Quiz: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

All 50 questions. A perfect score earns the gold medal; 80% earns silver.

1. 1. According to the passage of Anti-Dühring that Lenin quotes, in what does the real unity of the world consist?

   In the social agreement of experience In the unity of reason In its materiality In the principle of unique determination
2. 2. From how many points of view does Lenin say a Marxist evaluates empirio-criticism in the Conclusion?

   Six Two Three Four
3. 3. Which example does Lenin use to mock Bogdanov’s claim that laws are created by reason to organise experience?

   That Napoleon died on May 5, 1821 That water boils at a fixed temperature That winter follows autumn That the earth goes round the sun
4. 4. How many stages does Lenin count in Bogdanov’s philosophical development between 1899 and 1908?

   Two Three Six Four
5. 5. What objection does Lenin raise against Bogdanov’s definition of truth as an organizing form of human experience?

   Catholicism too is socially organized, so religion would count as true It is too close to Hegel’s absolute idealism, which makes the Idea the creator of the world It denies that individual experience exists at all, leaving only society It contradicts Mach’s theory of elements, on which Bogdanov claims to build
6. 6. What consequence of phenomenalism does Boltzmann point out in the passage Lenin quotes?

   It reduces physics to psychology It makes atoms directly observable Consistency would require doubting even one’s own past perceptions It proves the existence of the ether as the bearer of light and of heat
7. 7. What image does Rücker use for imperfect but correct scientific knowledge?

   A ship’s navigator steering by stars whose nature he does not understand A man in a dark room who does not stumble over the furniture A traveller finding his way across country with an old and inaccurate map A child learning to read
8. 8. In the letter to Kugelmann quoted by Lenin, what phrase does Marx say Lange made into a law of all history?

   The “economy of thought” The “survival of the fittest race” The “law of diminishing returns” The “struggle for existence”
9. 9. What did Avenarius call “a fetish of natural science”?

   The law of causality The atom The thing-in-itself The thinking brain
10. 10. How does Lenin characterize the Russian Machists’ treatment of Marx and Engels in his first preface?

    As philosophic revisionism that drops materialism without an open break As a faithful development of the philosophy Engels set out in his last years As an honest correction of antiquated views, like Mehring’s historical criticism As a purely political quarrel between factions with no philosophical content
11. 11. With which school does Lenin say the school of Mach and Avenarius tends toward close union?

    Utilitarianism Neo-Hegelianism The philosophy of immanence Dialectical materialism
12. 12. In his 1878 speech, how did Helmholtz describe the relation of a sensation to its external cause?

    As an exact copy As a sign, not an image As an arbitrary creation of the mind As a complex of elements
13. 13. Whom did Feuerbach attack in 1866 as a “physiological idealist”?

    Ernst Haeckel Hermann von Helmholtz Albert Lange Johannes Müller
14. 14. What example does Mach use to argue that the contrast between appearance and reality has no scientific meaning?

    A red rose analysed into its simple impressions A table that seems to shrink as we move away from it A pencil that looks bent in water Alizarin, the madder dye, made from coal tar
15. 15. Which French philosopher used Poincaré’s view of science to defend religion?

    Rey Duhem Sorel Le Roy
16. 16. Why does Lenin stress that Berkeley wrote in 1710?

    To show that Berkeley had borrowed his principal arguments against matter from Kant’s writings To prove that Mach had never read Berkeley To show that belief in “objects in themselves” was materialist before Kant was born To date the first appearance of dialectical materialism in British philosophy, long before Marx
17. 17. In Mach’s 1872 division of science, what is the subject of physics?

    The relation of energy to mass The laws of motion of matter independent of the observer The laws of the connection of sensations The connection of presentations
18. 18. How does Mach define matter, in the passage Lenin quotes?

    The objective reality given to us in sensation, existing independently of us The thing which moves A combination of elements or sensations according to certain laws An abstraction from the central term of the co-ordination, the experiencing self
19. 19. Which inference does Lenin not draw from Engels’s alizarin example?

    That things exist independently of our consciousness That we must think dialectically about how knowledge grows That things-in-themselves are forever unknowable That the only difference is between what is known and what is not yet known
20. 20. Which political figure does Lenin compare the Machist critics of Kant to?

    Purishkevich, a far-right deputy who attacked the Constitutional-Democrats Stolypin, who denied the black cabinets Chernov, the Socialist-Revolutionary leader Struve, a liberal ex-Marxist
21. 21. In the 1920 preface, under what guise does Lenin say Bogdanov is introducing bourgeois and reactionary views?

    “Proletarian culture” “Empirio-monism” “Recent positivism” “God-building”
22. 22. With which work does Diner-Dénes compare the latest discoveries in physics?

    Marx’s Capital Darwin’s Origin of Species Hegel’s Science of Logic Engels’s Anti-Dühring
23. 23. How does Lenin describe Blei’s relation to empirio-criticism?

    As the founder of the school As a Marxist misled by Mach As a heretic who betrayed Avenarius and was expelled from the school’s journal As a mirror that correctly reflects its fundamental tendencies
24. 24. Which thinker’s “energetics” does Bogdanov follow in 1899, according to Lenin?

    Ludwig Boltzmann Arthur Rücker Heinrich Hertz Wilhelm Ostwald
25. 25. After starting from Kant, toward whose views does Mach say he soon gravitated?

    Leibniz’s Hegel’s Fichte’s Berkeley’s
26. 26. According to the passages Lenin quotes, what “ill consequences” did Berkeley attribute to belief in matter?

    It leads the common people toward political revolution and disorder It contradicts the principle of economy of thought in philosophy It makes natural science impossible, since matter cannot be observed It supports atheism, fatalism, scepticism and idolatry
27. 27. What bargain does Lenin say the theologians offer the naturalists?

    Teaching, but not publishing Philosophy for the naturalists, provided ethics and education remain with the church Physics for the state universities, provided biology and medicine go to the church Science for the naturalists, epistemology and philosophy for the theologians
28. 28. What image does Diderot use for human beings in his dialogue with d’Alembert?

    Blank tablets on which experience and reason write their characters Mirrors reflecting a world of pure ideas Clocks wound up by God at the creation and then left to run on their own Sensitive instruments, like pianos, on whose keys nature strikes
29. 29. What does Lenin call the “Kantian-Machian formula” that man gives nature its laws?

    A formula of fideism A discovery of recent positivism A harmless restatement of materialism A truism of all natural science
30. 30. What example does Lenin give of people entering social relations without being conscious of them?

    A child learning the grammar of its native language A voter choosing between parties he barely understands A peasant selling grain on the world market A soldier obeying orders whose purpose he does not know
31. 31. According to Lenin, what do physicists really mean when they say “matter disappears”?

    That energy is destroyed in radioactive decay That the external world is only a complex of sensations, as Mach and the empirio-criticists had always maintained That atoms have been shown not to exist That matter has been reduced to electricity and old properties like mass have proved relative
32. 32. Whose solution of the problem of causality does Mach say “we prefer”?

    Hume’s Kant’s Spinoza’s Feuerbach’s
33. 33. Which principle of Berkeley’s does Lenin quote as frequently cited in textbooks?

    Esse is percipi: to exist is to be perceived Nature is primary and spirit is only secondary Things are complexes of elements and nothing more Matter is the permanent possibility of sensation
34. 34. How did Willy first try to save the co-ordination for the time before man existed?

    By treating all living beings, even a worm, as “fellow-men” whose experience could serve as the central term By denying that geology is a science By arguing that God observed the early earth, so that his experience could serve as the central term of the co-ordination By making causality an a priori principle
35. 35. Which English naturalist, according to Lenin, coined the term “agnostic”?

    Huxley Spencer Pearson Ward
36. 36. When Mach says science aims at a fuller picture of the world, what does Lenin say “economy of thought” becomes a clumsy phrase for?

    Habit Convenience Correctness Simplicity
37. 37. Why, according to Schubert-Soldern, must the individual self survive death?

    Because morality requires a future life in which virtue and happiness are at last brought into harmony by God Because the world is inconceivable without the self, and the whole world cannot be annihilated with it Because sensations cannot be destroyed Because the soul is a simple substance
38. 38. Which of these is one of Petzoldt’s proofs of a “tendency toward stability”?

    The spread of railways linking every capital of Europe by 1900 The growth of trade unions The falling rate of profit Collectors paying large sums for complete stamp collections
39. 39. Which scientific law does Engels use, as Lenin reports, to show that a truth holds only within limits?

    Mendel’s laws of inheritance in hybrid peas Newton’s law of universal gravitation and planetary motion The law of the conservation and transformation of energy Boyle’s law of gas pressure and volume
40. 40. What is, for Lenin, the sole “property” of matter that materialism depends on?

    Impenetrability, the resistance of bodies to one another Constant mass, unchanged by motion or by chemical change Being objective reality outside our cognition Being composed of indivisible and eternal atoms
41. 41. What does Lenin call “a complete muddle” in Plekhanov’s preface?

    Plekhanov’s definition of matter as that which, acting on our sense-organs, produces sensation His praise of Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism as a genuine advance on Marx The claim that if empirio-criticism only investigates experience, it is no different from materialism His statement that the thing-in-itself is unknowable and lies beyond all experience
42. 42. Whose 1801 dialogue does Lenin present as the essence of Avenarius’s “essential co-ordination”?

    Johann Gottlieb Fichte Immanuel Kant David Hume George Berkeley
43. 43. Which journals did Paul Carus edit, according to Lenin?

    The Monist and The Open Court Der Kampf and Die Neue Zeit L’Année Philosophique and Le Socialiste Mind and Nature
44. 44. According to the Engels passage Lenin quotes, how did Hegel define freedom?

    As independence from natural laws As the absence of external constraint As the will acting according to duty As the recognition of necessity
45. 45. In Dietzgen’s comparison of the two parties to solid and liquid matter, what is the intermediate stage?

    Ice Pulpiness Dust Vapour
46. 46. How does Lenin distinguish the Machist and the materialist criticisms of Kant?

    Both fault him for apriorism only The Machians fault his ethics; the materialists his logic The Machians fault him for being too materialist; the materialists for not being materialist enough The Machians accept his thing-in-itself; the materialists reject it as unknowable
47. 47. With what quip does Mach dismiss practical uses of the fourth dimension?

    No chemist has ever weighed an atom in it No engineer has ever built a bridge with it No ghost has ever been photographed in it No midwife has ever helped a delivery by means of it
48. 48. Which phrase of Lunacharsky’s does Lenin say contains “an absolute, and … a relative truth”?

    “Engels’ dialectics is mysticism” “Materialism has been refuted by modern science” “Perhaps we stray, but we are seekers” “We are relativists”
49. 49. What does Lenin say Bazarov did to Engels’s statement about perceptions and reality?

    He translated it correctly but ignored the context of Engels’s argument against Kant He added a reference to the thing-in-itself that is nowhere in Engels’s own text He attributed it to Plekhanov He took “coincide” to mean “be identical”, making perception the reality itself
50. 50. When was Chernyshevsky’s 1888 introduction, with its criticism of Kant, finally published?

    1888 1906 1917 1863