Quiz: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

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

1. Which principle of Berkeley’s does Lenin quote as frequently cited in textbooks? Nature is primary and spirit is only secondary Esse is percipi: to exist is to be perceived Matter is the permanent possibility of sensation Things are complexes of elements and nothing more
2. 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 His statement that the thing-in-itself is unknowable and lies beyond all experience The claim that if empirio-criticism only investigates experience, it is no different from materialism
3. What objection does Lenin raise against Bogdanov’s definition of truth as an organizing form of human experience? 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 Catholicism too is socially organized, so religion would count as true It contradicts Mach’s theory of elements, on which Bogdanov claims to build
4. Whom did Feuerbach attack in 1866 as a “physiological idealist”? Hermann von Helmholtz Ernst Haeckel Johannes Müller Albert Lange
5. 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 show that belief in “objects in themselves” was materialist before Kant was born To prove that Mach had never read Berkeley To date the first appearance of dialectical materialism in British philosophy, long before Marx
6. When was Chernyshevsky’s 1888 introduction, with its criticism of Kant, finally published? 1917 1906 1863 1888
7. How does Lenin characterize the Russian Machists’ treatment of Marx and Engels in his first preface? As a faithful development of the philosophy Engels set out in his last years As philosophic revisionism that drops materialism without an open break As a purely political quarrel between factions with no philosophical content As an honest correction of antiquated views, like Mehring’s historical criticism
8. In the 1920 preface, under what guise does Lenin say Bogdanov is introducing bourgeois and reactionary views? “God-building” “Empirio-monism” “Proletarian culture” “Recent positivism”
9. How does Lenin distinguish the Machist and the materialist criticisms of Kant? The Machians fault him for being too materialist; the materialists for not being materialist enough The Machians fault his ethics; the materialists his logic The Machians accept his thing-in-itself; the materialists reject it as unknowable Both fault him for apriorism only
10. Which thinker’s “energetics” does Bogdanov follow in 1899, according to Lenin? Arthur Rücker Wilhelm Ostwald Ludwig Boltzmann Heinrich Hertz
11. Which scientific law does Engels use, as Lenin reports, to show that a truth holds only within limits? The law of the conservation and transformation of energy Newton’s law of universal gravitation and planetary motion Boyle’s law of gas pressure and volume Mendel’s laws of inheritance in hybrid peas
12. 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 pencil that looks bent in water A table that seems to shrink as we move away from it Alizarin, the madder dye, made from coal tar
13. How does Lenin describe Blei’s relation to empirio-criticism? As a Marxist misled by Mach As the founder of the school As a mirror that correctly reflects its fundamental tendencies As a heretic who betrayed Avenarius and was expelled from the school’s journal
14. 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 composed of indivisible and eternal atoms Being objective reality outside our cognition
15. In his 1878 speech, how did Helmholtz describe the relation of a sensation to its external cause? As an exact copy As an arbitrary creation of the mind As a sign, not an image As a complex of elements

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