Science and revolution

SCIENCE

AND

REVOLUTION

By ERNEST UNTERMAMN

LIBRARY

University of California

IRVINE

SCIENCE AND
REVOLUTION

BY

ERNEST UNTERMANN

CHICAGO

CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
1910

Q
S

io

Copyright, 1905
BY CHARLES H. KSRR & Con r ANT

PRESS (OF
JOHN F. HIGGINS

CHICAGO

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Proletarian Science 5

II. The Starting Point 10

III. The Awakening of Philosophy ... 14

IV. A Step Forward in Greece 20

V. A Step Backward in Rome 28

VI. In the Slough of Ecclesiastic Feudalism . 38

VII. The Struggle for More Light .... 46
VIII. The Rehabilitation of Natural Philosophy

in England 54

IX. Natural Philosophy in France .... 62
X. A Reversion to Idealism in Germany . . 70
XI. In the Melting Pot of the French Revo-
lution 84

XII. The Wedding of Science and Natural Phi-
losophy 91

XIII. The Outcome of Classic Philosophy in Ger-
many 100

XIV. Science and the Working Class .... 107
XV. The Offspring of Science and Natural

Philosophy 127

XVI. A Waif and Its Adoption 153

XVII. Materialist Monism, the Science and " Re-
ligion " of the Proletariat . . . . . .175

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

I. PROLETARIAN SCIENCE

Human history is not only economic history,
but also natural history. The economic history
itself would not be possible without the founda-
tion which is the special domain of natural his-
tory. The study of human evolution, therefore,
requires an analysis of the biological develop-
ment of mankind as well as of its economic
development. From this point of view, man's
development in society and his general position
in the universe appear as parts of the entire
world-process.

My method of investigation is that of histor-
ical materialism. Just as in the study of eco-
nomics and politics we trace certain ideas, and
their application in practice, back to economic
facts, so in biology we trace certain ideas back
to the material facts of the earth and of the rest
of the universe. In this way, we obtain a uni-
versal key to the entire intellectual activity of

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

mankind, and a sound basis for the solution of
all the riddles of the universe.

I speak as a proletarian and a socialist. I
make no pretense to be a scientist without class
affiliation. There has never been any science
which was not made possible, and which was not
influenced, by the economic and class environ-
ment of the various scientists. I am, indeed,
aware of the fact, that there are certain general
facts in all sciences which apply to all mankind
regardless of classes. But I am also aware of
the other fact, that the concrete application of
any general scientific truth to different historical
conditions and men varies considerably, because
abstract truths have a general applicability only
under abstract conditions, but are more or less
modified in the contact with concrete environ-
ments. I make this statement in order to antici-
pate the criticism that there can be no special
science for the proletariat different from any
other science. Of course, a proposition in Eu-
clid is true, whether demonstrated by a prole-
tarian or by a capitalist. But it is true in
theory and in practice only so long as the prac-
tical application of the general conclusion of any
Euclid proposition does not interfere with the
interests of the ruling class. If it did and a

PROLETARIAN SCIENCE

proletarian mathematician were to argue that
what is true for the capitalist class must also
be true for the working class, the capitalist class
would speedily reply that it was not at all a
question of abstract truth, but of concrete power
to demonstrate this truth.

Moreover, I am also aware that all my ideas
are the products of my past and present environ-
ment. I cannot speak, therefore, without show-
ing in all I say, that I am a member of the class-
conscious proletariat, a member of that part of
the proletariat which has escaped from the spell of
capitalistic thought. I realize that a science,
however true may be its theoretical conclusions,
does not exist for that part of mankind who can-
not apply its -abstract truths in their practical
life. The proletariat has no science unless sci-
ence steps into its ranks or develops out of its
very life, for the purpose of combining scientific
theory with proletarian practice.

In this sense, then, I declare that my science
is a proletarian science. Not that I do not ap-
preciate what the bourgeois scientists of the past
have accomplished, or what the bourgeois scien-
tists of to-day are doing in the way of accumulat-
ing material for the storehouse of human knowl-
edge. But proletarian science is the expression

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

of the revolutionary fact that the proletariat has
learned to think for itself, that it refuses to
accept the teachings of members of other classes
without critical reservation, that it prefers to
think for itself in all other sciences as it does
in economics and politics, that it interprets the
facts of its terrestrial and cosmic environment
as it sees them from its own standpoint.

Proletarian science is the Declaration of Inde-
pendence of the proletarian mind from the con-
trol of the capitalist mind. And since the pro-
letariat is historically the most revolutionary class
in society, and the future man in embryo, prole-
tarian science is the most revolutionary science
and the embryo of the future world philosophy.
If this science finds that its conclusions agree
with those of the bourgeois scientists so much the
better for their science. If the two do not agree,
then let the best science win.

Since economic activity is based on biological
necessities — primarily food, clothing, and shel-
ter — we must understand biological facts as well
as sociological ones in order to obtain a full un-
derstanding of our nature and development.
Bourgeois statistics tacitly acknowledge this by
dwelling on biological facts, such as births, mar-
riages, diseases, deaths, crime, prostitution. But

8

PROLETARIAN SCIENCE

bourgeois scientists conveniently overlook the rev-
olutionary suggestions which come from their
tacit combination of sociology and biology.

The proletarian scientist, on the other hand,
recognizes the vital connection between econom-
ic and biological facts. He understands that
the very consciousness of his own class interests,
and of the historical mission of the proletariat,
is not only a sociological, but also a biological
problem, and that his proletarian environment
molds his physical qualities and brain processes
differently from those of a prosperous and well-
fed bourgeois living in a beautiful home and
standing aloof from the uncouth impressions of a
slum environment.

It is important to emphasize this, because at-
tempts have been made by certain bourgeois
scientists to justify the existence of different
economic classes, and the rule of privileged mas-
ters, on the ground of biological evolution. But
the formation of economic classes is not a biolog-
ical necessity. It results originally from economic
changes. The economic advantages then produce
biological advantages, and the interaction of these
movements then continues to favor the economi-
cally ruling class, up to the time when excessive
wealth leads to the atrophy of essential organs

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

and functions, partly from disuse, partly from
physical excesses.

In order to present the subject as a part of the
entire world-process, and constantly keep in mind
the universal application of our method, I shall
discuss everything under the aspect of environ-
ment. We then see that the world-process con-
sists in a struggle of various parts of the uni-
verse against one another, and in the gradual
ascendency of certain parts over all the other
parts of their environment. And since man is to
us the most important part, we shall observe HIM
in his struggle for the control of his environ-
ment.

II. THE STARTING POINT

Let us start from a secure foundation by de-
fining our terms, before entering into a discus-
sion of man's conquest of his environment.

What do I mean by man? What do I mean
by man's environment? In attempting to answer
these questions, we must have a definite point of
departure. The navigator who heads his vessel
for the open sea, traces his first course on his

10

THE STARTING POINT

chart from some lighthouse, cape, or other prom-
inent and well-known point, the exact latitude
and longitude of which are known. We, too, are
setting out on a voyage into the open sea, the sea
of unknown ideas. Where is the first point from
which we can take our departure?

Man is body, mind and soul, so we are told
by those who claim to have received this revela-
tion direct by wireless message from the un-
known. But if we are trying to locate the exact
bearings of either mind or soul, we soon dis-
cover that the experts disagree about the latitude
and longitude of these two points. However it
is generally admitted that the brain, the organ
of the intellect, is their headquarters.

The human brain, then, is our point of depar-
ture. It is tangible and its location is fixed.
About its internal processes, we need not trouble
ourselves for the present, any more than the
navigator requires a knowledge of the internal
nature of the lighthouse from which he marks
his first course. The brain and its location are
definitely known quantities, definite enough to
make good points of departure for our inquiry.

We know that this brain is a part of man's
anatomy. It has for its immediate environment
all the other parts of the body. It is, for instance,

11

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

directly connected with the central nerve system,
and through this system with the heart, the
lungs, the liver, the stomach, with the muscles,
the connective tissue, the bony skeleton, etc. The
physical brain, and the other physical parts of
the human body, constitute the individual man
with whom I am here dealing. And this indi-
vidual, and all his fellow-men, are the collective
man whose conquest of his environment I under-
take to study. Only this natural man and no
other.

Now, what is the environment which this nat-
ural man is to conquer? In explaining this I
must mention a few things which may seem triv-
ial. But there is nothing that is trivial in this
study except the things which science cannot
grasp by inductive and analytical methods. The
most trivial things in the environment of man
have a greater influence than most of us realize.

Man's environment, then, consists of the clothes
that cover his skin. The house in which he lives
and its furniture and fittings. The food that
sustains him. The other men, women and chil-
dren that live around him. Further, the village,
town, or city, where his house stands, and all the
inhabitants and their houses in the same locality.
Then the county, state, nation, with their entire

12

THE STARTING POINT

population, their social organization, their mode
of production, their historical conditions. Fur-
thermore, the air which man requires for breath-
ing, the climatic conditions of his locality, the soil,
grass, flowers, trees, animals, springs, lakes, riv-
ers, seas, mountains, not only those near him,
but on the entire surface of the globe ; the cosmic
conditions immediately surrounding this globe;
when the moon, the planets, the sun, the fixed
stars, the Milky Way, the comets, and all the
rest of the universe, whether he perceives it or
not. All these things, always considered as
natural things, form the environment of the
physical brain.

On the other hand, my brain is a part of the
environment of any or all these things. Each
part belongs to the environment of all the other
parts of the universe, and neither would be just
what it is without all the others.

But, some one may say, mind and soul and
all the rest of the unknown things of the world
are also parts of the universal environment of our
brain. True, even if mind and soul were but
imaginary terms, they would still be parts of
our brain's environment. But so are the un-
known quantities x, y and z parts of the environ-
ment of the known quantities of some algebraic

13

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

formula. And in attempting to find the value of
the unknown quantities of any algebraic formula
I must rely on the known quantities for a solu-
tion of the problem. And frequently it is found
in the process of the solution that one or all of
the unknown quantities are equal to zero. It is
not at all improbable that in solving the equation
of man and his environment I may find that the
so-called mind and soul, as currently conceived,
spell zero.

At all events, in the attempt of solving my
equation of man and his environment I must
operate with the quantities which are known.
And if I use the terms mind and soul occasionally
I refer to them simply as brain activities, identi-
cal so far as our discussion is concerned with
any other brain activity connected with thought.
Whether mind and soul are anything else but
brain activities we shall be better able to tell
at the end of our journey.

* * * # #

III. THE AWAKENING OF PHILOSOPHY

With man's material brain for a starting point
we now set out on our discussion of the evolu-
tion of theories of evolution.

14

THE AWAKENING OF PHILOSOPHY

Three great riddles have from time immemorial
puzzled this brain. These riddles are the origin
of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin
of man. And the solution of these riddles is
supposed to answer the questions : What will be
the fate of the universe? What part is death
playing in relation to life? Does individual life
imply individual immortality? And the efforts
made in the ages past to solve these problems
constitute the essence of all theories of evolution.

Evolution means development. It is frequently
understood to signify only development in a for-
ward direction, progressive advance in a straight
line. But the movement of universal evolution
does not proceed by uninterrupted forward steps
of all forms of matter. It is rather made up of
advance and retreat. At any stage of the world-
process, certain parts of the universe are on the
upward grade of their career, while others are
on the downward grade. But out of the general
interaction of the sum of forward and back-
ward movements, there seems to develop a grad-
ual supremacy of one part of the universe over
another, so that things which were the controlling •
element at one epoch are gradually superseded
by others, until the concentration of the control
of the entire process by one factor changes the

15

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

anarchic interaction of apparently aimless ele-
ments into a consciously directed and organized
movement toward a preconceived aim.

This interaction of two movements, of progress
and reaction, pervades every particle of the uni-
verse. It is going on in conglomerations of
masses as well as in the most minute particle.
Is it a wonder, then, that the same fluctuations
are also observed in the ideas of mankind, as we
find them registered in the pages of history?

Birth, growth, decay, and death, are the great
stages in the existence of all things of this world.
This observation was the basis for the early ideas
on transformation. But these ideas were vague
and crude, as vague as the natural history and
as crude as the tools of early man. A glance at
the maps of ancient Grecian and Roman geogra-
phers shows that their knowledge of the surface
of this globe was very limited. Astronomy was
then still in its swaddling clothes. Its scientific
instruments consisted of sand glasses, astrolabes,
sun dials, and the like. General education did not
exist. Means of communication and transporta-
tion were in an embryonic state. The intercourse
between nations through navigation and com-
merce was never very extensive, even at the
most flourishing period of ancient history, com-

16

THE AWAKENING OF PHILOSOPHY

pared to modern standards. Men, animals, and
plants, and their products, seemed to be the only
things of a passing nature, while all other things
seemed imperishable and eternal.

At this stage, the three great world problems
could be answered only in a speculative way.
Positive facts bearing on them had not yet been
collected. And since man's thoughts were natu-
rally centered on himself, nothing was more log-
ical than that he should consider his temporal
abode, the earth, as the center of the universe
and himself as the center of all life. This earth
was to him a flat disc, bounded on the West by
the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar),
and later, with the extension of Phoenician com-
merce and the Roman empire, by the Atb.nlic
Ocean; in the East by the fabulous C~t':?.y
(India), which was supposed to extend no farther
than about the 75th degree of lonrrituc^ er^.t of
Greenwich ; on the North by the 55th
latitude; on the South by the Sahara c
What lay beyond these boundaries \va«
heard of, except in fables and legends
primitive knowledge of the earth
responded the Ptolemaic
ceived toward the end c
Ptolemy of Alexandria. The heavens, according

17

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

to the current conceptions before him, were placed
over the disc of the earth like a section of a
hollow globe. The stars were fixed to this globe,
or were steered across it by heavenly pilots, as
were the sun and the moon. The origin of life
and of the universe was darkly hinted at in
mysterious legends or religious phantasies. The
Grecian legends of gods and demi-gods, as well
as the Buddhist legends, and later the German
and Norse legends, reflect this stage of human
philosophy. Man was dominated by mysterious
forces, and his fate after death was as mysterious
as the unknown forces themselves. Whatever
men could not explain in their environment, they
translated into objects of worship and awe. Ptol-
emy attempted a scientific solution of astronomical
problems in his " Syntaxis, A Treatise on the
Mathematical Construction of the Heavens." He
did remarkable work for his time, the period
following the death of Alexander the Great. But
historical conditions were against him, and he did
not emancipate himself from the idea that the
earth was the center of the universe and man the
central object of all creation.

When familiarity with iron, bronze, and wood
work led to a perfection of tools and to a greater
division of labor, when the ancient gentile groups

18

THE AWAKENING OF PHILOSOPHY

with their simple blood relationships were under-
mined by these economic changes, when local
division and property distinctions appeared in the
place of the fraternal relations of the former
members of a tribe, when the means of life be-
came abundant and a class of leisure freemen
thrived on the shoulders of a working population
composed of slaves, then the study of world
problems entered a new stage. The evolution of
the tools profoundly influenced the evolution of
man's ideas, in those primordial days as well as
ever after.

We then find growing up, simultaneously with
the gradual disintegration of the old faiths,
schools of thinkers who base their ideas on a
closer observation of tangible facts. The correct-
ness of the current conception of the world is
then doubted. With the growing tendency to
solve the riddles of the universe by inductive
methods and experienced facts, there also de-
velops a critique of human relationships, a prob-
ing into the meaning of right and wrong, good
and bad. When polytheism becomes pantheism,
materialism meets idealism on the field of
thought. And this growing materialism is but
the first faint reflex of a class struggle in ancient
society. And all philosophies of the world, no

19

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

less than all sciences, have ever worn the im-
print of this struggle. It is seen in the writings
of Confucius. It cries out from the mouths of
the Jewish prophets. And it has left its mark
on the philosophies of ancient Greece and Rome.

IV. A STEP FORWARD IN GREECE

In ancient Greece, it is the time from about
750 to 450 B. C, which gives expression in phi-
losophy to the transition from primitive society
to early class rule. And among the materialist
philosophers of those 300 years of primitive Gre-
cian history, none are more interesting for the
modern proletarian than Anaximander, Herakli-
tos, and Empedokles.

These philosophers were the first among an-
cient Greeks to seek for a natural explanation of
the universe. Their philosophy was a natural
philosophy and was logically limited by the scien-
tific knowledge of their period. This knowledge,
in its turn, was limited by the development of the
tools and the corresponding process of produc-
tion. With the tools of that period, and with
slave labor for a basis of society, natural philoso-

20

A STEP FORWARD IN GREECE

phy quickly found that its powers of perception
were very limited. Hence none of the early
Grecian philosophers could offer any other solu-
tion of the world problems than very daring
hypotheses. It is characteristic of all these think-
ers that they complain about the untrustworthi-
ness of human sense perceptions.

Anaximander assumed that innumerable world
bodies developed by the rotation of matter and
by condensation of gaseous substances. The
earth, according to him, came into existence in
the same way. Thus he anticipated the nebular
theory of Kant, who 2,400 years later, in 1755
A. D., published his " Natural History and The-
ory of Heaven." And Anaximander is not only
the prophet of Kant and Laplace in cosmogony.
We also find him hinting at biological ideas,
which were later developed by Lamarck and Dar-
win. He asserts, for instance, that the first liv-
ing beings of the earth were produced by the
influence of the sun on water, and that animals
and plants gradually evolved out of those primi-
tive living forms. Man, according to him, de-
veloped out of fish-like animals.

About loo years after Anaximander, similar
thoughts were expressed by Heraklitos. He
claimed that a continuous process of development

21

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

pervaded the entire universe ; that all forms were
in constant flow, and that " struggle is the father
of all things," thus expressing the idea of Dar-
win in regard to a struggle for existence.

A little later, Empedokles developed these ideas
still more. In his didactic poem, he sings:
" Long, long ago, whether boy or girl, I may
have been in a flower, a bird, or a fish . . ,"
Hate and love were to him the two active princi-
ples which determined the evolution of all things.
This is an embryonic conception of the subse-
quent theory of atomic interaction by attraction
and repulsion. And it is remarkable that Em-
pedokles believed in a development of all forms
by purposeless interaction and thus indicated the
problem, which Darwin solved in his " Origin of
Species," the problem: How can purposeful
forms arise mechanically without the control of
some universal guiding mind?

With the victorious conclusion of the Persian
wars, the industries and wealth of Athens grew
apace. With them grew also the distinction of
classes and the intensity of the class struggles.
The small property owners, representing the prin-
ciples of " Democracy " (only among freemen,
however), opposed the aristocratic tendencies of
the wealthier freemen. And these struggles are

A STEP FORWARD IN GREECE

reflected in the ideas of the thinkers following
those early natural philosophers, more especially
in those of Demokritos, Epicurus, and their re-
actionary opponents, Socrates, Plato, and Aris-
totle.

In the ideas of Demokritos, the influence of the
early materialist philosophers is still plainly vis-
ible. According to him, nothing exists but atoms
and empty space. The atoms are infinite in num-
ber and in form. They are in constant motion,
falling through space the faster the larger they
are. In their fall, the larger atoms strike the
smaller ones. These are thrown aside by the
force of the contact and continue in their whirl-
ing motion, thus forming the beginning of the
first globes by gathering other atoms in their
revolutions. The atoms, according to Demokri-
tos, do not experience any internal changes. They
react upon one another only by pressure or shock.
The soul of man is composed of fine, smooth
atoms, similar to those of fire. These atoms pene-
trate the whole human body and produce the phe-
nomena of life.

The theories of Demokritos contain in the germ
all the fundamental principles of modern mate-
rialism. And just as he represented the evolu-
tionary element in the society of Athens, so in

23

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

later historical periods the revolutionary elements
of society have always found in materialist
science their strongest weapons, while reaction
has ever relied upon idealist and metaphysical
philosophies. And be it said at this point: It
is not at all necessary that the individual idealist
or metaphysical philosopher should have con-
sciously aimed at reactionary political results by
means of his philosophy. The mere presence of
idealist and metaphysical ideas suffices to make
them useful in the interest of reaction, whether
the philosopher intends it or not.

Socrates, for instance, who developed out of
the ranks of the sophists and opened the attack
on them when the aristocratic counter-revolution
in Athens grew apace, was not conscious of the
fact that he was attacking the intellectual props
of democracy by attacking the humanitarian and
natural philosophy of the sophists. And while in
his teachings, he ostensibly sought to reform the
moral life of his country-men by true science, he
was in reality, by means of his metaphysical
conception of science, furnishing the aristocratic
reaction with its intellectual weapons against the
empirical science of Athenian democracy. But
neither Socrates nor the sophists could get out of
the vicious circle of their ideas, because both

24

A STEP FORWARD IN GREECE

Athenian democracy and its aristocratic enemy
were based on slave labor and sought to derive
absolute concepts, true for all time, out of rela-
tive conditions which were based on a fundamen-
tally unethical principle, slavery. The internal
contradictions of this economic structure of dem-
ocracy and aristocracy in Athens caused the
downfall of both of them, and with them fell also
the philosophies of their times.

So much is evident from the testimony of his-
tory: Whenever any proletarian movement at-
tempted to steal the reactionary thunder of super-
natural philosophies or religions, as the early
Christian movement seems to have done, it fell
so much the quicker under the blows of reaction,
for it carried within itself the historical weakness
of the ruling class mind. On the other hand, a
rising class other than proletarian that takes re-
course to materialism in its political struggle
against a declining ruling class quickly drops
materialism and espouses idealism, when mate-
rialisms threatens to further the interests of the
proletarian revolution. This is true, for instance,
of the modern capitalist class. At the beginning
of its struggle against feudal rule, it was com-
pelled, by the historical connection of the medieval
church with feudalism, and by the requirements

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

of its own commercial interests, to call in the
help of empirical science and materialist philos-
.ophy. But now that this same philosophy is be-
coming the weapon of the rising proletariat, cap-
italism once more allies itself with metaphysical
philosophy and mystic religion. Materialism is
the handmaid of revolution, and without it no
proletarian movement complies with the historical
requirements of its evolution.

The reactionary character of the anti-sophist
philosophies became very plain in the further
evolution of the followers of Socrates. While
the Cynics and Cyreneans strayed into practical
ethics and neglected the speculative side of the
Socratic philosophy, Plato, and later on Aristotle,
gave to this philosophy its typical character of
speculative metaphysics. This philosophy marks
the complete downfall of Athenian democracy,
the failure of the early attempts at a materialist
monism, and the temporary victory of the meta-
physical conception of mind and of idealist dual-
ism over empirical science. And the reactionary
character of Plato's philosophy is stamped on
every page of his Utopian " Republic," which he
intended to realize by the help of foreign tyrants
without asking for the co-operation of his fel-
low-citizens. The political pupils of Socrates

A STEP FORWARD IN GREECE

went the whole length of their reactionary logic,
and names like those of Xenophon and Alkibiades
were execrated by the Athenian democracy, be-
cause their bearers allied themselves with feudal
Sparta against the onward march of democratic
industrialism.

Aristotle, in his works on natural history, was
led back to nature. This contact with natural
things compelled him to recognize, in his phi-
losophy, the interaction of mind and matter.
Therefore he sought to reconstruct the dualism
of Plato, who had placed mind entirely outside
of matter, by making mind the superior and es-
sential principle of matter. In thus combining
natural science and speculative philosophy Aris-
totle became the beau ideal of all subsequent
apostles of reaction, who are compelled, by the
onward march of empirical science, to adjust
their metaphysical beliefs to the facts of experi-
ence. The Platonic-Aristotlean philosophy, by
its pseudo-scientific character, became the pet of
the Constantinian reaction against proletarian
Christianity and the legitimate boon companion
of the scholastic thinkers of medieval feudalism.

With Epicurus, materialist monism made one
last great effort to rehabilitate itself in the Gre-
cian world. But at his period, this world was

27

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

already in the final stages of disintegration, as a
result of the conquests of Alexander the Great.
Epicurus tried to represent the mind as a part
of the atomic world, as a tangible object. Here
we also find a first faint attempt to check the
crude fatalism and predestinarian logic of Dem-
okritos by giving to this materialist mind a lim-
ited scope of free will through the admission of
the possibility of accident. While Demokritos
believed in merely two primitive movements of
his atoms, a falling and a rebounding motion,
Epicurus introduced the idea of a deviation of the
atoms from the straight line. But his philosophy,
as well as that of all his predecessors, suffered
from the insufficiency of empirical data for the
substantiation of his theories. And with the dis-
solution of Grecian civilization, Grecian philos-
ophy fell into the hands of men representing other
classes and other environments. The result was
an adaptation of Grecian philosophy to the re-
quirements of these new men and conditions.

V. A STEP BACKWARD IN ROME

While Grecian philosophy had been climbing
to the peaks of its greatness, Rome had been

A STEP BACKWARD IN ROME

struggling for the control of the Italian peninsula.
And now, when Ptolemy Philadelphus continued
to build upon the foundations of literature, sci-
ence, and art, laid by his talented predecessor in
Egypt, Rome began its wars of expansion by a
first onslaught upon Carthage. Always engaged
in internal and external struggles, the rulers of
Rome had been compelled to give more attention
to the practical side of life than to the speculative.
In the further development of the Roman world,
internal class struggles and external wars of con-
quest continued to tax the resources of the Ro-
mans for the maintenance of the military power,
and it was not until a much later time that a class
of such wealth as that of classic Greece gave
breathing space to literature and art.

At the time when Grecian philosophy found its
patrons among the Ptolemies, the mental life of
the Romans had not yet risen above the level of
the Homeric stage of early Greece. And when
Rome finally arrived at that period of its career
where philosophy could become acclimatized in a
Roman atmosphere, that is to say, about the mid-
dle of the century preceding the dawn of Chris-
tianity, Grecian philosophy completely dominated
the ideas of all advanced thinkers. Moreover,
this philosophy corresponded so fully to the re-

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

quirements of the Roman empire, that it was sim-
ply adopted ready-made. But it was by no means
improved upon. For the thinkers of Rome little
understood the historical conditions out of which
this philosophy had been evolved. The works of
men like Lucretius and Cicero were either dreamy
reflections of the scientific systems of their Gre-
i cian masters, or muddled by the instincts of the
social class to which the philosophers of Rome
belonged.

The Roman world never arrived at an inde-
pendent philosophy. No sooner had the Roman
emperors taken their seats, than they were called
upon to put down rebellions at home and abroad,
and to devote the resources of their empire to the
maintenance of huge armies. Under these cir-
cumstances, science had to give precedence to
epics and historical works. Philosophy lived on
as a Grecian product. And in proportion as the
Roman world disintegrated under the baneful ef-
fects of unprofitable slave labor and barbarian
attacks, it created an environment in which the
warrior survived over the thinker. The mental
life of the masses, which had at no time risen
above the barbarian level, dragged along in this
deep furrow, and the more the dissolution of the
Roman empire proceeded, the farther did the in-

30

A STEP BACKWARD IN ROME

tellectual pendulum swing back towards mys-
ticism and idealism.

Philosophy as a science, in its garbled Cicero-
nian form, now withstood less than ever the
pressure exerted against it by priestcraft and
retrogressive obstinacy. Even in the East, where
its cradle had been, and where its pulse had al-
ways been strongest, it gradually lost all attributes
of science and was trampled under the heels of
reaction. All pillars of mental evolution gave
way, the Grecian and Roman gods lay prostrate,
and the obscurity of pre-Grecian stages settled
down upon rich and poor alike.

Among the ruling classes, brutal cynicism and
anarchist scepticism spread apace. Their educa-
tion was just far enough advanced to enable them
to sneer at heaven and hell. But the masses, un-
taught and superstitious, could not part with the
consolation of mystical beliefs. Everything paved
the way for the ascendency of some new god who
should be more powerful than any of the dis-
avowed gods.

As soon as the historical stage had been set for
the enactment of this new scene, the actors began
to play their parts. Of all the religions then ex-
isting, none was better fitted to fulfill the require-
ments of this historical situation than the Jewish.

31

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

It had clung steadfastly to its one god, ever since
Abraham emigrated from Chaldea to avoid idola-
try. It had withstood exile, war, and persecu-
tion. The Jewish god had but to be dressed up
in a garb acceptable to all nationalities that now
mingled in the Roman provinces and in Rome
itself. And he needed but an international force
that would raise him to the position of its chosen
patron. This force was ready at hand. It was
the proletariat, composed of freed slaves and im-
poverished freemen. An international language
also existed. It was a mongrel Latin, with which
everybody was more or less familiar.

There was a very good reason why this pro-
letariat should rally to the support of some inter-
national religion. At various times, and at wide-
ly separated places, attempts had been made to
overthrow the ruling classes by force of arms.
These attempts met with the same fate that has
since befallen all similar revolts which were un-
dertaken before the conditions for their success
had matured. They were drowned in seas of
blood. And the most Draconic laws forbade any
organization which was not officered by the over-
seers of the ruling classes. Political action was
likewise out of the question, for the same rea-
sons.

A STEP BACKWARD IN ROME

Religion was the only hope of the proletariat.
It offered the only possibility of organization
which the ruling class would not suppress, nay,
which it would promote for the same reasons that
rulers have ever had for preserving religion, viz.,
because it is an excellent means of dividing the
working classes and of strengthening belief in
authority.

It was but logical, therefore, that this new re-
ligion should first appear in Palestine, and that it
should try to justify itself from the ancient rec-
ords, which had once been the common heritage
of all members of the twelve tribes. The car-
penter of Nazareth and his followers had but to
step into the shoes of the ancient tribal prophets
in order to get a hearing among the workers.
The very arguments that once served in the
mouths of the old prophets against the usurpation
of the tribal chiefs, or kings, sounded familiar in
the mouths of the new prophets when used
against the rulers of Christ's time.

So the new paganism tried to drive out the
devil by the help of Satan. Christianity entered
history as the first conscious attempt of an inter-
national proletariat to hide its revolutionary aims
under the cloak of a religion adapted to its mental
requirements.

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

It spread like wildfire among the proletariat of
the entire Roman empire, for the soil had been
well prepared for it by the historical conditions.
Christ is reported to have been crucified about
the year 33. About thirty years later, Nero
burned Rome in order to set loose the fury of the
Roman plebs against the Christians, who were
permeating the entire fabric of the Roman world.
But religion is a double-edged sword and cannot
be overcome by any persecutions. The Roman
emperors had ample opportunity to learn this dur-'
ing the next 300 years. In spite of all persecu-
tions, Christianity worked its way into the very
heart of Roman society and into the remotest
provinces. It thrived on persecution. At last
the ruling class discovered that it had neglected
its best weapon when it failed to identify itself
with this new religious movement. Religion can
be overcome only by two things : Either by an-
other religion, or by science. But the ruling class
had neither science nor any other religion to op-
pose to this new creed. In 312, six years after
the advent of Constantine to the throne, matters
had reached such a climax that there remained
only one alternative to the ruling class: Either
to succumb between the invading hordes of Goths,

A STEP BACKWARD IN ROME

Franks, Allemanni, revolts in the provinces, and
the Christian proletariat, or to divide and rule.

Naturally, Constantine grasped this last straw.
Thanks to 300 years of evolution under the Ro-
man constitution, which was but the political mir-
ror of the then existing mode of production,
economic distinctions and religious schisms had
arisen among the Christians. The primitive com-
munist practices had become distasteful to many
Christians who had acquired property enough to
feel more kin to the pagan rulers than to their
proletarian brethren. Under the influence of their
material interests, these wealthy Christians were
only too prone to enter into a protective alliance
with the pagan powers against the proletariat of
any and all creeds. The rulers, on the other
hand, had reached the stage, where their only
safety lay in the domination of the Christian
movement by the help of the wealthy Christians.
Under these circumstances, we see here a phe-
nomenon, which became quite common later on,
and which we noticed once before in Greece :
When scepticism, or materialism, became useless
for the ruling class, and a hitherto persecuted
philosophy or religion useful, the rulers changed
their religion as easily as if it were a shirt. The
same tendency is once more apparent in our own

35

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

time, where formerly protestant or atheist rulers
are showing an ever more pronounced willingness
to enter the fold of the catholic church in ex-
change for the services of this church against the
rising revolution of the modern proletariat.

Whenever the rulers are ready for this step,
some great miracle happens. About 1,600 years
before Constantine, Moses had suddenly seen a
great light in the bush. He saw it several times
later, when new property relations demanded im-
peratively a transformation of the persistent tribal
customs into " laws " more in keeping with the
interests of the hierarchy. He had not been in
close touch with the Egyptian princes and their
priestcraft without learning from them. Now it
was Constantine's turn to see a great light. Saul
had seen the same thing before he became Paul,
only for a different purpose. The new Saul be-
came, not a Paul, but a Judas, and the Judases in
the Christian movement were lavishly rewarded
by him with grants of land and money. The
farce was inscribed " In hoc signo vinces" and
presto, the Christian religion became the church
of the ruling class. The Christian proletariat had
played with fire and got burned. But it was the
best they could do under the prevailing historical
conditions. They repeated the same mistake

36

A STEP BACKWARD IN ROME

many times after, and they will repeat it, until
they learn to use a weapon which no ruling class
can wrest from their hands, — proletarian sci-
ence.

In vain did the proletariat strive to overcome
ruling class religion by proletarian religion. No
sooner did the ruling class make the Christian
religion its own, than its struggling parties took
sides in the religious schisms of the Christians,
and used them as means for their own dynastic
ends. The adoption of the Nicene creed at the
council of Nicaea in 325, and the condemnation
of Arius who opposed the mystical additions of
Athanasius to the primitive Christian creed,
marked the complete control of the church or-
ganization by the ruling class. And when Julian
the Apostate championed the Arian creed in the
attempt to hold his position against the intrigues
of the Athanasian diplomats, he made the same
experience which the Christian proletariat had
made before him. In a mystic religion, mys-
ticism always holds the best trumps. The coun-
cil at Constantinople, in 381, marked another
step in the direction of mysticism, and in the fol-
lowing struggles for and against image worship,
it was again the reactionary tendencies which
won the day.

37

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

We need not go into the details of the evolu-
tion of Christianity at this stage. Suffice it to
say that henceforth it was lost to the proletariat
as a weapon in its struggles against the ruling
classes, and has ever since proven itself a bulwark
of retrogressive counter-revolutions.

VI. IN THE SLOUGH OF ECCLESIASTIC FEUDAL-
ISM

No sooner had the church of the ruling Chris-
tians become the Roman state, than the " souls "
of men were " saved " by suppressing their free
intellectual development. Science was tied hand
and foot. The strictest regulations were issued,
forbidding practices which were then almost the
only means of inductive research, such as the
anatomical study of human corpses. This was
still vetoed by the church in the I5th century. In
ancient Greece, natural philosophy owed most of
its inductive facts to physicians. Under the rule
of the Roman Christians, physicians were prac-
tically compelled to take up metaphysics, if they
cared at all for philosophical research. Science
fell almost entirely into the hands of the priests.

ECCLESIASTIC FEUDALISM

It was but natural, that Platonic-Aristotlean
philosophy should become the favorite of these
religious thinkers, and that under their influence,
astronomy should assume the form of astrology,
and chemistry that of alchemy.

Nor were economic and political conditions
favorable to the inductive modes of scientific re-
search. In the first place, the Huns began their
westward and southward march in 374, two years
after Ulfila had translated the Bible into Gothic.
And in 410, five years after the completion of the
VULGATE by Jerome, the Visigoths pillaged Rome.
The Huns were beaten on the Catalaunian fields
in 415, but in 455, the Vandals paid a visit to
Rome. The struggle between the East-Roman
and West-Roman empires, the continued inva-
sions of barbarians from the North, of the
Arabs from the East, kept Europe in a state of
restless ferment. And this condition of things
continued from century to century, so long as
feudalism, the successor of Roman slavery, en-
dured. Later we have the Moors in the South,
the Turks in the East, the Norsemen in the
North; the crusades, beginning in 1,095; tne
raids made in the interest of the Mediterranean
merchant towns against the Turks. All these
disturbances discouraged education at the ex-

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

pense of warrior's virtues. Even late in the mid-
dle ages, most of the " noble " heroes were con-
tent to leave the despised art of letters to monks
and physically weak bookworms.

On the economic field, production lagged along
in its feudal slowness, without stimulating the in-
vention of labor-saving machinery, of improved
methods of cultivation, or of scientific instruments
and processes. Alchemy and astrology occasion-
ally stumbled across some great discovery, but
did not know what to do with it when they found
it. The stone of the wise, the elixir of life, the
making of gold by laboratory methods, the idea
that phlogiston, or fire-air, was the cause of fire,
these and similar things mark the scientific meth-
ods on which the philosophy of the middle ages
based its speculations, which never dared to de-
viate very far from the religious dogma.

Communication and travel were very difficult
and dangerous. Marco Polo, in 1271, was the
first great traveler who sought to popularize the
results of his travels. Enlightenment inevitably
took a religious disguise, as before. This is evi-
dent, for instance, in the anti-papal movement of
Arnold of Brescia in the middle of the I2th
century, and in the struggle of the humanists
against the obscurantists in the I5th and i6th

40

ECCLESIASTIC FEUDALISM

centuries. But whatever may have been discov-
ered by inductive methods in the secrecy of the
investigator's cell, the outside world never heard
about it. Excommunication, the stake, the dun-
geon, poison and dagger, were always held in
readiness by the rulers, and their spiritual ad-
visers, for any daring thinker who might have
ventured forth with any startling discovery in
natural science. The horrors of bloodshed on
every hand were intensified by the burning of
" heretics," and to make the terror complete, the
" Black Plague " swept across Europe about the
middle of the I4th century.

But evolution, though denied official recogni-
tion, went its fateful way. Very soon, the church
itself felt the giant hand of social progress
clutching at its heart.

The church, instead of building its foundation
on the Rock of Ages, had built on a far less
" eternal " ground, viz., on the exploitation of
feudal serfs. Now this foundation had been grad-
ually undermined since the I3th century. More
than once, the feudal serfs had stirred restlessly
under the heavy yoke of the feudal church. In
Great Britain, they had rallied around John Ball
and Wat Tyler, about the last quarter of the I4th
century, and threatened the rule of the church.

41

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

On the continent, the wars against the Turks had
kept the class struggle more under cover. But
along with the decline of the worldly power of
the church, there had come a mighty growth of
commercial cities. These had taken part in the
movements against the oriental rulers who were
cutting western commerce off from the resources
of India and Persia. Since the nth century, the
Mediterranean cities had tried to capture the
eastern ports, such as Alexandria, Jaffa, Tyre,
Constantinople, and to control the land routes to
India across Asia Minor. But the capture of
Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 settled the
question of the control of these ports and routes
in favor of the Turks.

Cut off from the land route to the East, the
trading class naturally turned their thoughts to
the open sea in the West. The religious fervor
of the crusades had gradually given way to
frankly avowed commercial considerations, and
in the last crusades, it had not been so much a
question of saving the " Holy Sepulchre," as of
amassing wealth. And when the possibility of
gathering spoils had vanished beyond recall, the
desire to keep the grave of Christ in the care of
Christian hands had lost its dearest incentive.

But an outlet had to be found for the irre-

ECCLESIASTIC FEUDALISM

pressible longing to expand which filled the breast
of the trading class. It had gradually dawned on
the thinkers of Europe, that this globe was a
good deal larger than the Ptolemaic system sup-
posed. The travels of Marco Polo, made possi-
ble by the unification of Eastern Asia under the
rule of Genghis Khan, had revived the ancient
wonder-tales which the conquests of Alexander
the Great had carried back into the Western
world. The invasions of the Huns had reminded
Europe forcibly of the fact that there was a vast
territory of unknown extent beyond the gener-
ally accepted boundaries of the globe, and the
temporary control of Eastern ports in the Medi-
terranean and Black Sea, together with the estab-
lishment of advanced trading posts in Asia
Minor, had given a substantial basis to the idea
that the Eastern world contained fabulous riches.
Besides, even in ancient times, the Ptolemaic sys-
tem had not been accepted by all thinkers as cor-
rect. . Now the doubts as to its correctness grew
still more.

The improvement of shipbuilding had even
before this time permitted daring navigators to
venture out into the unknown seas of the West.
And when it became a vital necessity for the
trading class to get in touch with the East by

43

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

some hitherto untried route, it was not long be-
fore exploring trips were undertaken. It is true,
no scientific proofs of the unsoundness of the
Ptolemaic system had as yet been produced. But
the practical navigators did not wait for the the-
oretical proofs of its unsoundness. On a south-
ward trip made by Bartolomeo Dias in the years
1486 and 1487, the Cape of Good Hope was dis-
covered and the map of the world considerably
extended. On October 12, 1492, Columbus
landed on San Salvador, Bahama Islands. In
1497, John Cabot discovered the mainland of
North America. The year after that, Sebastian
Cabot went in search of a Northwest passage to
China, and Vasgo de Gama landed in India after
a successful trip around the Cape of Good Hope.
In 1499, Ojeda and Vespucci sailed along the
east coast of South America.

The earth had suddenly grown to twice its for-
mer size. Columbus had made good his claim
that it was a round globe, not flat. The discov-
eries of other navigators clinched his proof.
While the wise men were still debating this stu-
pendous revolution of their ideas, the trading
class vigorously pushed forward into the newly
discovered territory and began to gather untold
wealth. The church winked its eye and pocketed

44

ECCLESIASTIC FEUDALISM

its share. Although these discoveries were the
entering wedge which split open the entire dog-
matic world-conception, the church did not think
of condemning the daring navigators as heretics.
Their heresy paid well. Besides, these explora-
tions offered a great field for the expenditure of
more religious fanaticism in a new direction.
There were new nations to convert by fire and
sword, and they were not so hard to " convince "
as the Turks, because they could only argue with
primitive weapons against the improved arms of
the Europeans, who, thanks to Berthold Schwarz,
could now lend emphasis to their religious propa-
ganda by the help of gunpowder.

In 1513, Balboa saw the Pacific Ocean from
the Isthmus of Panama. In 1520, Magellan
sailed through the straits between Tierra del
Fuego and Patagonia which henceforth bore his
name; in 1521 he reached the Ladrones, and
Cortes conquered Mexico. And in 1531-33, Pi-
zarro looted Peru. At the same time, the Turks
pushed westward and threatened Vienna.

Every one of these historical events was a nail
in the coffin of ecclesiastical feudalism, and the
church, being the greatest feudal lord, helped to
drive those nails by making itself a party to these

45

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

looting expeditions, and covering them with the
cloak of missionary work.

VII. THE STRUGGLE FOR MORE LIGHT

The mental reaction of these discoveries on
philosophy and astronomy followed immediately.
In the same year in which Sebastian Cabot set
out on his trip across the North Atlantic, Savona-
rola was killed for his opposition to the church.
While Columbus was making his second and
third trip to the West Indies, Luther was girding
his loins against Rome, and three years before
the discovery of the Straits of Magellan, he nailed
his theses on the church door in Wittenberg.
One year after the conquest of Peru, England
threw off the papal yoke, the Anabaptists assem-
bled in Munster, and Luther completed his trans-
lation of the Bible. While the foundations of
Lima and Buenos Ayres were being laid in South
America, the first copies of the translated Bible
were on the press, thanks to the invention of
printing by Gutenberg, in 1438. The first enemy
of orthodox religion, a new religion, had arisen.

Science, the second and more dangerous enemy

46

THE STRUGGLE FOR MORE LIGHT

of orthodoxy, was not slow in following. In
1473, Copernicus had been born. Before De Soto
had reached the Mississippi river, Copernicus had
completed his life's work, and on his dying day,
in the year 1543, he received the first copy of his
great work, " De Revolutionibus Orbium Celes-
tium" (The Revolution of Celestial Bodies). In
order to understand the powerful impression
made by this work, we must fully enter into the
spirit of those times. For centuries it had been
a gospel truth that the earth stood still, that it
was the center of the universe, that the sun,
moon, and stars revolved around it from East to
West. Now this daring astronomer' claimed that
the earth was moving around itself from West
to East, and around the sun in a wide orbit, and
that the sun was the center of its planetary sys-
tem. That was contrary to all the established
teachings of the dogmatic scientists, it was op-
posed to the revealed "truths" of the Bible, it
was heresy. Anathema sit!

But the time was approaching, when the
anathema of the church did not stop the wheels
of scientific progress any more. The cities need-
ed the help of science and protected their scien-
tific explorers. In 1616, Harvey discovered the
circulation of the blood, a new step toward an

47

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

experimental philosophy. When the pilgrims
were landing in Plymouth, in 1620, Galileo Gali-
lei and John Kepler were engaged in further un-
dermining dogmatic ignorance by their revolu-
tionary work. Galilei is the founder of experi-
mental physics. He gave a scientific foundation
to the theory of gravity, invented the pendulum,
a hydrostatic balance, a thermometer, compasses
used in designing, and a telescope. In 1610, he
for the first time observed the satellites of the
planet Jupiter. In 1632, he published his main
work, " Four Dialogues on the Ptolemaic and
Copernican World Systems."

Perhaps the church would not have cared so
much about these scientific revolts against its es-
tablished ideas of the world, had they remained
mere academic discussions. For after all, none
of them touched the foundation of the spiritual
beliefs of the dogmatic religion, and it would
have been easy enough to adjust the spiritual
creed to this new science, without losing control
of the minds of the masses who believed in the
spiritual basis of the church. Even the ideas of
Luther might have been tolerated, had they pre-
served a mere scholastic existence. They were
no more dangerous than had been many other
religious heresies before that time.

48

THE STRUGGLE FOR MORE LIGHT

As a matter of fact, though Galilei was tried
for heresy on account of the above work, he was
treated without harshness, and even his obstinate
" E pur si muove" (And yet it moves), uttered
immediately after the revocation of his theories,
did not result in any increased penalty for him.
Luther might also have escaped with no more se-
vere penalties than Galilei, had it been merely a
question of a religious controversy.

But the class-struggle seized upon both re-
ligion and science, just as it had done before, and
as it will continue to do so long as class an-
tagonisms exist. To the extent that the merchant
class grew in wealth and power, it did not only
protect the new world-conception, but also began
to question the right of the church to collect
taxes and to mismanage church-property. And
the ideas of religious reformers became at once
the rallying center of bands of revolting peasants
and impoverished nobles, who threatened the
holdings of the church in land and movable
wealth. This outraged and hurt the hierarchy
more than all attacks on established articles of
faith and philosophy.

For this reason, it became a matter of self-
defence for the Roman church to call reactionary
science, religious fanaticism, and the entire appa-

49

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

ratus of its organization to its assistance against
the new and startling evolution of things and
ideas. So Tycho de Brahe entered the arena to
defend the Ptolemaic system against Galilei and
Kepler. Tetzlaff defended the right of the
church to levy taxes. Luther was challenged to
defend his ideas at Worms. And the feudal
rulers were instigated to gather their armed
forces and make war on the burghers and peas-
ants. The Reformation with its economic and
mental revolution struck deep into the flesh of
the church, and paved the way for the subse-
quent freedom of scientific investigation which
accumulated in the course of the following cen-
turies the basic facts for a consistent theory of
evolution.

When astronomy, geography, experimental
physics, and physiology were engaged in their
first determined attempts to clear away the meta-
physical rubbish of the Middle Ages and push
human thought once more into its truly evolu-
tionary course, philosophy likewise awoke from
its long slumber. For almost 1900 years, the
methods of the natural philosophers had been
abandoned. During all that time, the human
mind had been wandering aimlessly in the mazes
of metaphysical speculation. Revelation, instead

50

THE STRUGGLE FOR MORE LIGHT

of being sought in the open book of nature, had
been looked for with up-turned eyes beyond the
clouds, in fairy-land.

At last, in 1620, Francis Bacon published his
" Novum Organon" His plea for new methods
of research in the study of nature was a fatal
blow to the metaphysical philosophy of Aristotle.
By demanding a " new mind " and declaring the
human senses the infallible sources of all under-
standing, Bacon infused new life into the natural
philosophy of ancient Greece and pointed human
evolution once more into the redeeming course of
evolutionary materialism.

However, it cannot be emphasized too strongly,
that the idea of evolution, though sporadically
scattered through Bacon's philosophy and that of
other materialists of the I7th and i8th centuries,
had but a spasmodic existence among them, and
was frequently not even as clearly expressed as
we find it in the works of the Grecian natural
philosophers. The historical conditions for an
empirical proof of evolution had not yet matured,
and the theological influence of those times ap-
plied the brake too heavily for a rapid improve-
ment of the ideas of the natural philosophers.

Furthermore, the ancient natural philosophy
had been the rallying center of Grecian " democ-

61

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

racy." It had been the scientific weapon of prog-
ress in the class-struggle between aristocracy and
democracy, at a time when theology was not en-
throned as an economic ruler, and when religion
had at best but a slight hold on men's minds.
The new materialist philosophy, on the other
hand, arose at a time when the class-struggles
raged fiercely around two religions, and when
philosophy did not reach down into the world of
the trading and working classes. Through the
influence of the church, Latin had become the
language of science, and in consequence the new
materialist philosophy came upon the scene, not
as a social force, but as a hobby of scholars, a
pastime of the select. And it continued to use
Latin as its medium of expression for a long time.
Indeed, we have not gotten away from this reac-
tionary habit yet, and the fostering of ancient
languages in our modern schools still continues
to do valiant service in the interest of reaction.
It is not until the modern proletariat creates its
own science, that the old exclusive and aristo-
cratic mannerisms of feudal and middle class
science are abandoned, and the familiar language
of the day employed to prepare the mental food
for the eager proletarian student.

In the 1 7th century, and to a great extent also

THE STRUGGLE FOR MORE LIGHT

in the i8th and iQth, the exclusive methods and
assumptions of aristocratic science were fatal, not
alone for the masses, but also for the scientists
themselves. So long as science does not pulsate
in the throbbing life outside of the study of the
scientist, theological or metaphysical speculations
permeate the entire fabric of society. In the I7th
century, the class-struggles between the two great
religions kept the popular mind in a state of con-
tinuous excitement so that even kings had to be
careful not to exasperate the people in theological
matters. Neither Bacon nor the other material-
ists of the i /th century could get away from this
religious atmosphere, and their materialism is,
therefore, strongly tainted with theological and
metaphysical inconsistencies. As a logical result,
materialism did not get very far along on its evo-
lutionary road, and metaphysics retained its sway
in science as well as in philosophy. Neverthe-
less, it is the merit of Bacon to have imparted
fresh vigor to the inductive and empirical study
of nature.

*****

53

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

VIII. THE REHABILITATION OF NATURAL PHI-
LOSOPHY IN ENGLAND

The men who built on the foundation laid by
Bacon developed his materialism in two different
directions. Those who felt attracted by the
theistic aphorisms of his doctrine, became the
fathers of metaphysical schools of thinkers in
England and France. On the other hand, those
who felt kin to the materialist essence of Ba-
conian philosophy, continued along this road and
thus became the intellectual fathers of the so-
cialist philosophy. Frequently these two tenden-
cies intermingled and produced a hybrid material-
ist dualism, which was quite as incongruous as
the metaphysical materialism of their predeces-
sors.

This imperfect and groping philosophy led to
absurd contradictions between the theory and
practice of scientists and philosophers. For in-
stance, the logical successor of Bacon, Hobbes,
was more pronounced and consistent in his ma-
terialism than Bacon, and pushed the human
mind forward in the line of evolution toward a
more empirical and monistic science. But po-
litically he was a reactionary of the first water, a

54

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLAND

defender of royal prerogative and absolutism, a
foe of the puer robustus sed malitiosus (robust
but malicious boy), the "common" people. On
the other hand, Hegel, the father of modern
idealism and a vigorous opponent of materialism,
became the founder of the most revolutionary
method of research, the dialectic method, and con-
structed the fundament of the modern ideas of
evolution. This conflict between theory and prac-
tice characterizes all scientists and philosophers,
with the exception of the founders of scientific
socialism and of their socialist disciples. It is a
fact, which explains itself out of the historical
conditions of proletarian evolution, that the scien-
tific socialists are the only consistent monist ma-
terialists of the present day. It is the " irony of
fate," which compels the reactionary forces to do
evolutionary work against their will and to assist
the proletarian scientists, who are conscious evo-
lutionists from necessity, in their historical mis-
sion. The most conspicuous example of this his-
torical contradiction between theory and practice
is furnished by the churches. Yet they, too, in
spite of their reactionary and anti-proletarian
practices, have been compelled to level distinc-
tions between classes, nations, and races, and to
prepare the ground for a universal evolution

55

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

toward human brotherhood. The use of Latin
in science, to which I have just alluded, illustrates
one phase of this leveling process very well.
When the proletariat of the Roman empire had
been defeated in its evolutionary aims, the Roman
church cultivated Latin as an international lan-
guage. And though it promoted an internation-
alism of the select few, yet even this gradually
served to antagonize the reactionary power of
dogmatism, since it was the most relentless foe of
theological dogmatism, science, which finally cul-
tivated Latin as an international language. And
this science is in our day more and more com-
pelled to ally itself with the class-conscious pro-
letariat. It is. a significant fact that all modern
languages, which have become more or less world-
languages, such as Spanish, French, and English,
contain many elements of Latin. And since
English is rapidly becoming the international lan-
guage of the so-called civilized world, the modern
proletariat will have little difficulty in assimilat-
ing the scant survivals of Latin which are indis-
pensable for an understanding of the technicali-
ties of modern science.

However, in Bacon's time natural philosophy
tottered about rather drowsily after 1900 years of
sleep, and took but slight notice of the ominous

56

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLAND

handwriting which capitalist development was
slowly but surely tracing on the wall of social in-
stitutions. So much more briskly did economic
evolution proceed on its course, sowing the seeds
of future revolutions, which would in due time
clear the field for a more scientific and evolu-
tionary materialism. For instance, when cotton-
planting was introduced in Virginia, one year
after the publication of Bacon's " Novum Or-
ganon," the germs were scattered for the Civil
War, that was destined to shake the foundations
of the future North-American republic, 245 years
later, and to sound the tocsin for a proletarian
movement, which . would some day reap the ma-
ture fruits of materialist science.

At the same time, inventors began to cast about
for means of increasing the productivity of labor,
and natural science gathered more empirical ma-
terial for its special departments.

Early in the i/th century, De Caus, a French
engineer, had invented a machine by which a
column of water could be elevated by the pres-
sure of steam confined in a vessel above the water.
In 1629, Branca, an Italian inventor, contrived a
plan for working several mills by a blast of steam
against the vanes. In 1639, the transit of Venus
across the orb of the sun was for the first time

57

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

observed by Horrox. The barometer was in-
vented by Torricelli in 1642. The marquis of
Worcester described, in his " Century of Inven-
tions," 1663, an apparatus for raising water by
the expansive force of steam. Two years later,
Isaac Newton published his first improved meth-
ods of astronomical calculation. In 1669, Brandt
discovered phosphorus. Roemer ascertained the
velocity of light in 1675. Leibniz published his
invention of the differential calculus in 1684. And
in 1687, Newton came forth with his " Principia,"
enunciating the laws of gravity. Denis Papin, a
native of France and professor at the university
of Marburg, Germany, conceived the idea, in
1688, of obtaining motive power by means of a
piston working in a cylinder, through a sudden
condensation of steam by cold. In 1698, Captain
Savery, an Englishman, obtained a patent for the
first actual working steam engine to be used in
raising water. And in 1705, Thomas Newcomen,
a blacksmith, and John Cawley, a plumber, pat-
ented an atmospheric engine, in which condensa-
tion was effected by pouring cold water upon the
external surface of a cylinder.

These pioneer efforts in the construction of
steam engines were not to be crowned with suc-
cess until June 5, 1769, when James Watt ob-

58

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLAND

tained his first patent for an automatic steam
engine. So far as the philosophy of the ijth
century was concerned, these industrial and scien-
tific advances made little impression on it. When
in 1641, Descartes (Cartesius) published his
" Meditationes de Prima Philosophic,," he showed
himself to be still completely in the thrall of meta-
physics. He contended that man alone had a
true " soul," with sensation and free will, and
that animals were mere automata, without will
or sensibility. At the same time, he suffered
from the traditional contradictions of men of his
turn of mind. While in his philosophy, he at-
tributed a dualist and supernatural soul to man,
he endowed, in his physics, matter with self-creat-
ing power and regarded mechanical motion as its
life's function.

A valiant antagonist arose against the Car-
tesian metaphysics in the person of Hobbes. He
published, in 1642, his " Elementa Philosophica
de Cive," and fortified the materialist position in
this and other works considerably. By asserting
that it is impossible to separate thought from
matter that thinks, he did not only strike the Car-
tesian metaphysics heavily, but also shattered
the theistic survivals of Baconian materialism.
However, the historical conditions did not enable

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

him to furnish the proof for Bacon's fundamental
principle that all human understanding arises
from the world of sensations. On the other hand,
he was the first of the modern natural philoso-
phers to make a clear distinction between the nat-
ural and social environment and to realize that
social activity is a part of the general activity of
the universe. In his " Leviathan," published in
1651, he says: "The register of knowledge of
fact is called history. Whereof there be two
sorts, one called natural history, which is the his-
tory of such facts or effects of nature as have no
dependence on man's will, such as the histories
of metals, plants, animals, regions, and the like.
The other is civil history, which is the history of
the voluntary actions of men in commonwealths."
The modern monist will find much to criticise in
these definitions, but they mark nevertheless an
advance in the evolution of thought as compared
to the ideas of his predecessors and contempora-
ries.

In Leibniz and Spinoza, Descartes found allies
who contributed much toward the prolongation
of the life of metaphysics, and theistic idealism
had an eloquent spokesman in Berkeley. Even a
man of Newton's mathematical mind remained a
lifelong captive of dualistic ideas and his concep-

60

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLAND

tion of the solar system was of the crude kind
which speculated about the causes of the "first
impulse " for the motion of the planets. Still his
ideas seemed so dangerous to the theological
dualists that for instance Leibniz denounced the
Newtonian theory of gravitation, because it un-
dermined natural religion and denied revealed
religion. The theistic ideas owed a continued ex-
istence to the influence of Rousseau and Voltaire,
though especially the last-named was a scoffer at
all religions based on supernatural revelation.

But materialism remained close on the trail of
metaphysics. In France, Descartes was person-
ally confronted by Gassendi, who revived Epi-
curean materialism and accomplished for mate-
rialism in France what Hobbes did in England.
And Pierre Bayle prepared the way for a more
mature philosophy in France by a cutting criti-
cism of Cartesian metaphysics. Driven by re-
ligious doubts to a closer study of metaphysics,
Bayle wrote the history of metaphysics only to
give dualism a blow from which it would never
fully recover.

After this destructive work of materialistic
criticism, Locke appeared as a constructive ma-
terialist, in 1690, with his " Essay Concerning
Human Understanding," which was enthusias-

61

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

tically received by all friends of enlightenment,
especially in France. He furnished the first
philosophical proofs of the fact that all human
ideas are due to the functions of the senses, and
thus completed Baconian materialism which Hob-
bes had systematized.

Locke's work came at a time when metaphysics
had gradually lost its touch with the sciences that
had once given it a certain authority. While
mathematics, physics, zoology, astronomy, chem-
istry, and other exact sciences, made themselves
more and more independent, metaphysics retained
nothing but speculations and a mystical belief in
celestial things. But when the last great meta-
physicians of the 1 7th century, Malebranche and
Arnauld, died, worldly affairs were beginning to
absorb public interest to the exclusion of super-
natural speculations. To the same extent did
materialism gain favor among Frenchmen.

IX. NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE.

With the beginning of the i8th century, we see
the French champions of enlightenment engaged
in open war against metaphysics, theology, and

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE

the existing political institutions. In the interest
of " reason," all hitherto existing ideas and in-
stitutions had to be submitted to the most ruthless
criticism, and this " reason " was nothing else but
the dictates of the class-interests of the French
bourgeoisie. In England on the other hand, the
bourgeois revolution had at that time found its
temporary armistice in the compromise of 1689,
which left the great land-owners in possession of
the spoils of political office, while it at the same
time safeguarded the economic interests of the
rising bourgeoisie sufficiently for the time being.
The English bourgeois, was, therefore, as much
interested as the nobility in maintaining the in-
fluence of religion " for the people," meaning for
the exploitation of the working class, while the
French bourgeois was compelled, by the require-
ments of the historical situation in France, to stir
the working class to the highest pitch of revolu-
tionary activity against the feudal nobility.

Materialism, therefore, in the i8th century,
took up its abode in France. Once more the
irony of fate would have it that the metaphy-
sicians had to furnish the weapons for their own
undoing. For French materialism developed two
schools, and one of them took its departure from
the physics of the metaphysician Descartes. The

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

other school started out from Locke, and led di-
rectly to Socialism. Descartian materialism be-
came the father of that mechanical materialism
which characterizes the bourgeois materialists of
the 1 8th and iQth centuries, who were either ig-
norant of evolutionary materialism, or opposed to
it. It furnished at first the basis for the natural
science of France, and, combined with theistic
idealism, it became the stronghold of those who,
like Cuvier and Agassiz, clung to the Mosaic idea
of creation and to the theory of fixed species, in
opposition to the introduction of the idea of devel-
opment by the interaction of physical and chem-
ical movements. The followers of Locke, on the
other hand, cultivated the evolutionary branch of
French materialism.

" The immediate disciple and French inter-
preter of Locke, Condillac, directed the point of
Locke's sensationalism at once against the meta-
physics of the 1 7th century," writes Karl Marx
in the " Holy Family," in which he and Fred-
erick Engels exposed the shallowness of the
Young-Hegelians of the Bruno Bauer stripe.
" He proved that the French justly rejected meta-
physics, because it was merely a handiwork of
imagination and theological prejudices. He pub-
lished a refutation of the systems of Descartes,

64

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE

Spinoza, Leibniz, and Malebranche. In his
work, ' L'essai sur I'Origine des Connaissances
Humaines,' he elaborated the ideas of Locke and
proved that not only the soul, but also the senses,
not only the art of producing ideas, but also the
art of sense-perceptions, was a matter of experi-
ence and habit. The entire development of man
therefore depends on education and external cir-
cumstances. . . . From Helvetius, who like-
wise takes his departure from Locke, materialism
received its specific French character. He also
takes into consideration the social life, in his
work, ' De L'Homme! The senses and self-love,
enjoyment and a well understood personal inter-
est, are the basis of all morality. The natural
equality of human intelligences, the identity of
the progress of reason and the progress of indus-
try, the natural goodness of man, the omnipotence
of education, are the main points of his system.

" A combination of Cartesian and English ma-
terialism is found in the writings of Lamettrie.
He utilized the physics of Descartes to their mi-
nutest details. His machine-man is an elabora-
tion of the Cartesian machine-animal. In the
' Systeme de la Nature' of Holbach, the physical
part consists likewise of a combination of French
and English materialism, while the ethical part

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

is based principally on the ethics of Helvetius."
The universality of the French materialists has
a lasting monument in the " Encyclopedic," which
was begun by Diderot and D'Alembert in 1751,
and in which Robinet, Buffon, Holbach, Condil-
lac, Lamettrie, Helvetius and Grimm collab-
orated.

The French encyclopedists offer a fair standard
by which to judge the scientific position of their
age. Science was still in its rudimentary stage,
and this corresponded to the control of tools and
technique in keeping with the prevailing mode of
production. The two epoch-making works on
natural history typical for this period are the
" Systema Naturae," published by Linnaeus in
J735> and the " Histoire Naturelle," published by
Buffon in 1749. Franklin made his successful ex-
periments demonstrating the connection between
electricity and lightning in 1752. But neither his
work, nor the invention of the spinning- jenny by
Hargreaves in 1767, and the perfection of the
spinning frame by Arkwright in 1769, produced
any immediate effect on the ideas of scientific ex-
plorers. Cook was making his first voyage
around the world, about this time (1768), and
Priestley discovered oxygen in 1774, without,
however, knowing what he had discovered.

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE

The philosophical work, which followed in
England immediately after Locke's " Essay," was
Hume's " Treatise of Human Nature," published
in 1739. It cannot be regarded as an advance
beyond Locke, nor is it superior to the work of
the French materialists. Hume was a better his-
torian than philosopher, but even as a historian
he fell far below Vico, who in the beginning of
the 1 8th century had made an attempt to substi-
tute for the theological conception of history a
method which regarded historical events as the
fulfillment of natural laws. Nor was Hume the
equal of Gibbon, who, in 1776, published his " De-
cline and Fall of the Roman Empire," in which
faint traces of an evolutionary conception of his-
tory appear. On the other hand, Rousseau's
" Contrat Social" published in 1762, was but a
feeble attempt to explain the origin of human so-
cieties, without the slightest recognition of the
basic factors of social evolution.

A brighter light falls upon this historical pe-
riod from the department of mathematics, crim-
inology, and economics. In mathematics, the idea
of continuity led to the introduction of evolu-
tionary ideas into natural science. Buffon, who
had entered the French Academy as a geometri-
cian, introduced the continuity-idea into his " His-

67

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

toire Naturelle," and this idea became the spark,
which, in the hands of Lamarck, later on started
the fire of organic development in all natural
sciences.

In criminology, Beccaria made a new de-
parture in Italy, in 1774. He published his work
on crime and punishment under a false date and
with a false place of publication, knowing that his
ideas, which were impregnated with the spirit of
the impending French Revolution, would set loose
a storm of reactionary attacks against him. He
opposed the medieval methods of " justice," with
their torture and secret proceedings, and under-
mined the conception of a personal responsibility
of criminals. This threatened the dearest tenets
of theological dogmas about " vicarious atone-
ment," and set the Jesuitical machine of the
church into frenzied motion.

In economics, the year 1776 marks a milestone
of advance in Adam Smith's " Wealth of Na-
tions," which subverted the current ideas on the
origin of profits. Smith declared in so many
words, that profits were not an arbitrary addition
of the seller to the price of his article, but surplus-
values, surplus-products, appropriated by the
owners of means of production out of the unpaid
products of " industrious persons." This con-

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE

ception became the basis for Ricardo's law of
value, which, in the hands of Marx, was trans-
formed into the revolutionary analysis of capital-
ist production, out of which the modern socialist
movement developed its life.

Generally speaking, there was as yet no clear
perception of the evolutionary nature of social
and natural processes, neither in the writings of
the sociologists, nor in those of the scientists and
philosophers. While Buffon showed at least a
faint trace of continuous development in his
work, Linnaeus regarded his system of plants
and animals avowedly as a mere diagrammatic
classification, without the least suggestion of any
natural connection between the various classes of
animals and plants. And even when he elab-
orated the first outlines for a natural system of
classification, he still had the idea of fixed and
created species in mind.

But already the fiery glow of the bourgeois
revolution in the American colonies was redden-
ing the western horizon, and its sparks were soon
to ignite the dry feudal structures in France.
The Declaration of Independence asserted that
" all men were born equal," but the writers of
this document and their class forgot to apply this
" truth " to the slaves, indentured servants, debt-

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

ors, and propertyless colonists who were debarred
from voting. Nevertheless, this document marked
at least the awakening consciousness of the
" Rights of Man " and the " Age of Reason,"
that is to say, the consciousness of the rising
capitalist class that they had their own peculiar
idea of right and reason, as opposed to the feudal
powers. With the American and French Revo-
lutions, the capitalist class established a precedent
in social evolution by means of revolution, which
is still of too recent date to be easily forgotten,
and which the modern proletariat will some day
follow with good effect.

X. A REVERSION TO IDEALISM IN GERMANY

The English and French jingoes of the
and 1 8th centuries were doubtless convinced that
their countries were not only the leaders of Eu-
rope in economic and political progress, but also
the pathfinders in science and philosophy. The
wider horizon of the present day enables us to
notice without difficulty, that a few thinkers of
other nationalities, who viewed the events in
England and France at a distance and enjoyed

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IDEALISM IN GERMANY

the advantage of undisturbed study and seclu-
sion, did as much, if not more, for the evolution
of human understanding as the scientists and
philosophers of those industrially and politically
more advanced countries.

Of course, the list of the scientific accomplish-
ments of those two countries is not exhausted by
the enumeration of the few facts previously men-
tioned as mile-stones in the road of evolutionary
theories. Many other significant advances might
be mentioned. To name but a few, the work of
Hooke and Grew for the elaboration of the cell-
theory, the discovery of the function of the sta-
mens of flowers by Millington, and the attempts
at classification made by Ray, the forerunner of
Linnaeus, were among the minor steps in a for-
ward direction. Priestley's studies on the absorp-
tion of carbon-dioxide and the evolution of oxy-
gen by plants were rendered epoch-making by
the deeper research of Lavoisier, who subverted
the entire phlogistic theory of chemistry by show-
ing the actual function of oxygen. But the sig-
nificance of these discoveries for the progress of
science was not appreciated in those times, not
even by their authors. Their relation to philoso-
phy was still less suspected.

This is especially true of an invention, which

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

opened up entirely new fields of study, and has
become one of the most revolutionary aids in evo-
lution, the microscope. It developed out of the
magnifying glass, and came into use as a scien-
tific instrument about the beginning of the I7th
century. Francesco Stelluti is regarded as the
first who made its use known to science. It be-
came especially effective in the hands of Mal-
pighi and Leeuwenhoek. Malpighi, in the latter
half of the i/th century, published a complete
anatomy of the silk-worm and studied the devel-
opment of the chicken in the egg. Leeuwenhoek
discovered the blood corpuscles and described the
active elements in the semen of male animals.
After these scientists came an able corps of in-
vestigators and used the microscope to good ef-
fect in laying the foundation for an understand-
ing of the individual development (ontogeny) of
beings. From ontogeny to phytogeny, that is to
say to the development of species, genera, classes,
families, races, was but a logical step, which was
made in the iQth century as soon as the material
premises for it had developed.

But in the i/th and :8th centuries, the micro-
scopical revelations " fell flat." This was mainly
due to the prevailing theological conception of
nature and to the lack of interrelation between

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IDEALISM IN GERMANY

the various sciences, which aggravated the dif-
ficulties arising from insufficient experience and
from the undeveloped state of human control over
society and nature.

Under these circumstances, a similar "fate be-
fell a work, which in our day ranks high in the
literature of evolution — Kant's " Natural His-
tory and Theory of the Heavens," published in
1755, the year of the great earthquake, which
in five minutes destroyed the city of Lisbon and
killed 60,000 people. Hardly anyone took no-
tice of the ideas advanced in this work, until
Laplace, in 1799, published his " Mecanique
Celeste" and furnished the mathematical proof
for the Kantian hypotheses. Yet Kant's work
was the most revolutionary, and, from the stand-
point of materialist monism, most epoch-making
publication since the time of Demokritos. In it
the Konigsberg philosopher undertook to treat
of the " constitution and the mechanical origin
of the entire universe on the basis of Newtonian
principles." He proceeded to demonstrate that
the sun and its system had developed mechanically
by a rotation of a primitive nebular substance
filling universal space, and thus established a
theory, which has maintained itself up to the
present day. Only in the beginning of the 2Oth

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

century a few voices have been lifted against it
and a new cosmogeny advocated, which never-
theless, in its essence, is still a mere modification
in modern garb of the atomic theory of Demok-
ritos, on which Kant's theory is likewise based.

By demonstrating the mechanical origin of the
universe and transforming the " divine " act of
creation into a historical process, Kant went far
beyond Newton, who had assumed that a god
had given the first impulse to the universe and
then left it to follow its own laws. Yet Kant,
too, was loath to dismiss the creator. There was
still a last hiding place for the mysterious ele-
ment of dualism in the fact that the human
understanding, with its present organization in
the cosmic process, does not penetrate to the
" final nature " of things. Kant made this fact
the basis for carping attacks on Demokritos,
on whose shoulders he stood and whose philoso-
phy was in many respects superior to his own.
Moreover, Kant never grasped the historical re-
lation of Demokritos to Epicurus, and always
regarded Epicurus as the father of " sensualism "
(materialism), while we have seen that Epicurus
was a follower of Demokritos. It is also indis-
putable that lack of historical perception was not
the least of Kant's shortcomings. His philosophy

74

IDEALISM IN GERMANY

suffers especially from his unfamiliarity with
those natural sciences, without which no sound
theory of understanding can exist, namely com-
parative physiology, biology, and sociology. He
never realized, that philosophy requires not alone
the direct co-operation of these special sciences,
but in the last analysis of every department of
human knowledge. Even if we admit that this
defect was largely due to the scantiness of the
empirical material of his time and to the incom-
plete equipment of the Prussian universities under
Frederick the Great, it was also a consequence
of his extreme philistinism and book-worm ten-
dencies. He certainly made more liberal con-
cessions to the arrogance of orthodox and
bureaucratic censorship, than many of his
humbler intellectual contemporaries in Prussia.

But in spite of his mental gymnastics in the
matter of a god, the fact remains, that his nebular
theory of the origin of the universe, in its logical
application, knocks the main prop from under
the Mosaic world-conception, which had already
been considerably shaken by the discoveries and
demonstrations of Copernicus, Galilei, Kepler,
and Newton. Laplace was more consistent and
courageous than Kant and did not hesitate to
declare in reply to a question of Napoleon I., that

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

he had no need of the hypothesis of a creator.
No better proof is required for the soundness of
this position, than the persistent silence, which
the theologians have maintained about Kant's
nebular hypothesis, while praising the dualistic
ethics and theory of understanding contained in
his second work, " The Critique of Pure
Reason," published in 1781.

In order to appreciate Kant's philosophy fully,
this work must be compared with his " Critique
of Practical Reason," published in 1788. The
essence of his teaching in the former work is,
that the world of phenomena, such as we per-
ceive it, is entirely conditioned on the organiza-
tion of our senses. Owing to this fact, we can
never perceive the true nature of a thing, the
" thing in itself." There is only one universe,
and everything in it is regulated by natural laws,
operating as sternly as the law of gravitation.
The freedom of will cannot be demonstrated by
" pure " reason. The existence of a god and
the immortality of the soul cannot be ascertained
within the possible limits of experience.

However, throughout the work there are scat-
tered passages stating the exact opposite. One
would be at a loss to understand what Kant was
«€ally driving at, if he had not given an expla-

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IDEALISM IN GERMANY

nation for his contradictions in his preface to the
second edition of his work, 1787. There he
says that he had " to abolish reason, in order to
make room for belief." And this was necessary,
in order that he might " confer an inestimable
benefit on morality and religion, by showing that
the objections urged against them may be
silenced forever by the Socratic method, that is
to say, by proving the ignorance of the objector.
For as the world has never been, and no doubt
will never be, without a system of metaphysics
of one kind or another, it is the highest and
weightiest concern of philosophy to render it
powerless for harm, by closing up the sources of
error." One of these sources of error, as he
says in his " Critique of Pure Reason," is found
in men like Locke, who promote the idea that the
existence of a god and the immortality of the
soul can be proven with mathematical certainty
from the fact that there is no knowledge outside
of experience.

What a strange spectacle ! Materialist Locke
reprimanded by idealist Kant for insisting that
the existence of a god and the immortality of the
soul can be mathematically demonstrated, and
idealist Kant violently insisting that such a thing
is entirely outside of all possible experience and

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must be believed! And all for the benefit of
religion and rulers ! And what a peculiar logic !
Fancy the Socratic method in the role of the
invincible sword, which will lay open the igno-
rance of all objectors to religion, and remember
that no religion in the world could stand the
test of that method !

This, then, was the mighty outcome of two
thousand years of philosophy since the time of
Demokritos that religions were considered safe,
and the states defended by them secure, because
it could not be proven by experience that a god
existed and that the human soul was immortal;
that the mass of the people could never ascertain
the truth of these things by their own unaided
faculties, but must believe them upon the word
of authorities! Surely, the mountain need not
have labored through 500 pages of gold-brick
science to bring forth such a mouse !

Of course, Kant had spoken the truth, when he
said that theology must be believed. But what a
strange fact, that all other schools of thought,
especially the natural sciences and psychologies,
should be compelled, under penalty of immediate
ridicule, to demonstrate every iota of their
theories by irrefutable evidence, while the cham-
pions of religion should be privileged to fling

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IDEALISM IN GERMANY

their improvable assertions into our teeth and
insist that they were speaking the truth, because
it could not be demonstrated. And that from the
man, who had done more than any of his pred-
ecessors to undermine the world foundations,
on which this preposterous assumption is resting !

Kant thus acknowledged voluntarily, that he
was not a philosopher, who stood high above the
world and men, but merely a common bourgeois
sophist, who served the interests of the ruling
class. As such he destroyed the dogmatic
philosophy, which had done the work of feudal
society so well, and established a philosophy,
which was made to order for the requirements
of the rising bourgeoisie. As a scientist, he
was a materialist, who reiterated the philosophy
of Democritus, Epicurus, and Locke, and who
re-established the principle of mechanical devel-
opment in nature, which was a distinct advance
over the English and French materialists, if not
over the Grecian natural philosophers. But as a
philosopher, he was as scholastic, sophistical and
reactionary as any foe of progress could be.

Much is made of Kant's " categorical impera-
tive," the basis of his ethics, which runs : " Act
at all times so that thou usest man in thy own
person as well as in that of others not only

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

as a means, but also as an end." This ethics, like
many another conceived by bourgeois minds after
Kant, falls to pieces the moment it is tried as a
rule of conduct in society. Its ambiguity, and
therefore its meaninglessness, becomes apparent
in the effects of class-environment on human
reason. Well does Franz Mehring character-
ize the Kantian imperative, when he writes :
" For the historical thinker, this statement of
Kant's appears at once as the historical precipi-
tation of the economic fact, that the bourgeoisie,
in order to obtain objects of exploitation suitable
for their ends, must not only use the working
class as a means, but also take care to create a
proletariat, in other words, to free them in the
name of human liberty from feudal rule."

But in spite of his categorical imperative, and
his admiration for the French revolution, Kant
demanded full liberty only for the citizens of the
state, not for all its members, especially not for
the women and for the working class. Thus
he fell back to the status of the Roman constitu-
tion under the Caesars.

In his " Critique of Discrimination," Kant dis-
covered the laws of creative imagination and
demonstrated that art is an innate faculty of man.
This work also contains the statement that the

IDEALISM IN GERMANY

descent of all organic beings from a common
primeval ancestor is a thesis which is in con-
formity with the principle of mechanical devel-
opment in nature. But Kant deprecated such a
hypothesis as a " risky adventure of reason."
He was afraid of the logical application of the
very principle which he had established in his
cosmogeny. In other respects, however, this
work and his cosmological views may be read
with profit, even by modern proletarians.

The thinker of the present day, with his vast
array of empirical facts, is apt to be too harsh
in his judgment of the shortcomings of his
predecessors in earlier centuries. But I cannot
blame Paul Ree for summing up Kant's philoso-
phy in these words : " In Kant's works you
feel as though you were at a country fair. You
can buy from him anything you want — freedom
of the will and captivity of the will, idealism and
a refutation of idealism, atheism and the good
Lord. Like a juggler out of an empty hat, so
Kant draws out of the concept of duty a god,
immortality, freedom, to the great surprise of his
readers. True, these illegitimate children of
Kant's philosophy do not like to venture forth
into the light of day. They are somewhat
ashamed of their existence, more especially so,

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

because they find favor in the eyes of god and
men, particularly of men clothed with authority."

The followers of Kant claim that he has de-
fined the powers and limits of human perception
for all time to come. But the " Critique of Pure
Reason " demonstrates precisely the impossibility
of such absolute perception on the part of
Kant or of any other man. His own
powers of perception, especially in sociology,
certainly never penetrated beyond the bour-
geois horizon, and in other respects even
some of his immediate followers surpassed him,
for instance Laplace in his elaboration of the
nebular theory, and Schopenhauer, the legitimate
heir of his philosophy, in ethics. As for the germ
of truth contained in Kant's "categorical im-
perative " and in his " thing in itself," we shall
see that proletarian philosophers gathered out of
it an advance in thought for the revolution of
the modern working class.

In the same year, in which Kant's " Critique
of Pure Reason " appeared, Herschel discovered
the planet Uranus. And two years later, the
brothers Montgolfier made their first successful
balloon ascension, opening new fields of research
in the atmosphere and spurring the inventive
minds of humanity to greater technical exertions.

IDEALISM IN GERMANY

In 1789, Lavoisier established the law of the con-
servation of matter, which, supplemented in 1842
by Robert Mayer's law of the conservation of
energy, remained one of the fundamental tenets
of modern science, until the evolutionary con-
ception of the transformation of energy was in-
troduced at a later stage. In 1791, Galvani pub-
lished his discoveries in animal electricity, and
Thomas Paine appeared with his " Rights of
Man." Galvani's discovery led to startling in-
dustrial revolutions in the I9th century. Paine's
idea that man has natural rights, which no other
creature in the universe has, furnished a great
deal of powder to the bourgeoisie, so long as
they were revolutionary, but philosophically it
was a step backward and away from a monistic
conception of the universe and human society.
Paine stood in sociology on the same ground
as Rousseau, and was as little aware of the
existence and functions of evolutionary develop-
ment and class-struggles as the celebrated
Frenchman.

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

XL IN THE MELTING POT OF THE FRENCH REV-
OLUTION

The French revolution had broken out in the
meantime, and the philosophers now had an op-
portunity to watch what pure reason, practical
reason, natural rights, the categorical imperative,
the social contract, and metaphysical idealism
could accomplish. After wading through rivers
of blood at the instigation of practical reason,
pure reason mounted the throne by decree of the
national convention, on November 10, 1793. The
worship of reason, lasted till June 8, 1794, when
Robespierre brought god and metaphysical ideal-
ism back to the throne, dethroned reason, declared
atheism to be an aristocratic sin, and celebrated
the festival of the supreme being. But on July
27, 1794, the supreme being remembered the
categorical imperative, left Robespierre ungrate-
fully in the lurch, and looked on at a safe dis-
tance while " eternal justice " chopped off the
good man's head with that gory instrument of
natural rights introduced by practical reason, the
guillotine. Lavoisier received the same reward
for his services to mankind that Robespierre
earned for his services to the supreme being.

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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Reason and the supreme being continued to re-
lieve one another, until finally Napoleon I.
replaced them both by bayonets and cannons, and
discredited the supreme being by declaring that it
was always on the side of the strongest battalions.
And so the reign of reason and of the supreme
being ended in the nauseating farce of the resto-
ration of " law and order."

The reign of reason appeared on closer
scrutiny as a transcendental image of the cap-
italist state. The existence of the supreme
being had not been proven, neither by decree of
parliament nor by the guillotine, and for that very
reason it continued to exist in those heads which
were accustomed to reason no better than those
which had been chopped off. The categorical
imperative, stripped of its gaudy trappings, stood
forth as the impotent and incapable wag that he
was. The social contract was renewed on the
basis of " Every one for himself and the devil
takes the hindmost." And the natural rights
were bossed around by the right to exploit the
proletariat and to place private property above
propertyless man.

In the beginning of the I9th century, the dis-
appointment over the failure of all the glittering
ideals of bourgeois philosophy soon made itself

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

felt in an awakening of evolutionary ideas in
social science among the champions of the work-
ing class. Fourier began to elaborate his theories
of social reconstruction, in 1799, and to aim the
dagger thrusts of his critique at the heart of
capitalist society. And for the first time since
the overthrow of women's equality with men in
prehistoric times, a woman, Mary Wollstonecraft,
raised her voice in public protest against the eco-
nomic and social slavery of her sex. Saint Simon
saw dimly that material forces are the active
element in social movements and compel society
to develop mechanically through class-struggles.
And Fourier, after him, drew the first theoretical
outline of the evolution of man from savagery,
through barbarism and patriarchy, to civiliza-
tion. The investigators of the iQth century
following him were soon to supply the empirical
proofs of this theory. On the other side of the
channel, Robert Owen startled the comfortable
English bourgeois with his colony at New-Lanark
and threw the firebrand of the Chartist move-
ment into the quiet dulness of British life.

These first half-conscious movements of pro-
letarian thought were as immature as capitalism
itself was. But they were at least unmistakably
proletarian, and this fact makes the Utopias of

86

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

these three men superior to the dreams of Plato
and More. Historically, these French and
English Utopians excelled also their followers,
such as Bellamy and Groenlund, in keenness of
perception and political influence. All the at-
tempts at independent proletarian movements in
the beginning of the iQth century connected
themselves with the ideas of these prophets of
social revolution. Philosophically, these men
were the heirs of Locke and of his French school.
Whoever is looking for the roots of the modern
socialist philosophy, must seek them here. No
one knew this as well as the founders of scientific
socialism. Some of the modern socialists are
of the opinion that the socialist philosophy took
its departure from the German classical philoso-
phy. But Marx and Engels knew better, and
Engels entitled his book on Feuerbach advisedly
" Feuerbach and the Outcome of German Class-
ical Philosophy," and declared that the modern
proletariat was the "heir" of this philosophy,
and would accomplish what German idealism
had left undone. Scientific Socialism rejected
the classical philosophy of Germany, took its
departure from the humanitarianism of Feuer-
bach, and connected itself with the materialist
philosophy of the i8th century.

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

This acknowledgment was made by Marx and
Engels, in " The Holy Family," in these words :
" Just as Cartesian materialism leads to French
natural science, so the other school of French
materialism leads directly to socialism and com-
munism. It requires no great keenness of per-
ception to realize that the doctrines of materialism
relative to the original goodness and equal in-
tellectual endowment of men, to the omnipotence
of experience, habit, education, and the influence
of external circumstances on men, the great im-
portance of industry, the justification of enjoy-
ment, etc., lead necessarily to a connection with
communism and socialism. If man gets all his
knowledge and feeling, etc., from the world of
sense perceptions and his contact with it, then
the thing to do is to arrange matters in the
material world in such a way, that he gets truly
human impressions from it, acquires them as
habits, and realizes his human nature. If the
correct understanding of material interests is
the basic principle of all morality, then the private
interests of man must be made to coincide with
general human interests. If the human race is
unfree in the sense that the materialists use this
term, that is to say if man is free, not so much
by his negative power to avoid this or that, but

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

rather by his positive power to assert his true
individuality, then it is not proper to punish
the crimes of the individual, but to destroy the
antisocial breeding grounds of crime and to
secure for every one the social room for his
essential life expressions. If man is formed by
external circumstances, then circumstances must
be modeled to suit man. If man is by nature
social, then he can develop his true nature only
in society, and the power of his nature must not
be judged by individuals, but by that of his so-
cieties. These and similar statements are found
almost literally in the works of even the oldest
French materialists. . . . Fourier takes his
departure immediately from the teachings of the
French materialists. The Babouvists were crude
and uncivilized materialists, but even the devel-
oped communism starts directly from French
materialism. The latter emigrated, in the form
given to it by Helvetius, to its mother country,
England. Bentham founded his system of well
understood interests on the ethics of Helvetius,
and Owen, starting from the system of Bentham,
founded English communism. Exiled to Eng-
land, the Frenchman Cabet was stimulated by
the communist ideas of his exile and on his re-
turn to France became the most popular, although

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

the most superficial, representative of commu-
nism. The scientific French communists, Dez-
amy, Gay, etc., developed, like Owen, the
teachings of materialism into those of realistic
humanitarianism and into the logical basis of
communism."

These statements show at the same time, that
the French revolution did not settle any of the
fundamental problems of life. That revolution
merely testified to the incapability of the bour-
geoisie to undertake the solution of any such
problems. The first condition for their solution
is the abolition of the bourgeoisie itself. It could
not be very well expected of them that they should
commit political suicide, or rather that they
should " rise superior to their environment."

In fact, the history of the bourgeoisie is a
series of struggles to keep from being pulled
back into the old or pulled forward into a new
class environment.

The revolution of a new class was necessary,
before the great problems of the human race
could be solved. This revolution came in due
time.

******

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

XII. THE WEDDING OF SCIENCE AND NATURAL
PHILOSOPHY

The close of the i8th century was marked by
two discoveries which left their imprint on
science for a full hundred years. First, the in-
troduction of vaccination as a preventive against
smallpox, by Jenner, in 1796, stirred up the old
bones in medicine, and in the second place, the
invention of the Voltaic pile by Volta, in 1799
revived the interest in electricity. Jenner's idea
showed that the futility of the prevailing symp-
tomatic treatment of diseases was being realized,
but his method was itself still a fight against
symptoms, instead of a removal of causes. It
must be admitted, that it was the best that could
be done under the prevailing historical conditions,
for capitalism limits all human activity to more
or less symptomatic methods. One hundred
years of practical experience with Vaccination
and similar preventive methods have demon-
strated, that the scientific way to treat diseases is
to remove their causes, and this understanding
found its logical application in the revolutionary
method of the class-conscious proletariat.

Volta's invention was the forerunner of great

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

discoveries in experimental physics, all of which
were so many little stones in the beautiful mosaic
of a monistic conception of the universe. Ever
since Franklin had made his experiments with
lightning, scientists had studied the atmospheric
phenomena and investigated the nature of elec-
tricity. Rumford, in 1798, and Davy, in 1799,
published the results of their experiments on the
nature of heat. Thomas Young established
the undulatory theory of ether by explaining the
interference of light. And Dalton, who had
elaborated his atomic theory in chemistry in 1803
and communicated it to Thomas Thompson in
1804, published his " New System of Chemical
Philosophy " in 1808.

The fundamental laws, which dominated the
physics and chemistry of the iQth century, were
thus established. It was not until the beginning
of the 2Oth century, that doubts as to the sound-
ness of these three theories were expressed and
the desire for their reconsideration became strong
enough to lead to a greater accuracy in terms
and definitions. Dalton made a new departure in
chemical methods, and gave rise to two schools.
One of them devoted itself to chemistry, the other
to physics. The first result of Dalton's methods
in chemistry was the practical determination of

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

atomic weights by Berzelius, begun in 1811. And
in physics, Gay Lussac and Avogadro modified
the Daltonian theory profoundly. Gay Lussac
showed in 1808, that combination between gases
always takes place in simple relations by volume,
and that all gaseous densities are proportional
either to the combined weights of the various
substances, or to rational multiples of their
weights. And Avogadro generalized the new
ideas in 1811 and announced his law that " equal
volumes of gas, under like conditions, of tem-
perature and pressure, contain an equal number
of molecules." At the same time, the principle of
classification, adopted by natural science, worked
its way into economics, politics, and law. These
specialists were little aware of the fact, that they
were contributing their share to a monistic con-
ception of all phenomena in the universe, and
undermining inch by inch the foundation on
which the theological belief in supernatural mir-
acles rested.

Capitalism was now in its ascending stage, and
its technical requirements in transportation and
markets soon led to an improvement of steam
engines and means of general communication.
Fitch made an unsuccessful attempt to introduce
steam navigation on the Delaware, in 1790. The

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

first steamboat on the Clyde and Forth was
launched by Symington, in 1802. And finally
Fulton steamed up the Hudson, in 1807, and
succeeded where Fitch had failed. The first
locomotive was placed into practical commission
in 1804, and the discovery that smooth wheels
were better for railroads than toothed wheels
was made in 1813. Then came the first suc-
cessful trip of a train drawn by a locomotive,
made by Stephenson, in 1829. Improvements in
railroading were accompanied by the invention of
the telegraph and telephone, the credit for which
is due to Wheatstone, Oersted, Henry, Morse,
Edison and Bell. Steam navigation across the
Atlantic ocean was inaugurated in 1838, and the
first trans-Atlantic cable between Europe and
North America was completed in 1866. The
postal and telegraph systems came rapidly into
use, with cheap postage and mailing facilities.
Capitalism penetrated into the remotest hamlets,
created a world after its own image wherever it
went, and at the same time abolished the element
of distance in human intercourse.

From now on, scientific exploration trips to

every quarter of the globe became a permanent

feature of human life, and a network of scientific

stations was spread over the surface of the earth

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SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

from pole to pole. The tropics and the frigid
zones, the highest mountain ranges and the hid-
den valleys, the depths of the seas and the
interior of the earth, were compelled to give up
their secrets. Every unknown territory was in-
vaded, and a steady stream of facts began to
flow into the studies of the scientists. Soon hun-
dreds of thousands of minds and hands were
busy accumulating, sifting, classifying evidence,
and theorizing on it. One startling discovery
after another followed in bewildering succession.
It would require volumes to appreciate the merits
of even the most remarkable accomplishments of
science, in the iQth century, for the formulation
of a monistic conception of the world.

Specialization became an inevitable result of
this activity. Among many new departments in
science, the igth century gave birth to that
specialty, which has done more than any other to
bring the nature of the human faculty of under-
standing into reach of empirical methods and
take away the last mystical ground on which the
theory of a supernatural soul rested. That
specialty is biology. This term was first em-
ployed by Treviranus, who selected for his life's
work the creation of a new science, which should
study the forms and phenomena of life, its origin,

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

and the conditions and laws of its existence. In
his " Biology, or Philosophy of Living Nature,"
published in 1802, he defined life as the " uni-
formity of reactions on unlike stimuli of the outer
world." He thereby established a principle in
natural science, which has been all too frequently
overlooked by scientists and philosophers, namely
the interrelation of the individual and its en-
vironment. But a few remembered it and used it
with the most revolutionary effect. The living
animal and plant now became the objects of study
as well as the dead, and the most intimate proc-
esses of nature were stripped one by one of their
mysterious character.

It is interesting to note, though quite natural
from pur point of view, that, the ideas of the
ancient natural philosophers re-appeared simul-
taneously with the new accomplishments of sci-
ence. Irrespective of confessional differences,
scientists of various nations returned to materi-
alist and monist methods. And evolutionary
ideas unavoidably accompanied this tendency, for
as we have seen, the ancient natural philosophers
were all more or less imbued with evolutionary
(dialectic) ideas.

When Goethe published his " Metamorphosis
of Plants," in 1790, he intimated that a mysterious

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SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

law indicated the interrelation and common
descent of all plants from one primeval type.
And in his " Metamorphosis of Animals," he
made the same claims in regard to the origin of
animals. This was but a return of the human
mind, after a long and fruitless drift around a
circle, to the ideas of the Grecian natural philos-
ophers. But now the facts for an empirical proof
of this theory were within reach, and were soon
to be marshalled against the Mosaic theories,
which had dominated the human mind since the
advent of the medieval church to power.

In 1809, Lamarck came forth with his " Philos-
ophie Zoologique " and developed the theory of
natural evolution systematically. He struck first
of all a crushing blow at the metaphysical con-
ception of the mysterious nature of life, which the
naturalists of the i8th century had attributed to
a supernatural vital force. He opposed this idea
of vitalism by the theory that the primeval an-
cestors of living beings on this globe were the
simplest organisms imaginable and were gener-
ated spontaneously by the interaction of physical
causes, as soon as the globe had cooled sufficiently.
Half a century later, such simple organisms were
actually discovered, and still fifty years later the

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

first life processes were produced by mechanical
means in the laboratory.

According to Lamarck, those simple primeval
organisms were gradually transformed through
changes in their conditions of life, leading to the
greater use of some and to the disuse of other
organs, to adaptations to changed environments,
?,nd to the transmission of new characters thus
acquired by way of heredity. Similar ideas were
advanced by Geoffroy Saint Hilaire and Oken.
The misfortune of these pioneers of resurrected
evolution was, that the palaeontological and em-
bryological material for the substantiation of this
theory was not yet sufficient to silence the oppo-
sition. And as the new. ideas were at once vio-
lently assailed by reactionary thought, the cham-
pions of the new science had a hard stand. When
Cuvier, the founder of comparative anatomy,
challenged Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, in 1830, to a
public debate, the old ideas of the Mosaic creation
theory carried the day and remained victorious
for thirty years longer.

But the general results of Cuvier's own spe-
cialty, comparative anatomy, led to the elabora-
tion of a natural system of classification, which
stands as an eloquent proof of the interrelation
of forms claimed by Lamarck. And the flimsy

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

foundation of Cuvier's arguments was further
shaken by the progress in other lines of science.
In 1830, Lyell established the proofs of imper-
ceptible and continuous development in geology
in his " Principles of Geology," and pulled the
crude catastrophic theory of Cuvier to shreds.
And Humphrey Davy had already suggested in
1809, that matter might be of a much more com-
plex structure than was generally assumed. He
also intimated that matter might become radiant
through very great velocity. Faraday made
similar statements in 1816, but his work " On the
Magnetization of Light and the Illumination of
the Magnetic Lines of Force" did not appear
until 1845. Ten years later he discovered the
laws of electrolysis. These steps led directly to
the theory of electrons and ions, and with these
charged particles of matter the entire theory of
atoms assumed a new aspect. Light and heat,
electricity and magnetism, now appeared as very
close relatives, and it required but a few steps
more to establish the identity of all life's phe-
nomena with electricity, magnetism, and radia-
tion.

* * * * *

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

XIII. THE OUTCOME OF CLASSIC PHILOSOPHY
IN GERMANY

These conditions were at once reflected in
philosophy. It was Hegel whose works marked
the next milestone after Kant. Hegel's " Phe-
nomenology of the Mind " appeared in 1807.
His " Science of Logic " followed in 1812-16, his
" Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences " in
1817, his " Philosophy of Right " and " Philoso-
phy of Religion " in 1821, and his maturest work,
the " Philosophy of History," in 1827. This last
work differs from all previous historical works
"by its distinct recognition of evolution, although
it does not understand the means by which the
evolution of human societies is brought about.
From now on, the world and society were re-
garded dialectically, that is to say as a succession
of processes following one out of another.
Things were no longer merely static, but also
dynamic and dialectic.

But unfortunately, the mystical ideas were still
predominating. The reaction after the French
revolution had produced a profound dissatisfac-
tion with materialism in the bourgeois mind, and
as natural science had not yet permitted the ma-

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GERMAN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

terialist evolutionists to triumph, the indescribable
longing of the bourgeoisie for the consolations
of idealism and mysticism impressed itself on the
thinkers of the day in a very forcible manner,
especially since the proletariat was showing a de-
cided affinity for materialism and plain speech.
Too late did the French and German bourgeois
realize, what the English capitalist class had un-
derstood a hundred years before, namely that
" religion must be preserved for the people."

Under these circumstances, Hegel became an
idealist. To him the life processes of the human
brain, the production and realization of ideas, ap-
peared as the evolution of The Absolute Idea, of
the absolute mind, which was the real and only
ruler of the universe, while the things which the
human mind perceived were but unreal imagina-
tions of the Absolute Idea. Of course Hegel
had also to analyze Kant's proofs for the existence
of a god, as well as the proofs of the metaphysi-
cians and theologians, in order to establish his
theory. He made short work of them all by
turning them upside down. Kant had declared,
that there must be a god, because his existence
could not be proven by means of the things which
were in this world of human perceptions. Hegel,
on the contrary declared, that there must be a

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god, because the things of this world had no real
existence, and because the Absolute Idea alone
was real. And the theologians, on their part, had
furnished a third proof for the existence of a god
by declaring that he must be there, because the
world exists in reality. In short, the human mind,
in spite of all scientific progress, was still groping
around blindly in the same old contradictory cir-
cle. But this maze of contradictions was her-
alded by the ruling class as the most sublime
wisdom, and disseminated by the leaders of
thought with the zeal of fanatics. If any prole-
tarian thinker attempted to establish the truth of
his theories by such methods, he would be con-
sidered a fit companion for the inmates of a luna-
tic asylum. The most unreal and fantastic ideas
were hailed as inspired, and the simplest matter of
fact truths assailed as hare-brained imaginations.
The classic German school before and after He-
gel, represented by men like Schelling, Fichte,
and Schopenhauer, never got out of this labyrinth.
In one respect, however, Hegel stands entirely
by himself as an idealist philosopher. His is
the unique distinction of having elaborated
idealism into a complete system of monism, by
making his absolute idea the lock and key of all
science and philosophy, and thus interpreting the

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GERMAN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

world and its phenomena from a uniform point
of view. It was this monist principle which en-
abled him to trace the course of history as an
evolution and make a dialectic (evolutionary)
method of investigation and description familiar
to scientists.

It was also his monism which compelled him to
take issue with Kant's metaphysical conception of
" the thing itself." This metaphysical absurdity
did not fit into the frame work of Hegel's monistic
system. For the absolute idea was the only all-
pervading reality in this system, and everything
that appeared in the world was but the work of
this idea. In the human mind, the absolute idea
became self-conscious. It is evident, therefore,
that the idea must know and understand its own
nature and that of its emanations, including
Kant's unknowable thing itself. And since the
human mind was part and parcel of the absolute
idea, it, too, must partake of this absolute faculty
of understanding and must be able to learn all
there is to the thing itself. Now, things reveal
their nature by their qualities. Therefore, if alt
the qualities of a thing were known to us, we
should know all that we could ever learn about
the thing itself, including the fact that it existed
outside of our faculty of thought. But since all

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

things outside of us, and we ourselves, are buf.
different expressions of the absolute idea, there
can be nothing in the world that will remain un-
knowable to us.

Thinking and being were thus monistically
united. But thinking was the only reality in
Hegel's philosophy, and being merely an attribute
of thought. So the idealist monism of this
thinker came to this insoluble contradiction : It
tried to prove the reality of the absolute idea by
the identity of thinking and being, but the only
reliable means by which it could accomplish this
was the use of " pure " thought. It had to reject
all empirical methods, and rely solely on the power
of so-called innate (a priori) ideas for the solution
of the world's riddles. But innate ideas can
operate only with purely introspective philosophy
for the solution of all scientific problems. This,
however, was contrary to the dialectic (evolution-
ary) method of research, which compelled Hegel
to collect the experienced facts of history. Ac-
cording to this dialectic, the absolute idea de-
veloped by a process of evolution in such a way,
that every phenomenon begot its own negation,
which in turn was followed by a negation of the
negation, leading to the reproduction of the orig-
inal phenomenon on a higher scale. In fact, he

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GERMAN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

diligently followed the thread of evolution in all
fields of science known in his day, and an ob-
jective comparison would clearly show that even
the so-called great apostle of evolution, Herbert
Spencer, walked but in the steps of this encyclo-
pedic idealist monist.

Hegel's dialectic was thus perpetually at war
with his system. This was the fatal flaw in hisi
monism. The real and the unreal can never be
combined into a system, any more than the some-
thing and nothing. The something is real, the
nothing is — nothing, is unreal. Being and think-
ing can be combined only by accepting them as
realities. The term " nothing " expresses merely
the abstract opposite of an imaginary absolute
something. It exists only in thought, it is
" pure " thought, which means that it is human
imagination misled by false logic. And if this ab-
stract nothing is used as a basis for a system of
philosophy, it leads to nothing, in other words, it
leaves the human understanding in the wilderness
without a guide.

So far as the Hegelian system is concerned, it
tells us, therefore, nothing about man, life and
their origins, which would improve in any way
the work of the ancient Grecian philosophers, the
English materialists and the natural philosophers

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

of the 1 9th century, such as Treviranus and
Lamarck, or which would even indicate the prog-
ress made by these men. Nor does it explain the
hidden springs of the human faculty of thought.
Even a metaphysical thinker like Leibniz, who
tried as hard as Spinoza to find a monistic clue
to the world, had given a better foundation for
the study of this faculty by suggesting that so-
called innate ideas might be acquired by the hered-
itary transmission of ideas derived from experi-
enced perceptions. And those who went back to
Kant for an improvement of the Hegelian system,
for instance Schopenhauer, landed logically in
the swamp of reactionary obscurantism. With
all its undeniable brilliancy, Hegelian idealist
monism was, therefore, a step away from a
scientific understanding of the world.

Not so the Hegelian dialectic. This method de-
veloped all the hidden value of the Kantian philos-
ophy. And when the Hegelian system failed, the
dialectic survived and prepared, with the down-
fall of idealist monism, the ascendency and vic-
tory of materialistic monism. Jt is the evolution-
ary thread, which runs through all of Hegel's
writings, that renders a study of his works bene-
ficial for the socialist thinker, who has learned to

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SCIENCE AND THE WORKING GLASS

cull the evolutionary kernel from the idealist
husks.

*****

XIV. SCIENCE AND THE WORKING CLASS

The immediate result of the critical study of
Hegelian philosophy in Germany was a fight of
the Young-Hegelians against the system of their
master. Among these progressive thinkers, the
most decisive contribution toward materialist
monism was to come from Friedrich Koeppen,
Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels.

The strength of Koeppen lay in his understand-
ing of history. The study of the official writers
of Prussia had opened his eyes to the unrelia-
bility of the academic historians, whose sole
sources of information were diplomatic documents
and police reports. He made himself conspicuous
by a very clever and clear description of the reign
of terror in the French revolution, by which he
demonstrated his faculty of selecting the most
significant and characteristic factors out of a mul-
titude of garbled and intentionally colored tra-
ditions. And he distinguished himself favorably

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

from the mass of the Young-Hegelians by ad-
mitting the value of the materialists of the i8th
century, although he objected to the " crude ma-
terialism " of a Holbach and Helvetius. Koep-
pen never divested himself fully of the bourgeois
psychology, but his historical talent proved to be
invaluable to Karl Marx, who was destined to be-
come the first scientific spokesman of the prole-
tarian revolution.

With the development of the German bour-
geoisie, and its repression by the feudal nobility,
the thinkers of the rising classes felt the need of
finding a philosophical expression for their his-
torical condition. In the minds of Bruno Bauer,
Koeppen and Marx, this longing for self-expres-
sion found vent in a study of self-consciousness.
Their starting point was Hegel's analysis of the
Grecian philosophy of consciousness, particularly
the development of self-consciousness in its rela-
tion to social consciousness, in the Sceptics, Epi-
cureans and Stoics. In the Sceptics, self-con-
sciousness had renounced all contact with the
world and retreated into itself. The Epicureans
had undertaken to show that the principle of in-
dividual consciousness was the compelling motive
of the universe. The Stoics, finally, had empha-
sized the interrelation of individual consciousness

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SCIENCE AND THE WORKING CLASS

with universal consciousness. Hegel had given
a philosophically obscure and historically weak
presentation of these three schools of Grecian
thought, and the idealist nature of his system had
impregnated his statements with a good deal of
reactionary sentiment. It was natural that his
revolutionary disciples should take particular of-
fense at this part of Hegelian philosophy and test
its soundness by probing deeper into the problem
of Grecian self-consciousness and social con-
sciousness.

The result of their studies was a peculiar con-
tribution on the part of each one of these three
Young-Hegelians to the problem of conscious-
ness. Koeppen illustrated the significance of the
three above-named Grecian schools by the con-
crete example of Frederick the Great. Bruno
Bauer was led from the study of these three
Grecian schools to a study of their influence on
the development of primitive Christian conscious-
ness in the Graeco-Roman world. This research
bore fruit in the shape of a destructive criticism
of the historical value of the four gospels. Bauer
struck orthodox theology to the heart by denying
that the gospel accounts were based on historical
facts and demonstrating conclusively that Chris-
tianity arose in the Roman empire as a product of

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

Grecian philosophy and Roman conditions. But
neither Koeppen nor Bauer were able to exert
a pregnant influence on the political conditions of
their country by means of practical conclusions
drawn from their studies.

Marx, on the other hand, probed deeper than
his two companions and became an epoch-making
historical" figure. He first of all set out on a
searching analysis of the three significant Gre-
cian schools of thought and studied their connec-
tion with the entire Grecian philosophy. He
graduated at the University of Berlin with a dis-
sertation on the difference between the philosophy
of Demokritos and Epicurus. And he came to
the conclusion that his purpose could not consist
in anything else but in stating religious and polit-
ical questions in their self-conscious human form.
Religion was the all-absorbing topic in those days
of political oppression, and a critique of religion
an indirect way of combatting all political re-
action. Marx was intimately familiar with the
works of Kant and Hegel, and went into a mi-
nute study of their proofs for the existence of a
God. The comical contradictions in those proofs
wrung from him the amused exclamation:
" What sort of clients are those, whom their own

110

SCIENCE AND THE WORKING CLASS

lawyer cannot save from execution in any other
way than by killing them himself ? "

It is out of such considerations as these that
Marx felt justified in declaring that religion " is
the self-consciousness of a human being that has
either not yet found itself or again lost itself.
* * * Religion is the sigh of the oppressed crea-
tures, the mind of a heartless world, the spirit of
spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the peo-
ple. * * * The abolition of religion as the
illusory happiness of the people signifies their
demand for real happiness. * * * The world
has long been dreaming of things and has but
to become conscious of them in order to possess
them. * * * Just as religion is the index of
the theoretical struggles of mankind, so
the political state is that of its practical
struggles. * * *"

The theological opponents of Marx are fond
of quoting the first part of these statements in
order to prove that " socialism is the enemy of
religion," but they are careful to omit the other
quotations, which demand that the professed prin-
ciples of religion should be applied in every day
human life.

The religious criticisms of the Young-Hegelians
were crowned by Ludwig Feuerbach's " Essence

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

of Christianity " and " Theses for a Reform of
Philosophy," by means of which he emancipated
himself and his fellow-radicals from the Hegelian
system. He declared point blank : The mystery
of God's nature illustrates nothing else but the
mystery of human nature. The various proofs
for the existence of a God are merely interesting
attempts of self-affirmation on the part of the
human being. The method of speculative philos-
ophy, which attempts to deduce concrete truths
from abstract generalizations, is fallacious.
Nothing can be obtained in this manner but a
realization of one's own abstractions. The mys-
tery of speculative philosophy finds its logical
champion in theology. Hegelian philosophy is
the last resort of theology. Whoever does not
abandon Hegelian philosophy, does not abandon
theology. Being is the true reality, and thinking
merely an attribute of being. Being is simply
the existence of nature. Empirical philosophy
and natural -science must go hand in hand.

Theoretically, Feuerbach had thus overcome
Hegelian idealism and become a materialist
philosopher. But when it came to a practical
application of his new understanding to social
problems, he balked at the logical progress implied
by his advance over Hegel and fell into mean-

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SCIENCE AND THE WORKING CLASS

ingless ethical generalizations of love. On this
field, Hegel himself had gone farther than his
revolutionary disciple. Feuerbach overcame the
natural and religious idealism of Hegel, but
failed to even suspect the meaning of the Hegel-
ian philosophy of state and law. When con-
fronted with the actual problems of social
evolution, he was as helpless as the French so-
cialists of the i8th century, who were masters of
philosophic criticism, but had nothing construc-
tive to offer save Utopian abstractions.

Marx, on his part, had arrived at an under-
standing of the deep and significant interrelation
between politics and philosophy. In Kant's
philosophy, Marx recognized the German theory
of the French revolution. And with a fine sense
of discrimination, he pointed out the real progress
of Hegel over Kant in sociology and history.
While Kant had still maintained the distinction
between privileged citizens of the state and un-
privileged members of society, Hegel regarded
the state as that great organism, in which every
human being should realize its legal, moral and
political liberty. And the dialectic process, as
outlined by Hegel, was praised by Marx as a
wonderful advance over the historical blindness
of Kant.

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

Marx, under these circumstances, did not stop
at the point where Bauer and Feuerbach had
rested in their advance. He pushed ahead with-
out them, and was gradually compelled, by the
exigencies of the political situation, to combat
them. In the endeavor to better understand the
relation of philosophy to politics, he first under-
took to submit the Hegelian legal philosophy to
his scrutiny, with a view of determining the rela-
tion of political freedom to human freedom.
He opened his critique with these words : " The
criticism of religion ended with the statement
that man is for man the highest being. This
is equivalent to the categorical imperative to
abolish all conditions in which man is a degraded,
oppressed, forsaken, despicable being." This
requires a political revolution. What are the
conditions under which such a revolution can
take place? In analyzing this problem, Marx
discovered that the conditions for such a revolu-
tion had not yet matured in Germany. But at the
same time, he answered the question in such a
way that it was solved for Germans as well as
for all other nationalities.

" In order that the revolution of a nation and
the emancipation of a definite class may coincide,
in order that one class may be the representative

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SCIENCE AND THE WORKING CLASS

of the entire nation, it is necessary that all short-
comings of society should be concentrated in an-
other class, * * * so that the emancipation
of this class may be equivalent to the emancipation
of humanity."

This class is the modern proletariat, recruited
mainly from the ranks of the disintegrating mid-
dle class and the different strata of the precap-
italist working class. This proletariat will find
its intellectual weapons in philosophy. " Philos-
ophy cannot be realized without the abolition of
the proletariat, the proletariat cannot emancipate
itself without realizing philosophy."

This philosophical affirmation of the class strug-
gle was followed by a philosophical synopsis of
its historical mission. Bauer had declared that
the solution of the " Jewish question " was iden-
tical with that of the emancipation of mankind
from religion. Marx denied this and pointed out
that the question of the relation of religion to
politics was different from that of political to
human freedom. Even with the greatest amount
of political freedom possible in a bourgeois repub-
lic, the people might still be enthralled in religious
superstitions. Political emancipation is not iden-
tical with emancipation from religious dualism.
Exceptionally, the struggle for political emanci-

115

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

pation may coincide with the struggle for emanci-
pation from religion, as it did during a certain
period of the French revolution. But so long as
the bourgeoisie is the ruling class, this can occur
only by antagonizing the conditions of its own
existence, and must, therefore, result sooner or
later in a rehabilitation of religion.

Marx was incidentally led to a searching criti-
cism of the natural rights doctrine and found
that the so-called inalienable human rights were
nothing but an expression of bourgeois individ-
uality resting on an advocacy of private property
and individualism. " Not until the real indi-
vidual man discards the abstract citizen of the
state and realizes that he, as an individual, in his
actual life, his individual work, his individual
relations, is a generic being, not until man has
organized his individual powers into social pow-
ers, will human emancipation be accomplished."

It was this identical conclusion at which Fried-
rich Engels had likewise arrived in the meantime,
and which he expressed in these words, in a pre-
liminary critique of political economy : " Pro-
duce consciously, as human beings, not as separate
atoms without any generic consciousness, and you
will have overcome all artificial and untenable
contradictions ! " And with almost the same

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SCIENCE AND THE WORKING CLASS

words as Marx, Engels summed up his con-
clusions relative to religion by declaring that
" man lost in religion his own nature, divested
himself of his manhood. Now that religion has
lost its hold on the human mind through his-
torical development, man becomes aware of the
void in him and of his lack of support. There is
no other salvation for him, if he wishes to regain
his manhood, than to thoroughly overcome all
religious ideas and return sincerely, not to ' God,'
but to himself."

Engels, although not on such intimately per-
sonal terms with the historically significant
Young-Hegelians as Marx, had likewise taken
his departure from Hegel's dialectic. He had
then studied Bauer's conception of self -conscious-
ness and Feuerbach's humanitarianism, and
pushed on beyond them in search of a fuller
understanding of the Grecian natural philoso-
phers. He became aware of the great historical
value of the ancient natural philosophy. Realiz-
ing that it contained much fantastic by-work, he
nevertheless understood that it was the forerunner
of a scientific theory of evolution. On the other
hand, he did not fall into the mistake of those
purely empirical scientists, who snubbed Hegel
for his idealism and pretended to have explained

117

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

all unknown phenomena by attributing them to
some force or to some substance.

Thanks to this scientific application of dialectic
reasoning, at which Engels and Marx arrived in-
dependently of one another, they were spared the
mistakes of the other Young-Hegelians and the
aimless wanderings of the bourgeois scientists and
philosophers after them. It was due to the mis-
erable political conditions of Germany that both
of them applied their philosophical minds, not
to purely academic studies, but to a deeper pene-
tration of the sociological problems which con-
fronted them. Marx took up the study of the
French, Engels that of the English socialists. A
comprehensive grasp of history, economics, phi-
losophy and natural science was the result.
Marx was the first to bring order out of that
tangle of blunders known as political economy.
Thanks to him, we have a complete survey of
the evolution of economics as a science from
Aristotle down to Petty, North, Locke, Hume,
Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Quesnay.

The central fact, which impressed itself
especially on Marx, was that " legal relations and
state institutions can neither be understood of
themselves, nor as results of the so-called general
development of the human mind, but that, they are

118

SCIENCE AND THE WORKING CLASS

rooted in those material conditions of life which
Hegel, following the example of the English and
French of the i8th century, comprises under the
name of bourgeois society; that, on the other
hand, the anatomy of bourgeois society must be
sought in political economy." This led him to
the logical conclusion that " the mode of produc-
tion of the material requirements of life deter-
mines the general character of the social, political
and spiritual processes of life. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their exist-
ence, but, on the contrary, their social existence
determines their consciousness. At a certain
stage of their development, the material forces
of production in society come in conflict with
the existing relations of production, or, what is
but a legal expression for the same thing, with
the property relations within which they had
been at work heretofore. From forms of devel-
opment of the forces of production, these relations
turn into their fetters. Then follows a period
of social revolution."

These are the terms in which Marx formulated
his conception of history in his introduction to
his " Critique of Political Economy," published in
1859. But when he met Engels in 1845 f°r the
purpose of permanent association with him, he

119

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

had it already worked out in almost the same
terms. Engels eagerly assented to this new and
startling theory of history, which he had himself
approached in his " Condition of the Working
Class in England in 1844." Henceforth these
two thinkers worked side by side in a fraternal
co-operation never equaled before or after them.
And as the first emphatic declaration of the fact
that from now on philosophy, science and the
proletariat were united for the conquest of so-
ciety, and that no science could be monistic with-
out this combination, they flung the gage of battle
into the teeth of the bourgeois world in their
" Communist Manifesto," published in 1848.
Never before had the theory of social evolution
been stated in such consistently monist materialist
terms as in that immortal document.

Its fundamental proposition, as summed up
later on by Engels, is that " in every historical
epoch, the prevailing mode of economic produc-
tion and exchange, and the social organization
necessarily following from it, form the basis upon
which is built up, and from which alone can be
explained, the political and intellectual history of
that epoch; that consequently the whole history
of mankind, since the dissolution of primitive
tribal society, holding land in common owner-

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SCIENCE AND THE WORKING CLASS

ship, has been a history of class struggles, con-
tests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and
oppressed classes ; that the history of these class-
struggles forms a series of evolution in which,
nowadays, a stage has been reached, where the
exploited and oppressed class, the proletariat, can-
not attain its emancipation from the sway of the
exploiting and ruling class, the bourgeoisie, with-
out at the same time, and once for all, emancipat-
ing society at large from all exploitation,
oppression, class distinctions and class struggles."
The great problem of philosophy, the relation
of thinking and being, was thus stated with re-
gard to the human race in a dialectic and monistic
way on a materialist basis. For the first time man
understood clearly whence ideal forces come and
whither they are tending. Human emancipation
appeared no longer as the work of some future
inspired savior, but as a historical process, whose
trend was known and could be controlled by the
conscious action of a historically generated class.
As Engels stated later in his " Feuerbach " :
" The realities of the outer world impress them-
selves upon the brain of man, reflect themselves
there, as feelings, thoughts, impulses, volitions,
in short as ideal tendencies, and in this form
become ideal forces."

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

The compelling motive for the ideal aims of the
proletariat is the class struggle. The evolution
of capitalist production determines the form and
trend of this class struggle. And the slogan of
the revolutionary proletariat is henceforth no
longer " Lord help us ! " but " Proletarians of all
countries, unite ! "

In 1848, it was only a small group of proleta-
rians who responded to this cry. The hour for
the realization of the proletarian revolution had
not yet come. This revolution flared up in a few
fitful outbreaks, and then settled down to its
logical historical course. But a few far-seeing
men welcomed the new message with enthusiasm
and devoted themselves to its propagation in the
spirit of its authors.

One of the first to realize the importance of
'the Marxian theories was Ferdinand Lassalle, a
German lawyer, who, significantly enough, had
also oriented himself first by a study of the
Grecian philosophers. He hailed Marx as a
" socialist Ricardo and an economist Hegel," and
sprang into the political arena of Germany with
all the impetuousness of youth, to carry these
theories into practice and realize the union be-
tween science and the working class. His " Open
Letter," written in reply to a request for informa-

SCIENCE AND THE WORKING CLASS

tion to a group of German workingmen, led to
the organization, on May 23, 1863, at Leipsic,
of the " Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein"
(General Association of German Workingmen),
the nucleus of the International Socialist Party,
which is destined to fulfill the mission of the
modern proletariat.

When the first proletarian revolts had ended in
the supremacy of the capitalist class, and the his-
torical course of capitalist development was fully
understood by the proletarian thinkers, they set-
tled down to a careful elaboration of the in-
tellectual weapons of the proletarian advance.
The crowning outcome of these labors was that
series of writings by Marx and Engels, which
became the scientific fundament of the inter-
national party of the working class. The fore-
most of these works is Marx's " Capital," which
revolutionized political economy through his the-
ory of surplus-value, bridged the chasm between
economics and politics, gave an outline of the
past, present and future development of capitalist
production, and thus opened an impassable chasm
between bourgeois and proletarian science. Its
first volume appeared in July, 1867.

It awakened a loud echo in the breast of a
German tanner, who had found the way out of

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

the labyrinth of bourgeois thought independently
of Marx and Engels, by self-study. This man
was Josef Dietzgen, who wrote to Marx on No-
vember 7, 1867 : " You have expressed for the
first time in a clear, resistless, scientific form
what will be from now on the conscious tendency
of historical development, namely, to subordinate
the hitherto blind forces of the process of pro-
duction to human consciousness."

Dietzgen was a natural philosopher in the true
sense of the word. He realized that the Marxian
conception of history stated a truth which, in its
logical bearing, extended far beyond the sphere
of mere social evolution. If the materialist con-
ception of history claimed that material conditions
shape human thought, then it was the task of the
proletarian thinker to demonstrate, by what means
material conditions were converted into human
thought. And if this process was a historical
evolution, then it devolved upon the proletarian
thinker to show by what processes the evolution
of the universe resulted in the development of
the faculty of human thought and how this in-
strument of understanding did its work.

Dietzgen, therefore, wrote in the above letter
to Marx: "The fundament of all science con-
sists in the understanding of the thinking process.

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SCIENCE AND THE WORKING CLASS

Thinking means to develop from the material
facts, from the concrete, an abstract generaliza-
tion. The material fact is an indispensable basis
of thought. It must be present, before the
essence, the general, or abstract, can be found.
The understanding of this fact contains the solu-
tion of all scientific riddles."

This was, indeed, the crucial point, without
which the materialist conception lacked complete-
ness. Without it, the building of materialist
monism would have been imperfect. True, Marx
and Engels were able to show by the data of
history itself that material conditions have always
shaped human thought, which resulted in his-
torical events. But not until Dietzgen had shown
that the human mind itself was a product of that
greater historical process, of which human his-
tory is but a small part, the cosmic process, and
that the human faculty of thought produced its
thoughts by means of the natural environment,
was the historical materialism of Marx fully ex-
plained and the riddle of the universe solved so
far as human thought processes were concerned.

This was done for the first time in Dietzgen's
" The Nature of Human Brain Work," published
in 1869.

With this work, the socialist philosophy com-

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

pleted in bold outlines a consistent materialist
monist conception of the world, which was un-
compromisingly arrayed against all bourgeois
philosophy and science, because it rested for its
realization on the proletarian revolution. And
the test of its monism is found in the fact that
none of the shining lights of bourgeois philosophy
and science, with the exception of Alfred Russell
Wallace, has since worked his way upward to a
frank avowal of the historical connection of the
proletariat with such a materialist monist concep-
tion of the world. We shall presently see that
even the clearest thinkers of the bourgeoisie
either denied or ignored this connection, or, if its
inevitableness dawned upon them, that they be-
wailed it as auguring the destruction of all " civ-
ilization."

But the proletarian thinkers are calmly going
their historical way, just as the proletarian revolu-
tion is doing. The socialist philosophy, with the
founder of scientific socialism, can afford to adopt
the motto of Dante : " Segui il tuo corso, e lascia
dir le genii" — Follow your course, and let the
people talk.

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XV. THE OFFSPRING OF SCIENCE AND NAT-
URAL PHILOSOPHY

Materialist monism had enabled Marx, Engels,
and Dietzgen to find a general key for the solution
of all the riddles of the universe by means of
inductive reasoning from experienced facts. The
conscious and consistent application of this
method on the part of Marx and Engels permitted
them to realize the general evolution of nature
and society by dialectic processes, to make a
scientific forecast of industrial and political evolu-
tion, and to lay bare the mechanism of social
evolution under capitalism by the discovery of
the origin of surplus-value and the function of
class-struggles. In the hands of Dietzgen, the
same method produced a theory of understand-
ing which established harmony between the hu-
man mind and the universe and solved all the
difficulties, which had been the stumbling blocks
of scholastic and metaphysical philosophy for
centuries, and which have remained insuperable
obstacles for nearly every bourgeois scientist and
philosopher until this day.

The vital truth and strength of dialectic ma-
terialism was quickly demonstrated by the fact

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that this philosophy became the accepted guide
of millions of proletarians in all countries, who
organized themselves for conscious co-operation
in line with evolution. The bourgeois world,
ignorant of the historical necessity of this new
world-movement and its materialist monist phi
losophy, continued its heedless and headlong
course of individualistic anarchy in thought and
action. And when the new movement began to
show its power and urge an organization of
social life in accord with higher evolution, the
bourgeoisie opposed it with might and main as a
danger to " law and order."

But the bourgeois scientists more or less con-
sciously carried the method of dialectic mate-
rialism gradually into almost every department of
their science. In the last half of the I9th
century, the Marxian method was frequently
plagiarized by bourgeois professors, especially in
the field of sociology, economics, and history, with
the full knowledge of its original authorship and
with the intention of robbing its author of his
credit. But not one of the bourgeois plagiarizers
or commentators equaled the proletarian mas-
ters who had made a new departure in those
sciences.

In other sciences, especially in biology, phys-

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iology, psychology, physics and chemistry, the
combination of the dialectic method with science
and natural philosophy led to a universal cor-
roboration of the general conclusions established
by Marx, Engels, and Dietzgen. In the course
of the i Qth century, nearly every science gradually
made front against metaphysical dualism and
worked its way towards materialist monism.
But while the proletarian mind pursued its steady
and conscious course along a consistent materialist
monist road, the bourgeois mind never succeeded
in fully divesting itself of metaphysical relics.
Its class-environment proved too great a handicap
for a complete emancipation from all vestiges of
metaphysics.

In the beginning of the igth century, the
microscope began to exert its influence on phi-
losophy by a succession of discoveries, which en-
abled scientists to abandon speculation for facts.
The beginnings of the cell-theory, established by
Grew in his " Anatomy of Plants," and the first
description of the cell-nucleus by R. Brown, in
the i /th century, now bore unexpected fruits.
Schwann and Schleiden showed that all organic
structures are built up of cells, and Van Mohl
described a certain substance which forms the
lining of cells and called it protoplasm. No one

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realized as yet, that the essential basis for a
mechanical explanation of life had thus been dis-
covered.

But the microscope gave rise to an entirely
new science, histology, the study of the micro-
scopical structure of animal and plant tissue.
Specialization became more and more an indis-
pensable necessity for thorough research, and with
the multiplication of special departments the need
of correlation by means of philosophical gener-
alization grew apace. Specialist science and
natural philosophy thus became more and more
indispensable to one another.

From the study of structure to that of function
was the next logical step. Thus dialectics in-
evitably accompanied the new evolution of things
in science.

As soon as this stage had been inaugurated,
the battle against metaphysics and the survivals of
Mosaic philosophy in natural science began to
rage all along the line. Vitalism was compelled
to reorganize its lines, even though no consistent
theory of vital evolution had then become known.
In 1833, Johannes Miiller attempted to give a
physical basis to this metaphysical theory, by
comparing the physical processes in animals and
man, in his " Handbook of the Physiology of

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Man." But this work was indirectly a proof of
the untenability of the vitalist metaphysics. In
spite of the dogged resistance of the old theories,
the cell and protoplasm made themselves at home
in the studies of bourgeois scientists, and pro-
duced in Virchow's " Cellular Pathology " a. new
departure in the study and treatment of diseases.

This was the time of physiological anatomy,
and the work of Miiller, Briicke, Helmholtz, du
Bois-Reymond, and Ludwig in Germany, and of
Claude Bernard in France, became the basis on
which their pupils in those two countries, and in
England, America, Denmark, Sweden, Italy and
Japan, built up the structure of modern phys-
iology. In the course of this development, labo-
ratories became a part of every well-equipped
school and university.

Chemistry soon took part in this revolution and
began to reproduce, by simple laboratory methods,
many of the compounds which had been regarded
as special products of a supernatural vital energy.
Berthelot emphasized the growth of the tendency
toward a uniform scientific method of research
by declaring in his " Mechanique Chimique," that
he intended to " introduce into the entire chem-
istry the same mechanical principles which al-

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ready reign in the various departments of
physics."

In 1846, Lever rier and Adams simultaneously
and independently of one another discovered the
planet Neptune, and thereby reminded the scien-
tists of the vast universe outside of their little
specialties. This discovery was a new triumph
for empirical science and another blow for revela-
tion and metaphysics. For the existence of this
planet had been proclaimed by mathematical
astronomy long before it was actually observed
by human eyes, and reactionary mysticism had, of
course, scoffed at such " daring blasphemy."

Researches concerning the function of elec-
tricity, magnetism, and light became more fre-
quent, but led to no definite results until the latter
half of the iQth century. In 1864, Clerk-Max-
well announced his electro-magnetic theory of
light, but it was not until 1887, that Hertz dem-
onstrated the actual existence of electric waves in
the ether. In 1881, J. J. Thompson established
the basis of the electro-dynamic theory, and in
1888, William Crookes advocated the theory of
the formation of chemical elements from one pri-
mordial substance. He spoke of an " infinite
number of immeasurably small ultimate — or
rather ultimatissimate — particles gradually ac-

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creting out of the formless mist and moving with
inconceivable velocity in all directions." Thus
the 1 9th century reaffirmed on a more infinitesimal
and refined scale the atomic theory of Demokri-
tos.

With the steady progress of this new tendency,
Lamarckian ideas gained more and more favor
in the eyes of the younger generation of scien-
tists and found two able champions, about the
middle of the I9th century, in Alfred R. Wallace
and Charles Darwin. In 1859, Darwin's " Origin
of Species " carried fresh dismay into the ranks
of metaphysics and theology. Here was the
irrefutable proof that Lamarck's ideas of descent
and heredity were upheld by the facts of nature
as occurring before our eyes in animals and plants.
And in addition to these irrefutable facts, Dar-
win laid bare the mechanism by which natural
evolution produced the various animal and plant
species, which had so long been claimed as special
creations. Without any guiding intellect, with-
out any preconceived purpose, by an apparently
fortuitous natural selection, which, however, was
the product of forces mutually controlling one
another, nature was seen to produce its variety
of forms by incessant interaction of forces, by a
struggle of all organic forms against one another

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and their environment, leading to the survival of
those which were best equipped for this struggle
by superior powers of adaptation to the conditions
surrounding them. These produced an offspring
well adapted to continue the struggle under the
same conditions and in their turn to transmit their
qualities to their progeny by means of heredity,
while the organisms not well adapted to their
conditions of life were eliminated from the line
of evolution.

One of the most significant results of this trans-
formist theory was that it wiped out the line of
demarcation, not only between the various
animal species, but also between animals and
plants. In his first work, Darwin had left the
question of man's descent open, from considera-
tions of expediency. But when Wallace, Huxley,
Haeckel, and others showed that " in every vis-
ible character, man differs less from the higher
apes than these do from the lower members of
the same order," Darwin assented and came forth
with his " Descent of Man," in which he indicated
the evolution of man and the anthropoid apes
from a common man-like ancestor.

Simultaneously with Wallace and Darwin, Her-
bert Spencer appeared upon the scene, supple-
menting and perfecting their work by a complete

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elaboration of the theory of organic evolution
and tracing the struggle for existence through all
its manifold aspects. In his " First Principles,"
he stated the general outline of the universal
theory. In his " Principles of Biology," he ap-
plied it to the life of organisms. In his " Prin-
ciples of Psychology," he furnished a compre-
hensive summary of the results of physiological
psychology. And in his " Principles of Socio-
logy," he presented the relations of this theory,
as he understood it, to human society, activity,
and ideas in general. Although we are far from
agreeing with Spencer on all points, as we shall
presently show, we have no hesitation in saying
that Spencer's works rank as high in the evolu-
tion of materialism, as Hegel's do in idealism.
The "Synthetic Philosophy " will always hold its
place among the great works of the world.

In Darwin, Wallace, and- Spencer, dialectic
materialism erected on English soil a landmark
of its progress over speculative idealism. Al-
though the dogmatism and bigotry of the entire
reactionary world united in a furious assault upon
their work, not one of their fundamental stones
in the structure of evolution was injured by the
attack. Metaphysics and theology had no weap-

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ons with which to defeat their materialist an-
tagonist in open battle.

Vainly did Agassiz try to save personal creation
and fixed species by his " Essay on Classification."
Vainly did the most reactionary of churches set
its learned men to work forging arguments
against Lamarckian, Darwinian, and Spencerian
trans formism. Instead of defeating the new
ideas, even the Jesuit scientists that had not quite
degenerated in spiritual obesity from lack of ex-
ercise of their reason became gradually " tainted "
with transformist ideas, and finally the church
itself sanctioned the greater part of the new ideas
as divine creations and, as usual, sought to ruin
by adoption what it could not conquer by force.
And the palaeontological work of Agassiz himself
compelled him to proclaim the fact of progressive
changes in the organisms of each successive geo-
logical epoch.

By tracing the descent of man below the
primates, the question of the evolution of man
was not fully solved. It was merely stated in its
correct form, and science could not rest satisfied
and regard the Darwinian theories as proven,
until it had located the transition forms between
the common primeval ancestor of man and an-
thropoid apes and then followed the line of

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evolution as far back through the lower animals
as human faculties would permit. It was
palaeontology, embryology, comparative physiol-
ogy, and histology that became the most convinc-
ing witnesses for the mechanical origin and
development of organisms. In the Neanderthal
man, the Spy man, the Krapina man, and the
Pithecanthropus of Trinil, palaeontology supplied
one by one the missing links between man, the.
anthropoid apes, and their primitive common an-
cestor. At the same time, it gathered the proofs
of the existence of similar types in the Tertiary
age. Haeckel formulated his biogenetic law,
which revealed the fact that individual develop-
ment is a condensed repetition of the race devel-
opment, and that the embryos and newborn
individuals resemble their ancestral types more
closely than the adult parents. Then came
Behring with his discovery that blood serum of
horses treated with poison of diphtheria bacilli
was an antidote and preventive of diphtheria,
and Uhlenhuth found that blood transfusion fur-
nished an infallible test for the close or remote
relationship of animals. Uhlenhuth, Wasser-
mann, Stern, Friedenthal, and Nuttall continued
these experiments and proved the blood relation-
ship of man and the anthropoid apes.

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In therapeutics and pathology, similar experi-
ments led to the introduction, by Koch, Pasteur,
and others, of serous treatment, and the advance
of chemistry supplied anaesthetics for surgical
operations and robbed pain of its victims.

Comparative physiology, assisted by the bio-
genetic law and palaeontology, gradually traced
the evolution of man from the common ancestor
of man and primates down through some primi-
tive species of lemurs (night monkeys), thence on
through marsupials, duckbills, saurians, fishes, to
ascidians. Then Haeckel advanced his gastrula
theory and divided the lowest organisms into
unicellular protozoa and protophyta, and multi-
cellular metazoa and metaphyta, bringing the,
descent of man down to some primordial common
protist ancestor of animals and plants.

In Haeckel's " New History of Creation " and
Bcelsche's " Evolution of Man," the whole thread
of evolution from the unicellular protoplasm to
modern man is outlined so plainly, that we can
follow it from natural specimen to natural speci-
men and convince ourselves by a visit to any
well-equipped museum of natural history of the
reality of this outline.

In the sixties, Kirchhoff and Bunsen discov-
ered spectral analysis and thus furnished science

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with another revolutionary instrument, by which
the unity of the farthest fixed star with the rest
of the universe was irrefutably demonstrated.
Ethnology, anthropology, and the comparative
study of languages clearly established the unity
of the human race. Natural science dominated
all human thought and even found its way into
political history in Buckle's " History of Civiliza-
tion."

Once that the unity of all organisms in the
world had been established, two questions im-
mediately required an answer. One of them
concerned the unity of psychological phenomena,
the other that of life.

If the physiological development of mankind,
animals, and plants knows no line of demarca-
tion, but only degrees of organization, and if
psychology is in reality a branch of physiology,
why should there be a line of demarcation be-
tween the psychological development of man,
animals, and plants? And if all organisms are
descended from some common primordial proto-
plasmatic form, then the discovery of the origin
of the vital processes of that form, or of any
form, would solve the question of all organic life
in the universe.

The answer of science to both questions was

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positive. Romanes, Haeckel, and Jacques Loeb
accumulated superabundant proofs for the physi-
ological nature of the " soul " and the funda-
mental unity of the " soul " life of all organisms.
The line of demarcation was gradually wiped
out between mankind, animals, and plants, also
in psychology.

Romanes, in his " Mental Evolution of Ani-
mals and Man," pictured the growth of the
" soul " from primitive beginnings to its present
superb organization in the brain and nerve sys-
tem of man. Haeckel in his " Soul Cells and
Cell-Souls," demonstrated that the fundamental
conditions of " soul " life were contained in every
cell, whether it was a human, animal, or plant
cell. And Loeb showed convincingly that so-
called intelligent or instinctive action does not
depend on a supernatural, or even natural, cen-
ter of orientation or control, but on chemical
and physical interactions between the environ-
ment and the individual. The attraction toward
the earth (geotropism), toward the light (helio-
tropism), toward solid bodies (stereotropism),
and similar movements, in connection with elec-
tricity, magnetism, radiation, and chemico-phys-
ical changes in the organism, explained all the
intricate " soul " processes formerly attributed

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to supernatural intelligence or animal instinct.
Hereditary transmission by means of simple
natural processes in connection with use or dis-
use, produced the faculty of conscious memory in
the higher organisms and led by imperceptible
stages of gradation to the superior mind of man.
The primitive line of psychic development has
been outlined in popular language in France's
" Germs of Mind in Plants."

The quest after the origin of life compelled
science to penetrate far beyond so-called living
organisms. It led on into the inorganic, and
wiped out the line of demarcation between or-
ganic and inorganic, living and dead matter. It
showed that organic life arose through the me-
chanical evolution of inorganic life. It revealed
that life and death are but two poles of the
same universe, that the distinction can no longer
be between life and death, but only between dif-
ferent degrees of organization and intensity of
life, between positive and negative life.

Personal immortality now resolves itself into
personal evolution. Life and consciousness are
now revealed as attributes of all matter, going
through as many different stages of evolution as
the various material forms in the universe. The
personal immortality of any definite form would

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involve the control of all evolutionary processes
which endanger the persistence of that form.
So long as such a control is not established,
there is a " transmigration of the soul," but not
in the way that the mystics use this term. The
physiological processes of a certain positive con-
sciousness, or " soul," are converted by the proc-
ess of " death," into negative consciousness,
which in turn becomes the positive consciousness
of some other form.

With Haeckel and Jacques Loeb, a school of
biologists has arisen, which marks a new stage
in the revolution of the ideas concerning life
and consciousness. This school has made the
first steps toward a conscious control of the
processes of life and consciousness, and the ques-
tion of the control of these processes is within
measurable distance of solution by means of
laboratory methods. Loeb's works on tropisms
and his " Comparative Physiology of the Brain
and Comparative Psychology " are indispensable
textbooks for every sincere student of materialist
monism.

Other sciences have likewise gone far on the
road toward a conscious control of universal
processes. Liebig's commercial chemistry inaug-
urated the realization of Berthelot's dream,

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who looked forward to a time when all human
food stuffs would be prepared in the laboratory
and the drudgery of industrial and agricultural
labor eliminated. A new impetus was given to
electric vacuum work in 1893-95 by *ne publica-
tion in Germany of the results of experiments
made by Lenard and Rontgen, showing that cer-
tain rays of light, invisible to the human eye,
penetrated substances, which had been considered
impenetrable for light of any kind, and affected
photographic plates. And in 1896, Becquerel,
experimenting in France with phenomena of
phosphorescence, showed that salts of uranium
emit radiations which penetrate opaque bodies,
affect photographic plates, and discharge an elec-
trometer. Following close upon Becquerel's dis-
coveries came the brilliant work of Mr. and Mrs.
Curie on the radio-activity of bodies accompany-
ing uranium (radium and helium).

Edison's phonograph, Marconi's and Tesla's
experiments with wireless telegraphy, liquid air,
the transmission of power by means of water-
falls or tides of the oceans, sun-motors, airships,
color-photography, the ultra-microscope, and sim-
ilar discoveries and inventions, augur an
impending revolution in methods of industrial
activity, reducing the element of distance to a

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minimum, transforming manual labor into a su-
perintendence of machines, and narrowing the
domain of disease and death. Everywhere we
see the coming of that conscious control of ele-
ments which Marx has foretold.

But here, where natural science touches elbows
with social science, even the clearest of the bour-
geois thinkers bears evidence to the force of
environment by falling short of a complete mo-
nistic conception of evolution. For such a con-
ception foreshadows the abolition of the ruling
classes and the control of society by the working
class. Even the most encyclopedic mind among
the bourgeois transformists, the avatar of evolu-
tion, as he has been called, Herbert Spencer,
admitted but grudgingly that the evolution of
society tended inevitably toward socialism. And
so enveloped was he in the prejudices of bour-
geois individualism, in spite of his understanding
of the trend toward socialization, in spite of the
eloquent language of dialectic evolution which
through his own mouth heralded the conscious
interrelation of things, that he completely mis-
apprehended the effects of the socialization and
democratization of industry and bemoaned the
sad fate of humanity under the " coming slavery."
In ethics, his bourgeois horizon likewise did not

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permit him to arrive at a dialectic solution. He
could not reconcile his biological and social ethics
with his idea of the coming slavery.

The same criticism applies to Haeckel, who in
many respects equals Spencer' in his conception
of evolution. Haeckel's monism is not free from
class bias and metaphysical vestiges. He inter-
preted the struggle for existence with regard to
man as an aristocratic principle, resulting in the
selection of "the best," and declared that the
" crazy ideas " of the socialists had nothing to
do with Darwinism. Forty years of socialist lit-
erature and activity in Germany have made little
change in his opinions on this point. He has
never realized that the struggle of man against
nature is accompanied by the struggle of eco-
nomic classes, and that the modern class-struggle
between the working class and the capitalist class
is a democratic principle, resulting in the cr -uri-
zation of a new social environment, in \v1
struggle of classes shall be eliminated, and man
unite all his social and individual forces for the
struggle against nature. In his ethics he is as
vague as Spencer, unab1e to reconcile his bin
ical understanding of the physical bisi? '
with his views on sociology.

The logical result of this class bias is that

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

notwithstanding all the efforts of Haeckel and
others to establish a perfect monism, they are
unable to escape from the contradictions inherent
in the historical myopia of the bourgeoisie.
Haeckel's works on monism, such as the " Riddle
of the Universe," " Monism," or " The Wonders
of Life," are sadly disfigured by sudden relapses
into metaphysical language and thought The
same incongruities also vitiate the scientific dis-
cussions of bourgeois Darwinians, whenever the
subject calls for an understanding of the dialectic
nature of evolution, more especially for an un-
derstanding of the peculiar nature of the human
faculty of thought. The discussion of the con-
tinuity of the germ plasm and the transmission of
hereditary characters by natural selection through
the sole agency of this plasm in multicellular
organisms, as advocated by Weismann, or of the
mutation theory of De Vries, who tries to ex-
plain the sudden appearance of new varieties by
the peculiar laws of crossing, would have pro-
duced far better results, if the bourgeois scientists
could have agreed on a consistent understanding
of " natural selection," and if they could have
risen sufficiently above their environment to
grasp the full significance of materialist monism
as revealed by Dietzgen's theory of understand-

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ing. As it is, they onesidedly emphasize now
this, now that, forgetting the wider interrelations
of their subject, and this little shortcoming de-
feats all their efforts to disentangle themselves
from the difficulties of their semi-metaphysical
mode of reasoning. The tangle in the details
of Darwinism and Spencerianism will not be
straightened out, until a socialist Darwinian will
bring order out of this chaos, as Marx did out
of bourgeois political economy.

This bourgeois handicap becomes especially ap-
parent, whenever the practical application of
scientific understanding comes into conflict with
the business organization of bourgeois society. A
drastic illustration of this fact is furnished by
the attempt to reform the department of crimi-
nology and introduce evolutionary methods into
the treatment of the insane. When the revolution
in psychology demanded a revision of the ideas
concerning the free will and personal responsi-
bility of criminals, the bourgeois criminologists
made vain efforts to bring their criminal codes
into accord with the new facts without under-
mining their own juridical foundation. This be-
came especially plain in Italy, where the ideas of
Beccaria acted as a ferment and led to the rise
of the so-called positive school of criminology,

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in the last quarter of the iQth century. Carrara,
Pessina, and even Lombroso, strove vainly to
overcome bourgeois environment by radical bour-
geois criminology. They did not get farther
away from medieval methods and mass em-
prisonment than an imitation of the American
system of solitary confinement would permit, with
its corollary of sham justice. And they gave up
in despair the attempt to find the dividing line
between conscious and unconscious action, be-
tween completed and incompleted crime. It was
not until Lombroso's disciple, Enrico Ferri,
found his way into the field of historical ma-
terialism and socialism, that the positive school
of criminology was enabled to teach a monistic
and evolutionary solution for the vexed question
of social crime, by demanding the social preven-
tion of crime instead of police repression. But
Ferri does not indulge in any illusions as to the
revolutionary role which the bourgeoisie may
play in this question. He understands that the
evolution into socialism is the only means of real-
izing his demand. His " Socialism and Crim-
inality " and " Socialism and Modern Science "
are gems of dialectic and monistic materialism.

It is a significant fact that not one of the
numerous textbooks on psychology written by

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bourgeois professors for the use of universities
takes frankly issue with the metaphysical rubbish
of pseudo-science and espouses uncompromis-
ingly the cause of materialist monism. And this
is so for the same reason that no bourgeois pro-
fessor teaches the Marxian theory of surplus-
value and accepts its logical conclusions. The
same reason prevents bourgeois Darwinians from
accepting the facts of socialism. Darwin was
at least honest enough to admit that he had not
studied sociology and did not consider himself
competent to judge of the merits of Marx's
" Capital." But the modern Darwinians are not
so modest. They ridicule the socialist philosophy
before they have studied it. On the other hand,
every socialist writer of note is a convinced
Darwinian and Spencerian besides being a con-
vinced Marxian. For this reason, the socialist
Darwinians are alone able to reason in a con-
sistent materialist monist way.

When, in 1877, Lewis H. Morgan appeared
with his main work, " Ancient Society," in which
he demonstrated the blindness of his predeces-
sors, Bachofen and McLennan, in the field of
anthropology and disclosed the true nature of
the primitive sexual organizations, it was the
socialist Engels who rescued Morgan's work

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from oblivion and applied the new discoveries of
Morgan concerning these primitive " gentes "
with telling effect to further historical research.
In Engels' " The Origin of the Family, Private
Property, and the State," the connection between
the dissolution of the primitive sex-organizations
and the rise of private ownership of the essential
means of production was laid bare, and the origin
of the modern state as a result of this process
clearly proven. And the socialist Cunow, in his
" Sex-Organizations of Australian Aborigines,"
supplemented and perfected Morgan's work by
additional studies.

Again, when bourgeois female emancipation
started its planless crusade and hoped for the
support of the equally planless bourgeois science,
it was the socialist Bebel, who in his " Women
in the Past, Present, and Future," demonstrated
the weakness of bourgeois science and reminded
bourgeois women that female emancipation was
a process of evolution and could be accomplished
only through the proletarian class-struggle.

And finally, when the bourgeois psychologists
kept turning around their own axis in the vain
endeavor to find a monistic formulation for the
new psychological facts, it was the socialist En-
gels, who in his " Anti-Diihring " showed that

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the dialectic process pervaded society and nature,
and the socialist Josef Dietzgen, who in his
' Outcome of Philosophy " perfected his mate-
rialist monism by demonstrating that the universe
is an organism and the infinite cause and effect
of everything, including itself and the human
faculty of thought, or " soul."

But bourgeois minds will as soon accept the
socialist philosophy as a camel will go through
a needle's eye, or a rich man go to jail. So the
bourgeois science gropes along as best it may
in its half-hearted monism which is not monism,
continues the fruitless discussion of semi-meta-
physical functions, forces, or faculties, and leaves
much room for the speculations of pseudo-scien-
tific occultism. With functions, forces, and fac-
ulties, all manner of miracles are performed by
spiritualists, mental scientists, theosophists, and
other votaries of the mystic. But what do these
terms signify? What is, for instance, the faculty
(function, force) of thought?

Labor is a function of labor-power. Labor-
power is the latent (potential) energy of the
human body, and it performs its function by
converting this potential energy into kinetic en-
ergy, or motion. Quite analogically, thinking is
a function of the faculty of thought. This fac-

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ulty is the labor-power of the human brain, the
latent energy of the protoplasmatic system of the
human body. The brain performs its function
by converting its latent energy into motion, or
thought, in response to all the stimuli sent to it
by way of the protoplasmatic system. This func-
tion is a labyrinth of objective reactions and
subjective counter-reactions. It is all this as a
part of the entire natural universe, and it is
nothing else. The difference between conscious
and unconscious, or subconscious, thought is
purely one of the intensity of stimuli and reac-
tion. And when physio-chemical biology will
have analyzed this labyrinth of processes, traced
its fundamental reactions in the laboratory, and
connected them with the final source of all, the
universe, man will know all that his faculty of
thought can find out about itself and other rid-
dles of the universe.

This conception of the universe and of the
human soul is diametrically opposed to meta-
physical and theological dualism. Truly does
Haeckel cry out : " An honest and objective ob-
servation of these obvious antagonisms makes
their reconciliation impossible. Either an under-
standing of nature and experience, or the fables
of belief and revelation ! "

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But a scientific theory of understanding in-
cludes the recognition of the socialist philosophy.
And the only element which is consciously striv-
ing for the realization of this philosophy is the
class-conscious proletariat of the world.

XVI. A WAIF AND ITS ADOPTION *

With the establishment of the facts of uni-
versal evolution, bourgeois science had accom-
plished something which did not only far surpass
the narrow demands of business interests, but
which also became a serious annoyance and
danger to the ruling classes. True, most of the
bourgeois scientists vehemently denied that social
evolution partook of those tendencies of universal
evolution which were claimed for it by prole-
tarian thinkers. It is continually denied to this
day that the results of modern science are op-
posed to theological religion and class rule. But
the facts acknowledged by the bourgeois scien-
tists as irrefutable were sufficiently revolutionary
to call forth violent protests from bourgeois and
feudal politicians, and to set theological philos-
ophers at work writing long-winded treatises try-

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

ing to reconcile science and dogmatic revelation.

These ostentatiously legitimate protests were
at once re-enforced by a flood of personal abuse
and rancorous vilification, an art in which es-
pecially the theological harbingers of love and
peace have shown themselves as adepts. Men
like Darwin, Haeckel, Loeb, found out what sort
of a highly refined intellectuality the intimate ac-
quaintance with theology or bourgeois culture
produced in their adversaries. One has only to
turn over a few leaves of some of the so-called
refutations of Haeckel's works, written by Jesuit
and other confessional " scientists," in order to
get as pretty a collection of low billingsgate as
may be found anywhere in the vernacular of that
other product of bourgeois rule, the city slums.

Bourgeois science is thus perpetually at war
with bourgeois intelligence, and university pro-
fessors have learned to their bitter disappoint-
ment that freedom of science is little respected
when it runs counter to freedom of trade. It is
no wonder that many a bourgeois scientist, shirk-
ing the ordeal of want in old age, has revoked
the scientific convictions of a lifetime and pros-
tituted his better self for the flesh pots of bour-
geois Egypt.

Under these circumstances, the proletariat can-

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not place any reliance on bourgeois science. It
must and will maintain a critical attitude toward
all bourgeois science, and accept nothing that
does not stand the test of proletarian standards.

So far as bourgeois science coincides with the
findings of proletarian science, we shall gladly
accept and foster every truth, and we shall do
it so much more gladly, when that truth is re-
jected by bourgeois self-interest and combatted
for reactionary purposes. But we shall on our
part reject everything which tends to strengthen
the ruling class, endanger the progress of the
proletarian revolution, or interfere with the ad-
vance of human knowledge and control of
natural forces in general. Bourgeois science, so
far as it exceeds the demands of bourgeois so-
ciety, is a waif abandoned by its own mother, and
will be gladly adopted and nursed to vigorous
life by proletarian science.

It is natural that with the growth of the
socialist movement much reactionary bourgeois
thought is carried into it by newcomers from
the bourgeois intellectual camp. This thought
at once takes issue with the advanced proletarian
mind and, with the modesty typical of the bour-
geoisie, proceeds to instruct the proletarian
thinker and pull him back from his outpost. Un-

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compromising and frank discussion is the only
method used in return by socialists the world
over in their endeavor to ascertain the truth and
keep their movement in line with natural evolu-
tion. We welcome such discussion and neither
expect nor give any quarter.

The materialist part of the socialist philosophy
meets with strong disapproval from two camps
within its ranks. Neither of them is numerically
very strong at present, but they may become so
when larger bodies of the intellectual middle class
will ally themselves with the revolutionary prole-
tariat. One of these camps favors speculative
metaphysics, the other Christian socialism. Both
of them object to the consistent application of the
materialist conception of history and the universe
on the part of the strict Marxian school.

They urge against materialist monism that
their ethics are superior to or identical with those
of socialism, and out of this alleged superiority
or identity they construct an argument in favor
of speculative idealism or theological religion.

That ethics do not rest on idealism or religion
has been proven by thousands of years of human
history. We do not base our ethics on our phi-
losophy, nor our philosophy on our ethics, but
regard both ethics and philosophy as results of

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material environment, as we have sufficiently
shown in the preceding pages. Therefore we
first of all object to this confusion of the issue.

In the second place, we demand that both
speculative philosophy and theological religion
shall stand or fall on their merits, just as ma-
terialist monism is expected to do.

The science of the 2Oth century has grown
tired of operating with half-defined terms and
hypotheses. These are more and more discarded
for the study of movements. The discussion of
mere terms and definitions has developed into an
effort to arrive at a clear understanding of proc-
esses for the purpose of controlling them.
Vainly do the obsolete methods of research and
dogma attempt to adjust themselves to the new
conditions.

Vitalism dreams of saving itself by becoming
Neo- Vitalism, Idealism has donned the robes of
Neo-Kantianism, both of them trying to play
Hamlet with Hamlet left out. Metaphysics is
becoming a mere metaphor for a vague agnosti-
cism. Even theological religion is making a des-
perate effort to escape the inevitable by masque-
rading as "true" religion.

But their powers of adaptation are gone.

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They are strangers to dialectic reasoning, and
the old style of argument no longer holds.

But their champions fail to realize this. Argu-
ments that have been chewed ad nauseam for
fifteen centuries are still supposed to satisfy a
mind acquainted with the weightiest facts against
them.

Mosaic revelation had adjusted itself as best
it could to its earlier defeats. When the travel-
ers and navigators demonstrated to every
unbiased brain's satisfaction that orthodoxy's in-
spired men were ignorant of geography, the
advocates of the theological creation theories
mumbled confused excuses about the " divine
intention " to limit human understanding, until it
should please God to grant us more wisdom.
When it was shown by the astronomers, that
revelation had been mistaken in considering the
earth as the center of the universe and the sun
as a terrestrial satellite, the same stale excuse
was haled forth, after the most vindictive and
narrow-minded opposition had proven ineffective
against the new facts. Then the theologians
readjusted their revelation to suit this advance
of the human mind, made in the face of their
resistance. When science began to establish the
fact of the mechanical origin of the universe, and

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A WAIF AND ITS ADOPTION

threw the theological creator out of his own
creation, it seemed that the Mosaic conception
of the universe had reached the limits of its
adaptation. But Kant, who had been most in-
strumental in defeating it, did his best to save
it, and theology grasped eagerly at the Kantian
straws. Then Lamarck and Darwin came along
and demonstrated that species were not individ-
ual creations, but forms of evolution. Ortho-
doxy first had the same stereotyped answer ready
and then transformed the Mosaic god into a god
of modern evolution. Then it was found that
life itself was a product of cosmic evolution.
There was no other refuge left for the theological
creator but man's supposed supernatural " soul."
This, at least, theology said, was a creation of
God. But Haeckel, Dietzgen, and Loeb have
swept the last theological cobwebs out of this
hiding place by identifying the human soul with
the evolutionary processes of the material uni-
verse.

Nevertheless, orthodoxy in the disguise of
metaphysics and " true " religion, continues to
dodge around in the old way, to rest on its
unproven assertions as though they had been
established by the most painstaking and irrefut-
able work of science, to sneer at the results

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of the scientific accumulation of facts which every
one can verify without the help of any authority,
and to raise the cry of sacrilege at every attempt
to criticise without bias and without malevolent
intent the tenets of the believers in mystic creeds.

But the time has come when this method is
resented as an insult to intelligence and man-
hood. Orthodoxy must submit to the same criti-
cisms which all other things in the universe must
sustain. More still, it must henceforth bring
better proofs than bare assertions, if it would
survive. The cry that we are " attacking re-
ligion " when we are simply investigating its
claims, will no longer avail. And it is time to
hurl the accusation back at those who hide behind
it and who have always been the first to attack
the most objective and mild criticism with a flood
of abuse and misrepresentation.

Unless the metaphysical idealists bring better
proofs than heretofore in justification of their
insistent claims that the proletariat must " go
back to Kant " for more knowledge, we shall
decline the invitation and ask : " What is there
in Kant to go back for ? " Dietzgen went back
to Kant, but only to show the absurdity of the
mystic conception of the " thing itself " and to
excel Hegel in this respect by stating the ques-

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tion correctly and solving it. Laplace excelled
Kant in a consistent loyalty to scientific princi-
ples in cosmogeny. Hegel surpassed him in his-
torical perception and comprehensive grasp of
evolution. Marx and Engels eclipsed Hegel in
dialectics, setting up a new standard for the study
of history. And Dietzgen rounded out the work
of Marx and Engels by a consistent monist con-
ception of the universe. What else is there in
Kant that has not been outdone?

" His ethics," cry the Neo-Kantians, " his sub-
lime ethics ! " Let us see. In the " Neue Zeit,"
XXII, vol. I, No. 20, Franz Mehring writes that
the sublimity of Kant's ethics " is of the kind
which constitutes a step toward the ridiculous.
Nowhere is Kant so pronounced a philistine as in
his ethics, and at that a philistine in whose veins
all the bad blood of theology is circulating. His
ethics with its categorical imperative is nothing
but the Mosaic decalogue, and his doctrine of the
radical evil of human nature nothing but the
dogma of inherited sin. So far from having
assisted in the baptism of the New Testament,
Kant's ethics simply harked back to the Old
Testament. Goethe, who indeed looked with
sceptical eyes upon Kantian dualism, expressed
the opinion that Kant had miserably soiled his

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clean philosopher's clothes by his doctrine of the
' radical evil/ and even Schiller, the enthusiastic
Kantian, ridiculed the genuine philistine spleen,
according to which not he was acting virtuously,
who from motives of compassion assisted his
fellow-beings — because he was only following
his own impulse — but rather, e. g., a miser who
at the 'dictation of the categorical imperative very
reluctantly offers charity. . . . Even Scho-
penhauer, who proclaimed himself as the genuine
and true heir to Kant's throne — and justly so in
many respects — rebelled against Kant's ethics.
On Kant's rule, ' The sentiment which commands
man to obey the moral law is that it should be
obeyed as a duty, not from voluntary choice or
without being ordered,' Schopenhauer comment-
ed with the fitting remark, ' it must be ordered.
What slave morals ! ' And these slave morals
are to be grafted into the proletarian fight for
emancipation ! "

Of course there is a germ of truth even in
this Kantian idea of doing that which requires
individual self-compulsion. The individual must
adapt himself to his environment, on penalty of
being eliminated from the line of forward evolu-
tion by natural selection. An understanding of
the facts of evolution serves, therefore, as a

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categorical imperative for the individual to con-
trol reactionary impulses and keep his acts in
line with the social evolution of his class and
the cosmic evolution of his race. Whoever acts
in accord with these, acts virtuously. This is
a universal standard easily intelligible to every
one, for a moderate observation of our bodily
and mental condition will quickly reveal, whether
we are acting against our physical and intellec-
tual evolution, and the class-struggle continually
reminds us of the right course of our class, which
leads to the reconciliation of our class interests
with the general evolution of humanity as a
whole. But the first requirement for such an
understanding is the rebellion against metaphys-
ical dualism. It is a complete breach with Kant's
philosophy, not a return to it.

There is little consolation for our Neo-Kantian
exhorters in this reply, but it is the truth. Kant
accomplished enough for the historical conditions
of his time, and his work in cosmogeny will be
an everlasting credit to his name. But when we
are told that the modern proletariat must go back
to him for its philosophy, we smile as we would
if we were told that the butterfly must go back
into its chrysalis.

So far as ethics are concerned, this answer

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fits also the Christian socialist objectors to ma-
terialist monism. To any one versed in the
dialectic mode of reasoning it would also be a
sufficient refutation of the claims of Christian
theology on the proletarian revolution. But dia-
lectic logic is not one of the virtues of Christian
socialists, and especially in the United States they
are conspicuous by their lack of positive scientific
knowledge and their abundance of " divine wis-
dom." It will therefore be necessary to devote
a little more thought to them.

Among some Christian socialists in this coun-
try, where Christian socialism is not, as a rule,
opposed to the proletarian revolution as it is over-
whelmingly in Europe, the idea is propagated
that the coming of socialism will mean a revival
of " true " religion. But if we ask them what
they mean by true religion, we get a medley
of vague replies which differ more or less ac-
cording to individual idiosyncrasies.

According to materialist monism, the only
" true religion " is the " religion " of Natural
Truth. And this truth is not to be sought in
the unknowable and impossible nothing called the
supernatural. It is contained in the physical and
chemical elements in us and around us. And it
can be found with the natural means which every

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A WAIF AND ITS ADOPTION

human being has received by nature, the five
senses, and the brain, which is the organ of the
sixth sense of mankind. Without the help of
these, nothing can be learned, for without them
there is no human consciousness, no human
" soul."

But this " true religion " of Natural Truth
never came to conscious life, until it found its
monistic expression in the minds of the thinkers
of proletarian socialism. A thing that never
lived before the modern proletariat generated it
cannot be " revived " by its victory. It can
only be brought to full life by it. As for any
religion based on mystical beliefs, it will not be
revived, any more than the Mosaic ideas of geog-
raphy and astronomy. It will be defeated by the
overwhelming and ever growing control of the
human mind over the other parts of nature. To
the extent that science compels nature to yield
one of its mysteries after another, the basis of
mystical religion and authoritative revelation
disintegrates, and the science of life comes into
its own.

It is often denied that theological religion is
a matter of belief upon authorities. It is claimed
that it is rather a matter of belief upon " a re-
vealed word and the spiritual experience of the

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soul." The dualist conception of " spiritual "
and " soul " in this statement has already been
appreciated at its real value in the preceding
lines. As for the " revealed word," to whom was
it revealed? Moses, the prophets, the editors of
the Christian gospels who wrote from two to
three hundred years after the death of the first
Christian revolutionaries some contradictory rec-
ords which they claimed were the revealed word
of Christ and his disciples, were human beings
like the rest of us, but with less positive knowl-
edge of themselves and the world. The same is
true of the other alleged founders of other mys-
tical theologies. They asked their contempo-
raries to believe upon their self-interested
assertion, that they had received some " divine
revelation " by some miraculous " spiritual ex-
perience " of their individual " soul." They had
no other proofs for the truth of their assertions
but so-called miracles which we are told by others
they performed. A proletarian who to-day be-
lieves their assertions, or those of their unthink-
ing followers, all of whom were either members
of the ruling class or mentally controlled by them,
surrenders his intellectual or " spiritual " life into
the hands of his enemies. Revelation must either
come to each human being individually, and in

A WAIF AND ITS ADOPTION

that case each individual must experience the
same " spiritual " miracle that others claim
to have experienced, and we do not need any
spiritual authorities and their alleged miracles.
Or, revelation can come only to the select, and
then all the rest of humanity must take their
" spiritual " beliefs upon the authority of others.

If individual " spiritual " experience is to be
the test, then materialist monism acknowledges
only one revelation. That is the revelation of
nature, the communication between the natural
parts of the universe by means of their natural
elements. This is accessible to all without re-
gard to race, color, or station. It will come to
all who diligently seek for it. " Seek and ye
shall find." That is the only " true religion
and revelation " of all mankind.

It might be objected that even materialist
monism admits that the human mind can never
fully exhaust the universe, and that therefore it
can never know everything that is in it. But in
the first place, this leaves room only for natural
unknown things, not for any supernatural
agencies. In the second place, even if it per-
mitted the theory of the supernatural, the bur-
den of the proof for the existence of super-
natural agencies would still be upon those who

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

believe in them. The fact that we might not
be able to demonstrate that such agencies do
not exist would not relieve them of this bur-
den. But the assertions hitherto offered by
them are not proofs. In the third place, the dif-
ference between that which we can know com-
pared to that which we cannot know is not so
great, that it can defeat our endeavor to con-
trol the material forces of the universe.

It is true that man as organized to-day can see
only that which is visible for him, hear only
what is audible for him, taste only that which
his tongue can discriminate, feel only that which
his touch can bring to his notice, smell only
that which his olfactory organs can detect, think
only that which is thinkable for his brain, and
know only that which is knowable to this brain
under such circumstances. But in the first place,
the human brain will not always remain organ-
ized as it is to-day. A comparison of the con-
struction and volume of the skulls of a Pithe-
canthropus, a Neanderthal man, an Australian
aborigine, and an educated Caucasian, is so con-
vincing, that the development of a vastly higher
organ of understanding out of the human
mind, in the course of further millions of years,
becomes a logical demand of materialist monism.

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A WAIF AND ITS ADOPTION

Of course, even this higher organ of under-
standing will be limited by its organization and
cannot penetrate beyond that by any other
means but further evolution. Yet it will per-
ceive and understand a great deal more than
ours.

Furthermore, all things of the universe have
developed from a few basic elements, which we
cannot divide beyond the limits of human per-
ception. These basic elements do not seem to
have changed their fundamental nature- in all
the millions of years since organic life began
its evolutionary course. At least we have no
means of determining any changes in them, al-
though they too, go through an evolution along
with the different forms which they have gener-
ated, as is shown by radium and helium. But
evidently the elements have so far had a greater
affinity for reaction toward their type than
toward new variations, in other words, the evo-
lution of the forms generated by them proceeds
faster than that of the elements themselves.
These evolutionary forms have naturally a
greater tendency towards variation than their
basic elements.

The logical conclusion from these premises
is that the development of that higher organ

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

of understanding which will follow the human
mind, and which will, of course, be as much a
part of nature as we are, will gradually diminish
the difference between the absolutely unknowable
and the relatively knowable. Mathematically
speaking, the absolutely unknowable will be-
come infinitely smaller, the relatively knowable
will become infinitely greater, until the lines be-
tween the unknowable and the knowable become
imperceptible.

This conception does not leave the least room
for any metaphysical explanation of anything
that we may not know. It leaves no room for
any supernatural ghosts or " spirits."

That which theologians conceitedly call their
" spiritual " experience, and which according to
them no " atheist " can have, is a mixture of
vague feeling and self-suggestion. They sug-
gest to themselves that their indistinct, and to
them supernaturally mysterious, feeling of the
infinity of the natural universe is a " divine
revelation," and then they claim to have received
it by supernatural agencies. And when they are
shaken out of their self-hypnotism and asked to
show proofs for their assertions, they retire
gracefully behind that other bare assertion, that
this cannot be proven by any process of reason-

170

A WAIF AND ITS ADOPTION

ing, but must be believed upon the testimony of
individual " spiritual " experience. That is but
a mystic way of saying that no man can be-
lieve a thought unless he makes himself believe
it. But when theologians are driven to this ex-
tremity, they get mad, tell us that their belief
is sacred to them, and that they do not care to
discuss the matter any further. They want to
continue their hypnotic slumber and are mad at
being shaken out of it.

But nothing is sacred before the tribunal of
Natural Truth. Everything has to prove its
right to existence before this tribunal by natural
processes of reasoning, or stand convicted as an
imposture. By crawling behind the excuse that
this or that is sacred to them, the theologians and
their unreasoning herd merely acknowledge their
mental poverty and their lack of historical under-
standing. And they stand before the throne of
Natural Truth as self-convicted impostors, who
deceive themselves and others and bar the prog-
ress of the human mind to an understanding of
itself and of the universe.

As a last clincher, we sometimes hear the de-
fiant assertion that wise men generally " do not
understand the word of God." That is what the
ruling classes have hurled in the face of all revo-

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

lutionary thinkers since the betrayal of the Chris-
tian revolution, and it is certainly not calculated
to increase our confidence in Christian socialists
who repeat it against the revolutionary thought
x>f the very class whose ideals they claim to cham-
pion.

They may flatter themselves that they can
force the churches of the ruling classes to sur-
render to the Christian socialist interpretation
of the gospels and enact those teachings which
were a part of the revolutionary message of the
ancient Christian proletariat. They might as well
expect that the bourgeoisie should carry out the
principles of the natural rights doctrine. It
would be ridiculous to lose any more words
about such a lack of historical understanding.

Another argument of Christian socialism is
that the materialist standpoint prejudices Chris-
tian working men against socialism. If this
means anything, it means that we should sup-
press our better knowledge and prostitute a
known natural truth to some petty tactical utility.
That would certainly be neither " Christian " in
the sense of Christian socialism, nor reconcilable
with the ethics of the proletarian revolution.

Of course, it is not necessary that every mem-
ber of the socialist parties should endorse the full

172

A WAIF AND ITS ADOPTION

conclusions of the socialist philosophy. For
these conclusions reach far beyond the present
and future requirements of party activity. But
this cannot prevent us from making use of our
right of free speech within and without the party
for the mutual education of ourselves and others
by means of free discussion of vitally human
problems. On the contrary, it is one of our
greatest duties to make use of this right and
guard it against reactionary attempts to stifle the
free word in the interest of some " sacred " hal-
lucination.

Materialist monism is not " atheism." The
atheist is distinctly a product of class rule and
will die out with bourgeois culture. Atheism
is simply mental anarchy, a reflex of the indus-
trial and political anarchy in the " spiritual "
world. It is the bare negation of supernatural
gods, without any recognition of the construc-
tive tendencies of evolution, and its historical
place is in the museum of antiquities by the side
of the mechanical materialism of the i8th and
1 9th centuries, where the Christian theologies
will in due time also find a quiet resting place.
The fact that materialist monism has no god does
not make it identical with atheism any more than
the fact that Christianity believes in a supernat-

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

ural god makes it identical with paganism. Only
an ignoramus can dismiss materialist monism
with the supercilious and flippant term of " athe-
ism."

In stating the historical truth that the modern
proletarian revolution is inseparably linked with
the growth of materialist monism we do not im-
ply that the victory of socialism depends on the
spread of " atheism," or even of materialist mo-
nism. On the contrary, we are simply stating a
fact revealed by the materialist conception of his-
tory, namely, that the industrial and political
revolution produces a mental revolution. This
mental revolution strikes not only at the eco-
nomic and political institutions, but also at the
ideas of the ruling classes.

Class rule is inseparably united to mysticism
and theological religion. And if the declining
bourgeois world feels the need of a " spiritual
revival " in the sense that they long for a return
of the good times when they swung the rod over
the mental life of the working class, we can un-
derstand their feelings very well and sympathize
with them. But we are not going to fulfill their
wishes in this respect.

To the extent that class rule totters, the prole-
tarian mind rises out of the fog of mystic phi-

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MATERIALIST MONISM

losophy or theological religion into the bright
sunlight of materialist monism.

XVII. MATERIALIST MONISM, THE SCIENCE
AND " RELIGION " OF THE PROLETARIAT.

The world-process is an evolution through
revolutions. Its course appears to the monist
understanding of the present day as a parabolic
curve, coming out of the unknown infinity of
nature and leading into its eternal future.

In the dim past, where the world-process be-
comes perceptible to human understanding, we
see an infinite mass of infinitesimally minute
ether dust whirling about in all directions. Here
is life with all its attributes in the earliest and
most primitive form conceivable to monist rea-
son. Consciousness and will are among these
attributes in the germ, just as are electricity,
magnetism, radiation, or such abstract qualities
of the abstract matter of abstract school phi-
losophy as indestructibility and impenetrability.

This picture shows all there is in the universe
at that inconceivably remote stage of its career.
This is the cosmos, god, infinite, or whatever'

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

high name you wish to give it, that created itself
out of itself, that has no beginning and no end,
that has no other universe outside of itself, that
is omnipotent, omniscient, and above all omni-
natural. All these terms mainly prove the lim-
ited scope of the human understanding as at
present organized.

The evolution of this infinite ether-universe,
this great nothing which is everything, follows
its own laws. And the general law pervading all
evolution is this: The positive life of a certain
stage generates within itself the elements of its
own negation. At a certain period determined
by the pace of evolution, these negative elements
come into irreconcilable conflict with the old
positive conditions. Then follows a period of
revolution, which is cosmic, geological, meteoro-
logical, biological, psychic, economic, or political,
as the case may be. The new negative forces
finally dominate the old positive ones and trans-
form them into negative ones to conform with
the others. By this means the negative become
the positive elements of a new cycle of evolution.
They generate in their turn the elements of their
own negation, which in due time bring about the
negation of the previous negation by a new revo-
lution. This results in the domination of the

176

MATERIALIST MONISM

new negation as the positive force of the next
cycle, continuing evolution on a higher scale.

This is the eternal law, and it is fulfilled as
strictly in the most minute particle of ether as it
is in the physical molecule, the chemical atom,
the individual crystal, plant, animal, or man, the
globe of the earth, the sun, a fixed star, or the
entire universe.

In fulfillment of this law, a part of the primi-
tive ether-universe is gradually converted into
more condensed particles which assume by de-
grees certain mathematical forms. In response
to physico-chemical tropisms, they congregate
here and separate there. Out of the universal
whirl, more condensed whirls gradually loom up
and arrange themselves in accord with new laws
which develop to the extent that this movement
makes progress.

yEons pass, and the whirls have become worlds
in primitive stages of formation. By the process
of further condensation and rotation, heat is gen-
erated, marking a new revolution and the intro-
duction of new formations. Gradually the fun-
damental chemical elements of the universe as
we know them develop, and the glowing spheres
circle through the ether, distancing in their evo-
lution the slow processes of the old ether-uni-

177

x SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

verse. Still this old universe persists in its in-
finity, and the new worlds are but islands in its
boundless extension. It reacts on the new world-
processes and assists in their further condensa-
tion.

^ons pass before the physico-chemical reac-
tions have accumulated sufficient precipitations of
solid and fluid matter on the earth to form a
durable mineral shell with pools of water and an
atmosphere. Other aeons pass before the first
organic life rises out of the reactions of the inor-
ganic under favorable conditions. But when
these conditions are at last mature, the revolu-
tion of the organic against the inorganic gen-
erates the first protists. These separate in the
course of ages into unicellular plants (proto-
phyta) and unicellular animals (protozoa).

The inorganic environment continues to
change, and, through the interaction of organic
and inorganic life-processes, the simple monera
without a cell-nucleus are transformed into al-
garia with a cell-nucleus and a cell-membrane.
After the first division of labor between inside
and outside protoplasm has taken place, other
specializations of the interior and exterior struc-
ture follow in due time.

Along with this development comes association

178

MATERIALIST MONISM

of unicellular organisms into little cell-clusters,
and the division of labor arising under the new
environment produces the first multicellular ani-
mals, the gastraeades. These repeat on a higher
plane the primitive division of labor of the pro-
tozoa, producing the skin-and-stomach type of
the gastrula, which represents the first rudi-
mentary plan of connective tissue and internal
organs. The unicellular plants have in the
meantime accomplished similar results.

No sooner has this stage become fairly estab-
lished, than a new division of labor is inaugu-
rated. So long as the cell lives independently,
it propagates by fission or gemmation. But in
the multicellular community, fission is a nuisance.
Gemmation permits of modifications which do
not disturb the communal life. So each cell in
the community transmits its share of sexual life
to special sex-cells, and in the further selection
of these the male and female organs arise, lead-
ing to the climax of separation of sexes in in-
dividuals. Some still retain the old form of
common sexuality, but the new mode of propa-
gation proves superior in spite of its apparent
slowness and complexity, because it furnishes a
greater variety of new material for natural selec-
tion.

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SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

At this stage, the ether-universe is filled with
spheres in various stages of development. Nat-
ural selection continues its work in them as it
does in the surface and the interior of the earth.
Vast oceans and marshes cover the surface of the
terrestrial globe at this stage, and in the depths
of the water myriads of plant and animal organ-
isms from the lowest types to advanced worms
are disporting themselves. These organisms are
all of them endowed with the essential faculties
of consciousness and will. But this conscious-
ness is as yet little above that of the primitive
inorganic life out of which it evolved. These
forms have no brain, although some of them
have developed the rudiments of a nerve system.

Long before the Silurian period, we find in
those oceans certain worms which have devel-
oped a chorda, the first piece of cartilage indi-
cating the beginning of a thing which will in
course of time become the backbone of verte-
brate animals. Other worms continue without a
chorda and give rise to a separate line of inverte-
brate evolution.

The earth and its oceans change. In the tran-
sition from the pre-Silurian to the Silurian period,
we meet with the ancestors of the modern Am-
phioxus, a little headless fish that has improved

180

MATERIALIST MONISM

on the chorda of its worm ancestors and whose
tiny string of spinal nerves above the chorda
indicates a new feature which from now on be-
comes the characteristic mark of all vertebrates.

During the last stages of the transition toward
the Silurian period, worm-like fishes appear with
a better developed chorda, a more highly organ-
ized nerve system, and the rudiments of a skull
with brains. The spinal chord above the chorda
is becoming the halfway house between a brain
and a complicated nerve system.

The selachian and ganoid fishes of the Silurian
period have developed the chorda into a cartilage
backbone and skeleton, their brain is much bet-
ter organized, and they have acquired the definite
beginnings of that system of five fingers or toes
on four limbs, which we see later as a typical
mark of the highest vertebrates.

Ages pass and accumulated changes in the
earth's crust and surface bring on the Devonian
period. Dry land has been lifted out of the
oceans, and some fishes have been compelled to
live for months with little or no water. They
have developed their airbladder into a lung and
their forefins into strong supports for walking,
climbing and digging. Their cartilage skeleton
has become bony. The decisive step has been

18]

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

made for the transfer of some vertebrate life
from the water to the dry land and to the open
air.

Another terrestrial age passes away, and the
surface of the earth has become fully ripe for
organic life on land. The plant has wandered
ashore even faster than the animal. A miracu-
lous transformation has taken place since the
departure of the nebulous whirl of the earth from
the ether-universe, which still extends its inex-
haustible infinity all around the circling spheres.
The Carboniferous and Permian periods abound
in the amphibian successors of the lungfishes
and in the reptilian followers of the amphibians.
The brain, the nerve system, the finger system,
the skeleton, have made further progress.

From fishes to reptiles, the foundation has
been securely laid for the earthly supremacy of
animals with brains, nerves, lungs, and bones.
The higher evolution of these things by natural
selection through use in the struggle for adapta-
tion is assured.

Now the line of evolution comes once more to
a parting of the ways. Among fishes, amphibia,
and reptiles, there are exceptional cases of a de-
velopment of the forelegs into wings, and of
propagation by the birth of living young ones,

182

MATERIALIST MONISM

instead of the hatching of eggs. Now some rep-
tiles develop these wings still more, retaining at
the same time propagation by means of eggs.
Other reptiles spend their surplus-energy in the
development of a new method of propagation
and evolve a placenta in the womb of the female.
Again the brain, nerves, ringer system, and bones
are affected accordingly.

Wings prove after all of less value in the fur-
ther evolution than a placenta. With the de-
velopment of the sex-system of the mammalia,
the nerve and brain systems are far more directly
and profoundly affected than they are by the
comparatively slight modification of lizard wings
and scales into bird wings and feathers. The
internal adaptation is the more valuable. Thanks
to it the mammals rise superior to the birds and
the other animals. The mammalian brain, nerve,
and finger systems outstrip those of the birds,
and at the end of the Secondary period, the
brain and its accompanying marks of evolution
have arrived at the highest type of man-ape.

With the terrestrial changes of the Tertiary
period, the man-ape becomes an ape-man with
erect body, greater brain volume, and better
hands and feet. The further accentuation of
these factors results in the birth of man. The

183

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

new race proves to be especially well fitted for
survival and in the course of the Tertiary period,
spreads over vast areas of the earth's surface and
conquers its animal life.

Great geological catastrophes follow. The
Ice-Age overtakes the organic life of half the
earth. Man, having learned the use of fire,
drives the ferocious beasts out of their caves
and survives even here. Great floods surprise
many of the human beings when the ice melts.
Yet the race survives and spreads, growing in
brain volume and skill of fingers. They have
learned to think connectedly and to speak articu-
late languages. Their environment determines
the character of their social organization.

In one respect, all the early social groups of
mankind are alike : They are all rooted in sexual
kinships, and descent is traced by the female
line. The rules of mutual intercourse growing
out of these relations are democratic and dic-
tated by direct observation of the evil effects of
violating natural laws of adaptation and sexual
selection. Nature itself teaches primitive man
to observe the laws of evolution. All ideas of
modern altruism, morality, love, liberty, brother-
hood, and the like, are etherealized and dete-

184

MATERIALIST MONISM

riorated copies of natural practices of primitive
man.

From savagery through barbarism to patri-
archy, the primitive organizations of man learn
the first rudiments of the art of controlling na-
ture. Brain and hands unite to bring forth tools
and shelter by which to increase human power
and comfort. The wilderness of plant and ani-
mal life succumbs step by step to man's superior
powers, and as his powers grow, his nature
moves away from the brute and his thoughts
turn toward higher evolution by means of still
greater control over nature.

But with the increase of food, clothing, and
shelter, and the consequent multiplication of the
human sex group to a point where it becomes
unwieldy, the old natural relationships are un-
dermined. The human understanding is not
mature enough to consciously create better
adapted relationships. So, while the old rela-
tions gradually dissolve, new and unknown ones
arise and carry strife and disorder into the har-
mony of the ancient family life. To the extent
that this process continues, the common re-
sources of life are appropriated by the most
cunning or prominent man in each group, the
women are excluded from the common privileges,

185

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

and gradually the women and the majority of
men become economically dependent on those
who have profited from the disintegration of the
old groups and made themselves masters of the
formerly common requirements of life. Female
descent gives way to male lineage in the interest
of inheritance of private property.

Thus " civilization " comes in by a suppres-
sion of the fundamental condition of all social
morality and right, the common ownership of
the earth, of its products, and of the tools so-
cially acquired by the evolution and co-operation
of countless generations. Individualism and an-
archy now take the place of the spirit of com-
munity and natural order. New economic and
political forces grow up, which baffle all attempts
of man to control them, because he obstinately
declines to demolish the soil out of which they
grow, the private ownership of the earth and of
social wealth.

Economic usurpation begets wars for terri-
torial expansion and slavery of prisoners of
war. Slavery begets more wealth and leads
to the introduction of a coercive power, the
state, which gradually overawes not only the
captives, but also the poor members of the
same tribe. Political privileges are reserved

186

MATERIALIST MONISM

for the wealthy, local division into groups regard-
less of descent takes the place of organization by
sex-groups (gentes), and exploitation of fellovr-
gentiles comes gradually in the place of slavery,
when slaves are no longer profitable.

With the transformation of fellow-gentiles into
rulers and ruled, the old natural laws of moral
relationship are transformed into a code of op-
pressive law. The primitive worship of over-
whelming forces of nature is transformed into a
supernatural religion, which institutes a ruler in
heaven after the model of the rulers below. > Just
as economic and political fetters prevent the rise
of the lowly to social freedom, so mental fetters
now prevent the rise of their minds out of intel-
lectual oppression. This condition is defended
by the rulers as the best on earth, and their re-
ligious teachers derive out of this degradation
the consolation of spiritual salvation after death.

Feudalism, the successor of slavery, keeps the
majority of mankind in this condition, until new
economic forces burst serfdom asunder and in-
stal the capitalist class as the new rulers, who
derive out of their economic supremacy the same
justification as former rulers for keeping the
reason of mankind, including their own, en-
thralled in lies and ignorance.

187

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

But capitalism, like all other things in the uni-
verse, also begets its own negation. The mod-
ern working class, the negative force of capitalist
society, but the positive force of evolution at this
stage, abolishes the profit-system, transforms the
capitalists into workers, and makes itself the
positive force of the new social organization.

The negation of the capitalist class and the
domination of the proletariat as the new positive
force is at the same time the final negation of all
class-struggles, so that conscious co-operation
becomes the new law in social evolution and nat-
ural selection operates under radically changed
social conditions.

But the abolition of class-struggles is not the
negation of the struggle for existence against
the forces of nature. Conscious human co-opera-
tion in the struggle against nature merely inau-
gurates a new cycle of cosmic evolution. This
cycle cannot end in the abolition of the universal
struggle, because the universe, being infinite, al-
ways generates the elements for new negations.
Yet each new negation henceforth implies the im-
proved co-operation of human beings in the
control of evolutionary processes. For when the
proletariat as a class awakes to class-conscious-
ness, humanity to that extent awakes to world

188

MATERIALIST MONISM

and cosmic consciousness, realizes its mission in
society, on earth, and in the universe, and con-
sciously prepares the means for the accomplish-
ment of this mission. That is the tremendous
difference between the proletarian and all other
social revolutions, that it understands the course
of social and cosmic evolution and adapts its
action to this understanding, while all other so-
cial revolutions were carried through without this
understanding. With the proletarian revolution,
the highest organ of consciousness evolved by the
universal process of transformation takes the first
steps for a premeditated and scientific control of
the entire process.

The function of the human understanding is
henceforth not so much to maintain itself in its
present organization, but rather to control those
processes which will promote the negation of its
present organization and its evolution into a
higher one. It is not to strive for reactionary
immortality in its present form, not to preserve
its identity of to-day beyond the point where it
interferes with its identity of to-morrow, but
merely to insure its normal evolution into to-
morrow's identity. This alone is the way toward
immortality, and the individual cannot hope to

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

lead the way towards it without the conscious
evolutionary organization of society.

Along with the understanding of social and
cosmic evolution comes naturally an understand-
ing of individual and sexual evolution. Just as
the new social ethics demand a conscious adapta-
tion of social activity to a normal process of
cosmic evolution, so the new individual ethics de-
mand a conscious promotion of the natural selec-
tion of qualities which will be of most value in
social and cosmic evolution.

Reaction and progress are struggling in each
individual the same as they are in every particle
of the universe. Naturally this struggle is re-
flected in the individual consciousness, or " soul."
Every one of us therefore feels two natures
struggling within him. The one drives him for-
ward, prompts him to do the things which will
develop evolutionary qualities in himself and oth-
ers. The other nature suggests thoughts and ac-
tions which arrest evolution and create disease,
suffering, unhappiness.

It becomes, therefore, an imperative duty of
materialist monism to warn mankind against in-
timate relations between reactionary and evolu-
tionary individuals. Whether any one will give
heed to the voice of reaction or of evolution, de-

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MATERIALIST MONISM

pends in the last analysis on heredity and en-
vironment. It is well, therefore, to learn early
in life whether one's nature, and that of friends
or dearer comrades, tends more toward evolu-
tion or toward reaction, and whether proper treat-
ment will result in the victory of evolution.
Otherwise there is no secure basis for future hap-
piness.

An evolutionary ethic demands the abolition
of all economic, political, and intellectual op-
pression ; a reduction of the struggle for the ma-
terial requirements of life to a minimum by a
collective control of productive processes; an
understanding of cosmic, social, and individual
evolution; sexual selection of evolutionary na-
tures ; and a control of self in accord with the
requirements of universal evolution through the
fulfillment of the preceding conditions.

Those who violate these demands are elim-
inated from the line of evolution by natural selec-
tion; those who fulfill them are blessed with
eternal salvation through nature.

All finite things can survive in the universal
transformation only by conforming to this uni-
versal " moral law." Individual immortality of
the human consciousness, as to-day organized, is
a reactionary idea. The narrow path of eternal

191

SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION

life leads only through the golden gate of adapta-
tion to the understood line of evolution.

Only the universe is immortal, and it cannot
be destroyed. If the human mind wishes to
share in this immortality, and avoid being hurled
into the abyss of oblivion, it has only one course
open before it: The conscious promotion of an
environment in which an organ of understanding
can develop which will succeed in controlling
the universal process.

It is only the philosophy of the proletariat
which furnishes a scientific basis for the realiza-
tion of the most daring dreams of the thinkers
of all ages. The proletarian mind, conscious of
its origin, its present and future place in society
and universe, its social, terrestrial, and cosmic
mission, can exclaim triumphantly : " I was, I
am, and I shall be ! "

192

GLOSSARY

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR EXPLAINS HIS CONCEPTION OF
SOME OF THE SCIENTIFIC TERMS USED IN THIS BOOK.

(n. means noun, adj. means adjective.)

BIOLOGY, n., the science of life processes.

BIOLOGICAL, adj., pertaining to biology.

BOURGEOIS, n., a member of the bourgeoisie.

BOURGEOIS, adj., pertaining to the bourgeoisie.

BOURGEOISIE, n., originally the well-to-do middle
class of modern capitalism, nowadays applied
to the modern capitalist class in general.

DIALECTIC, adj., pertaining to dialectics.

DIALECTICS, n., a method of expression which aims
to portray the natural movement in the uni-
verse.

DUALISM, n., a conception of the universe as com-
posed of natural and supernatural parts.

EVOLUTION, n., a continuous -natural transformation
by the interaction of antagonistic movements,
resulting in the natural selection of progressive
forms.

HEGELIAN DIALECTICS, n., a conception of the
universal process as a movement of positive

193

GLOSSARY

and negative forces, the credit for which is due
to the German idealist philosopher Hegel.

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM, n,, a method of re-
search established by the socialist Karl Marx,
conceiving of human history as a dialectic
process based on economic changes.

IDEALISM, n., a theory distinguished from idealist
monism by a vague conception of the functions
of the universe as supernatural, without a just
appreciation of its physical structure and de-
velopment.

IDEALIST MONISM, n., a uniform conception of the
universe as a supernatural organism.

MARXISM, n., the foundation of scientific socialism,
established by Karl Marx, based on his theories
of surplus-value, historical materialism, and
social evolution through class-struggles.

MATERIALISM, n., a theory distinguished from ma-
terialist monism by a crude emphasis on the
physical structure of the universe, without a
just appreciation of its functions and develop-
ment

MATERIALIST MONISM, n., a uniform conception
of the universe as a natural organism.

METAPHYSICS, n., the science of the mental as dis-
tinguished from the physical life ; on account of
its historical origin, it is dualistic and opposed
to 'materialist monism, although it pretends to
be opposed to idealist speculation.

MONISM, n., a uniform conception of the universe.

PALAEONTOLOGY, n., the science of extinct ani-
mals.

194

GLOSSARY

PHYSIOLOGY, n., the science of the physical proper-
ties of animals and plants.

PROLETARIAN, n., a member of the proletariat.

PROLETARIAN, adj., pertaining to the proletariat.

PROLETARIAT, n., a class of human beings in class
societies having no other means of existence
but the use of their labor-power in the service
of the ruling classes. The modern proletariat,
in the strict meaning of the term, is the class
of industrial wage workers.

PSYCHOLOGY, n., the science of the processes of the
" soul," or " mind."

195

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