II. The Theory of Knowledge of Empirio-Criticism and of Dialectic Materialism II

So extensively did our Machians deal with the “thing-in-itself” that were we to collect all their writings, we would have heaps of printed matter. The “thing-in-itself” is a veritable bête noir of Bogdanov, Valentinov, Bazarov, Chernov, Berman and Yushkevich. There is no abuse which the “thing-in-itself” is spared, no ridicule which is not showered upon it. And against whom do they wage war because of this luckless “thing-in-itself”? Here begins a division of philosophers of Russian Machism into political parties. All Machians, desirous to be Marxians, combat Plekhanov’s “thing-in-itself,” accusing him of straying and succumbing to Kantianism and forsaking Engels. (The first accusation we shall take up in the fourth chapter; the second accusation will be the topic of our present discourse.) Victor Chernov, a populist, and a sworn enemy of Marxism, in his defence of the “thing-in-itself” openly attacks Engels.

It is a shame to confess, yet it would be a sin to conceal, that this open enmity toward Marxism makes of Chernov a more principled literary opponent than are our comrades in politics and opponents in philosophy. For only a guilty conscience (plus inadequate knowledge of materialism?) could have been responsible for the fact that the Machians, who are desirous of being Marxians, backslided from Engels, ignored Feuerbach and idled away their time on Plekhanov. This cavilling at Engels’ disciple is nothing but a trifling, boring, petty quarrel, and a cowardly manœuvre to avoid the direct treatment of the teacher’s views. And as the task of these cursory remarks is to disclose the reactionary character of Machism and the correctness of the materialism of Marx and Engels, we shall not bother about the Machians (who wished to be Marxians), trifling with Plekhanov, but shall turn directly to Engels, who was refuted by the empirio-criticist, Mr. Chernov.

In his Philosophical and Sociological Studies (a collection of articles written, with the exception of a few, before 1900) the article, “Marxism and Transcendental Philosophy” begins with an attempt to contrast Marx with Engels and levels accusations of “naive-dogmatic materialism,” of “the crudest materialist dogmatism” against the latter (pp. 29, 32). Mr. Chernov declares as a “sufficient” proof of his contention, Engels’ discussion of the Kantian thing-in-itself and of the philosophic trend of Hume. We will begin with this discussion.

In his Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels declares the chief philosophic alignments to be materialism and idealism. Materialism regards nature as primary, and spirit as secondary; being is first, and thinking, second. Idealism holds the contrary view. This fundamental difference between the “two great camps,” into which the philosophies of “various schools” of idealism and materialism are divided, Engels regards as the cornerstone of philosophy, accusing those who give another interpretation to idealism and materialism, of “confusion.”

“The great fundamental question of all philosophies, especially of those which regard themselves as new, is connected with the relation between thought and existence, between spirit and nature.” Having divided the philosophers into “two great camps,” Engels shows that “the question of the relationship of thinking and being has another side. In what relation do our thoughts with regard to the world surrounding us stand to this world itself? Is our thought in a position to recognise the real world? Can we, in our ideas and notions of the real world, produce a correct reflection of the reality?”

“This question is answered affirmatively by the great majority of philosophers,” says Engels, including not only the materialists but even the most consistent idealists, as, e.g., the absolute idealist Hegel who considered the real world to be the realisation of the “absolute idea” which has existed prior to the world and whose expression the human spirit could recognise in the real world.

“In addition there is still another class of philosophers, those who dispute the possibility of a perception of the universe or at least of an exhaustive perception. To them belong, among the moderns, Hume and Kant, and they have played a very distinguished role in the evolution of philosophy” (ibid, p. 60).

Mr. Chernov, citing these words of Engels, seems to be very anxious to engage in a controversy. To the word “Kant” he makes the following annotation: “In 1888 it was very strange to term such philosophers as Kant and especially Hume as ‘modern.’ At that time it was more natural to hear the mention of such names as H. Cohen, Lange, Riehl, Laas, Liebmann, Hering, etc. But ‘modern’ philosophy was evidently not a strong point of Engels” (op. cit., p. 33, note 2).

Mr. Chernov is true to himself. In both economic and philosophical questions he reminds us of Voroshilov, Turgeniev’s hero, who annihilates the ignorant Kautsky and the ignorant Engels by mere reference to “scholarly” names! The only trouble is that all these authorities mentioned by Chernov are the very Neo-Kantians of whom Engels speaks on the same page of his Feuerbach as theoretical reactionaries, who were endeavoring to revive the corpse of the long since refuted doctrines of Kant and Hume. The brave Chernov did not understand that Engels intended to refute by his argument those very same muddled but authoritative (for Machism) professors.

Having pointed out that it was Hegel who had already presented the “decisive” arguments against Hume and Kant, and that the “additions made by Feuerbach were more ingenious than deep,” Engels continues:

“The most destructive refutation of this as of all other fixed philosophic ideas is actual result, namely, experiment and industry. If we can prove the correctness of our idea of an actual occurrence by experiencing it ourselves and producing it from its constituent elements, and using it for our own purposes into the bargain, the Kantian phrase Ding an Sich (thing-in-itself) ceases to have any meaning. The chemical substances which go to form the bodies of plants and animals remained just such a thing-in-itself until organic chemistry undertook to show them one after the other, whereupon the thing-in-itself became a thing-for-us, as the colouring matter in the roots of madder, alizarine, which we no longer allow to grow in the roots of the madder in the field, but make much more cheaply and simply from coal tar” (loc. cit., pp. 60-61).

Mr. Chernov, presenting this argument, loses patience and completely annihilates poor Engels. This is what he says: “No Neo-Kantian will be surprised that from coal tar we can make alizarine more cheaply and simply. But if together with alizarine it is possible to produce the refutation of the ‘thing-in-itself? it would indeed prove to be a wonderful and unheard-of discovery—and not only for the Neo-Kantians alone. Engels, apparently, having learned that, according to Kant, the ‘thing-in-itself,’ was not knowable, directly converted the proposition and came to the conclusion that everything unknown was the thing-in-itself” (loc. cit., p. 33).

Mr. Machian, there must be a limit to your lying! Before the eyes of the public you are distorting the very quotation of Engels which you are attempting to “tear to pieces” without even having grasped the question under discussion!

In the first place, it is not true that Engels “produces a refutation of the ‘thing-in-itself.’” Engels said explicitly and clearly that he was refuting the Kantian “incomprehensible” (or unknowable) thing-in-itself. Mr. Chernov, therefore, confuses Engels’ materialistic conception concerning the existence of things independent of our mind. In the second place, if the Kantian theorem reads that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, the “converse” proposition would read “the unknowable is the thing-in-itself.” Mr. Chernov changed the unknowable into the unknown, without realizing that by such a substitution he had again blundered or lied about the materialistic views entertained by Engels!

So bewildered was Mr. Chernov by those reactionaries of the official philosophy whom he had taken as his guides, that he picked a quarrel with Engels, without having comprehended in the least what the meaning of the quotation was which he presented. Let us explain to the representative of Machism what all this means.

Engels states very definitely that he is answering both Hume and Kant, yet there is no mention at all in Hume about the “unknowable thing-in-itself.” What is there then in common between these two philosophers? It is this. Both distinguish between “appearance” and that which appears, between perception and the perceived, between the “thing-for-us” and the “thing-in-itself.” Hume does not want to hear about the “thing-in-itself.” He regards the very thought of it as illegitimate, considering it, as all later Humeans and Kantians do, as “metaphysics.” Kant does recognise the existence of the “thing-in-itself” but declares it to be “unknowable,” absolutely different from the phenomenon, belonging to quite a different plane of “other-sidedness,” inaccessible to knowledge, yet revealed to faith.

What is the kernel of Engels’ objections? Yesterday we did not know that coal tar contained alizarine; to-day we learned that it did. The question is, did coal tar contain alizarine yesterday? Of course it did. To doubt it is to make game of the science of to-day. And if it did, three important epistemological inferences follow from it:

(1) Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our sensations, for it is beyond doubt that alizarine existed in coal tar yesterday too; and it is also beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing at all about it and had no sensations of it.

(2) There is absolutely no difference between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there can be none. The difference is only between what is already known and what is not yet known. And the philosophic fiction which holds that a clear-cut distinction can be drawn, between one and the other—that the thing-in-itself is on “the other side” of the phenomenon (Kant), is the veriest nonsense together with the notion that we must cut ourselves off by a philosophic partition from the question concerning those aspects of existence which are as yet unknown (in one part or another) but which nevertheless exist. (Hume.)

(3) In the theory of knowledge, as in other branches of science, we must think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as ready made and unchangeable, but must determine how from ignorance knowledge is gradually built up, and how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact.

Once we accept this natural conception of how human knowledge gradually develops from ignorance, we shall find millions of instances of it at hand as simple as the discovery of alizarine in coal tar. By encountering millions of facts, not only in the history of science and technology, but in our everyday life, we become aware of how things-in-themselves are transformed into things-for-us, through the intermediation of those of our sense-organs which are subjected to bombardment by emanations from external objects. We reach a full stop in this process of transformation when due to the presence of one obstacle or another, the action of the external object upon our sense-organs is discontinued and we witness the apparent disappearance of the “thing-in-itself.” The sole and inevitable inference from all this, an inference which all of us draw in practical life and which lies at the basis of a “practical” theory of knowledge, is materialism. Its fundamental belief is that outside of us and independently of us, there exist objects, things, and bodies; that our perceptions are images of the outer world. The converse theorem of Mach (bodies are complexes of sensations) is nothing but sheer idealistic foolishness. Chernov manifested by his “analysis” of Engels his qualities of a Voroshilov; a simple instance from Engels seemed to him “queer and naive!” He regards as genuine philosophy only the pretentiously erudite fiction, already examined by us, unable as he is to distinguish between the professorial eclectic theory of knowledge and the consistent materialistic one.

It is both impossible and unnecessary to analyse the other arguments of Chernov; they are merely expressions of elaborate foolishness (as, for example, the assertion, that for the materialists an atom is a thing-in-itself). We shall note only the argument which is relevant to our discussion—one in which some one was confused in regards to Marx’s supposed difference from Engels. The question at issue is the second thesis of Marx’s gloss on Feuerbach and Plekhanov’s translation of the word Diesseitigkeit.

Here is the second thesis: “The question if objective truth is possible to human thought is not a theoretical, but a practical, question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and force and the “this-sidedness” (Diesseitigkeit) of his thought. The dispute as to the reality or unreality of thought which is separated from practice is a purely scholastic question” (Feuerbach, p. 130).

In Plekhanov’s translation instead of “to prove the this-sidedness of his thought” (a literal translation), there is written “to prove that thought does not stop at this side of phenomena.” And Chernov thunders: “The contradiction between Marx and Engels is eliminated very simply. . . . Marx, like Engels, asserted the knowableness of things-in-themselves and the ‘other-sidedness’ of mind” (loc. cit., note 34).

We have to deal here with a Voroshilov, who with each phrase involves us in infinite confusion! It is ignorance, Mr. Victor Chernov,—simply ignorance,—not to know that all materialists stand for the knowableness of things-in-themselves. It is either ignorance, Mr. Victor Chernov, or positive indecency to jump over the very first phrase of the thesis, without realising that “objective truth” (gegenständliche Wahrheit) means nothing else than the existence of objects (things-in-themselves) which are truly reflected by the mind. It is illiteracy, Mr. Victor Chernov, to assert that from Plekhanov’s exposition (Plekhanov gave an exposition, not a literal translation of the text) there results, as it were, a defense by Marx of the other-sidedness of thought. Only followers of Hume and Kant admit the validity of human understanding for “this side of phenomena.” But for all materialists (including those of the seventeenth century, whom Bishop Berkeley combated—see Preface), “phenomena” are “things-for-us” or copies of the “objects-in-themselves.” Of course, the free exposition of Plekhanov is not obligatory upon those who wish to know Marx himself, but it is obligatory to try to understand what it was that Marx actually meant, and not to show off one’s skill in the manner of a Voroshilov.

It is interesting to note that while among those who call themselves socialists, there is an unwillingness or inability to carefully ponder over the “theses” of Marx, bourgeois writers, expert in philosophy, sometimes manifest more conscientiousness. I know of one such writer who carefully examined the philosophy of Feuerbach and, in connection with it, the theses of Marx. The writer is Albert Levy, who devoted the third chapter of the second part of his book on Feuerbach to an examination of the influence of Feuerbach on Marx. Without going into the question of the correctness of Levy’s interpretation of Feuerbach, or of his criticism of Marx offered from the ordinary bourgeois viewpoint, we shall only present his judgment on the philosophic content of the famous “theses” of Marx. Regarding the first thesis Levy says: “Marx recognises together with the preceding materialists and Feuerbach that to our conceptions of things there correspond real and distinct objects outside us. . . .”

As the reader sees, it is quite clear to Albert Levy that not only the basic position of Marxism but the basic position of every kind of materialism, of all “preceding materialism” is the recognition of real objects outside us, to which our conceptions “correspond.” The truism, which holds good for all materialism in general, is unknown only to the Russian Machians. Levy continues:

“On the other hand, Marx expresses regret that materialism had left it to idealism to appreciate the importance of the active powers [i. e., human practice]. These active powers, in Marx’s opinion, must be wrested from the hands of idealism in order to integrate them into the materialist system; but it is understood that these powers must be given that real and sensible character, which idealism cannot grant them. Thus, Marx’s idea is this: Just as to our conceptions there correspond real objects outside us, so to our phenomenal activity there corresponds a real activity outside us, an activity of things. In this sense humanity participates in the absolute, not only through theoretical cognition but also through practical activity; thus all human activity acquires a dignity and nobility which permits it to advance hand in hand with theory. Revolutionary activity henceforth acquires a metaphysical significance. . . .”

Albert Levy is a professor, and a well-behaved professor must inveigh against the materialists as “metaphysicians.” For the idealist professors of the Humean and Kantian variety, every kind of materialism is “metaphysics,” because it posits beyond appearance a reality independent of us. Levy is, therefore, essentially right when he says that in Marx’s opinion to the “phenomenal activity” of humanity there corresponds “an activity of things,” that human practice has not only a phenomenal (in the Humean and Kantian sense) but an objectively real significance. The criterion of practice—as we shall show in greater detail in § 6 of this chapter—has an absolutely different meaning for Mach and Marx. “Humanity partakes of the absolute” means that human thinking reflects absolute truth (see below, § 5); the practice of humanity, which verifies the truth of our conceptions, establishes that which corresponds to absolute truth in them. Levy continues:

“Having reached this point, Marx naturally runs up against the objection of the critics. He has admitted the existence of things-in-themselves, in relation to which our theory appears to be their human translation. He cannot avoid the usual objection: What is your guarantee of the fidelity of the translation? What is the evidence that the human mind yields objective truth? Marx replies to this objection in his second thesis” (loc. cit., p. 291). The reader sees that Levy does not doubt for a moment that Marx recognised the existence of things-in-themselves!

If the Russian Machians, who desire to be Marxians, evaded one of the most explicit and emphatic statements of Engels, they “corrected” another statement of his in the manner of Chernov. Tedious and difficult as is the task of correcting these perversions and mutilations in turn, yet he who wishes to speak of the Russian Machians cannot rid himself of it.

Here is Bazarov’s mutilation of Engels. In the article, Historical Materialism, Engels writes the following about the English agnostics (philosophers of Hume’s trend of thought): “. . . Our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon the information imparted to us by our senses” (loc. cit., p. 12).

Let us note for the benefit of our Machians that the agnostic also takes his point of departure from sensations and recognises no other source of knowledge. For the information of the adherents of “recent positivism,” be it said that an agnostic is a pure “positivist.”

“But, he [the agnostic] adds, how do we know that our senses give us correct representations of the objects which we perceive through them? And he proceeds to inform us that, whenever he speaks of objects or their qualities, he does in reality not mean these objects and qualities, of which he cannot know anything for certain, but merely the impressions which they have produced on his senses. . .” (p. 12).

What two lines of philosophic thought does Engels contrast here? One line holds that perceptions give us correct impressions of things, that we directly know objects themselves, that the outer world acts on our sense-organs. This is materialism—a doctrine with which the agnostic does not agree. In what then does the essence of the agnostic’s reasoning consist? In this, that he does not go further than perceptions, that he stops on this side of phenomena, refusing to admit the “certainty” of our knowledge beyond the boundaries of sense-perception. About the things-in-themselves, we know nothing; this proposition which the materialists denied and which Berkeley supported, is also upheld by the agnostic. In short, this means that the materialist affirms both the existence and knowledge of things-in-themselves while the agnostic admits neither the thought concerning the existence of things-in-themselves, nor the possibility of knowing about them.

The question is, in what way does the position of the agnostic as presented by Engels, differ from that of Mach? In the “new” word “element”? But it is sheer childishness to believe that a “new” terminology can change a fundamental philosophic alignment, that sensations, when called “elements,” cease to be sensations! Or does the difference lie in the “novel” conception that the very same elements in one relation constitute physical elements and in another, psychical elements? Does not the agnostic, as Engels represents him, also put “impressions” in place of “things-in-themselves”? That means that to all intents and purposes the agnostic, too, differentiates between physical and psychical “impressions”! Here, also, the difference is exclusively one of nomenclature; when Mach says that “objects are complexes of sensations,” then he is a Berkeleian; when Mach “corrects” himself, and adds that “elements” (sensations) can be physical in one relation and mental in another, then he is an agnostic, a Humean. Mach does not forswear either of these two fundamental divisions in philosophy, and only the extremest naiveté can take this muddlehead at his word and believe that he actually “transcended” materialism and idealism.

Engels deliberately makes no mention of names in his exposition, criticising instead of single representatives, the whole Humean tradition (professional philosophers like to regard systems as original in which petty changes have been made in the terminology or argument of preceding systems), the fundamental philosophy of Hume. Engels criticises not the particular expression of the doctrine but its essential argument. He examines the principal differences which separate materialism from all followers of Hume, and his criticism therefore includes Mill, Huxley and Mach. It makes no difference whether we say with Mill that matter is the permanent possibility of sensations, or with Ernst Mach that matter is a more or less constant complex of “elements”—sensations; we remain within the bounds of agnosticism or Humism. These two standpoints or rather these two formulations are both covered by Engels’ exposition of agnosticism. The agnostic does not go beyond his sensations, and asserts that he cannot know anything for certain about their source, their origin, etc. And if Mach attributes such great significance to his disagreement with Mill in the minor details of this particular question, he lends additional point to Engels’ apt characterisation of professors as Flohknacker. Yes, gentlemen, having introduced petty corrections and altered your terminology instead of openly abandoning your half-hearted position, you have but crushed a flea!

And how does Engels (at the beginning of the article Engels explicitly and emphatically contrasts his materialism with agnosticism) refute their arguments?

“Now, this line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before there was argumentation there was action. Im Anfang war die Tat. And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn these objects to our own use, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perceptions. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is positive proof that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves” (loc. cit., p. 12).

The materialist theory then, the theory of reflection of objects by our mind, is here presented with perfect clearness: things exist outside of us. Our perceptions and representations are their images. The verification of these images, the distinction of true and false images, is given by practice. But let us listen further, what Engels has to say about the matter (Bazarov ceases to cite Engels or Plekhanov, for he deems it unnecessary to settle accounts with Engels himself):

“And whenever we find ourselves face to face with a failure, then we are generally not long in making out the cause that made us fail; we find that the perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and superficial, or combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not warranted by them—what we call defective reasoning. So long as we take care to train and to use our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits prescribed by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long we shall find that the result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions with the objective nature of the things perceived. Not in one single instance, so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perceptions, scientifically controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are, by their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it. But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say:” (p. 12).

We shall leave for some other time the presentation of the arguments of the Neo-Kantians. Let us remark here that anyone who was in the least acquainted with the matter, or who had simply paid attention to what he read, could not have failed to understand that Engels was propounding here the same materialism with which the Machians always and everywhere do battle. Now witness the manner in which Bazarov misrepresented Engels:

“Engels,” writes Bazarov of the quotation which was partly adduced by us, “really comes out here against the Kantian idealism. . . .” It is not true. Bazarov confuses matters. In the part which he quoted, and which we also quoted in full, there is not a syllable uttered against either Kantianism or idealism. If Bazarov had really read through the whole article by Engels, he would have seen that of Neo-Kantianism, and of Kant’s whole line of thought, Engels speaks only in the sentence which we did not completely cite. And had Bazarov paid more attention to reading that part which he himself quotes, then he would have seen that in the arguments of the agnostic—refuted there by Engels—there was not a trace of either the idealistic or Kantian philosophy. Idealism begins only when the philosopher says that objects are my sensations; Kantianism begins when the philosopher says that the thing exists in itself, but is unknowable. Bazarov confuses Kantianism with Humism; and he confuses them because, being a half-Berkeleian, half-Humean of the Machian sect, he does not comprehend—as will further be shown—the difference between the Humean opposition to Kantianism and the materialists’ opposition to it.

“But, alas!” continues Bazarov, “Engels’ argument is directed as much against Plekhanov’s philosophy as it is against the Kantian one. In the school of Plekhanov—Orthodox, as Bogdanov has already remarked, there is a fatal misunderstanding about the nature of consciousness. To Plekhanov, as to all idealists, it seems that everything experienced, or cognised, is ‘subjective,’ that if experience is made the starting point it leads directly to solipsism since real existence can be found only beyond the boundaries immediately experienced . . .” (loc. cit.).

This is totally in the spirit of Chernov and his assurances that Liebknecht was a true Russian populist! If Plekhanov is an idealist who deviated from Engels, then why are not you, Bazarov, who supposedly are an adherent of Engels, a materialist? This is nothing but wretched mystification. By means of the Machian expression, “immediately experienced,” you are beginning to confuse the difference between agnosticism, idealism and materialism. Don’t you understand that such expressions as the “immediately experienced,” or the “factually experienced,” betray the confusion of both the Machians and the immanentists, that it is a masquerade, in which the agnostic (and sometimes, as in Mach’s case, the idealist too) puts on the cloak of a materialist? For the materialist the outer world, the image of which is our sensation, is “factually given.” For the idealist sensation is “factually given,” while the outer world is declared to be a “complex of sensations.” For the agnostic also sensation is the “immediately experienced,” but the agnostic does not go on to either the materialist recognition of the outer world’s reality, or to the idealist recognition of the world as my sensation. Therefore your statement, that “the real existence, according to Plekhanov, can be found only beyond the boundaries of the immediately experienced,” is utterly fallacious, and follows only from your Machian position. Although you have a perfect right to adopt whatever position you choose, even including that of Mach, you have no right whatsoever to misrepresent Engels once you speak of him.

From Engels’ own expression it is obvious that for the materialist the real existence lies beyond the “sense-perceptions,” impressions and representations of man; for the agnostic it is impossible to go beyond those perceptions. Having taken Mach, Avenarius and Schuppe at their word that what is “immediately” (or factually) experienced, “connects” the perceiving self with the perceived environment through the famous doctrine of “essential” co-ordination, Bazarov wishes to ascribe this fallacy to Engels!

“. The above quoted citation from Engels,” Bazarov goes on to say, “looks as if it were specially written by him in a very popular and accessible form, in order to clarify this idealist misunderstanding. . . .”

Not in vain did Bazarov attend Avenarius’ school! He continues his mystification, under the pretence of a struggle with idealism (of which Engels does not speak), in order to smuggle in the idealist notion of “co-ordination.” Not so bad, Comrade Bazarov!

“. The agnostic asks, how do we know that our subjective perceptions give us a correct impression of objects?”

You muddle things, Comrade Bazarov! Engels himself certainly does not say it and does not even ascribe to his enemy, the agnostic, such an absurd expression as “subjective” perceptions. There are no other perceptions, besides human ones, for we have been speaking from the human point of view and not from the devil’s point of view. You are again trying to make a Machian of Engels, trying to make it appear that the agnostic regards perceptions, or, to be more exact, sensations, as subjective (which the agnostic does not say!), and that we, together with Avenarius, have “co-ordinated” the object into an inseparable connection with the subject! Not so bad, Comrade Bazarov!

“. . But what do you term ‘correct’? asks Engels. The correct is that which is confirmed by our practice. Hence, inasmuch as our sense-perceptions are confirmed by experience, they are not ‘subjective,’ that is, they are not voluntary, or illusory, but correct and real as such. . . .”

You are confusing matters again, Comrade Bazarov! You have altered the question concerning the existence of things outside our sensations, perceptions, representations, for the question regarding the criterion of correctness of our representations of “these same” objects. You are obscuring the first question with considerations relevant to the second. But Engels says explicitly and clearly that what distinguishes him from the agnostic is not only the latter’s uncertainty as to whether our representations are “correct,” but rather the agnostic’s doubt as to whether we may speak of the objects themselves, as to whether we may have “certain” knowledge of their existence. Why did Bazarov resort to this illegitimate change? In order to obscure and confound the basic question of materialism (and of Engels’ position as a materialist) as regards the existence of things outside our mind, which, by acting on our sense-organs, give rise to sensations. It is impossible to be a materialist without answering this question in the affirmative; but one can be a materialist and still differ on the question as to what constitutes the criterion of correctness of our sense-perceptions.

Bazarov confuses matters still more when he attributes to Engels the absurd and ignorant expression, in the dispute with the agnostic, that our sense-perceptions are confirmed by “experience.” Engels did not use and could not have used this word, for he was well aware that the idealist Berkeley, the agnostic Hume and the materialist Diderot all had recourse to experience.

“. . . Between the limits in which we have to deal with objects in practical life, the representations of the object and its properties coincide with the reality existing outside of us. ‘To coincide’ is somewhat different than being merely an ‘hieroglyphic.’ To coincide means that, in the given limits, the sense-perception is the external existing reality . . .” (Bazarov: loc. cit.).

All’s well that ends well. Engels has been prepared à la Mach, fried and served with a Machian dressing. Let the most respectable cook take care lest he himself choke over the dish!

“Sense-perception is the reality existing outside of us!” But this is just the fundamental fallacy which we have seen constitutes the blunder and falsity of Machism, and which was responsible for the remaining absurdities of that system, and which helps to explain why Mach and Avenarius have been embraced by the most rabid reactionaries and priests together with the followers of the immanentist school. No matter how circuitous Bazarov was in his approach, no matter how diplomatic he was in evading ticklish questions, he nevertheless gave himself away at the end, and displayed his Machian character! To say that “sense-perception is the existing reality outside of us,” is to return to Hume or even to Berkeley whose modern protagonists have hidden themselves in the mist of “co-ordination.” It is either the fraud of the idealist or the subterfuge of the agnostic, Comrade Bazarov, for sense-perception is not the reality existing outside of us, it is only the image of that reality. You are cavilling at the ambiguous connotation of the Russian word sovpadat (coincide). Do you wish to compel the unsophisticated reader to believe that “to coincide” means “to be the same” and not “to correspond”? This is to misrepresent Engels à la Mach, by perverting the sense of the quotation.

Take the German original and you will find there the words stimmen mit, which mean to correspond, “to voice with”; the latter translation is literal, for Stimme means voice. The words “stimmen mit” cannot mean “to coincide” in the sense of being one and the same thing. And even for the reader who does not know the German language but who reads with the least bit of attention, it is perfectly clear that Engels, throughout his presentation, treats the expression “sense-perception” as the image (Abbild) of the reality existing outside of us. He will see that the word “coincide” ought to be used in Russian exclusively in the sense of “correspondence” or “concurrence.” To attribute to Engels the thought that “sense-perception is the existing reality,” is such a gem of misinterpretation and perversion, such a flagrant attempt to palm off agnosticism and idealism as materialism, that one must readily grant that Bazarov has broken the record!

How can sane people, who still have sound judgment and a reliable memory, utter the statement that “sense-perception [it matters not how qualified] is the reality existing outside of us”? The earth is a reality existing outside of us. It cannot “coincide” (in the sense of being the same) with our sense-perception, or exist in an inseparable co-ordination with it, or be at bottom a “complex of elements” identical with sensation in one of its aspects, for the earth existed at a time when there was no human being, no sense-organs, no matter organised in the complex form with which the property of sensation is associated.

It is clear that in order to cover up the idealist folly of such an assertion, the sham theories of “co-ordination,” “introjection,” and of the newly discovered “world elements,” were invented. Bazarov’s formulation, which escaped him so unexpectedly and inadvertently, is excellent in that it reveals just that monstrous absurdity, which otherwise it would have been necessary to unearth from heaps of pseudo-erudite detail.

You deserve commendation, Comrade Bazarov! We shall erect a monument to you during your lifetime. On one side of it we shall inscribe your pronunciamento, and on the other, “To the Russian Machian, who did Machism to death among the Russian Marxists”!

We shall speak separately of the two points which were touched upon by Bazarov in the above-mentioned citation—the difference between the criteria of practice for agnostics (Machians included) and for materialists, and the difference between the theory of reflection and the theory of symbols. Now we shall continue to quote from Bazarov a little further.

“. . . And what is to be found beyond those boundaries? Of this Engels does not say a word. He does not manifest the desire anywhere to perform that ‘transcendence,’ that transcendental flight from the perceptually given world, which lies at the foundation of Plekhanov’s theory of knowledge. . . .”

What does he mean by “those” boundaries? Does he mean the boundaries of the “co-ordination” of Mach and Avenarius which inseparably connects the ego and the environment, the subject and object? The very question which Bazarov puts is devoid of sense. Had he asked the question in an intelligible way, he would understand that the outer world lies “beyond the boundaries” of the sensations, perceptions and representations of men. But the word “transcendence” betrays Bazarov more and more. It is a specific Kantian and Humean “stratagem” to erect an absolute boundary between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. To go beyond the phenomenon to the object existing outside of perception, or, if you will, to transcend the limits of our sensation, etc., is an instance of “transcendence,” says Kant; and this “transcendence” (or transcendental flight), let us admit, is not a matter for knowledge but of faith. Hume contends that such transcendence is completely inadmissible. And the Kantians, like the Humeans, call the materialists transcendental realists, “metaphysicians,” for illegitimately transcending the limits of the given region of experience in order to get at one absolutely different from it. In the works of the contemporary professors of philosophy, who follow in the path of the Kantian and Humean reactionary philosophy, you will encounter (to take at least the names enumerated by Voroshilov-Chernov) innumerable repetitions of accusations against the materialists for being “metaphysicians” and “transcendentalists.” Bazarov adopts both the word and the thought from the reactionary professors and boastfully parades this piece of profound criticism in the name of “recent positivism”! As a matter of fact the very idea of “transcendentalism,” that is the absolute separation between appearance and the thing-in-itself, is a fallacious idea given currency by the agnostics (Humeans and Kantians included) and idealists themselves. We have already explained it in the example taken from Engels about alizarine, and we will shortly elaborate upon the words of Feuerbach and Joseph Dietzgen. But let us first get through with Bazarov’s misrepresentation of Engels:

“. . . In one place in his Anti-Dühring, Engels says that the existence of anything outside of the realm of sense-perception is an offene Frage, for whose answer we have no data.”

Bazarov repeats this argument after the German Machian, Friedrich Adler. This last example is perhaps even worse than the celebrated identification of “sense-perception” with “external reality.” In his Anti-Dühring Engels says:

“The unity of the universe does not lie in the bare fact of its existence, although its existence is a presumption of its unity, since it must first exist before it can be a unit. Existence beyond the bounds of our horizon is an open question (offene Frage). The real unity of the universe lies in its materiality, and this is established, not by a couple of juggling phrases but by means of a long and difficult development of philosophy and natural science.”

Look at the new dish which our cook has prepared for us. Engels is speaking here of the possibility of something existing beyond the bounds of our horizon, the existence of men on Mars, for instance. It is clear that such existence is indeed an open question. And Bazarov, not presenting the full quotation, apparently with malice and aforethought, interprets Engels as if the offene Frage relates to the question of “bare existence beyond the perceptual world.” This is the height of absurdity, for Engels is here being taxed with the views of those professors of philosophy whom Bazarov accepts without any questioning and whom Dietzgen justly called the “graduated flunkeys” of the priesthood or fideism. Indeed, fideism does assert that there exists something “beyond the world of perception.” The materialists in agreement with natural science decidedly oppose such assertion. The position which mediates between the two is held by those professors, followers of Kant, Hume or Mach, “who have found the truth outside the poles of both materialism and idealism” and who “make peace,” for this in an “open question.” Had Engels said anything similar to this, it would be positively disgraceful to call oneself a Marxist.

But enough! The half page of quotation from Bazarov is so full of blunders that we are compelled to limit ourselves to what has already been said about it, without following further the aberrations of the Machian point of view.

To reveal the absurdity of the assertions made by the Machians to the effect that the materialists, Marx and Engels, denied the existence of the “thing-in-itself” and the possibility of its cognition, or that they admitted the existence of an absolute line of division between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, we shall adduce a few quotations from Feuerbach. The trouble with our Machians arose from the fact that they began to parrot the words of the reactionary philosophers on dialectic materialism without either acquainting themselves with dialectics or with materialism.

“Modern philosophical spiritualism,” says Feuerbach, “which calls itself idealism reproaches materialism with the following destructive (in its own eyes) stricture: Materialism is dogmatism; it starts from the world of perception as if from an undisputed, objective truth, and considers it as a world-in-itself existing outside of us, while in reality the world is only a product of the spirit.”

This seems sufficiently clear. The world-in-itself is a world that exists outside of us. The materialism of Feuerbach, as well as the materialism of the seventeenth century, which was attacked by Bishop Berkeley, consisted in the recognition of the existence of objects-in-themselves external to the human mind. The an sich (in itself) of Feuerbach is absolutely opposed to the an sich of Kant. (Let us recall the excerpt from Feuerbach, where he says that for Kant the Ding an sich is an “abstraction without reality.”) For Feuerbach the Ding an sich is an abstraction of a reality, that is, of an external intelligible world, which does not differ from the world of “phenomena.”

Feuerbach shows very ingeniously and clearly how ridiculous it is to postulate a “transcendence” between the world of phenomena and the world-in-itself, an abyss created by the priests and adopted by the professors of philosophy. Here is one of his analyses:

“Of course the products of phantasy, too, are the products of nature, for the power of phantasy, like other human powers, is in the last analysis, both in its basis and in its origin a force of nature. Nevertheless a human being is a creature who is distinguished from the sun, moon and stars, from stones, animals and vegetables, in a word, from those creatures (Wesen) which he designates by one general name, ‘nature.’ Consequently, his images or perceptions of the sun, moon and stars and other creatures of nature (Naturwesen), although products of nature, are yet distinct from those objects in nature of which they are the perceptions.”

The objects of our presentations are distinguished from our presentations themselves; the thing-in-itself is distinguished from the thing for us, for the latter is only a part, or only one aspect, of the former, just as man himself is only a fragment of nature which reflects itself in his presentations.

“, . . My taste-nerve is just as much a product of nature as salt is, but from this it does not follow that the taste of salt, as such, would be its independently existing objective property, that the salt which appears only as an object of sensation would be such in itself, or that the sensation of salt on the tongue would be the property of salt when we only think of it without tasting it. . . .” And several pages previous: “A saline taste is the subjective expression of an objective property of salt” (ibid., p. 514).

Sensation is the result of the action of an objectively existing thing-in-itself upon our sense-organs. Such is the theory of Feuerbach. Sensation is a subjective image of an objective world, a world an und für sich.

“. . . Although man is a creature of nature (Naturwesen), like the sun, stars, vegetables, animals, and rocks, nevertheless he is distinguished from nature. Nature in the head and heart of man is distinguished from nature outside of the human head and heart. . . . The human body is the only object in which, according to the admission of the idealists themselves, the fact of the ‘identity between object and subject’ is realised; for the human body is that object whose equality and unity with my own inner being stands beyond any possible doubt. . . . But is not one man for the other, even the most intimate, an object of phantasy, an object of representation? Does not each man comprehend the other in his own way, in his own sense [in und nach seinem Sinne]? . . . And if between man and man, and between mind and mind, there is a difference which it is impossible to ignore, how much greater must the difference be between an unthinking, unhuman, dissimilar (to us) being in itself [Wesen an sich] and the same being as we think of it, perceive it and apprehend it?” (ibid., p. 518).

Every mysterious, subtle and insidious difference between the appearance and the thing-in-itself is an absolute philosophic fallacy. In fact each one of us has observed innumerable times the simple and palpable transformation of the “thing-in-itself” into the “thing-for-us.” This transformation is cognition. The “teaching” of Machism that since we know only sensations, we cannot know of the existence of something beyond sensations, is an old sophism of the idealist and agnostic philosophy presented in a new dressing.

Joseph Dietzgen is a dialectical materialist. We shall show below that his method of expression is often inexact, that often it is not devoid of confusion, a fact which is seized upon by various unwise people (Eugene Dietzgen amongst them) and, of course, by our Machians; yet either they were unable or unwilling to determine the dominant trend of his thought, and to disengage clearly his basic materialism from the elements foreign to it.

“If we wish,” says Dietzgen, “to regard the world in the light of the thing-in-itself, we shall easily see that the world ‘itself’ and the world as it appears, the world of phenomena, differ only in the same way in which the whole differs from its component parts.” “A phenomenon is no more and no less different from the thing which produces it than the stretch of a twenty-mile road is different from the road itself” (p. 83). There is not, nor can there be any difference in principle; there can be no “transcendence,” or “innate disagreement.” But there is, to be sure, a difference involved in the transition from the bounds of sense-perceptions to the existence of things outside of us.

“We learn by experience that each experience is only a part of that which, in the words of Kant, surpasses all experience. . . . In the sense of the cognition conscious of its own nature, each particle, be it of dust or of stone or of wood, is incomprehensible as to its whole extent, each particle being an inexhaustible material for the human faculty of cognition, consequently something which surpasses all experience” (Philosophical Essays, p. 284).

To write, “in the words of Kant,” to accept for purposes of popularisation the erroneous, baffling terminology of Kant, means that Dietzgen recognised the transcendental existence of something “beyond experience.” This is a good example of what the Machians will fasten upon in order to justify their change from materialism to agnosticism. You see, they say, we do not wish to go beyond the “bounds of experience,” for us “sense-perception is the reality external to us.”

“Morbid mysticism,” objects Dietzgen to such philosophy, “separates unscientifically the absolute truth from the relative truth. It makes of the phenomenal thing and of the ‘thing-in-itself,’ that is, of the phenomenon and truth, two categories which differ completely from each other and are not contained in one united category” (p. 285). We may now judge of the enlightenment and ingenuity of the Russian Machian, Bogdanov, who does not wish to call himself a Machian but wishes to be considered a Marxist in philosophy.

“The golden mean between panpsychism and panmaterialism has been taken by the materialists of the more critical shade. They have rejected the notion of the absolute unknowableness of the thing-in-itself, but at the same time regard it as being radically different from the ‘phenomenon’ and, therefore, only dimly discernible in it; it is taken to be transempirical in content [that is, probably, as far as the “elements” are concerned which are not as such elements of experience], but yet lying within the bounds of what has been called the forms of experience, i. e., time, space and causality. Such is approximately the standpoint of the French materialists of the eighteenth century and of the newer philosophers, Engels and his Russian follower, Beltov” [Plekhanov—Ed.].

This is a complete blunder. (1) The materialists of the seventeenth century, with whom Berkeley argues, hold that “objects-in-themselves” are unconditionally knowable, for our representations and ideas are only copies or reflections of those objects which exist “outside of the mind” (see Preface). (2) Feuerbach, and Dietzgen after him, decidedly oppose the radical separation introduced between the thing-in-itself and its phenomenon, and Engels, too, with his brief example of the transformation of the “thing-in-itself” into the “thing-for-us,” attacks this position. (3) And, finally, to maintain that the materialists regard things-in-themselves as “only dimly discernible in the phenomena,” is mere folly, as we have seen from Engels’ refutation of the agnostic. The reason for Bogdanov’s perversion of materialism is his misunderstanding of the relation of absolute truth to relative truth (about which we shall speak later). As far as the “transempirical” thing-in-itself and “elements of experience” are concerned, they represent intrusions of what we have already seen to be Machian blunders. To “poll-parrot” the reactionary professors on the absurdity of materialism, to disavow Engels in 1907, to attempt to palm Engels off as an agnostic—that is the sum and substance of the philosophy of “recent positivism,” upheld by the Russian Machians!

Says Bogdanov: “As I understand it, Marxism represents the denial of the unconditional objectivity of any truth whatsoever, the denial that there is any such thing as a purely eternal truth.” What is meant by “unconditional objectivity”? “Eternal truth” is “an objective truth in the absolute meaning of the word,” says Bogdanov, agreeing to recognise the existence of “objective truth only within the limits of a certain epoch.”

Two questions are here confused: (1) Is there such a thing as objective truth, that is, can there be in human representation a given content whose truth does not depend upon the existence of either a subject, a human being, or on humanity in general? (2) And if objective truth does exist, can a human conception, which gives expression to it, express it as a whole, at one time, unconditionally, absolutely, or only approximately, relatively? The second question revolves around the correlation of absolute and relative truth.

As far as the second question is concerned, Bogdanov’s answer is clear, open and definite. He denies completely the possibility of acquiring absolute truth and accuses Engels of eclecticism for making an opposite sort of admission. We shall speak later on about Bogdanov’s discovery of eclecticism in Engels. Here we shall pause on the first question which Bogdanov very obscurely also answers in the negative, for although it is possible to deny the element of the relative principle in one human notion or another, without denying the existence of objective truth, yet it is impossible to deny the existence of absolute truth without denying the existence of objective truth. “. . . There is no criterion of objective truth,” writes Bogdanov a little further (p. ix), “in Beltov’s [Plekhanov’s] sense of the word; the truth is an ideological form, an organising form of human experience. . . .”

This has nothing to do with “in the sense of Beltov,” for the question here is about one of the fundamental philosophic problems and not at all about Beltov; nor has it to do with the criterion of truth which we must treat separately and not confound with the question as to whether objective truth exists. Bogdanov’s negative answer to the latter question is clear: If truth is only an ideological form, it means that there cannot exist any truth independently of the subject, or of humanity, for as we both agree, we do not know any other ideology, besides a human one. And still clearer is his negative answer to the second half of his question: If truth is a form of human experience, it means that there cannot be any truth which would not depend upon humanity; there cannot be any objective truth.

The denial of objective truth by Bogdanov is agnosticism and subjectivism. The absurdity of this denial is evident when we consider the example of the scientific-historical truth quoted above, Natural science does not leave any room for doubt about the truth of its assertion that the earth existed before the appearance of man. From the viewpoint of the materialistic theory of knowledge it is quite consistent to hold that what is reflected exists in independence from what does the reflecting. In fact the doctrine of the independence of the outer world from consciousness is the fundamental proposition of materialism. The assertion of science that the earth existed before the appearance of man is an objective truth. This position is incompatible with the philosophy of the Machians, and with their doctrine of truth. For, if truth is an organising form of human experience, then any assertion about the existence of the earth without the experience of men cannot be true.

But this is not sufficient. If truth is only an organising form of human experience, then the teaching, say, of Catholicism may be considered as truth. For there is not the least doubt that Catholicism is an “organising form of human experience.” Bogdanov himself senses the fallacy of this startling theory, and it is rather interesting to watch how he attempts to extricate himself from the mire into which he has fallen.

“The basis of objectivity,” we read in Book I of Empirio-Monism, “must rest in the sphere of collective experience. We term those data of experience objective which have the same meaning for us and for others. Not only must we base our activity upon them, if we desire to avoid contradiction, but other people must do likewise, in order not to arrive at a contradiction. The objective character of the physical world consists in that it exists not for each one personally, but for all [it is not true! it exists independently of ‘all’], and therefore has a certain meaning which is the same for everybody. The objectivity of the physical order is its general meaning” (p. 25). “The objectivity of physical bodies which we encounter in our experience is established on the basis of the mutual verification and agreement of various people. In general, the physical world is a socially agreed, socially-harmonised, or in a word, a socially-organised experience” (p. 36).

We do not have to repeat that this idealistic definition of objectivity is essentially untrue, that the physical world exists independently of humanity and of human experience, and that the physical world existed at a time when no “sociability” and no “organisation” of human experience was possible.

We shall stop to point out the falsity of the Machian philosophy from still another angle. Objectivity is so defined that it embraces religious doctrines, which undoubtedly possess a “universal meaning.” But let us continue with Bogdanov: “We remind the reader once more that objective experience is not at all social experience. . . . Social experience is by no means organised as a social whole, and always contains various contradictions, so that some parts of it do not agree with the others. House goblins and wood-demons can exist in the domain of social experience of a given people or a given group of people as, for example, the peasantry; but in socially-organised or objective experience they are not included, for they do not harmonise with the rest of collective experience or fit into its organised forms as, for example, its category of causal connection” (p. 45).

Of course it is very kind of Bogdanov “not to include” the social experience of ghosts and goblins into objective experience. But this well-meant “correction,” which is in the spirit of anti-fideism, does not really “correct” the fundamental error of Bogdanov’s whole position. His definition of objectivity and of the physical world absolutely breaks down because the doctrines of religion have a “general meaning,” more widespread than those of science; the majority of mankind, let us remember, still clings to religion. Catholicism is “socially organised, harmonised, and agreed upon” because of its centuries of historic development; and it can easily be “tied up” with the category of “causal connection,” for religions did not originate without cause, they did not come into existence by accident and are still popular with the masses at the present time; and even our professors of philosophy quite “legitimately” adjust themselves to them. If this experience, which undoubtedly has a “universal meaning” and undoubtedly is socially organised, does not “harmonise” with the “experience” of science, it is because there is a fundamental difference between one and the other which Bogdanov eradicates when he rejects the notion of absolute truth. And though Bogdanov tries to “correct” himself by saying that fideism or clericalism does not harmonise with science, nevertheless, his denial of objective truth “harmonises” completely with fideism. Modern fideism does not reject science—Oh! no, it only rejects the “exaggerated claims” of science, especially its claim to objective truth. If objective truth exists (as the materialists contend), if natural science, reflecting the outer world in human “experience,” is alone capable of giving us objective truth, then every kind of fideism is absolutely false. But if there is no objective truth, if truth (including scientific truth) is only the organised form of human experience, then a way is left open for the fundamental postulate of clericalism; a door is opened for it, and a place cleared to house the “organising forms” of the religious experience.

The question is, should this denial of objective truth be attributed directly to Bogdanov, who refuses to call himself a Machian, or is it a consequence of the fundamental teachings of Mach and Avenarius? It is clear that the latter is the case. If only sensation exists (Avenarius, in 1876), if bodies are complexes of sensations (Mach, in the Analysis of Sensations), then it is obvious that we are confronted with a philosophical subjectivism, which inevitably leads to the denial of objective truth. And if sensations are called “elements,” which in one aspect are physical and in another psychical, then, as we have seen, the starting point of empirio-criticism becomes only entangled but not rejected. Avenarius and Mach recognise sensations as the source of our cognition. They hold the viewpoint of empiricism (all cognition from experience) or sensationalism (all cognition from sensations). This viewpoint leads to the reassertion of the fundamental opposition between idealism and materialism; it does not eliminate that opposition, no matter in what “new” verbal attire (“elements”) it might be clothed. The solipsist, that is, the subjective idealist, and the materialist may recognise sensations as the source of our cognition. Both Berkeley and Diderot started from Locke. The first proposition of the theory of knowledge is that the sole source of our cognition is sensation. Having recognised the first proposition, Mach confuses the second important proposition, concerning the objective reality which is given to man in his sensations,—an objective reality which is the source of his sensations. Starting from sensations, it is theoretically possible to follow the line of subjectivism which leads to solipsism (“bodies are complexes or combinations of sensations”), or to follow the line of objectivism which leads to materialism (sensations are images of objects in the external world). The first viewpoint gives us agnosticism, and if we push it a little further, subjective idealism—for which there cannot be any objective truth. The second viewpoint, gives us materialism, for which the recognition of the objective truth is essential. This old philosophic question, out of which these two irreconcilable tendencies grow, is not solved by Mach; it is not eliminated or overcome by him, but is rather entangled through his juggling with the word “element,” etc. The denial of objective truth by Bogdanov is an inevitable consequence of Machism, and not a deviation from it.

Engels, in his Ludwig Feuerbach, calls Hume and Kant philosophers “who dispute the possibility of knowing the world or at least of acquiring a thorough knowledge of it.” Engels lays stress on that which Hume and Kant hold in common, not on that which divides them. He shows there that “the decisive arguments for the refutation of this [Humean and Kantian] view were already advanced by Hegel.” In connection with this, it is noteworthy that Hegel regarded materialism as “a consistent system of empiricism.” He wrote: “Generally speaking, empiricism finds the truth in the outward world; and even if it allow a supersensible world, it holds knowledge of that world to be impossible and would restrict us to the province of sensation. This doctrine when systematically carried out produces what has been latterly termed materialism. Materialism of this stamp looks upon matter, qua matter as the genuine objective world.”

All knowledge is derived from experience, from sensation, from perception; this is true. But the question remains, is the source of perception, objective reality? If you answer affirmatively, then you are a materialist. If not then you inevitably come to subjectivism, or agnosticism, irrespective of whether you deny the knowledge of the thing-in-itself, or the objectivity of time, space, causality (Kant), or whether you reject the idea of the thing-in-itself (Hume). The inconsistency of your empiricism, of your philosophy of experience, will lie in the fact that you are denying the objective content of experience, the objective truth of empirical knowledge.

Those who follow the line of Kant and Hume (Mach and Avenarius included, since they are not pure Berkeleians) call us materialists, “metaphysicians,” because we recognise the objective reality which is given us in experience, because we recognise an objective and independent source of our sensations. We materialists, after Engels, term the Kantians and Humeans, agnostics, because they deny the objective reality of the source of our sensations. Agnostic is a Greek word: a “no,” gnosis “knowledge.” The agnostic says I do not know whether there is an objective reality which reflects and is reflected by our sensations; I declare it impossible to know. (Cf. citation above from Engels’ in which the position of the agnostic is presented.) Hence the denial of objective truth by the agnostic, and the tolerance—a bourgeois, philistine, cowardly tolerance—of the dogmas of house goblins and wood-demons, Catholic saints and the like. Mach and Avenarius, pretentiously employing a “new” terminology, advancing a supposedly “new” viewpoint, in fact repeat the agnostic’s position in a confusing way. On the one hand bodies are complexes of sensation (pure subjectivism, pure Berkeleianism); on the other hand, if we christen our sensation “elements,” it becomes possible to think of their existence independently of our sense-organs!

The Machians like to recite this theme. They like to say that they are philosophers who absolutely trust the evidence of their sense-organs, that they account the world as it actually seems to us, full of sounds, colours, etc., while the materialists, as it were, regard the world as dead, without sound or colour, distinct in its nature from what it seems to us, and so on. In such wise, does Petzoldt hold forth in his Einführung in die Philosophie, etc., and in his Das Weltproblem vom positivistischen Stand punkte aus (1907). Victor Chernov, enthusiastic over the “new” idea, apes Petzoldt. But in truth the Machians are subjectivists and agnostics, for they do not sufficiently trust the evidence of our sense-organs and are inconsistent in their sensationalism. They do not recognise objective reality as the source of our sensations. They do not see in sensations the true copy of this objective reality, thus coming into direct contradiction with natural science and opening the door to fideism. On the other hand, for the materialist the world is richer, livelier, more varied than it actually seems, for with each scientific step taken in advance, new parts of it are discovered. To the materialist, sensations are images of the ultimate and only objective reality, ultimate not in the sense that it is already explored to the end, but in that there is not and cannot be any other besides it. This viewpoint irrevocably closes the door, not only to all sorts of fideism, but also to that professorial scholasticism which, without regarding objective reality as the source of our sensations, “infers” the existence of the objective, by means of such sham verbal constructions, as “unique determination,” “the socially-organised,” so that it is finally reduced to a position in which it is unable to separate objective truth from the belief in wood and house spirits.

The Machians contemptuously shrug their shoulders at the “antiquated” views of the “dogmatic” materialists who still cling to the conception of matter which has been supposedly refuted by “recent” science and “recent positivism.” We will speak separately of the new theories of physics, concerning the nature of matter. It is unpardonable to confound, as the Machians do, the teaching of this or the other construction of matter with the epistemological category, to confound the problem of the new properties of the new species of matter (electrons, for instance) with the old problem of the theory of knowledge, with the problem concerning the sources of our cognition—or the existence of objective truth, etc. Mach “discovered the world elements,” we are told: red, green, hard, soft, loud, long, etc. We ask whether or not objective reality is assumed as given us, when we see red or perceive hard. This hoary philosophic question is confused by Mach. If one holds that it is not given, then he is relapsing together with Mach, into subjectivism and agnosticism and into the arms of the immanentist school, who are really philosophic Menshikovs. If one holds that it is given, then a certain philosophic doctrine necessarily follows. Such a doctrine has long since been worked out, namely, materialism. Matter is a philosophic category which refers to the objective reality given to man in his sensations,—a reality which is copied, photographed, and reflected by our sensations, but which exists independently of them. To say that such a doctrine can become antiquated, is childish prattle and merely a senseless repetition of the arguments of the fashionable reactionary philosophy. When could the struggle between materialism and idealism have become antiquated during the two thousand years of the development of philosophy? Recall the conflicts which have been waged over the following issues: the tradition of Plato or the tradition of Democritus; the struggle between religion and science; the denial of objective truth and its assertion: the struggle between those who believed in supersensible knowledge and their adversaries.

The acceptance or rejection of the notion of matter presents a problem concerning the confidence of man in the evidence of his sense-organs, a problem which bears on the question of the source of our cognition, one which has been asked, answered and debated from the very inception of philosophy, one which can be elaborated in thousands of ways by professorial circus-clowns, but which can no more become obsolete than the question as to whether the source of human cognition is sight, hearing and smell. To regard our sensations as copies of the external world, is to admit an objective truth, that is, to hold a materialistic point of view. To illustrate this, I will adduce a quotation from Feuerbach and from two textbooks of philosophy, in order that the reader may judge the elementary nature of this question.

“How vulgar it is,” wrote Feuerbach, “to refuse to acknowledge that sensation is the gospel, the dispensation of the objective saviour.” As you see, a strange, queer terminology, but a perfectly clear philosophic line: sensation reveals the objective truth to us. “My sensation is subjective, but its foundations or grounds are objective” (ibid., p. 195). Compare the quotation where Feuerbach says that materialism regards the perceptual world as the ultimate objective truth.

“Sensationalism,” we read in Frank’s Dictionary, “is a doctrine which infers all our ideas from the experience of perceptions, reducing knowledge to sensation. There is subjective sensationalism [scepticism and Berkeleianism], moral sensualism [Epicureanism], and objective sensationalism. Objective sensationalism is materialism, for matter or bodies are, in the opinion of the materialists, the sole objects which can affect our senses (atteindre nos sens).”

“If sensationalism,” says Schwegler, “asserts that truth or being can be known exclusively by means of the senses, the only thing that remains [the question concerns the philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century in France] is to formulate objectively this proposition: ‘Only the perceptual exists; there is no other being save material being.’ This is the thesis of materialism.”

These truisms, which have found their way even into the textbooks, have been forgotten by our Machians.

Bogdanov made this discovery in 1906 announcing it in the preface of Book III of his Empirio-Monism. “Engels in Anti-Dühring,” writes Bogdanov, “expresses himself almost in the same sense which I characterised as ‘the relativity of truth’ (p. v), that is, in the sense of the denial of eternal truth, the denial of the absolute objectivity of whatever truth there is. . . . Engels mistakenly wavers in his views when he ironically recognises certain wretched eternal truths (p. viii). . . . Only inconsistency can account for Engels’ eclectic reservations in this connection . . .” (p. ix). Let us cite one instance of Bogdanov’s refutation of Engels’ eclecticism. “Napoleon died on May 5, 1821,” says Engels, in Anti-Dühring, in the chapter, “Eternal Truths,” where he treats of the platitudes which one must encounter in pretending to find eternal truths in historical sciences. Bogdanov thus answers Engels: “What ‘truth’ is it? And what is there ‘eternal’ about it? The constancy of the one-to-one correspondence between a point-instant of time and the death of Napoleon has no longer any real significance for our generation, it cannot serve as the starting point for any activity, and it leads nowhere” (p. ix). And on p. viii: “Can you call Plattheiten Wahrheiten? Are platitudes truths? The truth is a vital organising form of experience; it leads us somewhere in our activity and gives us a prop in the struggle of life.”

It is sufficiently clear from these two quotations, that instead of refuting Engels, Bogdanov is really beating air. If you are not in a position to maintain that the proposition, “Napoleon died on May 5, 1821,” is false, then you are practically acknowledging that it is true. If you do not assert that it can be refuted in the future, then you are acknowledging this truth to be eternal. But to present such phrases as that the truth is a “vital organising form of experience” as an answer is to offer a jumble of words as philosophy. Was the earth evolved in the manner taught by the science of geology, or was the earth created in seven days? Is it really possible to dodge the question by phrases of “vital” (what does it mean?) truth which “leads” somewhere? Is it true that the knowledge of the earth’s history and the history of humanity “have no real significance”? But this is only a trifle by the means of which Bogdanov covers his retreat. Having taken it upon himself to prove that the admission of eternal truths by Engels is eclecticism, it is no more than a transparent dodge to settle the question verbally and leave unrefuted the fact that Napoleon really died on May 5, 1821. To think that this truth can possibly be refuted in the future is absurd.

The example taken by Engels is elementary, and anybody can present scores of such truths (as e. g., the other instance of Engels, that Paris is in France), which are eternal and absolute, and which only insane people can doubt. Why does Engels speak of “platitudes”? Because he ridicules and refutes the dogmatic, metaphysical materialist, Dühring, who could not apply dialectics to the question of the relation between absolute and relative truth. To be a materialist is to acknowledge objective truth revealed by our sense-organs. To acknowledge as objective truth, a truth independent of man and mankind, is to recognise in one way or another, absolute truth. Now, this “one way or another” separates the metaphysical materialist Dühring from the dialectical materialist Engels. Dühring juggled with the words “last, final, eternal truth” in discussing the most complicated questions of science, and especially in discussing history. Of course, there are eternal truths, says Engels, but it is unwise to use “high-sounding” words (gewaltige Worte) for small matters. To further materialism, we must drop the vulgar play upon the expression “eternal truth”; we must know how to put, and solve dialectically, the question of the correlation between absolute and relative truths. This was the source of the struggle between Dühring and Engels which took place thirty years ago. And Bogdanov, who manages “not to have noticed” Engels’ explanation of the problem of absolute and relative truth given in the same chapter, and who accuses Engels of “eclecticism” for his admission of a proposition which is a truism for every sort of materialism, once more reveals his complete ignorance of materialism and dialectics.

“We now come to the question,” Engels writes in Anti-Dühring, in the chapter mentioned, “as to what product, if any, of human knowledge can especially have ‘sovereign validity’ and ‘unrestricted claims to truth’” (loc. cit., p. 118). Engels thus solves the problem:

“The sovereignty of thought is realised in a number of highly unsovereign men capable of thinking; the knowledge which has unlimited pretensions to truth is realised in a number of relative blunders; neither the one nor the other can be fully realised except through an endless eternity of human existence.

“We have here again the same contradiction as above between the necessary, as an absolute, conceived characteristic of human thought, and its reality in the very limited thinking single individual, a contradiction which can only be solved in the endless progression of the human race, that is, endless as far as we are concerned. In this sense human thought is just as sovereign as not . . . and its possibility of knowledge just as unlimited as limited. It is sovereign and unlimited as regards its nature, its significance, its possibilities, its historical end; it is not sovereign and limited with respect to individual expression and its actuality at any particular time. It is just the same with eternal truths” (p. 119).

This discussion is very important for the question of relativism, or the principle of the relativity of our knowledge which is emphasised by all Machians. The Machians insist that they are relativists, but the Russian Machians, repeating those words after the Germans, are afraid to, or cannot, put clearly and directly the question concerning the relation of relativism to dialectics. For Bogdanov (as for all the Machians) the recognition of the relativity of our knowledge excludes the least admission of absolute truth. For Engels absolute truth is made up of relative truths. Bogdanov is a relativist; Engels is a dialectician. Here is another no less important discussion of Engels from the same chapter of Anti-Dühring:

“Truth and error, like all such mutually antagonistic concepts, have only an absolute reality under very limited conditions, as we have seen, and as even Herr Dühring should know by a slight acquaintance with the first elements of dialectics, which show the insufficiency of all polar antagonisms. As soon as we bring the antagonisms of truth and error out of this limited field it becomes relative and is not serviceable for new scientific statements. If we should seek to establish its reality beyond those limits we are at once confronted by a dilemma, both poles of the antagonism come into conflict with their opposite; truth becomes error and error becomes truth” (ibid. p. 125). There follows the example of Boyle’s law (that the volume of gas is inversely proportional to its pressure). . . . The “particle of truth” contained in that law is only absolute truth within certain limits. The law is proven to be a truth “only approximately.”

Human reason then in its nature is capable of yielding and does yield the absolute truth which is composed of the sum-total of relative truths. Each step in the development of science adds new fragments of truth, and from this the absolute truth is constituted, but the limits of the truth of each scientific statement are relative, now expanding, now shrinking with the growth of science. “Absolute truth,” says Dietzgen in his Excursions, “can be seen, heard, smelt, touched and, of course, also known; but it cannot be resolved into pure knowledge, it is not pure mind . . .(p. 281). How can a picture ‘conform’ with its model? Approximately it can. What picture worth the name does not agree approximately with its object? Every portrait is more or less of a likeness. But to be altogether alike, quite the same as the original—what a monstrous idea!

“We can only know nature and her parts relatively, since even a part, though only a relation of nature, possesses again the characteristics of the Absolute, the nature of the All-Existence which cannot be exhausted by knowledge.

“How, then, do we know that behind the phenomena of Nature, behind the relative truths, there is a universal, unlimited, absolute nature which does not reveal itself completely to man? . . . Whence that knowledge? It is innate; it is given us with consciousness” (p. 283).

This last phrase is one of Joseph Dietzgen’s inexact expressions, which led Marx, in one of his letters to Kugelmann, to make note of the confusion in Dietzgen’s views. Only by seizing upon these incorrect and unessential phrases can one speak of a special philosophy of Dietzgen which is supposedly different from dialectical materialism. But Dietzgen corrects himself on the same page: “When I say that the consciousness of the endless, absolute truth is innate in us, is the one and only knowledge a priori, I am confirmed in my statement also by the experience of this innate consciousness.”

From all these statements of Engels and Dietzgen it is obvious that as far as dialectical materialism is concerned there does not exist a fixed immutable boundary between relative and absolute truth. Bogdanov did not grasp this at all, as is evident from the fact that he could bring himself to write the following: “Old-fashioned materialism sets itself up as the absolute objective knowledge of the essence of things [Bogdanov’s italics] but this is incompatible with the historical conditioning features of any particular ideology.”

From the standpoint of modern materialism, or Marxism, the relative limits of our approximation to the cognition of the objective, absolute truth are historically conditioned; but the existence of this truth is unconditioned, as well as the fact that we are continually approaching it. The general outlines of a picture are historically conditioned, but it is unconditionally true that this picture reflects an objectively existing model. Historically conditioned are the circumstances under which we made progress in our knowledge of the essence of things. For example, the discovery of alizarine in coal tar was historically conditioned, or the discovery of the electronic structure of the atom was historically conditioned; but it is unconditionally true that every such discovery is a step forward to “absolute objective knowledge.” In a word, every ideology is historically conditioned, but it is unconditionally true that to every scientific theory (as distinct from religion), there corresponds an objective truth, something absolutely so in nature. You will say that this distinction between relative and absolute truth is indefinite. And I will reply that it is sufficiently indefinite to prevent science from becoming dogmatic, in the bad sense of the word, from becoming dead, frozen, ossified; but it is at the same time sufficiently “definite” to preclude us from espousing any brand of fideism or agnosticism, from embracing the sophistry and philosophical idealism of the followers of Hume and Kant. Here is a boundary which you have not noticed, and not having noticed it, you have fallen into the mire of reactionary philosophy. It is the boundary between dialectical materialism and relativism.

We are relativists, declare Mach, Avenarius and Petzoldt. We are relativists, Mr. Chernov, and a few Russian Machians who wish to be Marxians, echo after them. In this, Mr. Chernov and my Machian comrades, lies your error. To make relativism the basis of the theory of knowledge is inevitably to condemn oneself to absolute scepticism, agnosticism and sophistry, or subjectivism. Relativism as the basis of the theory of knowledge is not only a recognition of the relativity of our cognition, but is tantamount to the denial of the existence of an objective limit or goal independent of humanity to which our cognition approaches. From the point of view of mere relativism one can justify any sophistry, one can even regard the statement “Napoleon died on May 5, 1821,” as conditioned; one can declare things to be true for the “convenience” of an individual or humanity, as well as recognise scientific ideology to be “convenient” in one respect and religious ideology to be very “convenient” in another, etc.

Dialectics, as Hegel explained it, includes an “element” of relativism, of negation and scepticism, but it is not thereby reduced to relativism. The materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels certainly does contain relativism, but it is not reduced to it, that is, it recognises the relativity of all our knowledge, not in the sense of the denial of objective truth, but in the sense of the historical conditions which determine the degrees of our knowledge as it approaches this truth.

Bogdanov writes in italics: “Consistent Marxism does not admit such dogmatism and such static expressions” as eternal truths. This is a blunder. If the world is an eternally moving and developing material mass (as the Marxians assume) which reflects a progressive human consciousness, what has all this to do with the notion of the “static”? The question at issue here is not one concerning the intrinsic essence of things, nor of the intrinsic nature of consciousness, but of the correspondence between the consciousness which reflects nature, and the nature which is reflected by consciousness. In this question, and in this question alone, the term “dogmatism” has a special, characteristic philosophic flavor; it is the favourite word which the idealists and the agnostics hurl against the materialists, as we have already seen from the example of the very “old” materialist, Feuerbach. The objections that are raised from the standpoint of the prominent “recent positivists” against materialism are as old as they are trashy!

We have seen that Marx, in 1845, and Engels, in 1888 and 1891, introduced the criterion of practice into the theory of knowledge of materialism. To ask outside the realm of practice whether “the objective truth corresponds to human reason” is scholasticism, says Marx in his second thesis on Feuerbach. The best refutation of Kantian and Humean agnosticism as well as of other philosophic whims (Schrullen) is practice, repeats Engels. “The success of our actions proves the correspondence (Uebereinstimmung) of our perception with the objective nature of the objects perceived,” he answers the agnostics.

Compare with this the argument of Mach regarding the criterion of practice:

“A common and popular way of thinking and speaking is to contrast ‘appearance’ with ‘reality.’ A pencil held in front of us in the air is seen by us as straight; dip it into the water, and we see it crooked. In the latter case we say that the pencil appears crooked, but is in reality straight. But what justifies us in declaring one fact rather than another to be the reality, and degrading the other to the level of appearance? In both cases we have to do with facts which present us with different combinations of the elements, combinations which in the two cases are differently conditioned. Precisely because of its environment the pencil dipped in water is optically crooked; but it is tactually and metrically straight. An image in a concave or flat mirror is only visible, whereas under other and ordinary circumstances a tangible body as well corresponds to the visible image. A bright surface is brighter beside a dark surface than beside one brighter than itself. To be sure, our expectation is deceived when, not paying sufficient attention to the conditions, and substituting for one another different cases of the combination, we fall into the natural error of expecting what we are accustomed to, although the case may be an unusual one. The facts are not to blame for that. In these cases, to speak of “appearance” may have a practical meaning, but cannot have a scientific meaning. Similarly, the question which is often asked, whether the world is real or whether we merely dream it, is devoid of all scientific meaning. Even the wildest dream is a fact as much as any other.”

It is true that not only is the wildest dream a fact, but the wildest philosophy as well. There can be no doubt about it after our acquaintance with the philosophy of Ernst Mach. As the last sophist, he confounds scientific-historical, psychological investigations of human errors, all kinds of “wild dreams” of humanity, such as faith in spooks, with the epistemological differentiation of truthful and “wild.” It is as if an economist would say that the theory of Senior, that the whole surplus value of the capitalist is given to him at the “last hour” of the worker’s labour-time, and the theory of Marx are both a fact; and from the point of view of science there is no sense in the question as to which theory expresses objective truth and which the prejudice of the bourgeoisie and the corruption of its professors.

The tanner, Joseph Dietzgen, saw in the scientific, that is, materialist theory of knowledge a “universal weapon against religious belief,” and yet for Professor Ernst Mach, the difference between the materialist and the subjective-idealist theories of knowledge “is devoid of all scientific meaning.” That science is impartial in the clash of materialism, idealism and religion, is a favourite idea not only of Mach, but of all modern bourgeois professors, who are, to quote Dietzgen, “graduated flunkeys using their sham idealism to keep the people in ignorance” (loc. cit., p. 130).

It is sham professorial idealism when the criterion of practice, which makes a distinction between illusion and actuality, is taken by Mach out of the realm of science, out of the theory of knowledge.

Human practice proves the correctness of the materialist theory of knowledge, said Marx and Engels, declaring as “scholastic” and “philosophic legerdemain,” all attempts to solve fundamental epistemological questions which ignore practice. For Mach practice is one thing, and the theory of knowledge another. “Cognition,” says Mach, in his last work, Erkenntnis und Irrtum, “is a biologically useful mental experience. Only success can separate knowledge from error (p. 116). . . . Understanding is a physical working hypothesis” (p. 183). Our Russian Machians, who wish to be Marxians, accept with a peculiar naiveté such phrases of Mach as proof that he borders very closely on Marxism. But Mach borders on Marxism as closely as Bismarck bordered on the labour movement or Bishop Yevlogy on democracy. With Mach, such assumptions stand side by side with his idealist theory of knowledge, but do not preponderantly determine the choice of a fundamental tendency or theory in epistemology. Knowledge may be biologically useful, useful in human practice, in the preservation of the species, but it is useful only when it reflects an objective truth, independent of man. For a materialist, the “success” of human practice proves the correspondence of our representations to the objective nature of the things we perceive. For a solipsist, “success” is restricted to what is needed only in practice, and can be dissevered from the theory of knowledge. To include the criterion of practice as the basis of the theory of knowledge is inevitably to come to materialism, says the Marxian. Practice has a materialistic reference, says Mach, but the theory of practice is a different article.

“Now in practice,” Mach writes in the Analysis of Sensations, “we can as little do without the Ego-presentation when we act, as we can do without the presentation of a body when we grasp at a thing. Physiologically we remain egoists and materialists, just as we always see the sun rise again. But theoretically this way of looking at the matter cannot be maintained” (p. 357).

Egoism is beside the point here, for egoism is not an epistemological category. The question of the rising of the sun is also beside the point, for in practice, which serves us as a criterion in the theory of knowledge, we must include also the practice of astronomical observations, discoveries, etc. There remains only Mach’s valuable admission that men in their practice are totally and exclusively guided by a materialist theory of knowledge; the attempt to overlook it “theoretically” is characteristic of the scholastic erudition and sham idealist endeavours of Mach.

That these attempts to eliminate practice, in order to make room for agnosticism and idealism, on the grounds that practice is irrelevant to epistemology, are by no means new, can be seen in the following example from the history of German classical philosophy. Midway between Kant and Fichte stands Schulze (in the history of philosophy, the so-called Schulze-Aenesidemus). He openly defends the sceptical alignment in philosophy, considering himself a follower of Hume (and of the ancients, Pyrrho and Sextus). He decidedly rejects the thing-in-itself and the possibility of objective knowledge, and insists that we should not go beyond “experience,” beyond sensations, while he foresees the following objection from the other camp. He says: “Since a sceptic, by participating in affairs of life, recognises as indubitable the reality of objective things, behaves accordingly and admits the criterion of truth, his own behaviour is the best and most obvious refutation of his scepticism.” . “Such proofs,” Schulze objects angrily, “are only valid for the mob; my scepticism does not touch upon practical life, but remains within the domain of philosophy” (p. 255). But the subjective idealist Fichte, too, hopes to find room within the domain of idealism for that “realism which is inevitable for all of us and even for the most determined idealist when it comes to practice,—that realism which assumes that objects exist absolutely independent of us and outside of us.”

The recent positivism of Mach has not gone very far from Schulze and Fichte! Let us note as a curiosity that for Bazarov also in this question, no one exists save Plekhanov—for him, too, there is no stronger beast than a cat. Bazarov ridicules the “salto-vitale” philosophy of Plekhanov (Outlines, p. 69), who really made the absurd remark, that “belief” in the existence of the outer world is an inevitable “salto-vitale” (vital leap) in philosophy. The word “belief,” though put in quotation marks (after Hume), discloses a confusion of terms in Plekhanov. There can be no question about it. But what has the problem particularly to do with Plekhanov? Why has not Bazarov taken another materialist, let us say, Feuerbach? Is it because he does not know him? But ignorance is no argument. Feuerbach also, like Marx and Engels, make an inadmissible “leap” (from the viewpoint of Schulze, Fichte and Mach) to practice, in the fundamental problems of epistemology. Criticising idealism, Feuerbach presents its essence in the following significant quotation from Fichte which demolishes Machism. “You assume,” writes Fichte, “that things are real, that they exist outside of you only because you see them, hear them and touch them. But vision, touch and hearing are only sensations . . . You perceive, not the objects, but your perceptions.” And Feuerbach replies: “A human being is not an abstract ego; he is either a man or a woman. The question, whether the world is perception, can be compared to the question, whether a human being is my perception, or our relations in practical life prove the contrary? The fundamental error of idealism is that it asks and answers the question about objectivity and subjectivity, about the reality or unreality of the world only from the theoretical viewpoint” (ibid, p. 189). Feuerbach absorbs the sum-total of human practice into the theory of knowledge. He says: “Of course, idealists also recognise the reality of the I and Thou in practical life. For the idealists this viewpoint is good only for life and not for speculation. But a speculation which contradicts life, which sets in place of the standpoint of truth the standpoint of death, which separates the soul from the body, is a false and dead speculation [p. 192]. Before perceiving we breathe; we cannot exist without air, food and drink.”

‘Does this mean that we must deal with questions of food and drink in examining the problem of the ideality or reality of the world?’ exclaims the indignant idealist. How base! What an offence to good manners to scold a refined, scientific materialism from the chair of philosophy and theology, only to practise the crudest sort of it at the table” (p. 196). And Feuerbach exclaims, to make subjective perception equivalent to the objective world “is to identify pollution with childbirth” (p. 198).

The remark is not a polite one, but it hits the mark of those philosophers who teach that sense-perception is the reality existing outside of us.

From the standpoint of life, practice ought to be the first and fundamental criterion of the theory of knowledge. It inevitably leads to materialism, brushing aside the infinite inventions of professorial scholasticism. Of course, we must not forget that the criterion of practice, in the nature of things, neither confirms nor refutes completely any human presentation. This criterion is sufficiently indefinite not to allow human knowledge to become “absolute,” and at the same time sufficiently definite to wage a bitter struggle with all varieties of idealism and agnosticism. If that which our practice confirms, is the sole, ultimate and objective truth, then it follows that the sole path to this truth is the road of science which stands by the materialist creed. For instance, Bogdanov agrees to recognise Marx’s theory of the circulation of capital as an objective truth only for “our time,” regarding as “dogmatism” the designation of this theory as an “historically objective” truth. This again is a blunder. No future circumstances can change the correspondence of this theory with the fact, for the simple reason that such a truth is as eternal as that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821. But inasmuch as practice, i. e., the development of capitalist countries in the last few decades, actually proves the objective truth of the whole social and economic theory of Marx in general, and not only some of its specific formulations, it is obvious that to speak here of the “dogmatism” of the Marxists, is to make an inexcusable concession to bourgeois economy. The sole inference from the proposition upheld by Marxists, that the theory of Marx is the objective truth, is this: Following in the direction of the Marxian theory, we shall draw nearer and nearer to the objective truth (without exhausting it); following another path, we shall arrive at confusion and falsehood.