programmatic "Introduction" printed in the first issue of the philosophical organ of the immanentists, alongside a declaration of war on materialism and an expression of sympathy with Charles Renouvier, we read: "Even in the camp of the scientists themselves voices of individual thinkers are being raised sermonising against the growing arrogance <"fnp248">
* Dr. Richard von Schubert-Soldern, Ueber Transcendenz des Objekts und Subjekts [On the Transcendence of the Object and Subject ], 1882, S. 37 and 5. Cf. also his Grundlagen einer Erkenntnistheorie [Principles of a Theory of Knowledge ], 1884, S. 3.
** Vierteijahrsschlift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 17. Jahrg., 1893, S. 384.
*** Dr. Richard von Schubert-Soldern, Das menschliche Glück und die soziale Frage [Human Happiness and the Social Question ], 1896, S. v, vi.
page 249
of their colleagues, against the unphilosophical spirit which has taken possession of the natural sciences. Thus the physicist Mach. . . . On all hands fresh forces are stirring and are working to destroy the blind faith in the infallibility of the natural sciences, and once again people are beginning to seek for other paths into the profundities of the mysterious, a better entrance to the house of truth."[*]
A word or two about Ch. Renouvier. He is the head of the influential and widespread school in France known as the neo-criticists. His theoretical philosophy is a combination of the phenomenalism of Hume and the apriorism of Kant. The thing-in-itself is absolutely rejected. The connection of phenomena, order and law is declared to be a priori ; law is written with a capital letter and is converted into the basis of religion. The Catholic priests go into raptures over this philosophy. The Machian Willy scornfully refers to Renouvier as a "second apostle Paul," as "an obscurantist of the first water" and as a "casuistic preacher of free will" (Gegen die Schulweisheit, S. 129). And it is such co-thinkers of the immanentists who warmly greet<"p249"> Mach's philosophy. When his Mechanics appeared in a French translation,[94] the organ of the neo-criticists -- L'Année philosophique [95] -- edited by Pillon, a collaborator and disciple of Renouvier, wrote: "It is unnecessary to speak of the extent to which, in this criticism of substance, the thing, the thing-in-itself, Mach's positive science agrees with neo-critical idealism" (Vol. XV, 1904, p. 179).
As for the Russian Machians, they are all ashamed of their kinship with the immanentists, and one of course could not expect anything else of people who did not deliberately <"fnp249">
* Zeitschrift für immanente Philosophie,[93] Bd. I, Berlin, 1896, S. 6, 9.
page 250
adopt the path of Struve, Menshikov, and the like. Bazarov alone refers to "certain representatives of the immanentist school" as "realists."[*] Bogdanov briefly (and in fact falsely ) declares that "the immanentist school is only an intermediate form between Kantianism and empirio-criticism" (Empirio-Monism, Bk. III, p. xxii). V. Chernov writes: "Generally speaking, the immanentists approach positivism in only one aspect of their theory, in other aspects they go far beyond it" (Philosophical and Sociological Studies, p. 37). Valentinov says that "the immanentist school clothed these [Machian] ideas in an unsuitable form and found themselves in the blind alley of solipsism" (op. cit., p. 149). As you see, you pay your money and take your choice: constitution and salmon mayonnaise, realism and solipsism. Our Machians are afraid to tell the plain and clear truth about the immanentists.
The fact is that the immanentists are rank reactionaries, I open advocates of fideism, unadulterated in their obscurantism. There is not one of them who has not frankly made his more theoretical works on epistemology a defence of religion and a justification of medievalism of one kind or another. Leclair, in 1879, advocated his philosophy as one that satisfies "all the needs of a religiously inclined mind" (Der Realismus, etc., S. 73). J. Rehmke, in 1880, dedicated his "theory of knowledge" to the Protestant pastor Biedermann and closed his book by preaching not a supersensible God, but God as a "real concept" (it was for this reason <"fnp250">
* "Realists in modern philosophy -- certain representatives of the immanentist school who have emerged from Kantianism, the school of Mach-Avenarius, and many other kindred movements -- find that there are absolutely no grounds for rejecting the basis of naïve realism" (Studies, etc., p. 26).
page 251
presumably, that Bazarov ranked "certain" immanentists among the "realists"?), and moreover the "objectivisation of this real concept is relegated to practical life," while Biedermann's "Christian dogmatism" is declared to be a model of "scientific theology" (J. Rehmke, Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff, Berlin, 1880, S. 312). Schuppe in the Zeitschrift für immanente Philosophie assures us that though the immanentists deny the transcendental, God and the future life do not come under this concept (Zeitschrift für immanente Philosophie, II. Band, S. 52). In his Ethik he insists on the "connection of the moral law . . . with the metaphysical world conception" and condemns the separation of the church from the state as a "senseless phrase" (Dr. Wilhelm Schuppe, Grundzüge der Ethik und Rechtsphilosophie [Principles of Ethics and the Philosophy of Law ], Breslau, 1881, S. 181, 325). Schubert-Soldern in his Grundlage einer Erkenntnistheorie deduces both the pre-existence of the self before the body and the after-existence of the self<"p251"> after the body, i.e., the immortality of the soul (op. cit., p. 82), etc. In The Social Question,[96] arguing against Bebel, he defends, together with "social reforms," suffrage based on class distinction, and says that the "Social-Democrats ignore the fact that without the divine gift of unhappiness there could be no happiness" (p. 330), and thereupon laments the fact that materialism "prevails" (p. 242): "he who in our time believes in a life beyond, or even in its possibility, is considered a fool" (ibid.).
And German Menshikovs like these, no less obscurantists of the first water than Renouvier, live in lasting concubinage with the empirio-criticists. Their theoretical kinship is in contestable. There is no more Kantianism in the immanentists than in Petzoldt or Pearson. We saw above that they
page 252
themselves regard themselves as disciples of Hume and Berkeley, an opinion of the immanentists that is generally recognised in philosophical literature. In order to show clearly what epistemological premises these comrades-in-arms of Mach and Avenarius proceed from, we shall quote some fundamental theoretical propositions from the works of im manentists.
Leclair in 1879 had not yet invented the term "immanent," which really signifies "experiential," "given in experience," and which is just as spurious a label for concealing corruption as the labels of the European bourgeois parties. In his first work, Leclair frankly and explicitly calls himself a "critical idealist " (Der Realismus, etc., S. 11, 21, 206, etc.). In this work he criticises Kant, as we have already seen, for his concessions to materialism, and clearly indicates his wn path away from Kant to Fichte and Berkeley. Leclair fights materialism in general and the tendency towards materialism displayed by the majority of scientists in particular as mercilessly as Schuppe, Schubert-Soldern and Rehmke.
"If we return," Leclair says, "to the standpoint of critical idealism, if we do not attribute a transcendental existence [i.e., an existence outside of human consciousness] to nature or the processes of nature, then for the subject the aggregate of bodies and his own body, in so far as he can see and feel it, together with all its changes, will be a directly given phenomenon of spatially connected co-existences and successions in time, and the whole explanation of nature will reduce itself to stating the laws of these co-existences and successions" (p. 21).
Back to Kant! -- said the reactionary Neo-Kantians. Back to Fichte and Berkeley! -- is essentially what the reactionary immanentists are saying. For Leclair, all that exists consists
page 253
of "complexes of sensations " (p. 38), while certain classes of properties (Eigenschaften ), which act upon our sense-organs, he designates, for example, by the letter M, and other classes, which act upon other objects of nature, by the letter N (p. 150, etc.). Moreover, Leclair speaks of nature as the "phenomena of the consciousness" (Bewusstseinsphänomen) not of a single person, but of "mankind" (pp. 55-56). If we remember that Leclair published his book in Prague, where Mach was professor of physics,<"p253"> and that Leclair cites with rapture only Mach's Erhaltung der Arbeit,[97] which appeared in 1872, the question involuntarily arises: ought we not to regard the advocate of fideism and frank idealist Leclair as the true progenitor of the "original" philosophy of Mach?
As for Schuppe, who, according to Leclair,[*] arrived at the "same results," he, as we have seen, really claims to defend "naïve realism," and in his Open Letter to Prof. Avenarius bitterly complains of the "established perversion of my [Schuppe's] theory of knowledge to subjective idealism." The true nature of the crude forgery which the immanentist Schuppe calls a defence of realism is quite clear from his rejoinder to Wundt, who did not hesitate to class the immanentists with the Fichteans, the subjective idealists (Philosophische Studien, loc. cit., S. 386, 397, 407).
"In my case," Schuppe retorts to Wundt, "the proposition 'being is consciousness' means that consciousness without the external world is inconceivable, that the latter belongs to the former, i.e., the absolute connection (Zusammengehörigkeit ) of the one with the other, which I have so often asserted <"fnp253">
* Beiträge zu einer monistischen Erkenntnistheorie [Essays in a Monistic Theory of Knowledge ], Breslau, 1882, S. 10.
page 254
and explained and in which the two constitute the primary whole of being."[*]
One must be extremely naïve not to discern unadulterated subjective idealism in such "realism"! Just think: the external world "belongs to consciousness" and is in absolute connection with it! The poor professor was indeed slandered by the "established" practice of ranking him with the subjective idealists! Such a philosophy completely coincides with Avenarius' "principal co-ordination"; no reservations and protests on the part of Chernov and Valentinov can sunder them; both philosophies will be consigned together to the museum of reactionary fabrications of German professordom. As a curiosity once more testifying to Valentinov's lack of judgment, let us note that he calls Schuppe a solipsist (it goes without saying that Schuppe vowed and swore that he was not a solipsist -- and wrote special articles to this effect -- just as vehemently as did Mach, Petzoldt, and Co.), yet is highly delighted with Bazarov's article in the Studies ! I should like to translate into German Bazarov's dictum that "sense-perception is the reality existing outside us" and forward it to some more or less intelligent immanentist. He would embrace and kiss Bazarov as heartily as the Schuppes, Leclairs and Schubert-Solderns embraced Mach and Avenarius. For Bazarov's dictum is the alpha and omega of the doctrines of the immanentist school.
And here, lastly, is Schubert-Soldern. "The materialism of natural science," the "metaphysics" of recognising the objective reality of the external world, is the chief enemy of <"fnp254">
* Wilhelm Schuppe, "Die immanente Philosophie und Wilhelm Wundt " ["The Immanent Philosophy and Wilhelm Wundt "] Zeitschrift für immanente Philosophie, Band II, S. 195.
page 255
this philosopher (Grundlagen einer Erkenntnistheorie, 1884, p. 31 and the whole of Chapter II: "The Metaphysics of Natural Science"). "Natural science abstracts from all relations of consciousness" (p. 52) -- that is the chief evil (and that is just what constitutes materialism!). For the individual cannot escape from "sensations and, hence, from a state of consciousness" (pp. 33-34). Of course, Schubert-Soldern admitted in 1896, my standpoint is epistemological solipsism (Die soziale Frage, S. x), but not "metaphysical," not "practical" solipsism. "What is given us immediately is sensations, complexes of constantly changing sensations" (Ueber Transcendenz des Objekts und Subjekts, S. 73).
"Marx took the material process of production," says Schubert-Soldern, "as the cause of inner processes and motives, in the same way (and just as falsely) as natural science regards the common [to humanity] external world as the cause of the individual inner worlds" (Die soziale Frage, S. xviii). That Marx's historical materialism is connected with natural-historical materialism and philosophical materialism in general, it does not even occur to this comrade in-arms of Mach to doubt.
"Many, perhaps the majority, will be of the opinion that from the standpoint of epistemological solipsism no metaphysics is possible, i.e., that metaphysics is always transcendental. Upon more mature reflection I cannot concur with this opinion. Here are my reasons. . . . The immediate foundation of all that is given is the spiritual (solipsist) connection, the central point of which is the individual self (the individual realm of thought) with its body. The rest of the world is inconceivable without this self, just as this self is inconceivable without the rest of the world. With the destruction of the individual self the world is also anni-
page 256
hilated, which appears impossible -- and with the destruction of the rest of the world, nothing remains for my individual self, for the latter can be separated from the world only logically, but not in time and space. Therefore my individual self must continue to exist after my death also, if the entire world is not to be annihilated with it. . ." (ibid., p. xxiii).
The "principal co-ordination," "complexes of sensations" and the rest of the Machian banalities render faithful service to the proper people!
". . . What is the hereafter (das Jenseits ) from the solipsist point of view? It is only a possible future experience for me. . ." (ibid.). "Spiritualism . . . would be obliged to prove the existence of the Jenseits. But at any rate the materialism of natural science cannot be brought into the field against spiritualism, for this materialism, as we have seen, is only one aspect of the world process within the all-embracing spiritual connection" ( = the "principal co-ordination") (p. xxiv).
All this is said in that philosophical introduction to Die soziale Frage (1896) wherein Schubert-Soldern all the time appears arm in arm with Mach and Avenarius. Only for the handful of Russian Machians does Machism serve exclusively for purposes of intellectual prattle. In its native country its role as a flunkey to fideism is openly proclaimed!
<"c4s4">
Let us now cast a glance at the development of Machism after Mach and Avenarius. We have seen that their philosophy is a hash, a pot-pourri of contradictory and disconnected epistemological propositions. We must now examine how and whither, i.e., in what direction, this philosophy is
page 257
developing, for this will help us to settle certain "disputable" questions by referring to indisputable historical facts. And indeed, in view of the eclecticism and incoherence of the initial philosophical premises of the trend we are examining, varying interpretations of it and sterile disputes over particulars and trifles are absolutely inevitable. But empirio-criticism, like every ideological current, is a living thing, which grows and develops, and the fact that it is growing in one direction or another will help us more than long arguments to settle the basic question as to what the real essence of this philosophy is. We judge a person not by what he says or thinks of himself but by his actions. And we must judge philosophers not by the labels they give themselves ("positivism," the philosophy of "pure experience," "monism" or "empirio-monism," the "philosophy of natural science," etc.) but by the manner in which they actually settle fundamental theoretical questions, by their associates, by what they are teaching and by what they have taught their disciples and followers.
It is this last question which interests us now. Everything essential was said by Mach and Avenarius more than twenty years ago. It was bound to become clear in the interval how these "leaders" were understood by those who wanted to understand them, and whom they themselves (at least Mach, who has outlived his colleague) regard as their successors. To be specific, let us take those who themselves claim to be disciples of Mach and Avenarius (or their adherents) and whom Mach himself ranks as such. We shall thus obtain a picture of empirio-criticism as a philosophical current, and not as a collection of literary oddities.
In Mach's Introduction to the Russian translation of the Analysis of Sensations, Hans Cornelius is recommended as
page 258
a "young investigator" who is following "if not quite the same, at least very close paths" (p. 4). In the text of the Analysis of Sensations Mach once again "mentions with pleasure the works" of Cornelius and others, "who have disclosed the kernel of Avenarius' ideas and have developed them further" (p. 48). Let us take Cornelius' Einleitung in die Philosophie [Introduction to Philosophy ] (Germ. ed., 1903) and we find that its author also speaks of his endeavour to follow in the footsteps of Mach and Avenarius (pp. viii, 32). We have before us then a disciple acknowledged by the teacher. This disciple also begins with sensations-elements (pp. 17, 24), categorically declares that he confines himself to experience (p. vi), calls his views "consistent or epistemological empiricism" (p. 335), emphatically condemns the "one sidedness" of idealism and the "dogmatism" of both the idealists and the materialists (p. 129), vehemently denies the possible "misconception" (p. 123) that his philosophy implies the recognition of the world as existing in the mind of man, flirts with naïve realism no less skilfully than Avenarius, Schuppe or Bazarov ("a visual, as well as every other sense perception, is located where we find it, and only where we find it, that is to say, where the naïvenaïve mind, untouched by a false philosophy, localises it" -- p. 125) -- and this disciple, acknowledged as such by his teacher, arrives at immortality and God. Materialism -- thunders this police sergeant in a professorial chair, I beg your pardon, this disciple of the "recent positivists" -- converts man into an automaton. "It need hardly be said that together with the belief in the freedom of our decisions it destroys all considerations of the moral value of our actions and our responsibility for them. Just as little room is left for the idea of the continuation of our life after death" (p. 116). The final note of the book is:
page 259
Education (or the youth stultified by this man of science presumably) is necessary not only for action but "above all . . . to inculcate veneration (Ehrfurcht ) not for the transitory values of a fortuitous tradition, but for the imperishable values of duty and beauty, for the divine (dem Göttlichen ) within us and without" (p. 357).
Compare this with Bogdanov's assertion that "there is absolutely no room " (Bogdanov's italics) and "there cannot be any room" for the idea of God, freedom of the will and immortality of the soul in Mach's philosophy in view of his denial of every "thing-in-itself" (p. xii). While Mach in this same book (p. 293) declares that "there is no Machian philosophy," and recommends not only the immanentists, but also Cornelius who had disclosed the kernel of Avenarius' ideas! Thus, in the first place, Bogdanov absolutely does not know the "Machian philosophy" as a current which not only nestles under the wing of fideism, but which itself goes to the length of fideism. In the second place, Bogdanov absolutely does not know the history of philosophy; for to associate a denial of the ideas mentioned above with a denial of the thing-in-itself is to insult the history of philosophy. Will Bogdanov take it into his head to deny that all consistent followers of Hume, by rejecting every kind of thing-in-itself, do leave room for these ideas? Has Bogdanov never heard of the subjective idealists, who reject every kind of thing in-itself and thereby make room for these ideas? "There can be no room" for these ideas solely in a philosophy that teaches that nothing exists but perceptual being, that the world is matter in motion, that the external world, the physical world familiar to all, is the sole objective reality -- i.e., in the philosophy of materialism. And it is for this, precisely for this, that materialism is combated by the immanentists
page 260
recommended by Mach, by Mach's disciple Cornelius, and by modern professorial philosophy in general.
Our Machians began to repudiate Cornelius only after this indecency had been pointed out to them. Such repudiations are not worth much. Friedrich Adler evidently has not been "warned," and therefore recommends this Cornelius in a socialist journal (Der Kampf, 1908, 5, S. 235: "a work that is easy to read and highly to be commended"). Through the medium of Machism, downright philosophical reactionaries and preachers of fideism are palmed off on the workers as teachers!
Petzoldt, without having been warned, detected the falsity in Cornelius: but his method of combating this falsity is a gem. Listen to this: "To assert that the world is idea [as is asserted by the idealists -- whom we are combating, no joke!] has sense only when it implies that it is the idea of the predicator, or, if you like, of all predicators, i.e., that its existence depends exclusively upon the thought of that individual or of those individuals; it exists only inasmuch as he thinks about it, and what he does not think of does not exist. We, on the contrary, make the world dependent not upon the thought of an individual or individuals, or, to put it better and clearer, not upon the act of thinking, or upon any actual thought, but -- and exclusively in the logical sense -- upon thought in general. The idealist confuses one with the other, and the result is agnostic semi-solipsism, as we observe it in Cornelius" (Einführung, II, 317). <"p260">
Stolypin denied the existence of the cabinets noirs ![98] Petzoldt annihilates the idealists! It is truly astonishing how much this annihilation of idealism resembles a recommendation to the idealists to exercise more skill in concealing their idealism. To say that the world depends upon man's
page 261
thought is perverted idealism. To say that the world depends upon thought in general is recent positivism, critical realism -- in a word, thoroughgoing bourgeois charlatanism! If Cornelius is an agnostic semi-solipsist, Petzoldt is a solipsist semi-agnostic. You are cracking a flea, gentlemen!
Let us proceed. In the second edition of his Erkenntnis und Irrtum, Mach says: "A systematic exposition [of Mach's views], one to which in all its essentials I can subscribe, is given by Professor Dr. Hans Kleinpeter" (Die Erkenntnistheorie der Naturforschung der Gegenwart, Leipzig, 1905: The Theory of Knowledge of Modern Natural Science ). Let us take Hans Number Two. This professor is an accredited disseminator of Machism: a pile of articles on Mach's views in philosophical journals, both in German and in English, translations of works recommended by Mach with introductions by Mach -- in a word, the right hand of the "teacher." Here are his views: ". . . All my (outer and inner) experience, all my thoughts and aspirations are given me as a psychical process, as a part of my consciousness" (op. cit. p. 18). "That which we call physical is a construction of psychical elements" (p. 144). "Subjective conviction, not objective certainty (Gewissheit ) is the only attainable goal of any science " (p. 9). (The italics are Kleinpeter's, who adds the following remark: "Something similar was already said by Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason.") "The assumption that there are other minds is one which can never be confirmed by experience" (p. 42). "I do not know. . . whether, in general, there exist other selves outside of myself" (p. 43). In § 5, entitled "Activity (Spontaneity) in Consciousness," we read that in the case of the animal-automaton the succession of ideas is purely mechanical. The same is true of us when we dream. "The quality of our consciousness
page 262
in its normal state essentially differs from this. It possesses a property which these [the automata] entirely lack, and which it would be very difficult, to say the least, to explain mechanically or automatically: the so-called self-activity of the self. Every person can dissever himself from his states of consciousness, he can manipulate them, can make them stand out more clearly or force them into the background, can analyse them, compare various parts, etc. All this is a fact of (immediate) experience. Our self is therefore essentially different from the sum-total of the states of consciousness and cannot be put as an equivalent of it. Sugar consists of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen; were we to attribute a soul to it, then by analogy it would have to possess the faculty of directing the movement of the hydrogen, oxygen and carbon at will" (pp. 29-30). § 4 of the following chapter is headed: "The Act of Cognition -- an Act of Will (Willenshandlung )." "It must be regarded as definitely established that all my psychical experiences are divisible into two large main groups: compulsory acts and deliberate acts. To the former belong all impressions of the external world" (p. 47). "That it is possible to advance several theories regarding one and the same realm of facts . . . is as well known to physicists as it is incompatible with the premises of an absolute theory of knowledge. And this fact is also linked with the volitional character of our thought; it also implies that our volition is not bound by external circumstances" (p. 50).
Now judge how bold Bogdanov was in asserting that in Mach's philosophy "there is absolutely no room for free will," when Mach himself recommends such a specimen as Kleinpeter! We have already seen that the latter does not attempt to conceal either his own idealism or Mach's. In
page 263
1898-99 Kleinpeter wrote: "Hertz proclaims the same subjectivist view [i.e., as Mach] of the nature of our concepts. . . . If Mach and Hertz [with what justice Kleinpeter here implicates the famous physicist we shall soon see] deserve credit from the standpoint of idealism for having emphasised the subjective origin of all our concepts and of the connections between them -- and not only of certain individual ones -- from the standpoint of empiricism they deserve no less credit for having acknowledged that experience alone, as a court entirely independent of thought, can solve the question of their correctness" (Archiv für systematische Philosophie, Bd. V, 1898-99, S. 169-70). In 1900 he wrote that in spite of all the points on which Mach differs from Kant and Berkeley, "they at any rate are more akin to him than the metaphysical empiricism prevailing in natural science [i.e., materialism! The professor does not like to call the devil by name] which is indeed the main target of Mach's attacks" (op. cit., Bd. VI, S. 87). In 1903 he wrote: "The starting point of Berkeley and Mach is irrefutable. . . . Mach completed what Kant began" (Kantstudien, Bd. VIII, 1903, S. 314, 274).
In the preface to the Russian edition of the Analysis of Sensations Mach also mentions T. Ziehen, "who is following, if not the same, at least very close paths." We take Professor Theodor Ziehen's book The Psychophysiological Theory of Knowledge (Psychophysiologische Erkenntnistheorie, Jena, 1898) and hnd that the author refers to Mach, Avenarius, Schuppe, and so forth in the very introduction. Here therefore we again have a case of a disciple acknowledged by the teacher. Ziehen's "recent" theory is that only the "mob" is capable of believing that "real objects evoke our sensations" (p. 3), and that "over the portals of the theory
page 264
of knowledge there can be no other inscription than the words of Berkeley: 'The external objects subsist not by themselves, but exist in our minds!'" (p. 5). "What is given us is sensations and ideas. Both are embraced by the word psychical. Non-psychical is a word devoid of meaning" (p. 100). The laws of nature are relations not of material bodies but of "reduced sensations" (p. 104. This "new" concept -- "reduced sensations" -- contains everything that is original in Ziehen's Berkeleianismt).
Petzoldt repudiated Ziehen as an idealist as far back as 1904 in the second volume of his Introduction (S. 298-301). By 1906 he had already included Cornelius, Kleinpeter, Ziehen and Verworn (Das Weltproblem, etc., S. 137 Fussnote) in the list of idealists or psychomonists. In the case of all these worthy professors, you see, there is a "misconception" in their interpretations "of the views of Mach and Avenarius" (ibid .).
Poor Mach and Avenarius! Not only were they slandered by their enemies for idealism and "even" (as Bogdanov expresses it) solipsism, but their very friends, disciples and followers, expert professors, also understood their teachers pervertedly, in an idealist sense. If empirio-criticism is developing into idealism, that by no means demonstrates the radical falsity of its muddled Berkeleian basic premises. God forbid!<"p264"> It is only a slight "misconception," in the Nozdriev-Petzoldt[99] sense of the term.
The funniest thing of all perhaps is that Petzoldt himself, the guardian of purity and innocence, firstly, "supplemented" Mach and Avenarius with his "logical a priori " and, secondly, coupled them with Wilhelm Schuppe, the vehicle of fideism.
page 265
Had Petzoldt been acquainted with Mach's English adherents he would have had very considerably to extend the list of Machians who had lapsed (because of a "misconception") into idealism. We have already referred to Karl Pearson, whom Mach praised, as an unadulterated idealist. Here are the opinions of two other "slanderers" who say the same thing of Pearson: "Professor Pearson is merely echoing a doctrine first given clear utterance by the truly great Berkeley" (Howard V. Knox, Mind, Vol. VI, 1897, p. 205). "There can be no doubt that Mr. Pearson is an idealist in the strictest sense of the word" (Georges Rodier, Revue philosophique, 1888, II, Vol. 26, p. 200). The English idealist, William Clifford, whom Mach regards as "coming very close" to his philosophy (Analysis of Sensations, p. 8), must be considered a teacher rather than a disciple of Mach, for Clifford's philosophical works appeared in the 'seventies. Here the "misconception" is due to Mach himself, who in 1901 "failed to notice" the idealism in Clifford's doctrine that the world is "mind-stuff," a "social object," a "highly organised experience," and so forth.* For a characterisation of the charlatanism of the German Machians, it is sufficient to note that Kleinpeter in 1905 elevated this idealist to the rank of founder of the "epistemology of modern science"!
On page 284 of the Analysis of Sensations, Mach mentions the "kindred" (to Buddhism and Machism) American philosopher, Paul Carus. Carus, who calls himself an "admirer and personal friend" of Mach, edits in Chicago
* William Kingdon Clifford, Lectues and Essays, 3rd ed., London, 1901, Vol. II, pp. 55, 65, 69: "On this point I agree entirely with Berkeley and not with Mr. Spencer" (p. 58); "The object, then, is a set of changes in my consciousness, and not anything out of it" (p. 52).
page 266
The Monist, a journal devoted to philosophy, and The Open Court, a journal devoted to the propagation of religion. "Science is divine revelation," say the editors of this popular little journal, and they express the opinion that science can bring about a reform of the church that will retain "all that is true and good in religion." Mach is a regular contributor to The Monist and publishes in it individual chapters from his latest works. Carus corrects Mach "ever so little" à la Kant, and declares that Mach "is an idealist or, as we would say, a subjectivist." "There are, no doubt, differences between Mach's views and mine," although "I at once recognised in him a kindred spirit."[*] "Our Monism," says Carus, "is not materialistic, not spiritualistic, not agnostic; it merely means consistency . . . it takes experience as its basis and employs as method the systematic forms of the relations of cxperience" (evidently a plagiarism from Bogclanov's Empirio-Monism !) . Carus' motto is: "Not agnosticism, but positive science, not mysticism, but clear thinking, not supernaturalism, not materialism, but a monistic view of the world, not a dogma, but religion, not creed, but faith." And in conformity with this motto Carus preaches a "new theology," a "scientific theology," or theonomy, which denies the literalness of the bible but insists that "all truth is divine and God reveals himself in science as he does in history."** It should be remarked that Kleinpeter, in his book on the theory of knowledge of modern science already referred to, recommends Carus, together with Ostwald, Avenarius and <"fnp266">
* The Monist,[100] Vol. XVI, 1906, July; P. Carus, "Professor Mach's Philosophy," pp. 320, 345, 333. The article is a reply to an article by Kleinpeter which appeared in the same journal.
** Ibid., Vol. XIII, p. 24 et seq., "Theology as a Science," an article by Carus.
page 267
the immanentists (pp. 151-52). When Haeckel issued his theses for a Monistic Alliance, Carus vigorously opposed him on the ground that, first, Haeckel vainly attempts to refute apriorism, which is "quite in keeping with scientific philosophy"; second, that Haeckel's doctrine of determinism "excludes the possibility of free will"; third, that Haeckel is mistaken "in emphasising the one-sided view of the naturalist against the traditional conservatism of the churches. Thus he appears as an enemy to the existing churches instead of rejoicing at their higher development into a new and truer interpretation of their dogmas . . ." (ibid., Vol. XVI, 1906, p. 122). Carus himself admits that "I appear reactionary to many freethinkers who blame me for not joining their chorus in denouncing all religion as superstition" (p. 355).
It is quite evident that we have here a leader of a gang of American literary fakers who are engaged in doping the people with religious opium. Mach and Kleinpeter joined this gang evidently as the result of a slight "misconception."
<"c4s5">
"I personally," writes Bogdanov of himself, "know so far of only one empirio-monist in literature -- a certain A. Bogdanov. But I know him very well and can answer for it that his views fully accord with the sacramental formula of the primacy of nature over mind. To wit, he regards all that exists as a continuous chain of development, the lower links of which are lost in the chaos of elements, while the higher links, known to us, represent the experience of men [Bogdanov's italics] -- psychical and, still higher, physical experience. This experience, and the knowledge
page 268
resulting therefrom, correspond to what is usually called mind" (Empirio-Monism, III, xii).
The "sacramental" formula here ridiculed by Bogdanov is the well-known proposition of Engels, whom Bogdanov, however, diplomatically avoids mentioning! We do not differ from Engels, oh, no!
But let us examine more carefully Bogdanov's own summary of his famous "empirio-monism" and "substitution." The physical world is called the experience of men and it is declared that physical experience is "higher " in the chain of development than psychical. But this is utter nonsense! And it is precisely the kind of nonsense that is characteristic of all idealist philosophies. It is simply farcical for Bogdanov to class this "system" as materialism. With me, too, he says, nature is primary and mind secondary. If Engels' definition is to be thus construed, then Hegel is also a materialist, for with him, too, psychical experience (under the title of the Absolute Idea) comes first, then follow, "higher up," the physical world, nature, and, lastly, human knowledge, which through nature apprehends the Absolute Idea. Not a single idealist will deny the primacy of nature taken in this sense for it is not a genuine primacy, since in fact nature is not taken as the immediately given, as the starting point of epistemology. Nature is in fact reached as the result of a long process through abstraction of the "psychical." It is immaterial what these abstractions are called: whether Absolute Idea, Universal Self, World Will, and so on and so forth. These terms distinguish the different varieties of idealism, and such varieties exist in countless numbers. The essence of idealism is that the psychical is taken as the starting point; from it external nature is deduced, and only then is the ordinary human consciousness deduced from nature. Hence, this primary
page 269
"psychical" always turns out to be a lifeless abstraction concealing a diluted theology. For instance, 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. Everybody knows what human sensation is; but sensation independent of man, sensation prior to man, is nonsense, a lifeless abstraction, an idealist artifice. And it is precisely to such an idealistic artifice that Bogdanov resorts when he erects the following ladder.
1) The chaos of "elements" (we know that no other human concept lies back of the term "element" save sensation).
2) The psychical experience of men.
3) The physical experience of men.
4) "The knowledge emerging therefrom."
There are no sensations (human) without man. Hence, the first rung of this ladder is a lifeless idealist abstraction. As a matter of fact, what we have here is not the usual and familiar human sensations, but fictitious sensations, nobody's sensations, sensations in general, divine sensations -- just as the ordinary human idea became divine with Hegel when it was divorced from man and man's brain.
So away with the first rung!
Away also with the second rung, for the psychical before the physical (and Bogdanov places the second rung before the third) is something unknown to man or science. The physical realm existed before the psychical could have appeared, for the latter is the highest product of the highest forms of organic matter. Bogdanov's second rung is also a lifeless abstraction, it is thought without brain, human reason divorced from man.
page 270
Only when we throw out the hrst two rungs, and only then, can we obtain a picture of the world that truly corresponds to science and materialism. To wit: 1) the physical world exists independently of the mind of man and existed long prior to man, prior to any "human experience"; 2) the psychical, the mind, etc., is the highest product of matter (i.e., the physical), it is a function of that particularly complex fragment of matter called the human brain.
"The realm of substitution," writes Bogdanov, "coincides with the realm of physical phenomena; for the psychical phenomena we need substitute nothing, because they are immediate complexes" (p. xxxix).
And this precisely is idealism; for the psychical, i.e., consciousness, idea, sensation, etc., is taken as the immediate and the physical is deduced from it, substituted for it. The world is the non-ego created by the ego, said Fichte. The world is absolute idea, said Hegel. The world is will, said Schopenhauer. The world is conception and idea, says the immanentist Rehmke. Being is consciousness, says the immanentist Schuppe. The physical is a substitution for the psychical, says Bogdanov. One must be blind not to perceive the identical idealist essence under these various verbal cloaks.
"Let us ask ourselves the following question," writes Bogdanov in Book I of Empirio-Monism (pp. 128-29): "What is a 'living being,' for instance, 'man'?" And he answers: "'Man' is primarily a definite complex of 'immediate experiences.' [Mark, "primarily "!] Then, in the further development of experience, 'man' becomes both for himself and for others a physical body amidst other physical bodies."
Why, this is a sheer "complex" of absurdities, fit only for deducing the immortality of the soul, or the idea of God, and so forth. Man is primarily a complex of immediate expe-
page 271
riences and in the course of further development becomes a physical body! That means that there are "immediate experiences" without a physical body, prior to a physical body! What a pity that this magnificent philosophy has not yet found acceptance in our theological seminaries! There its merits would have been fully appreciated.
". . . We have admitted that physical nature itself is a product [Bogdanov's italics] of complexes of an immediate character (to which psychical co-ordinations also belong), that it is the reflection of such complexes in others, analogous to them, but of the most complex type (in the socially organised experience of living beings)" (p. 146).
A philosophy which teaches that physical nature itself is a product, is a philosophy of the priests pure and simple. And its character is in no wise altered by the fact that personally Bogdanov emphatically repudiates all religion. Dühring was also an atheist; he even proposed to prohibit religion in his "socialitarian" order. Nevertheless, Engels was absolutely right in pointing out that Dühring's "system" could not make ends meet without religion. The same is true of Bogdanov, with the essential difference that the quoted passage is not a chance inconsistency but the very essence of his "empirio-monism" and of all his "substitution." If nature is a product, it is obvious that it can be a product only of some thing that is greater, richer, broader, mightier than nature, of something that exists; for in order to "produce" nature, it must exist independently of nature. That means that something exists outside nature, something which moreover produces nature. In plain language this is called God. The idealist philosophers have always sought to change this latter name, to make it more abstract, more vague and at the same time (for the sake of plausibility) to bring it nearer to the
page 272
"psychical," as an "immediate complex," as the immediately given which requires no proof. Absolute Idea, Universal Spirit, World Will, "general substitution " of the psychical for the physical, are different formulations of one and the same idea. Every man knows, and science investigates, idea, mind, will, the psychical, as a function of the normally operating human brain. To divorce this function from substance organised in a definite way, to convert this function into a universal, general abstraction, to "substitute" this abstraction for the whole of physical nature, this is the raving of philosophical idealism and a mockery of science.
Materialism says that the "socially-organised experience of living beings" is a product of physical nature, a result of a long development of the latter, a development from a state of physical nature when no society, organisation, experience, or living beings existed or could have existed. Idealism says that physical nature is a product of this experience of living beings, and in saying this, idealism is equating (if not subordinating) nature to God. For God is undoubtedly a product of the socially-organised experience of living beings. No matter from what angle you look at it, Bogdanov's philosophy contains nothing but a reactionary muddle.
Bogdanov thinks that to speak of the social organisation of experience is "cognitive socialism" (Bk. III, p. xxxiv). This is insane twaddle. If socialism is thus regarded, the Jesuits are ardent adherents of "cognitive socialism," for the basis of their epistemology is divinity as "socially-organised experience." And there can be no doubt that Catholicism is a socially-organised experience; only, it reflects not objective truth (which Bogdanov denies, but which science reflects), but the exploitation of the ignorance of the masses by definite social classes.
page 273
But why speak of the Jesuits! We find Bogdanov's "cognitive socialism" in its entirety among the immanentists, so beloved of Mach. Leclair regards nature as the consciousness of "mankind" (Der Realismus, etc., S. 55), and not of the individual. The bourgeois philosophers will serve you up any amount of such Fichtean cognitive socialism. Schuppe also emphasises das generische, das gattungsmässige Moment des Bewusstseins (Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, Bd. XVII, S. 379-80), i.e., the general, the generic factor of consciousness. To think that philosophical idealism vanishes when the consciousness of mankind is substituted for the consciousness of the individual, or the socially-organised experience for the experience of one person, is like thinking that capitalism vanishes when one capitalist is replaced by a joint-stock company.
Our Russian Machians, Yushkevich and Valentinov, echo the materialist Rakhmetov in asserting that Bogdanov is an idealist (at the same time foully abusing Rakhmetov himself). But they could not stop to think where this idealism came from. They make out that Bogdanov is an individual and chance phenomenon, an isolated case. This is not true. Bogdanov personally may think that he has invented an "original" system, but one has only to compare him with the afore mentioned disciples of Mach to realise the falsity of such an opinion. The difference between Bogdanov and Cornelius is far less than the difference between Cornelius and Carus. The difference between Bogdanov and Carus is less (as far as their philosophical systems are concerned, of course, and not the deliberateness of their reactionary implications) than the difference between Carus and Ziehen, and so on. Bogdanov is only one of the manifestations of that "socially-organised experience" which testifies to the growth of Machism into
page 274
idealism. Bogdanov (we are here, of course, speaking exclusively of Bogdanov as a philosopher) could not have come into God's world had the doctrines of his teacher Mach contained no "elements". . . of Berkeleianism. And I cannot imagine a more "terrible vengeance" on Bogdanov than to have his Empirio-Monism translated, say, into German and presented for review to Leclair and Schubert-Soldern, Cornelius and Kleinpeter, Carus and Pillon (the French collaborator and disciple of Renouvier). The compliments that would be paid by these outright comrades-in-arms and, at times, direct followers of Mach to the "substitution" would be much more eloquent than their arguments.
However, it would scarcely be correct to regard Bogdanov's philosophy as a finished and static system. In the nine years from 1899 to 1908, Bogdanov has gone through four stages in his philosophical peregrinations. At the beginning he was a "natural-historical" materialist (i.e., semi-consciously and instinctively faithful to the spirit of science). His Fundamental Elements of the Historical Outlook on Nature bears obvious traces of that stage. The second stage was the "energetics" of Ostwald, which was so fashionable in the latter 'nineties, a muddled agnosticism which at times stumbled into idealism. From Ostwald (the title page of Ostwald's Lectures on Natural Philosophy bears the inscription: "Dedicated to E. Mach") Bogdanov went over to Mach, that is, he borrowed the fundamental premises of a subjective idealism that is as inconsistent and muddled as Mach's entire philosophy. The fourth stage is an attempt to eliminate some of the contradictions of Machism, and to create a semblance of objective idealism. "The theory of general substitution" shows that Bogdanov has described a curve of almost 180° from his starting position. Is this stage of Bogdanov's
page 275
philosophy more remote or less remote from dialectical materialism than the previous stages? If Bogdanov remains in one place, then he is, of course, more remote. If he keeps moving along the same curve in which he has been moving for the last nine years, he is less remote. He now has only one serious step to make in order to return once more to materialism, namely, universally to discard his whole universal substitution. For this universal substitution gathers into one Chinese pigtail all the transgressions of half-hearted idealism and all the weaknesses of consistent subjective idealism, just as (si licet parva componere magnis ! -- if it is permissible to compare the great with the small) Hegel's "Absolute Idea" gathered together all the contradictions of Kantian idealism and all the weaknesses of Fichteanism. Feuerbach had to make only one serious step in order to return to materialism, namely, universally to discard, absolutely to eliminate, the Absolute Idea, that Hegelian "substitution of the psychical" for physical nature. Feuerbach cut off the Chinese pigtail of philosophical idealism, in other words, he took nature as the basis without any "substitution" whatever.
We must wait and see whether the Chinese pigtail of Machian idealism will go on growing for much longer.
<"c4s6">
AND THE CRITICISM OF HELMHOLTZ
As a supplement to what has been said above of the idealists as the comrades-in-arms and successors of empirio-criticism, it will be appropriate to dwell on the character of the Machian criticism of certain philosophical propositions touched upon in our literature. For instance, our Machian would-be
page 276
Marxists fastened with glee on Plekhanov's "hieroglyphs," that is, on the theory that man's sensations and ideas are not copies of real things and processes of nature, not their images, but conventional signs, symbols, hieroglyphs, and so on. Bazarov ridicules this hieroglyphic materialism; and, it should be stated, he would be right in doing so if he rejected hieroglyphic materialism in favour of non-hieroglyphic materialism. But Bazarov here again resorts to a sleight-of-hand and palms off his renunciation of materialism as a criticism of "hieroglyphism." Engels speaks neither of symbols nor of hieroglyphs, but of copies, photographs, images, mirror-reflections of things. Instead of pointing out the erroneousness of Plekhanov's deviation from Engels' formulation of materialism, Bazarov uses Plekhanov's error in order to conceal Engels' truth from the reader.
To make clear both Plekhanov's error and Bazarov's confusion we shall refer to an important advocate of the "theory of symbols" (calling a symbol a hieroglyph changes nothing), Helmholtz, and shall see how he was criticised by the materialists and by the idealists in conjunction with the Machians.
Helmholtz, a scientist of the first magnitude, was as inconsistent in philosophy as are the great majority of scientists. He tended towards Kantianism, but in his epistemology he did not adhere even to these views consistently. Here for instance are some passages on the subject of the correspondance of ideas and objects from his Handbook of Physiological Optics : "I have . . . designated sensations as merely symbols for the relations of the external world and I have denied that they have any similarity or equivalence to what they represent" (French translation, p. 579; German original, p. 442). This is agnosticism, but on the same page further on we read: "Our concepts and ideas are effects wrought on
page 277
our nervous system and our consciousness by the objects that are perceived and apprehended." This is materialism. But Helmholtz is not clear as to the relation between absolute and relative truth, as is evident from his subsequent remarks. For instance, a little further on he says: "I therefore think that there can be no possible meaning in speaking of the truth of our ideas save as a practical truth. Our ideas of things cannot be anything but symbols, natural signs for things, which we learn to use in order to regulate our movements and actions. When we have learned to read these symbols rightly we are in a position with their aid to direct our actions so as to achieve the desired result. . . ." This is not correct. Helmholtz here lapses into subjectivism, into a denial of objective reality and objective truth. And he arrives at a flagrant untruth when he concludes the paragraph with the words: "An idea and the object it represents obviously belong to two entirely different worlds. . . ." Only the Kantians thus divorce idea from reality, consciousness from nature. However, a little further on we read: "As to the properties of the objects of the external world, a little reflection will show that all the properties we may attribute to them merely signify the effects wrought by them either on our senses or on other natural objects" (French ed., p. 581; German original, p. 445; I translate from the French). Here again Helmholtz reverts to the materialist position. Helmholtz was an inconsistent Kantian, now recognising a priori laws of thought, now tending towards the "transcendental reality" of time and space (i.e., to a materialist conception of them); now deriving human sensations from external objects, which act upon our sense organs, and now declaring sensations to be only symbols, i.e., certain arbitrary signs divorced from the "entirely different" world of the things signified (cf . Viktor Heyfelder, Ueber
page 278
den Begriff der Erfahrung bei Helmholtz [Helmholtz's Conception of Experience ], Berlin 1897).
This is how Helmholtz expressed his views in a speech delivered in 1878 on "Facts in Perception" ("a noteworthy pronouncement from the realistic camp," as Leclair characterised this speech): "Our sensations are indeed effects wrought by external causes in our organs, and the manner in which such effects manifest themselves, of course, depends very essentially on the nature of the apparatus on which these effects are wrought. Inasmuch as the quality of our sensation informs us of the properties of the external action by which this sensation is produced, the latter can be regarded as its sign (Zeichen ), but not as its image. For a certain resemblance to the object imaged is demanded of an image. . . . But a sign need not resemble that of which it is a sign. . ." (Vorträge und Reden [Lectures and Speeches ], 1884, Bd. II, S. 226). If sensations are not images of things, but only signs or symbols which do "not resemble" them, then Helmholtz's initial materialist premise is undermined; the existence of external objects becomes subject to doubt; for signs or symbols may quite possibly indicate imaginary objects, and everybody is familiar with instances of such signs or symbols. Helmholtz, following Kant, attempts to draw something like an absolute boundary between the "phenomenon" and the "thing-in itself." Helmholtz harbours an insuperable prejudice against straightforward, clear, and open materialism. But a little further on he says: "I do not see how one could refute a system even of the most extreme subjective idealism that chose to regard life as a dream. One might declare it to be highly improbable and unsatisfactory -- I myself would in this case subscribe to the severest expressions of dissent -- yet it could be constructed consistently. . . . The realistic hypo-
page 279
thesis, on the contrary, trusts the evidence (Aussage ) of ordinary self-observation, according to which the changes of perception that follow a certain action have no psychical connection with the preceding impulse of volition. This hypothesis regards everything that seems to be substantiated by our everyday perception, viz., the material world outside of us, as existing independently of our ideas." (pp. 242-43.) "Undoubtedly, the realistic hypothesis is the simplest we can construct; it has been tested and verified in an extremely broad field of application; it is sharply defined in its several parts and, therefore, it is in the highest degree useful and fruitful as a basis of action" (p. 243). Helmholtz's agnosticism also resembles "shamefaced materialism," with certain Kantian twists, in distinction to Huxley's Berkeleian twists.
Albrecht Rau, a follower of Feuerbach, therefore vigorously criticises Helmholtz's theory of symbols as an inconsistent deviation from "realism." Helmholtz's basic view, says Rau, is a realistic hypothesis, according to which "we apprehend the objective properties of things with the help of our senses."* The theory of symbols cannot be reconciled with such a view (which, as we have seen, is wholly materialist), for it implies a certain distrust of perception, a distrust of the evidence of our sense-organs. It is beyond doubt that an image cannot wholly resemble the model, but an image is one thing, a symbol, a conventional sign, another. The image inevitably and of necessity implies the objective reality of that which it "images." "Conventional sign," symbol, hieroglyph are concepts which introduce an entirely unnecessary element of agnosticism. Albrecht Rau, therefore,
* Albrecht Rau, Empfinden und Denken [Sensation and Thought ], Giessen, 1896, S. 304.
page 280
is perfectly right in saying that Helmholtz's theory of symbols pays tribute to Kantianism. "Had Helmholtz," says Rau, "remained true to his realistic conception, had he consistently adhered to the basic principle that the properties of bodies express the relations of bodies to each other and also to us, he obviously would have had no need of the whole theory of symbols; he could then have said, briefly and clearly: the sensations which are produced in us by things are reflections of the nature of those things" (ibid., p. 320).
That is the way a materialist criticises Helmholtz. He rejects Helmholtz's hieroglyphic or symbolic materialism or semi-materialism in favour of Feuerbach's consistent materialism.
The idealist Leclair (a representative of the "immanentist school," so dear to Mach's heart and mind) also accuses Helmholtz of inconsistency, of wavering between materialism and spiritualism. (Der Realismus, etc., S. 154.) But for Leclair the theory of symbols is not insufficiently materialistic but too materialistic. Leclair says: "Helmholtz thinks that the perceptions of our consciousness offer sufficient support for the cognition of sequence in time as well as of the identity or non-identity of transcendental causes. This in Helmholtz's opinion is sufficient for the assumption and cognition of law in the realm of the transcendental" (i.e., in the realm of the objectively real) (p. 33). And Leclair thunders against this "dogmatic prejudice of Helmholtz's": "Berkeley's God," he exclaims, "as the hypothetical cause of the conformity to natural law of the ideas in our mind is at least just as capable of satisfying our need of causality as a world of external objects" (p. 31). "A consistent application of the theory of symbols. . . can achieve nothing without a generous admixture of vulgar realism" (i.e., materialism) (p. 35).
page 281
This is how a "critical idealist" criticised Helmholtz for his materialism in 1879. Twenty years later, in his article "The Fundamental Views of Ernst Mach and Heinrich Hertz on Physics,"[*] Kleinpeter, the disciple of Mach so highly praised by his teacher, refuted in the following way the "antiquated" Helmholtz with the aid of Mach's "recent" philosophy. Let us for the moment leave aside Hertz (who, in fact, was as inconsistent as Helmholtz) and examine Kleinpeter's comparison of Mach and Helmholtz. Having quoted a number of passages from the works of both writers, and having particularly stressed Mach's well-known statements to the effect that bodies are mental symbols for complexes of sensations and so on, Kleinpeter says:
"If we follow Helmholtz's line of thought, we shall encounter the following fundamental premises:
"1) There exist objects of the external world.
"2) A change in these objects is inconceivable without the action of some cause (which is thought of as real).
"3) 'Cause, according to the original meaning of the word, is the unchangeable residue or being behind the changing phenomena, namely, substance and the law of its action, force.' [The quotation is taken by Kleinpeter from Helmholtz.]
"4) It is possible to deduce all phenomena from their causes in a logically strict and uniquely determined manner.
"5) The achievement of this end is equivalent to the possession of objective truth, the acquisition (Erlangung ) of which is thus regarded as conceivable" (p. 163).
Rendered indignant by these premises, by their contradictoriness and their creation of insoluble problems, Klein- <"fnp281">
* Archiv für Philosophie, II, Systematische Philosophie,[101] Bd. V., 1899, S. 163-64.
page 282
peter remarks that Helmholtz does not hold strictly to these views and sometimes employs "turns of speech which are somewhat suggestive of Mach's purely logical understanding of such words" as matter, force, causality, etc.
"It is not difficult to find the source of our dissatisfaction with Helmholtz, if we recall Mach's fine, clear words. The false understanding of the words mass, force, etc., is the basic weakness of Helmholtz's whole argument. These are only concepts, products of our imagination and not realities existing outside of thought. We are not even in a position to know such things. From the observation of our senses we are in general unable, owing to their imperfection, to make even a single uniquely determined conclusion. We can never assert, for instance, that upon reading a certain scale (durch Ablesen einer Skala ) we shall obtain a definite figure: there are always, within certain limits, an infinite number of possible figures all equally compatible with the facts of the observation. And to have knowledge of something real lying outside us -- that is for us impossible. Let us assume, however, that it were possible, and that we did get to know reality; in that case we would have no right to apply the laws of logic to it, for they are our laws, applicable only to our conceptions, to our mental products [Kleinpeter's italics]. Between facts there is no logical connection, but only a simple succession; apodictic assertions are here unthinkable. It is therefore incorrect to say that one fact is the cause of another and, consequently, the whole deduction built up by Helmholtz on this conception falls to the ground. Finally, the attainment of objective truth, i.e., truth existing independently of any subject, is impossible, not only because of the nature of our senses, but also because as men (als Menschen ) we can
page 283
in general have no notion of what exists quite independently of us (p. 164).
As the reader sees, our disciple of Mach, repeating the favourite phrases of his teacher and of Bogdanov, who does not own himself a Machian, rejects Helmholtz's whole philosophy, rejects it from the idealist standpoint. The theory of symbols is not even especially singled out by the idealist, who regards it as an unimportant and perhaps accidental deviation from materialism. And Helmholtz is chosen by Kleinpeter as a representative of the "traditional views in physics," "views shared to this day by the majority of phys icists (p. 160).
The result we have arrived at is that Plekhanov was guilty of an obvious mistake in his exposition of materialism, but that Bazarov completely muddled the matter, mixed up materialism with idealism and advanced in opposition to the "theory of symbols," or "hieroglyphic materialism," the idealist nonsense that "sense-perception is the reality existing out side us." From the Kantian Helmholtz, just as from Kant himself, the materialists went to the Left, the Machians to the Right.
<"c4s7">
Let us note another characteristic feature in the Machians' incredible perversion of materialism. Valentinov endeavours to beat the Marxists by comparing them to Büchner, who supposedly has much in common with Plekhanov, although Engels sharply dissociated himself from Buchner. Bogdanov, approaching the same question from another angle, defends, as it were, the "materialism of the natural scientists," which,
page 284
he says, "is usually spoken of with a certain contempt" (Empirio-Monism, Bk. III, p. x). Both Valentinov and Bogdanov are wretchedly muddled on this question. Marx and Engels always "spoke contemptuously" of bad socialists; but from this it follows that they demanded the teaching of correct socialism, scientific socialism, and not a flight from socialism to bourgeois views. Marx and Engels always condemned bad (and, particularly, anti-dialectical) materialism; but they condemned it from the standpoint of a higher, more advanced dialectical materialism, and not from the standpoint of Humism or Berkeleianism. Marx, Engels and Dietzgen would discuss the bad materialists, reason with them and seek to correct their errors. But they would not even discuss the Humeans and Berkeleians, Mach and Avenarius, confining themselves to a single still more contemptuous remark about their trend as a whole. Therefore, the endless faces and grimaces made by our Machians over Holbach and Co., Büchner and Co., etc., are absolutely nothing but an attempt to throw dust in the eyes of the public, a cover for the departure of Machism as a whole from the very foundations of materialism in general, and a fear to take up a straightforward and clear position with regard to Engels.
And it would be hard to express oneself more clearly on the French materialism of the eighteenth century and on Büchner, Vogt and Moleschott, than Engels does at the end of Chapter II of his Ludwig Feuerbach. It is impossible not to understand Engels, unless one deliberately wishes to distort him. Marx and I are materialists -- says Engels in this chapter, explaining what fundamentally distinguishes all schools of materialism from the whole camp of the idealists, from all the Kantians and Humeans in general. And Engels reproaches Feuerbach for a certain pusillanimity, a certain
page 285
frivolity of thought, as expressed in his rejection at times of materialism in general because of the mistakes of one or another school of materialists. Feuerbach "should not have confounded the doctrines of these hedge-preachers<"p285"> [Büchner and Co.] with materialism in general," says Engels (p. 21).[102] Only minds that are spoilt by reading and credulously accepting the doctrines of the German reactionary professors could have misunderstood the nature of such reproaches levelled by Engels at Feuerbach.
Engels says very clearly that Büchner and Co. "by no means overcame the limitations of their teachers," i.e., the materialists of the eighteenth century, that they had not made a single step forward. And it is for this, and this alone, that Engels took Büchner and Co. to task; not for their materialism, as the ignoramuses think, but because they did not advance materialism, because "it was quite outside their scope to develop the theory [of materialism] any further." It was for this alone that Engels took Büchner and Co. to task. And thereupon point by point Engels enumerates three fundamental "limitations" (Beschränktheit ) of the French materialists of the eighteenth century, from which Marx and Engels had emancipated themselves, but from which Büchner and Co. were unable to emancipate themselves. The first limitation was that the views of the old materialists were "mechanical," in the sense that they believed in "the exclusive application of the standards of mechanics to processes of a chemical and organic nature" (p. 19). We shall see in the next chapter that failure to understand these words of Engels' caused certain people to succumb to idealism through the new physics. Engels does not reject mechanical materialism for the faults attributed to it by physicists of the "recent" idealist (alias Machian) trend. The second limitation was the meta-
page 286
physical character of the views of the old materialists, meaning the "anti-dialectical character of their philosophy." This limitation is fully shared with Büchner and Co. by our Machians, who, as we have seen, entirely failed to understand Engels' application of dialectics to epistemology (for example, absolute and relative truth). The third limitation was the preservation of idealism "up above," in the realm of the social sciences, a non-understanding of historical materialism.
Having enumerated these three "limitations" and explained them with exhaustive clarity (pp. 19-21), Engels then and there adds that they (Büchner and Co.) did not emerge "from these limits " (über diese Schranken ).
Exclusively for these three things and exclusively within these limits, does Engels refute both the materialism of the eighteenth century and the doctrines of Büchner and Co.! On all other, more elementary, questions of materialism (questions distorted by the Machians) there is and can be no difference between Marx and Engels on the one hand and all these old materialists on the other. It was only the Russian Machians who brought confusion into this perfectly clear question, since for their West-European teachers and co-thinkers the radical difference between the line of Mach and his friends and the line of the materialists generally is perfectly obvious. Our Machians found it necessary to confuse the issue in order to represent their break with Marxism and their desertion to the camp of bourgeois philosophy as "minor corrections" of Marxism!
Take Dühring. It is hard to imagine anything more contemptuous than the opinion of him expressed by Engels. But at the same time that Dühring was criticised by Engels, just see how he was criticised by Leclair, who praises Mach's "revolutionising philosophy." Leclair regards Dühring as the
page 287
"extreme Left " of materialism, which "without any evasion declares sensation, as well as every activity of consciousness and intelligence in general, to be the secretion, function, supreme flower, aggregate effect, etc., of the animal organism" (Der Realismus, etc., 1879, S. 23-24).
Is it for this that Engels criticised Dühring? No. In this he was in full agreement with Dühring, as he was with every other materialist. He criticised Dühring from the diametrically opposite standpoint, namely, for the inconsistency of his materialism, for his idealist fancies, which left a loophole for fideism.
"Nature itself works both within ideating beings and from without, in order to create the required knowledge of the course of things by systematically producing coherent views." Leclair quotes these words of Dühring's and savagely attacks the materialism of such a point of view, the "crude metaphysics" of this materialism, the "self-deception," etc., etc. (pp. 160 and 161-63).
Is it for this that Engels criticised Dühring? No. He ridiculed all florid language, but as regards the cognition of objective law in nature, reflected by the consciousness, Engels was fully in agreement with Dühring, as he was with every other materialist.
"Thought is a form of reality higher than the rest. . . . A fundamental premise is the independence and distinction of the materially real world from the groups of manifestations of the consciousness." Leclair quotes these words of Dühring's together with a number of Dühring's attacks on Kant, etc., and for this accuses Dühring of "metaphysics" (pp. 218-22), of subscribing to "a metaphysical dogma," etc.
Is it for this that Engels criticised Dühring? No. That the world exists independently of the mind and that every
page 288
deviation from this truth on the part of the Kantians, Humeans, Berkeleians, and so forth, is false, on this point Engels was fully in agreement with Dühring, as he was with every other materialist. Had Engels seen from what angle Leclair, in the spirit of Mach, criticised Dühring, he would have called both these philosophical reactionaries names a hundred times more contemptuous than those he called Dühring. To Leclair Dühring was the incarnation of pernicious realism and materialism (cf. also Beiträge zu einer monistischen Erkenntnistheorie, 1882, S. 45). In 1878, W. Schuppe, teacher and comrade-in-arms of Mach, accused Dühring of "visionary realism" (Traumrealismus )[*] in revenge for the epithet "visionary idealism" which Dühring had hurled against all idealists. For Engels, on the contrary, Dühring was not a sufficiently steadfast, clear and consistent materialist.
Marx and Engels, as well as J. Dietzgen, entered the philosophical arena at a time when materialism reigned among the advanced intellectuals in general, and in working-class circles in particular. It is therefore quite natural that they should have devoted their attention not to a repetition of old ideas but to a serious theoretical development of materialism, its application to history, in other words, to the completion of the edifice of materialist philosophy up to its summit. It is quite natural that in the sphere of epistemology they confined themselves to correcting Feuerbach's errors, to ridiculing the banalities of the materialist Dühring, to criticising the errors of Büchner (see J. Dietzgen), to emphasising what these most widely known and popular writers among the workers particularly lacked, namely, dialectics. Marx, Engels and J. Dietz- <"fnp288">
* Dr. Wilhelm Schuppe, Erkenntnistheoretische Logik [Epistemological Logic ], Bonn, 1878, S. 56.
page 289
gen did not worry about the elementary truths of materialism, which had been cried by the hucksters in dozens of books, but devoted all their attention to ensuring that these elementary truths should not be vulgarised, should not be over-simplified, should not lead to stagnation of thought ("materialism below, idealism above"), to forgetfulness of the valuable fruit of the idealist systems, Hegelian dialectics -- that pearl which those farmyard cocks, the Büchners, the Dührings and Co. (as well as Leclair, Mach, Avenarius and so forth), could not pick out from the dungheap of absolute idealism.
If one envisages at all concretely the historical conditions in which the philosophical works of Engels and J. Dietzgen were written, it will be perfectly clear why they were more concerned to dissociate themselves from the vulgarisation of the elementary truths of materialism than to defend the truths themselves. Marx and Engels were similarly more concerned to dissociate themselves from the vulgarisation of the fundamental demands of political democracy than to defend these demands.
Only disciples of the philosophical reactionaries could have "failed to notice" this circumstance, and could have presented the case to their readers in such a way as to make it appear that Marx and Engels did not know what being a materialist means.
<"c4s8">
FAVOUR WITH THE REACTIONARY PHILOSOPHERS?
The previously cited example of Helfond already contains the answer to this question, and we shall not examine the innumerable instances in which J. Dietzgen receives Helfond-
page 290
like treatment at the hands of our Machians. It is more expedient to quote a number of passages from J. Dietzgen himself in order to bring out his weak points.
"Thought is a function of the brain," says Dietzgen (Das Wesen der menschlichen Kopfarbeit, 1903, S. 52; there is a Russian translation). "Thought is a product of the brain. . . . My desk, as the content of my thought, is identical with that thought, does not differ from it. But my desk outside of my head is a separate object quite distinct from it" (p. 53). These perfectly clear materialistic propositions are, however, supplemented by Dietzgen thus: "Nevertheless, the non-sensible idea is also sensible, material, i.e., real. . . . The mind differs no more from the table, light, or sound than these things differ from each other" (p. 54). This is obviously false. That both thought and matter are "real," i.e., exist, is true. But to say that thought is material is to make a false step, a step towards confusing materialism and idealism. As a matter of fact this is only an inexact expression of Dietzgen's, who elsewhere correctly says: "Mind and matter at least have this in common, that they exist" (p. 80). "Thinking," says Dietzgen, "is a work of the body. . . . In order to think I require a substance that can be thought of. This substance is provided in the phenomena of nature and life. . . . Matter is the boundary of the mind, beyond which the latter cannot pass. . . . Mind is a product of matter, but matter is more than a product of mind. . ." (p. 64). The Machians refrain from analysing materialist arguments of the materialist Dietzgen such as these! They prefer to fasten on passages where he is inexact and muddled. For example, he says that scientists can be "idealists only outside their field" (p. 108). Whether this is so, and why it is so, on this the Machians are silent. But a page or so earlier Dietzgen recognises the "positive side
page 291
of modern idealism" (p. 106) and the "inadequacy of the materialist principle," which should rejoice the Machians. The incorrectly expressed thought of Dietzgen's consists in the fact that the difference between matter and mind is also relative and not excessive (p. 107). This is true, but what follows from this is not that materialism as such is inadequate, but that metaphysical, anti-dialectical materialism is inadequate.
"Simple, scientific truth is not based on a person. It has its foundation outside [i.e., of the person], in its material; it is objective truth. . . . We call ourselves materialists. . . . Philosophical materialists are distinguished by the fact that they put the corporeal world at the beginning, at the head, and put the idea, or spirit, as the sequel, whereas their opponents, after the manner of religion, derive things from the word. . . the material world from the idea" (Kleinere philosophische Schriften, 1903, S. 59, 62). The Machians avoid this recognition of objective truth and repetition of Engels' definition of materialism. But Dietzgen goes on to say: "We would be equally right in calling ourselves idealists, for our system is based on the total result of philosophy, on the scientific investigation of the idea, on a clear insight into the nature of mind" (p. 63). It is not difficult to seize upon this obviously incorrect phrase in order to deny materialism. Actually, Dietzgen's formulation is more inexact than his basic thought, which amounts to this, that the old materialism was unable to investigate ideas scientifically (with the aid of historical materialism).
Here are Dietzgen's ideas on the old materialism. "Like our understanding of political economy, our materialism is a scientific, historical conquest. Just as definitely as we distinguish ourselves from the socialists of the past, so we distinguish ourselves from the old materialists. With the
page 292
latter we have only this in common, that we acknowledge matter to be the premise, or prime base of the idea" (p. 140). This word "only" is significant! It contains the whole epistemological foundation of materialism, as distinguished from agnosticism, Machism, idealism. But Dietzgen's attention is here concentrated on dissociating himself from vulgar materialism.
But then follows a little further on a passage that is quite incorrect: "The concept matter must be broadened. It embraces all the phenomena of reality, as well as our faculty of knowing or explaining" (p. 141). This is a muddle which can only lead to confusing materialism and idealism under the guise of "broadening" the former. To seize upon this "broadening" would be to forget the basis of Dietzgen's philosophy, the recognition of matter as the primary, "the boundary of the mind." But, as a matter of fact, a few lines further down Dietzgen corrects himself: "The whole governs the part, matter the mind. . . . In this sense we may love and honour the material world . . . as the first cause, as the creator of heaven and earth" (p. 142). That the conception of "matter" must also include thoughts,<"p292"> as Dietzgen repeats in the Excursions [103] (op. cit., p. 214), is a muddle, for if such an inclusion is made, the epistemological contrast between mind and matter, idealism and materialism, a contrast upon which Dietzgen himself insists, loses all meaning. That this contrast must not be made "excessive," exaggerated, metaphysical, is beyond dispute (and it is to the great credit of the dialectical materialist Dietzgen that he emphasised this). The limits of the absolute necessity and absolute truth of this relative contrast are precisely those limits which define the trend of epistemological investigations. To operate beyond these limits with the distinction between matter and mind,
page 293
physical and mental, as though they were absolute opposites, would be a great mistake.
Dietzgen, unlike Engels, expresses his thoughts in a vague, unclear, mushy way. But apart from his defects of exposition and his individual mistakes, he not unsuccessfully champions the "materialist theory of knowledge " (pp. 222 and 271), "dialectical materialism " (p. 224). "The materialist theory of knowledge then," says Dietzgen, "amounts to the recognition that the human organ of perception radiates no metaphysical light, but is a piece of nature which reflects other pieces of nature" (pp. 222-23). "Our perceptive faculty is not a supernatural source of truth, but a mirror-like instrument, which reflects the things of the world, or nature" (p. 243). Our profound Machians avoid an analysis of each individual proposition of Dietzgen's materialist theory of knowledge, but seize upon his deviations from that theory, upon his vagueness and confusion. J. Dietzgen could find favour with the reactionary philosophers only because he occasionally gets muddled. And, it goes without saying, where there is a muddle there you will find Machians.
Marx wrote to Kugelmann on December 5, 1868: "A fairly long time ago he [Dietzgen] sent me a fragment of a manuscript on the 'faculty of thought' which in spite of a certain confusion and of too frequent repetition, contains much that is excellent<"p293"> and -- as the independent product of a working man -- admirable" (Russ. trans., p. 53).[104] Mr. Valentinov quotes this opinion, but it never dawned on him to ask what Marx regarded as Dietzgen's confusion, whether it was that which brings Dietzgen close to Mach, or that which distinguishes Dietzgen from Mach. Mr. Valentinov does not ask this question because he read both Dietzgen and Marx's letters after the manner of Gogol's Petrushka. Yet it is not
page 294
difficult to find the answer to this question. Marx frequently called his world outlook dialectical materialism, and Engels' Anti-Dühring, the whole of which Marx read through in manuscript, expounds precisely this world outlook. Hence, it should have been clear even to the Valentinovs that Dietzgen's confusion could lie only in his deviation from a consistent application of dialectics, from consistent materialism, in particular from Anti-Dühring.
Does it now dawn upon Mr. Valentinov and his brethren that what Marx could call Dietzgen's confusion is only what brings Dietzgen close to Mach, who went from Kant not towards materialism, but towards Berkeley and Hume? Or was it that the materialist Marx called Dietzgen's materialist theory of knowledge confused, yet approved his deviations from materialism, that is, approved what differs from Anti-Dühring, which was written with his (Marx's) participation?
Whom are they trying to fool, our Machians, who desire to be regarded as Marxists and at the same time inform the world that "their " Mach approved of Dietzgen? Have our heroes failed to guess that Mach could approve in Dietzgen only that which Marx called confusion?
But taken as a whole, J. Dietzgen does not deserve so severe a censure. He is nine-tenths a materialist and never made any claims either to originality or to possessing a special philosophy distinct from materialism. He spoke of Marx frequently, and invariably as the head of the trend (Kleinere philosophische Schriften, S. 4 -- an opinion uttered in 1873; on page 95 -- 1876 -- he emphasises that Marx and Engels "possessed the necessary philosophical training"; on page 181 -- 1886 -- he speaks of Marx and Engels as the "acknowledged founders" of the trend).<"p294"> Dietzgen was a Marxist, and Eugene Dietzgen,[105] and -- alasl -- Comrade P.
page 295
Dauge are rendering him left-handed service by their invention of "Naturmonismus," "Dietzgenism," etc. "Dietzgenism" as distinct from dialectical materialism is confusion, a step towards reactionary philosophy, an attempt to create a trend not from what is great in Joseph Dietzgen (and in that worker-philosopher, who discovered dialectical materialism in his own way, there is much that is great!) but from his weak points.
I shall confine myself to two examples in order to illustrate how Comrade P. Dauge and Eugene Dietzgen are sliding into reactionary philosophy. <"p295">
In the second edition of the Akquisit [106] (p. 273), Dauge writes: "Even bourgeois criticism points out the connection between Dietzgen's philosophy and empirio-criticism and also the immanentist school," and, further on, "especially Leclair" (a quotation from a "bourgeois criticism").
That P. Dauge values and esteems J. Dietzgen cannot be doubted. But it also cannot be doubted that he is defaming him by citing without protest the opinion of a bourgeois scribbler who classes the sworn enemy of fideism and of the professors -- the "graduated flunkeys" of the bourgeoisie -- with the outspoken preacher of fideism and avowed reactionary, Leclair. It is possible that Dauge repeated another's opinion of the immanentists and of Leclair without himself being familiar with the writings of these reactionaries. But let this serve him as a warning: the road away from Marx to the peculiarities of Dietzgen -- to Mach -- to the immanentists -- is a road leading into a morass. To class him not only with Leclair but even with Mach is to lay stress on Dietzgen the muddlehead as distinct from Dietzgen the materialist.
page 296
I shall defend Dietzgen against Dauge. I assert that Dietzgen did not deserve the shame of being classed with Leclair. And I can cite a witness, a most authoritative one on such a question, one who is as much a reactionary, as much a fideist and "immanentist" philosopher as Leclair himself, namely, Schubert-Soldern. In 1896 he wrote: "The Social-Democrats willingly lean for support on Hegel with more or less (usually less) justification, but they materialise the Hegelian philosophy; cf. J. Dietzgen. . . . With Dietzgen, the absolute becomes the universal, and this becomes the thing-in-itself, the absolute subject, whose appearances are its predicates. That he [Dietzgen] is thus converting a pure abstraction into the basis of the concrete process, he does not, of course, realise any more than Hegel himself did. . . . He frequently chaotically lumps together Hegel, Darwin, Haeckel, and natural-scientific materialism" (Die soziale Frage, S. xxxiii). Schubert-Soldern is a keener judge of philosophical shades than Mach, who praises everybody indiscriminately, including the Kantian Jerusalem.
Eugene Dietzgen was so simple-minded as to complain to the German public that in Russia the narrow materialists had "insulted" Joseph Dietzgen, and he translated Plekhanov's and Dauge's articles on Joseph Dietzgen into German. (See Joseph Dietzgen, Erkenntnis und Wahrheit [Knowledge and Truth ], Stuttgart, 1908, Appendix). The poor "Natur-monist's" complaint rebounded on his own head. Franz Mehring, who may be regarded as knowing something of philosophy and Marxism, wrote in his review that Plekhanov was essentially right as against Dauge (Die Neue Zeit, 1908, No. 38, 19. Juni, Feuilleton, S. 432). That J. Dietzgen got into difficulties when he deviated from Marx and Engels (p. 431) is for Mehring beyond question. Eugene Dietzgen replied to
page 297
Mehring in a long, snivelling note, in which he went so far as to say that J. Dietzgen might be of service "in reconciling" the "warring brothers, the orthodox and the revisionists" (Die Neue Zeit, 1908, No. 44, 31. Juli, S. 652).
Another warning, Comrade Dauge: the road away from Marx to "Dietzgenism" and "Machism" is a road into the morass, not for individuals, not for Tom, Dick and Harry, but for the trend.
And do not complain, Messrs. Machians, that I quote the "authorities"; your objections to the authorities are but a screen for the fact that for the socialist authorities (Marx, Engels, Lafargue, Mehring, Kautsky) you are substituting bourgeois authorities (Mach, Petzoldt, Avenarius and the immanentists). You would do better not to raise the question of "authorities" and "authoritarianism"!
<"NOTES">
<"en67">[67] I. e., Notes on the Concept of the Subject of Psychology. [p.169]
<"en68">[68] "Revue de Philosophie " (Review of Philosophy ) -- idealist journal published in Paris from 1900. [p.170]
<"en69">[69] I. e., Mechanics, a Historical and Critical Account of Its Development. [p.171]
<"en70">[70] I. e., Notes on the Concept of the Subject of Psychology. [p.173]
<"en71">[71] I. e., the first section of "Introduction" to Anti-Dühring. [p.178]
<"en72">[72] Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1954, pp. 33-34, 36 and 55. [p.179]
<"en73">[73] Frederick Engels, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy", Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1951, Vol. II, pp. 350 and 353. [p.179]
page
<"en74">[74] Die Prinzipien der Wärmelehre (The Principles of the Theory of Heat ). [p.181]
<"en75">[75] Annalen der Naturphilosophie " (Annals of Natural Philosophy ) -- idealist journal of positivist tendency, edited by Wilhelm Ostwald, published in Leipzig from 1902 to 1921. [p.190]
<"en76">[76] I. e., Studies "in" the Philosophy of Marxism. [p.192]
<"en77">[77] The exclamation is provoked by the fact that Yushkevich here uses the foreign word "infinite" with a Russian ending. [p.192]
<"en78">[78] Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1954, pp. 65-66. [p.200]
<"en79">[79] Ibid., p. 76. [p.204]
<"en80">[80] "Natural Science " -- monthly review published in London from 1892 to 1899. [p.214]
<"en81">[81] "The Philosophical Review " -- American journal of idealist philosophy published since 1892. [p.214]
<"en82">[82] In the first edition this read: ". . . it is not only a smile your flirtation with religion provokes." After reading the proofs, Lenin wrote to A. I. Elizarova that "it is not only a smile", should be changed to "it is not a smile, but disgust", or an erratum should be given to this effect. In the first edition this correction was indicated in the list of errata. [p.218]
<"en83">[83] Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1954, p. 158. [p.219]
<"en84">[84] The cry "Back to Kant! " was raised in Germany in the 1870s by representatives of a bourgeois reactionary philosophical trend known as Neo-Kantianism, which reproduced the most reactionary and idealist propositions of Kantianism. Lenin firmly refuted Neo-Kantianism supported by the "legal Marxists" in his "Once More on the Theory of Realization" (1899) (V. I. Lenin, Works, 4th Russ. ed., Vol. 4, pp. 59-77), and "Marxism and Revisionism". [p.227]
<"en85">[85] I. e., Studies "in" the Philosophy of Marxism. [p.231]
<"en86">[86] V. M. Purishkevich, monarchist and extreme reactionary. Founder of the Union of the Russian People (the Black Hundreds). [p.233]
<"en87">[87] A reformist-opportunist trend that arose in the French, Italian and Belgian working class movements at the end of the last century. This trend preached that socialism should rely on the "wretched" of society at large instead of only on the working class, and that class peace be
page 447 substituted for class struggle. The chief representative of this trend was Benoit Malon.
[p.238]
<"en88">[88] Le Socialiste -- weekly theoretical organ of the French Wotkers' Party (after 1902 called the Socialist Party of France), published from 1885, became the organ of the French Socialist Party in 1905. It ceased publication in 1915. [p.239]
<"en89">[89] Frederick Engels, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy", Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1951, Vol. II, p. 340. [p.242]
<"en90">[90] The reference is to Engels' "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy" (1888); "On Historical Materialism" (1892), that is, "Special Introduction to the English Edition of 1892" of "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1951, Vol. II, pp. 324-64 and 88-106). [p.242]
<"en91">[91] Frederick Engels, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy", Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1951, Vol. II, p. 342. [p.242]
<"en92">[92] Frederick Engels, "Special Introduction to the English Edition of 1892" of "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific", Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1951, Vol. II, p. 92. [p.244]
<"en93">[93] "Zeitschrift für immanente Philosophie " (Journal of Immanentist Philosophy ) -- German philosophical journal, published in Berlin from 1895 to 1900, advocating solipsism, an extremely reactionary form of subjective idealism. [p.249]
<"en94">[94] The French edition of Mechanics, a Historical and Critical Account of Its Development was published in 1904 in Paris. [p.249]
<"en95">[95] I. e., Philosophical Year. [p.249]
<"en96">[96] I. e., Das menschliche Glück und die soziale Frage (Human Happiness and the Social Question ). [p.251]
<"en97">[97] I. e., Die Geschichte und die Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit (History and Roots of the Principle of the Conservation of Work ). [p.253]
<"en98">[98] Lenin is referring to the false statement of tsarist prime minister Stolypin who denied the existence in the postal service of cabinets noirs engaged in examining the correspondence of persons suspected by the tsarist government. [p.260]
<"en99">[99] Nozdriev, a character in Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, a landlord and habitual liar. [p.264]
page 448
<"en100">[100] "The Monist " -- American philosophical journal propagating idealism and religious views, published in Chicago from 1890 to 1936. [p.266]
<"en101">[101] "Archiv für Philosophie " (Philosophical Archives ) -- journal of the Neo-Kantian and Machian brands of idealist philosophy, published in Berlin from 1895 to 1931 in two editions: one devoted to the history of philosophy, the other to general questions of philosophy. [p.281]
<"en102">[102] Frederick Engels, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy", Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1951, Vol. II, p. 339. [p.285]
<"en103">[103] I. e., Excursions of a Socialist into the Domain of the Theory of Knowledge. [p.292]
<"en104">[104] Karl Marx's letter to Kugelmann, December 5, 1868 (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1953, p. 261, footnote 2). [p.293]
<"en105">[105] Eugene Dietzgen was the son of Joseph Dietzgen. [p.294]
<"en106">[106] Reference is to the postscript written by Dauge under the title: "Joseph Dietzgen and His Critic Plekhanov" for the second Russian edition of Joseph Dietzgen's Das Acquisit der Philosophie (Acquisition of Philosophy). [p.295]