Quiz: The Holy Family: Critical Battle against French Materialism

10 questions drawn at random. Score 80% for a silver medal.

1. 1. 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 Locke’s empiricism dominated it, in an English and a French form That Spinozism dominated it, in materialist and theist forms
2. 2. In whose work does materialism receive “its properly French character”, applied to social life?

   Diderot Holbach Helvétius Condorcet
3. 3. 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
4. 4. According to Voltaire, as Marx quotes him, what made the French indifferent to the quarrels of Jesuits and Jansenists?

   Law’s financial speculations Newton’s physics The Revolution The loss of Canada to Britain in 1763
5. 5. With which ancient philosophers did French and English materialism always remain in close relation?

   Plato and Aristotle Democritus and Epicurus Pythagoras and Parmenides Zeno and Chrysippus
6. 6. 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 appealing to God’s omnipotence, forcing theology to preach materialism By denying God, so that matter alone remained as the cause of all things
7. 7. 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
8. 8. Who, according to Marx, theoretically deprived seventeenth-century metaphysics of its credit, with the weapon of scepticism?

   Condillac Rousseau Pierre Bayle Claude Helvétius
9. 9. Complete the reasoning Marx draws from materialism: “If man is formed by circumstances, then …”

   crime must be punished more severely man cannot be changed circumstances must be formed humanly education is useless
10. 10. 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