Quiz: The Holy Family: Critical Battle against French Materialism

All 34 questions. A perfect score earns the gold medal; 80% earns silver.

1. 1. How did Duns Scotus make the idea of thinking matter possible, according to Marx?

   By experiment, showing that living bodies arise from inanimate matter alone By following Aristotle, who had treated the soul as the form of the living body By denying God, so that matter alone remained as the cause of all things By appealing to God’s omnipotence, forcing theology to preach materialism
2. 2. With which ancient philosophers did French and English materialism always remain in close relation?

   Pythagoras and Parmenides Plato and Aristotle Zeno and Chrysippus Democritus and Epicurus
3. 3. How does Marx describe Cabet, stimulated by communist ideas while exiled in England?

   The most popular, if also the shallowest, representative of communism The most scientific of the French communists, and their best theorist A disciple of Hegel, who carried German philosophy into France An opponent of communism, who defended small property against it
4. 4. From which two thinkers does Marx derive the two trends of French materialism?

   Descartes and Locke Voltaire and Diderot Spinoza and Leibniz Hobbes and Rousseau
5. 5. According to Voltaire, as Marx quotes him, what made the French indifferent to the quarrels of Jesuits and Jansenists?

   Law’s financial speculations The loss of Canada to Britain in 1763 Newton’s physics The Revolution
6. 6. How does Marx explain the downfall of seventeenth-century metaphysics?

   From the decrees of the king, who suppressed it in the universities From a single book, Spinoza’s Ethics, which undermined it from within From the worldly, practical bent of French life From the influence of German philosophy, carried into France by Leibniz
7. 7. According to Marx, on whose system did Owen found English communism?

   Bentham’s, founded on Helvétius Adam Smith’s, founded on the Scottish moralists Hegel’s Fourier’s
8. 8. Besides existing politics and religion, what else did the French Enlightenment openly struggle against, according to Marx?

   Seventeenth-century metaphysics, and all metaphysics Ancient Greek philosophy and its revival at the Renaissance English empiricism and the sensationalism of Locke and his school Natural science, as it had developed since Galileo and Newton
9. 9. What does Marx promise to oppose to Criticism’s history of French materialism?

   A new metaphysical system A biography of Spinoza Its profane, mass history A theological history
10. 10. Which book came “as if called for, from across the Channel” to give the French a positive anti-metaphysical system?

    Newton’s Principia Locke’s Essay Bacon’s Novum Organum Hobbes’s Leviathan
11. 11. What had Descartes done in his physics, according to Marx?

    Made God the only true cause of every motion within the physical world Denied matter any reality, treating it as a mere idea in the thinking mind Rejected mathematics in favour of direct observation of nature Endowed matter with self-creative power, making mechanical motion its life
12. 12. Where, according to Marx, did Bauer get his “critical history” of French materialism?

    From Hegel’s writings, chiefly his History of Philosophy and Phenomenology From original French sources, read closely in the editions of the time From his own research in Paris libraries among the papers of the Encyclopedists From English histories of philosophy, chiefly those of the Scottish common-sense school
13. 13. Which work does Marx call characteristic of the socialist tendency of materialism?

    Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees Hobbes’s Leviathan Rousseau’s Social Contract
14. 14. What does Marx’s closing Remark say still needs detailed exposition?

    The theology of the Jansenists and its quarrel with the Jesuits in seventeenth-century France The influence of Descartes’s physics on the natural science of the eighteenth century The link between eighteenth-century materialism and nineteenth-century communism The debt of French materialism to the physics of Newton and the English deists
15. 15. Who was Locke’s immediate French disciple and interpreter?

    Condillac Fontenelle Montesquieu Malebranche
16. 16. What happens to materialism with Hobbes, its systematiser?

    It is abandoned It turns back into theology and natural religion It becomes one-sided, geometrical and hostile to man It becomes poetic
17. 17. What philosophy did Locke found, according to Marx?

    Transcendental idealism and the critique of reason The philosophy of bon sens, common sense The philosophy of revelation The philosophy of the absolute
18. 18. Who, according to Marx, theoretically deprived seventeenth-century metaphysics of its credit, with the weapon of scepticism?

    Rousseau Pierre Bayle Claude Helvétius Condillac
19. 19. What view of the eighteenth century does the passage from “Criticism” quoted at the start put forward?

    That it began the socialist movement, in a utopian and a practical form That it was a religious age, divided between Jansenists and Jesuits That Spinozism dominated it, in materialist and theist forms That Locke’s empiricism dominated it, in an English and a French form
20. 20. Whom does Marx call “the true progenitor of English materialism and of all modern experimental science”?

    Locke Bacon Hobbes Newton
21. 21. What did the French give English materialism, according to Marx?

    A religious foundation Nothing new Esprit, flesh and blood, eloquence Mathematical rigour and geometrical method
22. 22. What did Condillac conclude the whole development of man depends on?

    Innate ideas implanted by the Creator Education and circumstances Divine grace granted at baptism Heredity and the blood of one’s ancestors
23. 23. What profession did Leroy, Lamettrie and Cabanis share?

    They were lawyers They were priests They were physicians They were military engineers
24. 24. Into what does the Lockean trend of French materialism lead, according to Marx?

    Into socialism and communism Into natural science and medicine Into a revived natural theology Into German romanticism and idealism
25. 25. How does Marx describe materialism in Bacon, its first creator?

    Matter is the enemy of man and of his spirit Matter is cold and mathematical Matter smiles at the whole man with a poetic, sensuous glow Matter is an illusion
26. 26. Of which country does Marx call materialism “the native son”?

    France Great Britain Greece The Netherlands
27. 27. What did Bayle prove about atheism, according to Marx?

    That only priests could be moral, the laity needing their supervision That atheism leads to crime, since without God there is no ground for morality That atheism is impossible, since every people on earth has some idea of a deity That a society of atheists could exist, and an atheist be a respectable man
28. 28. Complete the reasoning Marx draws from materialism: “If man is formed by circumstances, then …”

    crime must be punished more severely education is useless man cannot be changed circumstances must be formed humanly
29. 29. Who confronted Descartes in person as the restorer of Epicurean materialism?

    Gassendi Bayle Pascal Arnauld
30. 30. To which part of Descartes’s work did mechanical French materialism attach itself?

    His metaphysics His physics, in opposition to his metaphysics His theology and his proofs of God’s existence His ethics
31. 31. How did a French writer describe Bayle, as Marx quotes?

    The last seventeenth-century metaphysician and the first eighteenth-century philosopher The first of the French communists and the last of the Christian sceptics The father of the Revolution and the first of the modern enemies of throne and altar The French Hegel, who first wrote the critical history of philosophy as a whole
32. 32. Which work completed Cartesian materialism at the end of the eighteenth century?

    Cabanis’s Rapport du physique et du moral Holbach’s Système de la nature (1770) Lamettrie’s L’Homme machine (1747) Diderot’s Encyclopédie
33. 33. In whose work does materialism receive “its properly French character”, applied to social life?

    Diderot Helvétius Condorcet Holbach
34. 34. Who, according to Marx, destroyed the last theological barrier of Locke’s sensualism?

    Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley Berkeley and Hume Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and the Scottish moralists Newton and Boyle