Marxism and Modern Idealism

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EDITED BY PROFESSOR BENJAMIN FARRINGTON M A

4M RXISMN MO ERNI E LISMJOHN L WIS

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ONE SH ILLING NET


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M RXISMN

MO ERN I E LISMy John LewisB Sc Ph D

MARXISM TODAY SERIESEDITED BY

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN FARRINGTON M A

1944L WRENCE WISH RT LTD

LONDON


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Other works by the same author ditorand part author

TEXT BOOK OF MARXIST PHILOSOPHYCHRISTIANITY NDTHE SOCIAL REVOLUTION

uthorINTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHYDOUGLAS FALLACIESTHE CASE AGAINST PACIFISMETC ETC

First published 944ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Printed England at The Curwen Press Plaistow E 13


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ONT NTSPage

FOREWORD 4I DOES IT MATTER WHAT A MAN BELIEVES? 5 IDEALISM AND ITS REFUTATION 9 THE REFUTATION OF MECHANISTIC MATERIALISM 4 THE DELUSION OF DUALISM 9V S JAMES JEANS THE DISINTEGRATIOK OF

MATTER MODERN IRRATIONALISM A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE 9

MODERN MAGIC 35GLOSSARY OF PHILOSOPHICAL TERMS 43

The first requisite for philosophizing is a freeand fearless mind.

KARL MARX


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FOR WORTHIS senes of booklets was begun in 1943 the sixtieth anru-versary of the death of Marx as a tribute to his memory byBritish Marxists It does not aim at a complete exposition ofMarxism but offers from time to time a Marxist commentaryon contemporary problems

The present essay seeks to expose the fallacies of modernidealism could not be more timely The idealist philosophyprevalent in Britain is remote from the life and problems of thepeople The efforts of our philosophers to break down theirisolation are irresolute ineffective and doomed to perpetualfailure The failure is in the philosophy itself It has not rid itsown exponents of scepticism dilettantism pedantry andobscurantism There is grave danger in this situation For aprogressive people philosophy is a necessary instrument ofaction correct outlook on the world of nature and of man isnot merely a luxury of contemplation is as necessary for aman s public as for his private life It is part of the equipmentof the citizen as well as of the man

Dr Lewis is well qualified to serve as a guide to the pressingproblems of the day He is already known as an authority ondialectical materialism He will be found an expert at exposingthe errors of idealism which cripple the modern mind His essaywill stimulate and assist progressive thinkers to understand therole of philosophy in changing the conditions of life

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M RXISMN MO ERN I E LISM

THE FUN TION OF PHILOSOPHY IN THEMODERN WORLD

I. Does it Matter what a Man Believes?PHILOSOPHY has been supposed to be a purely academic pursuitof no possible interest to the man of action the speculative activityof curious minds with nothing better to do. A distinguishedscientist says Philosophy may be described as argu men t aboutthings of which we are ignorant. Its subject matter is supposed bymany to be that which lies beyond everyday experience and istherefore in its very nature either unknowable or non-existent.O thers regard philosophy as the pursuit of pur e t ru th by puremind an activity of great indeed of the highest importance buton a different and loftier plane than everyday life which is concerned with material affairs. Thus Dr. Tudor Jones discussingcontemporary German philosophy in the year 1935 says: In spiteof the chaos that now exists in Germany in the political social andreligious life there are still men who have not bowed the knee toBaal but have proceeded with their philosophical thoughts as nothing had happened . Our italics). An activity so utterly remotefrom the problems and demands of real life might well be considered to be futile and quite beyond the interest of ordinary folk.But as a matter of fact the man in the street has more philosophical notions in his head than he knows and they affect bothhis thinking and his actions. It has been well said that we haveno choice whether we shall form philosophies for ourselves onlythe choice whether we shall do so consciously and in accord withsome intelligible principle or unconsciously and at random. Theman who is contemptuous of philosophy may be merely a manwith an unexamined philosophy whose assumptions are uncriticallyheld and many of whose judgments are prejudices. T heunexamined life said Socrates is not worth living and an unexaminedphilosophy may prove to be equally unsatisfactory.

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A moment s reflection reveals the extent to which modernthinking is saturated with unexamined and usually false philo-sophical notions. is not difficult to trace their origin back totraditional modes of thought which were the consciously held andtaught philosophies of yesterday or to the writers journalistsbroadcasters lecturers preachers and teachers of our own daysome of them philosophers others popularizers of other men sphilosophies while the rest reflect in many cases more than theyrealize the current philosophies of the time. Eventually discussionand conversation spread these ideas more widely still until the manin the railway train is heard declaring that science no longerbelieves in matter the wife by the fireside argues that instinct ismore to be trusted than reason and the Brains Trust despite theprotests of Prof. J. D. Bernal informs a credulous world that thereis a lot to be said for spooks.At first glance these common beliefs may seem to be quiteunimportant but their social significance is greater than appears.As Bernal pointed out on the occasion mentioned above it issignificant that an immense increase in superstition characterizedthe decline of ancient Rome and now accompanies the disintegrationof our own civilization. The cult of unreason has been one of thediseases of the fascist mind in Germany and Italy and reflects adeliberate turning back to barbarism the repudiation of therational and scientific approach to the world. The renewed beliefin mentalism the theory that mind is the fundamental stuff of theuniverse and that matter is secondary or even unreal is a viewwhich crops up as the philosophical background of many reactionaryattitudes and much social pessimism.Now all these apparently trivial and certainly loosely held viewsreally stem from philosophical positions of far greater importanceand complexity from syst s of philosophy which merit carefulenquiry. Moreover they will mostly be found on examination tobe forms of what is known as Idealism or to be closely allied to anddependent upon idealist views. is therefore important that weshould clearly understand exactly what is meant by idealism.Philosophically it is not used in any of the popular senses either todescribe an outlook on life which is blind to facts as they are or adetermination to think the best of one s fellows or a life ruled byideals. The philosophical doctrine is a theory of reality in terms of ideas . The matter has been clearly put by Engels: The great

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basic question of all philosophy, especially of modern philosophy,is that concerning the relation of thinking and being The.answers which the philosophers gave to this question split theminto two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit tonature comprised the camp of idealism. The others whoregarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools ofmaterialisrn.

modern philosopher defines it as the vi w that mind alone isreal and material bodies are in some sense to be regarded as statesof, or clernertts in, consciousness. 2The fundamental principle is that matter is not the final reality,

so that the actual world of nature tends to appear trivial and unimportant, or at any rate derivative and secondary. Many idealistsbelieve that Reality lies beyond the material, orld, as a rationaland perfect system to be contrasted with the irrationality andimperfectness of the world as experienced. Idealists also believethat mind or spirit is the creative force in the world. [ot only didSpirit precede and create the material world, but in life and historymen lay hold of ideas and ideals, which are right and true inthemselves, and proceed to apply them to the world, making orre-making the world according to these principles.We shall shortly sec what forms this philosophy takes in our timeand what significance it has for a world passing through one of itsgreat periods of transformation.

Marxism is itself a philosophy and its criticism of idealism is ofcourse philosophical. It does not adopt the merely philistine pointof view which brushes philosophy aside as argument about thingsof which we are ignorant , or futile speculation; nor does it adopta position of naive realism or common sense, the attitude ofDr. Johnson who when asked how he proposed to refute idealismsaid, striking his foot against a great stone, refute it thus . Bothl\larx and Engels were trained philosophers whose own positionwas a development rather than a wholesale repudiation of currentphilosophy. Engels said Those who abuse philosophy most areslaves to precisely the worst vulgarized relics of the worst philosophers. Elsewhere he spoke of the importance of learning toassimilate the results of the development of philosophy during thepast two and a half thousand years. Plekhanov, the Russianl\Iarxist and the teacher of Lenin, was an able philosopher, the study

Engels, Ludtcig Feuerbach Stebbing, Philosophy and the Physicists7


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of whose philosophical works Lenin regarded as indispensable.Lenin s own mind was naturally philosophical and his philosophicalreading was systematic and unusually efficient. If his one greatphilosophical work Materialism and Empirio Criticism is not alwaysappreciated it is because most of those who try to read it aretotally unaware of the irrationalist philosophies which it criticizes.

Marxism is a classical development of European philosophy arevolutionized Hegelianism. is far from treating idealism withcontempt Idealism has its origin in a more critical account ofhuman knowledge. It shows rightly the extreme difficulty ofknowing exactly what the objects of experience really are. Now thiscriticism of our knowledge of the external world is not nonsense; itis the first step from vulgar philistinism to a more rational andscientific understanding of man and his relation to nature. Theunderstanding of how relative all our knowledge is and of theimportant question as to whether we can know anything at allwithout altering it is a matter of importance. Idealism is a reactionfrom the naive belief in an abrupt presentation of physical things tothe mind as if they could be known for what they are as simply asa photographi c plate records a picture. It errs when going beyondthis it denies the independent existence of the object of perceptionor asserts that we more really know our own sensations or mentalstates than any objects beyond them.We cannot do without the contribution which idea lism has madeto our understanding of the world but on the other hand neithercan we do with idealism as a philosophical system. Lenin says thatit is only its one sidedness which vitiates idealism. Philosophicalidealism is nonsense only from the standpoint of a crude simpleand metaphysical materialism. On the contrary from the stand-point of dialectical materialism philosophical idealism is aone-sided exaggerated swollen development of one of thecharacteristic aspects or limits of knowledge. 1 This aspect ofknowledge is the fact of its relativity to the knower and to theconditions of knowing.

While accepting this characteristic aspect or limit of knowledgewhich idealism has established Marxism and of course not onlyMarxism but many other philosophies rejects the exaggeration ofrelativity into a doubt as to the existence of an independent worldwhich is characteristic of much idealism and asserts instead what

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we may call the axiom of independent reality As Prichard states itKnowledge unconditionally pre-supposes that the reality knownexists independently of the knowledge of it and that we know it asit exists in this independence.Marxism therefore does not flatly refute idealism as though thewhole idealist movement from Descartes to Hegel had been a pre-posterous error. does not brush Plato and his own disciples onone side . So far from engaging in a head-on collision in theohnsonian style as is the manner of the crude materialist it absorbseven while it criticizes it includes even while it transcends theidealist philosophy. In other words its whole attitude is dialectical.

dealism and its RefutationBEFORE dealing with certain recent developments of idealistphilosophy which are taking a very denfiite place in the modernmind it is necessary to clear up the whole muddle about the theorythat each mind perceives nothing but its own mental states. Oncewe have done so and not before the errors of our contemporariescan be successfully disposed of.

When a hard square red object such as a brick is perceived weare perceiving a collection of qualities and we usually believe thatthe object the brick in this case is that which has these qualities.But all such qualities are only known to us as mental experiencesof colour and the like. The red patch is really for our minds asense experience not a brick. we smell a rose we really smell anodour and that too is a sense experience. Even the hardness andshape are tactile ~ x et us call what we actually experiencesense-data. is clear that what we normally do is to interpret thesense-data as qualities of concrete objects and we say that weperceive the brick by sensing its qualities The quality we believerequires a substance in which to inhere. But does it? The whole notion of substance is a myth says theidealist. The thing is nothing more than the sum of its experiencedqualities There can be no possible proof of anything else. But sinceall qualities reside only in percipient minds the object itself mustdo the same. In brief the object is of the nature of an idea.

that is so the idea of a brick is not different from the idea ofbeauty or squareness or God. They are all mentally real but notreal in any other way. or is a brick more real than squareness orsquareness less real than a brick.9


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But the plain man at once points out a significant difference. ot all ideas have the same status. Some are vividly and persistently held in our minds s these qualities inhered in someobject before us others are less objective they are merely ourideas. The idealist grants this at once. He does not deny theexistence f objects so i li insist on being known and which arepersistently there. II that he is out to deny is that an experienceof this kind requires a m teri l universe. The experience he arguesis not necessarily an experience of knowing a m teri l world isonly a peculiar kind of experience. It is still something mental.Tile real problem is what can be the origin of such an experienceif not a .material object? But since even if matter existed it israther hard to imagine how it would get across to something sodifferent from itself as mind why should not something ment l bethe cause of our experiences of collections of qualities?Idealists differ considerably as to what mental or ideal organthere might be for our perceptions. Bishop Berkeley one of theablest and the first of the modern idealists held that the objectswe perceive not being of our own making have their cause butthat cause is not matter but God. The only realities then are Godother spirits created by Him and- the various ideas or experienceswhich He has ordained to be apprehended in certain regularsequences. Idealism however need not believe in God and mayinstead simply rest in the ideal or mental character of all reality.

t will be seen that the upshot of the discussion is to disprove theexistence of a material world and to suggest that the whole experi need univer _ is of the same nature as the mind that is thecase materialism is refuted and the principal objection to a religiouse. planation of the universe is removed. And that is precisely whatthe founder of modern idealism Bishop Berkeley intended. Andverr often it is precisely what our modern idealists have in mindas well.

1 ow what is the reply? To strike a great stone with the foot ands ay I refute it thus is only to show that the theory has never evenbeen understood.We must do better tha n that. The refutation is simpler thanmight be supposed. Vhen the idealist says that it is only our ownmental states that we know or that we certainly know them betterthan we know anything else he is labouring under a misconception. Of course to know a thing is to have an idea of it but that does

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not mean that you only know the idea. Because you cannot beconscious of the material world without thinking about it, it doesnot follow that all you are conscious of is your thinking The factthat a known thing must, as an element of knowledge, be classedas an idea only means that when a thing is known it occupies a newrelationship-the relationship of bcing known. But in thus assuming the status of an idea as well as a material object, it docs notby any means become identified with it. The object does notbecome an idea and nothing but an idea. Therefore whatever isknown is not, just because it is thought about, itself of the nature f mind. The idealist has not yet proved his case, and it is up tohim to prove that material objects do not exist. The onus probandiis not on the believer in material reality to prove that they do.

Let us put the matter a little differently. The idealist confusesthe thing apprehended with the act of apprehension. A thought ofa thing must be in the mind, but the thing of which we are awareis not in the mind, and is therefore not mental. We thus vindicatea common sense attitude to reality.So far from mental experience shutting us up to pure subjectivism mind is essentially that which possess . S the characteristic ofbecoming acquainted with things other than itself. The idealiststreat knowing in a way which flatly traverses our experience. AsWhitehead says, This experience knows away from and beyondour own personality-it is not a knowledge about our own personality. Moreover it is not a passive perception of an uri-get-at-ableworld, as if the observer were located in one of those glass observation chambers sunk in the sea. Knowledge is for action and resultsin action, and action means passing beyond the self into the world.That is why Lenin said that to ask outside the realm of practicewhether the objective truth corresponds to human reason isscholasticism. 1 It is the success of our actions, argues Engels, thatproves the correspondence of our perception with the objectivenature of the objects perceived. Practice ought to be the first andfundamental criterion of the theory of knowledge.There are purely mental experiences but they are quickly shownto be such by not standing up to the test of action. We then rightly,call them illusions. If, on the other hand, any experience allows usto act upon it, corrects what was purely mental (i.e. illusory) bysome sharp reaction or verifies the correctness of our perception

1 Lenin teri lism n Empirio Critirism p. I 13


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by standing up to our activity, then we have no reason whatever todoubt its objectivity and materiality, e.g. a mirage does not allowus to slake our thirst, it vanishes as we approach. Real water isdrinkable, can be splashed, objects float on it, it is wet, and so on.

Our knowledge of nature is an experience of activity .we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of anatural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out ofits conditions and using it for our own purposes into the bargain,then there is an end of the Kantian incomprehensible thing-initself . The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plantsand animals remained just such things-in-themselves untilorganic chemistry began to produce them one after another,whereupon the thing-in-itself became a thing for US. 2

other words, there is a continual interaction between knowerand known on the basis of his knowledge. What he knows enableshim to act successfully. his knowledge is not of the object as it is,is not correct, his action is unsuccessful and the result may bedisastrous. Moreover, successful action changes the externalsituation and brings new facts before us, which we have to observecarefully and learn to know. This new knowledge immediatelyrequires a new kind of action and so the process goes on.

Thus experience bears out the fact that we are very far from beinglocked up in the world of our own ideas. On the contrary we arealways finding out things about the world outside us and adjustingourselves by action to its requirements. Objectivity is of the essenceof the experience. t must, however, be carefully noted just w t is refuted. t is subjectivism, mentalism, that is the mistake.But relativism is not a mistake. This is a fact of the greatestimportance, a fact unknown to the older materialists, and ignoredby the uncritical. What idealism bequeathes to us as a permanentheritage, is what Lenin calls the dialectical element in knowledge therecognition of the relativity of all knowledge, of the fact that it isstrictly conditioned, that what we know of it depends on a multitudeof particular circumstances. This is the truth behind the fact thatwe perceive only through sense-data. We perceive objects, but the

qualities of objects are conditioned in all manner of ways. Qualitiesdo not merely inhere in substances but are given in the relationshipof the observer to the object. the object is the permanent1 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World 2 Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach

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possibility of sensation . That possibility is only realized underconditions, and not only the object but wh t the conditions arcdetermine wh t the qualities are.Yet once again we must beware of one-sidedness, of falling overbackwards into a complete denial of objective truth and the assertion that all we know are fictions or symbols created by our ownminds. However relative our knowledge to the conditions underwhich we know, whatever properties and laws we discover arereally there and are as accurately recorded as the circumstancesallow. The results are true as far as they go. This is less than naiverealism claims when it asserts that we know objects as they reallyand completely are in themselves, but very . much more than isallowed by sceptical idealism which declares that we cannot be sureof anything at all outside of our own mental states. In other wordseach recorded observation and discovery is a step forward toabsolute objective knowledge. The steps of our advancing scienceare partial and limited, but they advance into fuller and fuller truthNow we have hitherto been discussing only our knowledge andits conditions. But it is already obvious that we cannot separate though we can distinguish) knowledge and its object. When we saythat under certain conditions of temperature and light a certainsubstance is a colourless fluid, we are stating the limits of ourknowledge at that moment and at the same time describing theobject, not absolutely, but relatively. we lower the temperaturethe same substance may become hard and opaque. This extendsthe limits of our knowledge and adds new properties, under newconditions, to the object. This is a very simple example but bothmodern science and modern philosophy are at one with Marxismin stressing the gre t v ri bility nd the infinite potenti lity of thingswhich are not neat bundles of fixed qualities, but ever-changingcomplexes with explosive possibilities and a great range of proper-ties, only few of which we at present know.So that we no longer say: This is a hard square, red object, but:This is an object which to me, in this particular light, at thisparticular temperature from here is a square, red object, and, inrelation to what I am scratching it with, it is hard.

That of course, is simple enough. But it is not quite so simplewhen you begin to organize things into different patterns orcombinations. Suddenly entirely new and unpredictable propertiesemerge. Chemical o m p o ~ n s have quite different properties from13


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the elements which combine to form them. Hydrogen is a gasoxygen is a gas but their combination in certain proportions iswater. Organic substances have quite different properties frominorganic and yet may be synthesized from the inorganic. Protoplasm performs a synthesis which we cannot as yet perform in thelaboratory; it builds organic substances first into proteins and theninto protoplasm which then exhibits the characteristics of life-itrespires it reproduces itself it moves it e. .crctes it respondsto stimulus.

Life is simply the property of a particular pattern or combination of previously non-living parts but its reality and noveltyare undeniable.The relativity principle thus becomes the principle of emergencethe principle of the infinite potentiality of matter. It completely

shatters the older materialist view that matter was a limited andalmost altogether known affair hich was certainly predictable inall its reactions and as certainly incapable of the transition fromnon-living to living. 1 TOW in so far as idealism insists that we do notknow anything completely but only under the peculiarly limitedconditions of each particular experience of knowing it helps uswithout mentalism or magic to loosen up the rigidities of an earliermaterialism. .

But once again note that this is a statement about our knowledgeand not only about matter. So far as I knou: we must always saysuch and such is the case or such and such are the properties ofthis thing. Every statement of knowledge must be thus qualified.\Ve can no longer say that we know anything unconditionally.

Knowledge we see is not a reading off of the specification of anobject but a statement of the result of a particular relationshipbetween the knower and the known at a particular moment andunder the unique conditions of that moment. Knowing is a twoway business in which the way I approach what I know what I doin order to find out what it is the conditions of my knowing arequite as important as what the object is in itself.

I. The Refutation of Mechanistic aterialismA position almost identical with that of idealism has been reachedby certain physiological materialists. This position has beenexpounded for instance by Bertrand Russell. They point out thatour only evidence for the existence of an external world is given


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by certain sensations which are themselves the result of nervouscurrents activating certain cells in the brain. These nerve currentsare set up by purely physical stimuli, of heat, wave motion,pressure, applied to certain nerve endings in the skin, eye, ear andso forth. 1 ow we have no reason at all to assume that the mentalend effect prod uced by a brain cell at the end of a long chain ofphysical or physiological events is in any way like the originalstimulus, any more than the explosion of a cartridge is like thefinger which pressed the trigger. The physiology of the human bodyand the brain, it is argued, shuts us up to mental end effectsEverything that we can direct observe of the physical world,says Bertrand Russell, happens inside our heads and consists ofmental events. The development of this puint of view will lead usto the conclusion that the distinction between mind and matter isillusory. Thus a purely materialistic view ends up as somethingindistinguishable from idealism an interesting example, by theway, of the l\Iarxist law of a thing passing over into its opposite.But by a curio lis inconsistency, as Whitehead has pointed out,these same people who express themselves as though bodies, brainsand nerves were the only real things in an entirely imaginary worldbase all their evidence on the experimenters perception of anotherperson s body. But our evidence for the bodies we experiment uponand dissect in order to build up our science of physiology is ofexactly the same type as, but weaker than, our evidence for theexternal world we are asked to deny. These materialists arctreating bodies on materialist principles in order to treat all the restof the world on idealist principles and it won t do. An excellentexample, we may remark, of what Bosanquet called the meetingof extremes in contemporary philosophy .We have already indicated the reply. we are quite sure thatthese end-effects are obtained by a physical stimulus falling on aspecific nerve-ending or sense organ which can be fully described,as of course can the physical stimulus and its organ, if we are quitesure about the optic and other sensory nerves hich we havedissected out and experimented with, and of the brain with its

1 As Lenin said, dialectic is the teaching of how contradictions may be andare identical . . . how they turn into each other the one always in process oturning into the other. Engels, too, has spoken of the moving of oppositesin one another s direction. his position however must not be confusedwith more limited and abstract notion that opposites merely logically pre-suppose each other.IS


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nerve cells localized functions visual and auditory areas etc. allthe result of endless experiments we are surely pretty certain aboutthe existence of at any rate that much of the external world andif we find no reason to doubt that why doubt the rest

But the argument is from the other end so to speak onlyBishop Berkeley all over again. It is not a physiological argumentfor mentalism but a philosophical argument and to that we havealready replied.In short Russell like the bishop confuses perceiving and thething perceived perception and the brain event. We do not per-ceive perceptions or even brain events we perceive objects.

To the biologist no such o ~ t s as to the existence of theexternal world ar e likely to occur because unless he is a very badbiologist he is concerned all the time not with a dead specimen ona dissecting board in whose anatomy he is interested but with aliving organism functioning in an external environment adapted tothat environment and constantly reacting to it. The biologist workson two major assumptions firstly that the animal is aware of itsenvironment and has a most elaborate apparatus of sense organsand responsive mechanisms to keep it aware and to make swiftreaction possible; secondly he assumes that his organisms dofunction in relation to a real world and do know a great deal of itenough of it to react satisfactorily and survive. In fact if an animalis insufficiently aware of it the external world will in the form ofthe inanimate environment or living enemies very speedilyterminate its existence.

The biologist also believes that while even his most primitiveorganisms possess this awareness and power of response the mostcomplex including mammals and man have developed awarenessand response to an altogether amazing degree. Moreover he knowsthat in the case of man we have not only a very subtle and skilfulcontrol of behaviour in relation to environmental demands butforesight and self aware ess of which there is no evidence amongthe simpler forms of animal life.

biologist e xcept when he is thinking philosophically andthinking a wrong philosophy is either a mentalist denying theexternal world or a mechanistic materialist. For him an animalexists in relation to a real environment and reacts with it throughawareness and the power to know it.The significance of. the biological approach is immense. It is at

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one and the same time a refutation of idealism and a refutation ofthat form of materialism which excludes mind from the universe.Constrained by its own subject matter, its own experience andexperiment, biology holds together what man has too often putasunder, mind and matter.The materialist who, believing only in the physiological mech-anism leading to brain events, so surprisingly ends up as an idealistdoes not, of course, anticipate that this will prove the inevitableconclusion of his argument. He sets out to prove only that minddoes not exist, that there is nothing properly to be called real butmatter, which is limited to predictable chemical and physiological

effects. For him, if consciousness occurs at all, it is either a sort ofshadow cast by the brain or in some other way consistent with thecomplete dependence of mind on matter. Consciousness, in thatcase, becomes a product without consequences, as a chalk markleft by drawing with a piece of chalk on a board is an effect left bythe passage of the chalk but has, as a mark, no effect itself on thechalk nor the hand which moves the chalk. This for most material-ists is the conclusion of the argument and it is the classical positionof what is often called mechanistic materialism but more generallyknown simply as the materialist philosophy.Marxism has always strenuously opposed this form of materialismon the ground that it is in flat contradiction of the evidence toreduce life and consciousness to chemistry. l\Iarxism does not denythe reality of either life or mind. I t asserts, however that they arefunctions of highly organized matter on the organic level. Everylevel of organization , says 1 [ecdharn, has its own regularities andprinciples, not reducible to those appropriate to lower levels oforganization, nor applicable to higher levels, but at the same time inno way inscrutable or immune from scientific analysis or com-prehension. Therefore the levels of life and mind are not reducibleto physics and chemistry but are unique, with their own specialcharacteristics, modes of behaviour and laws.

u the arxist does not attribute these special characteristics tothe infusion of a vital principle into matter from the realm of mind orspirit He claims that in the realm of nature are to be found differentorganizational levels in an ascending series. From ultimate physicalparticle to atom, from atom to molecule, from molecule to colloidalaggregate, from aggregate to living cell, from cell to organ, from joseplr Needham Time the Refreshing River

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organ to body from animal body to social association the series oforganizational levels is complete. 1 Just as life in its simplest formis characteristic of the colloidal aggregation of proteins known asprotoplasm and has the altogether new power in nature of synthesizing new protoplasm from organic acids so protoplasm organizedin a living cell follows this power of organic growth with the newpowers of reproduction of self-repair of response to stimulus. At ahigher level still specialized cells concern themselves wholly withregistering impressions from the environment and bringing aboutthe activation of muscles which secures an ap pr op riate response.These nerves are called receptors and effectors. Finally a complexorganization of nerve cells is interposed between receptors andeffectors first to provide a multitude of alternative associations likea telephone exchange but ultimately to think about the situationrevealed by the receptors in order that the effect or discharge maybring about considered problem-solving action. In other wordswhen matter is organized in nerves it feels and acts when matter isorganized in a brain it thinks Thought mind is not a substanceadded to matter it is a/unction of a certain kind of matter. This is aconclusion as perfectly in harmony with biological science asmechanistic materialism is in contradiction to it. It is of course aview held not only by Marxists but by most if not all professionalbiologists and by an increasing number of philosophers with a realknowledge of biology.

The mechanistic materialist has formulated his position in anhonest endeavour to be true to scientific principles to seek outscientific c u ~ e s not to multiply entities and fall back in every caseof difficulty upon the supernatural. He is above all things in violentreaction from vitalism which injects a living force into matter toexplain life. He is fundamentally opposed to the theory of theinteraction of two completely disparate entities- m i n d and body.All this is perfectly correct and even in this narrow and somewhatrigid form materialism has broadened the field of science firmlyestablished the scientific method and done much to overthrowobscurantism and superstition.

But the mechanist in banishing mind from the universe becausehe cannot accept the interaction of mind and matter really presupposes this fundamental dualism this parallel existence of amatter without mind and a mind without matter. he didn t have

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extended substance occupying space) and exhaustively comprehended in the terms of mathematics. Give me extension andmotion he said, and I will construct the universe. But how, inthat case, account for mind? Descartes held that mind also exists,but it cannot interact with matter since it does not occupy space.Thus arose that strange philosophical bifurcation of the universewhich has not been overcome down to our own day. It had twoopposite consequences. On the one hand science went ahead andby the immense success of its purely mathematical approach, andjust because it ruled out the supernatural, achieved considerablevictories. Its followers dropped the idealism of Descartes. Theycould do without the realm of pure spirit. It was entirely s up erfluous. On the other hand, those who based their thinking onDescartes proofs of the existence of pure spirit, soon found theyhad no need for matter. They became pure idealists.Thus there came into existence two opposing philosophies,materialism and idealism, each of which really implied theother. They were the two halves of an indissoluble whole. Thematerialist has stripped the universe of mind, but he has not

got rid of it. He cannot. It is, if not the skeleton, at any rate theghost in his cupboard, and it is always plaguing him. the physicaluniverse is without mind, then mind must exist as a thing initself, and to that conclusion men will continue to come as certainlyas water will come in through the holes of a sieve. They are wrong,of course, but they are forced to be wrong in order somehow tojustify the indisputable evidence for the mental and spiritualelements in human life.In their efforts to win back the mind which is separate from

matter they will be compelled to follow one of two courses. Thefirst solution is to go back to dualism and stand these utterlyincompatible entities side by side, invoking magic or the super-natural, to explain their interaction this was the position of thepsychologist William McDougall and is today the position ofJoad). The alternative solution, natural to those convinced ofthe independent reality of mind, is to deny the existence of matter,except as a construct or projection or creation of mind, and weslide rapidly down into mentalism again.The firm believer in the self-existence of mind is also an invertedmaterialist since he also believes that matter cannot think. Thusin a recent Brains Trust Joad disagreed with the medical man

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who asserted that the mind ceases to assimilate new ideas in oldage because of hardening of the arteries. Surely, said oad, wemust distinguish between the mind and the brain. What assimilatesnew facts is not the brain but the mind. A piece of matter cannotknow anything, cannot contain a fact, it can only move about.What happens to the brain cannot possibly affect the mind. Towhich the doctor replied that it was evident that joad did notknow very much about physiology.

Let us note one other consequence. There is a sham fight on.A battle between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. It is this head-oncollision between the materialists and the idealists. is a uselessand confusing procedure. They are both right and they are bothwrong. The presuppositions of both are wrong. It is a mistaketo prove to the materialist that mind exists as something overagainst matter. But it is equally a mistake to prove that matteris mindless. The materialist has got to see that matter in brains)can think. The idealist has got to see that thinking, being realenough, nevertheless never takes place except in brains.Now this is a dialectical solution and Marxism is a dialecticalphilosophy. Descartes splits the unity of thinking matter andcreates the thesis and anti-thesis of the opposites, body and mind.This is an historical necessity and a phase in the development ofscience and thought. But it is not a final phase. I t creates insolublecontradictions. They are resolved, not eclectically by tying up mindand matter side by side, but dialectically, by a return to the originalunity on a higher level. The identity of opposites, says Lenin,more accurately perhaps their unity, is the recognition of themutually exclusive and opposed tendencies in all the phenomenaand processes of nature. 1 The existence of two mutually contradictory aspects, their conflict and their flowing together intoa new category, wrote Marx , comprises the essence of thedialectical movement.In the new synthesis we embrace the manifold achievements ofmechanistic science and idealist philosoph and they are great).We enrich that unity and we resolve the contradictions. That isthe 1 Iarxist as it is the biological and philosophical solution of theBody-Mind problem.

Marxism maintains the unity and interpenetration of oppositeswhich we find in the concrete world. Mind and matter are united Lenin, aterialism and Empirio Criticism.

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and interdependent. Pure matter is an abstraction and while itmay be useful enough to abstract the physical or mathematicalproperties of matter for practical purposes yet we must put whatwe have on paper or in our heads separated from the morecomplex whole back into that whole when we have finished.Not only is this true of living things it is also true of the physicaluniverse which to be known and understood at all has to bebrought into close relations with living beings. As we have seenearlier what we know depends largely on the range of our senseson what we actually do with things on the nature of our experiments and on the n at u re of our requirements. In this way toomind and matter interpenetrate and an organic unity exists inall knowledge a unity of knower and known.Out of the artificial dualism which we have criticized arise notonly mechanistic materialism and idealism but a host of philosophical aberrations some of them of considerable popularity.

They constitute the current philosophy of our times in its idealist aspect and are not without social significance.We propose to consider some idealistic consequences of philosophical dualism current today and to indicate their results inthe social and political sphere.

V ir James Jeans and the isintegration o MatterI T is frequently stated today in pseudo-philosophical writings andin the pulpit that the old idea of matter as a non-mental externaland objective reality has gone that modern science has refinedand dissolved matter away into something so intangible so tenuousso shot through with purely mental elements as to be virtuallysomething more spiritual than material. this be so then theidealist s claim is greatly reinforced. There can certainly be arealm of pure spirit with all that that implies. Endless vistas ofspiritual entities open up none of which of course have need tobe even associated with a material substratum.

Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans have done morethan anyone else to popularize such a notion and it has of coursebeen taken up enthusiastically by ministers of religion broadcasters and journalists. Eddington declares that the floor onwhich we stand is not really solid. The plank has no solidity ofsubstance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. 1 Eddington The Nature of the Physical World

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Another writer says, A table, a piece of paper, no longer possessesthat solid reality which they appear to possess; they are both of themporous, and consist of very small electrically charged particles. 1And J oad points out that the materialistic view of matter whichconceived of the atom as a hard, simple, obvious little lump ofstuff is out of date. This has disappeared: modern matter issomething infinitely attenuated and elusive; it is a hump in spacetime, a mush of electricity , a wave of probability undulatinginto nothingness. Frequently it turns out not to be matter at allbut a projection from the consciousness of the perceiver.t

Sir James Jeans sums it up by saying, The fact that so much ofwhat used to be thought to possess an objective physical existencenow proves to consist only of subjective mental constructs mustsurely be counted a pronounced step in the direction of mentalism. 3However, Stebbing, who has subjected these philosophicaldeductions from modern physics to acute criticism in her Philo-sophy and the Physicists sums up by saying: In my opinion, atleast, modern theories of the atom afford not the slightest justification for saying that recent developments in physics have anytendency to show that materialism is false or are capable ofbeing used to provide any argument in favour of idealism. 4

There are three separate fallacies in volved in the idealist position.Firstly all that is really meant by modern science is that thenineteenth-century view of matter, at the ultra-microscopic level,is out of date. It no longer consists of hard, indivisible billiardball -like atoms but of electrical phenomena. But neither view hasgot anything at all to do with solidity on the level of ordinaryexperience On that level matter is as solid as ever it was, it notonly appears to be solid, it is solid, it does possess that solidreality which it appears to possess . The scientist does not denythat however tenuous and impalpable the ultimate constituentsof matter may be, the result in our man-size world is ordinarytables and chairs which the scientist believes in like everybody else.Secondly however tenuous and non-solid ultra-microscopicmatter is found to be, it does not cease to be matter. Matter hasmerely been further described. It has only ceased to be materialin the common use of that word, not in the exact or in the scientific

Ernst Zimmer, The Revolution in Physics (our italics .2 joad, God and Evil3 Jeans, Physics and Philosophy Stebbing, o o cit

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sense. For anything is matter that exists prior to man and priorto mind, that is an objective reality existing independently of thehuman mind and subsequently known by it. . The sole propertyof matter with which materialists are concerned, says Lenin.is the property of being objective reality, of existing outside ourcognition . . . The recognition of immutable elements is not

materialism-it is only mechanistic or metaphysical materialism.Whether we speak of electrons or what, we ask one fundamentalquestion-Do they exist as objective realities outside the humanmind? 2

Matter is akin to energy and radiation. But these obviouslybelong to the physical, i.e. material, world. Sunlight possessesinertia and is bent in a gravitational field. T h e discovery thatmatter, as regards its inertial property, is not different from sunlight does not in the least tend to abolish the distinction whichwe recognize between the mental and the material. \Vhen modernscience refuted the billiard-ball theory of the mechanists, somephilosophers not only threw out the bath water, but the baby aswell, By denying the immutabil ity of the elements and propertiesof matter known hitherto, they ended with the denial of matter,the denial of the objective reality of the physical world. 3Thirdly from the lack of solidity on the ultra-microscopic level,from the mathematical abstractions which help us to understandmatter at that level, and from the undeniable fact of the relativityof our knowledge that which we know depends on how we handleit, on our limitations, our conditions of knowledge) they pass overinto pure mentalism, as Joad does, matter becomes a projectionfrom the consciousness of the perceiver .B ut this does not follow. We have already discussed the dependence of knowledge on the point of view of the knower and shownthat dependence does not rule out independence. The argumentis of sufficient importance to be recalled. That the object existsindependently of us is an unchangeable fact; what it is exactlywe know only in part, in aspects, with but an approximate degreeof truth. That what we thus know is true as far as it goes we knowbecause we act successfully on that knowledge. So far from matterdissolving into mind, mind remains that which possesses thecharacteristic of becoming acquainted with things other than

Lenin speaks of course as a dialectical materialist not as a mechanist2 and 3 Lenin Materialism n Empirio Criticism.


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due to irresistible and inscrutable forces which it is folly for usto seek to control and presumptuous to seek to understand. it should be contrary to the interests of any privileged sectionof the community to remove these evils it will be seen how the

superstition which paralyses man s efforts serves their ends. Inthis fact we have perhaps one of the reasons for the revival ofidealism in an age in which many social evils exist and in whichthe remedies at hand conflict with vested interests.I s it not odd asks Stebbing that men should welcome assome do any indication of unreason in the world i TO it isnot at all odd. The approach of scientific reason in physicalscience in biology and medicine and above all in sociology isa hard discipline. t is easier to invoke the s upernatu ra l or to yieldto inscrutable powers than to wrestle with 1 Tature learn her lawsand control the world. In sociology moreover the interests of theprivileged may be immediately threatened by sound social theory.In that case it will be desirable that knowledge should be cloudedand human power to interfere enfeebled.This does not mean of course that every idealist is consciously

defending his cash interests or the interests of a privileged classbut it does suggest that in a society ruled by and ideologicallydominated by such interests there will be a certain pressure or driftaway from scientific social thinking and towards idealism super-stition and supernaturalism and that thegreaterthe danger of socialchange the more widespread will superstition tend to become.V odern rrationalism

T II ER E is an implicit irrationalism wherever scientific inqu iry isruled out of any part of experience. All supernaturalism is irra-tional because in it there can be no discovery of ascertainable andverifiable laws of cause and effect. All is conjecture or dependenceon unprovable revelation . l\Ien find themselves deducing fromunprovable a priori principles as revealed truths what must ormust not be so. The result is that there will be as many systemsas there art: sets of unproved dogmas all mutually exclusive. Whenman cannot find the truth of science he is forced to accept the truthof his own intuition and that means complete subjectivism be-lieving what is strongly even overwhelmingly felt to be true atthe moment. Psychology tells us what an infinity of mentaldelusions such beliefs lay us open to.

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But there are movements today of the first importance whichbase irrationalism not on pure mentalism, not on the need for avital force to explain life or causation, but on the very nature ofscientific knowledge itself. The chief protagonist is again Eddington, but he is only the last of a long line of irrationdlist philosophersand scientists from Mach and Avenarius to Bergson and Vaihinger.This view is that science never gets beyond its own perceptionsand the more or less arbitrary ways in which they are built up bythe mind into scientific constructs. These come, mistakenly, tobe regarded as external objects and scientific laws All throughthe physical world, says Eddington, runs an unknown content,which must really be the stuff of our own consciousness. \Vehave found that where science has progressed the farthest, themind has but regained from nature that which the mind has putinto nature. 1 Scientific laws and, in fact, the whole scientificdescription of the world, thus come to be a collection of fictionsor abstractions which, to use an example of Eddington s, no moredescribe the reality they stand for than the numbers of telephonesubscribers tell us anything about the subscribers themselves.The theory, in some quarters, is extended to overthrow the wholenotion of causation and scientific law and to substitute meresuccession or observed regularities. Thus a wire glows when youpass electricity through it, but we must not say that the electricitycauses the rise in temperature, we have merely two events whichfrequently occur together so that there is the probability of themdoing so again. There can be no necessary connection between theso-called cause and effect. As Joad rightly says of this whole pointof view, it strikes the authentic subjectivist note.is a much older th eory th an most people suppose. The firstexhaustive criticism of it, indeed, was Lenin s Materialism andEmpiric criticism published in 1909, in which Mach, Avenarius,Karl Pearson, Ostwald, Poincare the scientist and the NeoKantians come in for severe criticism.

Once again the issue cannot be resolved by head-on collision.The irrationalists and fictionalists have got something.They are in revolt from a much too rigid rationalism and from a

naive spot-light view of scientific knowledge. Objects are notlike a neat row of exhibits on a shelf which can be accuratelylabelled. Laws are not a collection of fixed and final legal rulesEddington, The ture of the Physical World.


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which things must o ey and which science looks up and reads offin the great textbook of nature. Cause and effect in nature is notthe same thing as the logical necessity by which the conclusionof a syllogism is reached. The effect is not in the cause as theconclusion is co tained in the premises. That kind of a mechanicaluniverse never existed. It is correct too that all formulations areabstractions freeze the flowing moment select an aspect from aninfinity of possibilities. It is true that in all knowledge the knoweris so tied up with what he knows that you cannot separate them.Knowledge as we have said is an organic relation and a relationof selectivity and activity not a bare contemplative reflection.

But because the mechanical universe of naive science does notexist there is no need to abandon the objectivity of things and thereality of laws. That as Lenin said is to empty out the baby withthe bath water.All suc h doubts are based upon the erroneous notion that trueknowledge is the perception of an external object which is preciselywhat it is apart from our knowing it an intuitive apprehensionof the real and necessarily always infallible; and it is also basedupon the view that we ought never to rest content with anythingless than a full coercive and infallible knowledge. Once this simpledogmatism is subjected to the thorough-going criticism of relativism the tendency is to abandon it for sheer irrationalism.But reality is not overthrown by its relational character but isso constituted. is only the ghost of a strict rationalism whichcondemns us to despair.

These criticisms of scientific reality are due to the unavailingstruggle to apprehend with logical certainty the structure of afinished reality as it stands over against a passive observer. Onceit is seen that reality can be truly if imperfectly known only as aconstruct in which mind and nature are partners then we shallsee that while our claims to know may be modest they maynevertheless be firm.

Just as idealism refutes a naive realism so does irrationalismbut it goes too far. The mind does contribute a great deal to thescientific picture of reality which is not merely read off .Hypotheses models fictions categories all imply mental activitynot a passive reflection of reality. But there is a way of makingsure that the e le me nt of construction inherent in our scientificthinking is valid and not as irrationalism believes mere fiction.

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\Ve do not only observe and think we experiment. \Ve can testboth our theories and the observation on which they are basedby our success or failure in acting upon them. our imaginaryconstructions cannot be used to anticipate correctly the results ofour activities they cannot be valid. Experiment is an essentialpart of our means of distinguishing between constructions whichare knowledge and constructions which are merely efforts of theimagination. 1 Such experiment moreover is not an appeal fromthought to perception but an appeal from reflection and imagina-tion to action from theoretical experience to practical experience. 2Irrationalism however is more than a philosophical error; ithas the most serious social consequences.1 Truth becomes anything we can get believed any patternconvenient to ourselves into which we can force the facts. TheFascist attempt to coerce the facts is a good example of this.2 On the other hand if the universe is irrational no honest mancan really have faith in any theory since he knows it is really onlythe shape his own mind puts upon events. The economic and

political theories of Socialism are not truths but fictions myths.Conviction therefore comes to depend not on understandingreality but on faith. And that kind of faith is not what men die for.3. Finally this view sees in the objective world only chaos andlawlessness since order and law are simply the mental spectaclesthrough which we choose to look. The conclusion for every honestmind is to throwaway the spectacles and face the sheer bruteirrationality of life a creed of complete despair. In a decliningcivilization torn with insoluble contradictions and distressed withhopeless paradoxes chaos is of course a fact and that is whyirrational theories of the world and flights to realms of purelymental peace or super natur al perfection are so common. But bothreactions avoid the plain task of understanding the world in itschaos diagnosing its evils and reconstructing it. Such theoriesare therefore popular with those who either cannot or dare notor will not face that task.

TII Pluralistic UniverseANOTHER strange consequence may follow from this idealisticreaction. In stead of accepting one or the other of the two sides ofdualism it is possible to accept both We thus come to attach equal

I\lacmurray The Boundaries of Science Ibid


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validity to the realities of the external world of sense and to therealities of the mind. What are these realities? Firstly of courseour own minds or spirits. Secondly a whole range of mental orspiritual realities which mind has the power to apprehend including the absolutes: Truth Beauty and Goodness. Such realitiessays [oad who is one of the principal upholders of this view areknown by means of a faculty which only minds at a certain levelof development have evolved They are not objects of perceptionbut first of all objects of thought. From this level we proceed toobjects of value which are apprehended by insight and thoseultimate realities which are known only to mystical intuition.The objects to which the philosopher s mind is directed belongentirely to the world of thought. The objects of philosophy lieon those confines of the world of thought which are furthest fromthe physical realm and also nearest to the realm of values. 1Hence the aloofness of the true philosopher. His mind is normallydirected upon the objects of a non-physical world and he cannoteasily bring attention to bear upon the contents of the physical one.But it is clear that once tlte fallacies of idealism are exposedthe so-called realities of dualism and pluralism are seen to bemental projections and nothing else qualities and functions ofthe material torn off and given independent existence. Going backfor a moment to. Descartes dualism we see that it is the productof a vicious abstraction which separates the complex organicreality into mind and body knower and known dead matter andlive minds. From such a position it is inevitable to conceive mindif it is accepted at all as a thing in itself.

From such pluralistic beliefs arise a whole succession of fatalheresies. len spend their time in contemplating pursuingarguing about and worshipping projected aspects of their ownconsciousness or sub-consciousness. is a waste of time. Itdirects attention away from the concrete. It is as if a doctor wereequally concerned with the exorcism of devils and with germs ora scientist were not quite sure whether magic or mechanics shouldestablish the principles of aeroplane construction.The Harvard philosopher Santayana has devoted his great giftsto the cult of this form of idealism. His other-worldliness hisascetic rapture over pure beauty and the ideal world spring fromhis discovery in the heart of metaphysics of that perfection he

joad The Return to hilosophy3


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vainly sought in nature and in reason. He has come full circle toa Platonic insight that looks upon all life as fleeting and imperfectand somehow unsatisfactory. He is at last a free soul , bound tothis earth by only the slightest of ties and ever ready to turn hisback on these.This contemplative habit obviously finds more satisfaction insolitude than in society in art than in business in prayer than inpolitics. is stimulated by looking inwards contemplativelyrather than by looking outwards to see what needs to be done.The world has not to be altered but only understood by mysticalinsight by seeing all things under the form of eternity.

Such theories invariably affirm the superiority of the spiritualover the material. The more abstract and unreal indeed the moresacred the reality. The consequence is to give the utmost importance to the non-real and little or no importance to the real.The result is not only complete futility but in pursuing thiswill-o -the wisp such people turn away from and condemn everysane rational and scientific approach to the problems before themas doomed to.failure because it neglects the spiritual. Thus theydrift into opposition to all schemes and movements for socialreform.Fortunately most idealists are sufficiently inconsistent to attemptto make the best of both worlds an attempt not however likelyto succeed since their theories tend inevitably to vitiate their

saner and more rational impulses. What must be the influencefor example of Mr. Gerald Heard on his disciples? He comesforward as himself the prophet or mystic to point the way to the higher life. Yet the loftier his claims the more completely emptyof content or reason do they appear; the more woolly are his ideasthe more verbal his precepts. He is the nco-Brahmin. He isth e pilot. He is the antennae of the new society. He specializes inand communicates spiritual power. He is in touch with the Source.I only wish I could escape the impression that he is selling something the nature of which unfortunately cannot be divulged. 2Once again the door is flung wide open to every form of selfdelusion and charlatanism. One the criterion of conformity toexternal material reality of experiment and practice is removed

Howgate, George Santayana G. \V. St onier Review in th e SUI day Tim es of l n the M aster byG erald Heard .

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literally anything can be exalted into a spiritual thing-in-itself.The wise and good exalt into mystical realities their own wisdomand goodness, but the fool worships his folly and the villain hisvillainy. In fact, as Chesterton pointed out, long ago, When Jonesbegins to worship the God within, he usually ends up by worshipping Jones .

There is another side to the cult of the non-material, and thatis the degradation of the physical. Beginning with Plato the idealisttends, in separating consciousness, and with it human values,from the body to abandon the body to non-human that is to say,animal propensities. the higher life is in the realm of spirit, itcan only be followed by turning one s back on the life that belongsto the flesh, which is on a lower plane. It is a simple step to associateall that is evil in life with the material or bodily side and all that isnoble with the spiritual s if there were not as much and morespiritual evil than bodily There follows the doctrine of originalsin or the innate corruption of human nature, the seat of thatcorruption being the flesh. What Plato left undone in riveting thisheresy upon men s minds St. Paul and St. Augustine completed.The result today is that social evil is attributed not to error, orhistorical causes, not to economic or class interests but to theineradicable and inscrutable evil in human nature. This providesa welcome alibi for the real interests opposing reform, spreadsa pessimism and defeatism equally useful in preserving thestatus quo and directs the whole of human effort to the task ofpurifying the soul by breaking its links with the world and itstemptations, in other words to the task of lifting oneself by one sown boot-straps.

Much has been written recently to disparage that social effortwhich assumes that man can behave decently, Social reformers,we are told, neglect man s inherent wickedness, attempting toexplain his being and purpose on one plane . The dualistic orreligious view is that man has being on two planes, the materialand the spiritual, and therefore needs redemption.Society says Aldous Huxley, can never be greatly improveduntil such time as most of its members choose to become theocentricsaints. our fathers had argued in this way few great reformswould have been achieved. Today it is calculated to spread alarmand despondency in the minds of men and women of goodwill

Nicholson, Mall and Literature Griffith, nterpreters of Mall32


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who would otherwise give their practical aid and support toprogressive social policies. 1This literary pessimism which is widespread both in criticismand in creative work is a true reflection of the conditions which

have shaped them. is philosophically clearly related to irrationalism and subjectivism on the one hand and to a decadentmodern theology on the other. A typical example is the late BernardLord Manning a modern Calvinist starkly opposed to Modernism.His deepest dissent was from the belief that man and his worldare good that given a chance they will develop alright. What hestood for was renunciation not amelioration of the world;transformation not development of the individual .The optimistic literature of the early Shaw and Wells basedon the belief that man was essentially a rational and decent creaturehas suffered shipwreck. Man will listen neither to sermons norto reason. His nature is not fundamentally good but evil as thepsycho-analysts have shown. The reaction begins with Hardy andHousman who viewed man as the sport of Nature in some sensemalignant: And how am I to face the oddsOf man s bedevilment and God s?

Lawrence found the human soul diseased and his cure wasfor man to become possessed not by a divine but by an inhumanwill or as he put it to be inhumanly physiologically materiallynot to feel according to the human conception . Social collapseand frustration the war and the appalling moral debacle of theAxis peoples reveal man as an imperfect and sinful creature.Three writers who take the lid off humanity are mentioned byNicholson. They are Joyce with his Catholic background Kafkawho wrote fantastic allegories or nightmares on the impotence ofman and T. S. Eliot. In all of them is a Catholic sense of sin selfdisparagement defeatism loneliness cynicism and pedantry.As Connolly says of Joyce tortured with the lapsed Catholic sguilt we find in him horror and delight in failure . He hasturned away from social responsibilities am afraid I am moreinterested Mr. Connolly in the Dublin street names than in theriddle of the Universe .No one would question joyce s influence on literature his

Needham Time the efreshing iver33


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extremely sensmve auditory imagination, his enrichment oflanguage. His reali sm, too, pays the tribute of all devotees ofpure experience from Mach to Bergson) to the unique value andvalidity of each separate moment of consciousness. His sense ofthe interpenetration of all moments of reality is not only experientialand poetic but reflects Whitehead s view of reality as process inwhich an infinite number of factors and relations determine eachfleeting event and the world which we see about us is involvedin some more intimate fashion than is ordinarily supposed withthe things that go on in our minds .Nevertheless, as Edmund Wilson 1 shows, this whole literarytendency reflects a desire to stand apart from the common lifeand live only in the imagination-not for the fruit of experience,but for experience itself. Reflecting the decadence of their class,such writers are the last historians of Heartbreak House .Hence the ineffectual fragmentary imagination, the impotenceand resignation of Eliot : 2

, This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.

There falls on literature a sullenness, a lethargy, a sen se ofenergies ingrown and festering, while poetr y is dully weighted bya leaden acquiescence in defeat. Eventually, as Wilson says,literature, music and painting become th e three branches ofneurology . Eliot, defending classicism, Royalism and Catholicism,says, We fight rather to keep something alive than in expectationthat anything will triumph. )

The social criticism of such writers does not aim at anything:it is an exercise of. the pure intelligence not driven by the motorpower of any hope and not directed by any creative imaginationfor the possibilities of human life. they ever indicate a preferencefor any social order different from the present one, it is invariablyfor some society of the past.Yet their achievement is considerable. They were correct inrefuting the shallow optimism that foresaw man r i ~ t i n theuniverse by sheer power of will and reason, man out of relationto his class or conditions, man taking no heed of developing socialforces and declining institutions. They were right in depicting

Edmund Nilson, Axe s Castle and 71 llnd and the BowEdmund Wilson. Asel s Cast e

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society as disintegrating and corrupt. They were right again intheir disruption of mere materialism and naturalism in weldingbody and mind in indissoluble unity.

They were wrong in isolating man as a mere point-instant ofexperience in forgetting the fact that man without fellowshipwithout membership in society is nothing. Forsooth brothersfellowship is heaven and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship islife and lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do uponthe earth it is for fellowship s sake that ye do them and the lifethat is in it that shall live on and on for ever and each one of youpart of while many a man s life upon the earth from the earthshall wane. 1

V Modern Magic0 . E of the inevitable results of draining everything but thephysical and chemical out of matter and so reducing it to puremechanism is that it becomes quite impossible to account onrational grounds for the objective phenomena of life and mindand for the evolution of the living out of the non-living. Theattempt to explain these away by reducing them to physical termsis so hopelessly artificial that it immediately breaks down. Nowsince ex hypothesi the only material factors are mechanical and theonly scientifically rational effects are calculable and predictableresultants how do you account for life and how do you explain.the evolution of totally new and unpredictable types such as thebird evolving out of a reptile? There can be only one solutiona vital force must be at work. But it is the whole aim of the scientistto reduce such new effects to law to analyse until he has all theconditions and factors responsible for them. To invoke a vitalforce is to sabotage investigation and scientists have been severeon the vitalists in consequence. Biologists have strongly opposedthe attribution of evolution to this non-material mystical urgethis impact of pure spirit on pure matter. They have sought andto a considerable and steadily increasing degree found scientificcauses for evolutionary change. Where gaps in the causal chainare still unbridged the scientist does not immediately postulatethe necessity for miracle but simply continues his investigationin the faith that discoverable causes are there. He points out thatit is precisely this attitude in contradiction to baffled surrender

William. [orris Dream of John Ball


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to vitalism that has in the past solved innumerable similar problems which would never have been solved if a supernatural causehad been assumed.Vitalism however arises from a mistake as to the real meaningof cause and effect. When Eddington declares that no physicisttoday believes ill scientific determinism he expresses the commonirrationalist view that law is only a statement of high probabilitybased on statistical averages and not therefore a statement ofnecessity this is the case then three important results follow.Firstly the door is opened to the operation of purely spiritualfactors thus vindicating the reality and independence of the nonmaterial world. Secondly an indefinite sphere is indicated outsidethe bounds of scientific understanding and control within whichwill be included human conduct society politics and economics.Thirdly science itself suffers. Law has always been regarded byscientists as a higher level of physical reality which expl ins theworld as we find it in experience. This new doctrine rejects thatnot ion and asserts that there are nothing but experiences or factsand that laws merely summarize them for our convenience.The older scientific view was based on the theory that the onlykind of law or causal necessity was a mathematical or logical onein which reason by itself can deduce the effect from the causeor find the effect to be already in the cause in which case ofcourse nothing really new can ever happen.In so far as vitalism shows this view to be inadequate r endersa valuable service. everything that has happened was containedin the original physical order We ought then to regard the presentstate of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and thecause of the state that is to follow says Laplace in the classicalstatement of this position. Now this is indeed the case in a greatdeal of mathematics and physics a simple example being thepropositions of Euclid. But events occur which are certainly notpredictable in this way for example the colour and other properties of chemical compounds the behaviour of protoplasmand so on. These effects are not mathematical resultants. Are theytherefore irrational? Are they outside scientific causation? Arethey merely inexplicable observed succession-given A then Balways follows? Only if we accept a pur ely logical not ion of reasonand causation.But is this the real meaning of causation? Not at all. The more

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explanation and yet nature is one succession .of novelties and iscreative through and through.Marxism has always held firmly to the theory of integrative levelsand qualitative change while denying the need of vitalistic inter-ference. arxism is wholly at one with modern science and modernphilosophy in this approach which escapes from the dilemma byavoiding the original error of dualism which denied the capacityfor life and change to matter. Marxism finds a sufficient explanationfirstly in the infinite potentialities of matter secondly in theself movement of matter thirdly in the repatterning of matteras it seeks to adjust internal to eternal relations and as itdevelops its own various aspects in organic relation to its environ-ment. This is sufficient to account for the evolution of all thesuccessive and infinitely varied types of existence including livingforms thinking animals social types like man and eventually ofsociety itself.Vitalism however is not only a scientific but a social heresy. helps to reinforce that attitude to the contradictions and problemsof society which places them beyond rational control. encouragesbelief in the existence of unconscious urges and blind irrationalforces.An age of increasing contradictions and social paradoxes inwhich poverty and plenty increase together and want seemsactually to be created by the same system that is producing wealthto an unexampled degree in which war and economic slumpdescend on the peoples like natural calamities is an age in whichmen will feel themselves increasingly to be the sport of forcesthey can neither explain nor understand.But a vigorous attempt to find a rational solution is bound todiscover economic causes for poverty unemployment and warwhich are rooted in the system of class ownership and can only befinally removed by ending it. Since such a solution is unwelcomeboth to those who profit by the st tus qu and by those who thinkthey might and since the rest are economically dependent uponthe ruling class and derive their ideas largely from the educationand propaganda provided by it the result will be a flat refusalof the mind even to entertain the possibility of radical reform.I t thus becomes as impossible to understand or control socialphenomena as it would be electrical phenomena if we began byrefusing to acknowledge the existence of electricity.

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There is an obsession here which can only be explained psychologically. The urge to fly from the truth at all costs drives the mindinto every kind of fantastic and supernatural explanation andresort. Hence the popularity of astrology, mysticism and everykind of superstit ion today.

The result of the collapse of Europe s spiritual and social order,says Drucker, is that men turn to miracle. The final defeat ofreason and order was the failure first of capitalism and then oforderly liberal reform. Thereafter man is convinced that theworld has no order and follows no law-the forces which governsociety have become irrational, therefore .miracle is the only wayout and he will believe in nothing else'The conventional lie of a society divided into classes assumesproportions which are all the more extensive according as theexisting order of things is endangered through economic evolutionand by the working of the class struggle which is the outcome ofthat evolution. Marx said truly that the greater the development ofantagonisms between the growing forces of production and theextant social order, the more does the ideology of the ruling classbecome permeated with hypocrisy.

Our ancestors invented the supernatural to give them faith ina world of perils which they would not contro ' It was both understandable and excusable. Moreover, superstition was mingled withempirical facts of some value. It was not impossible to progressthrough partial and inadequate understanding to science andrationality. In our day we sin against the light. With all the achievements of science in our hands we turn back to magic. This wilfulreaction is pathological and its effect mental disintegration, thecult of unreason.Now the rational buttress of irrationalism is that form of idealismwhich we call vitalism, is that failure to explain change whichdescribes it as 'statistical regularity because law is no longerbelieved in.

Thus does a false ideology support a reactionary social attitudeand confuse, paralyse and discourage the activity of thought inthe solving of economic and political problems.

What is already a well-marked sympton of the modern mindin the English-speaking world has long been the predominant Drucker, The ndof conomic an' Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism

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philosophy of both Italy and the Third Reich. On the one handan exaggerated idealism reducing the historical world to pureunalterable Idea in which the individual holds a fixed and completely subordinate place. On the other, the repudiation of reason,and a complete surrender to primitive instinct as the short cut toreality. The more morbid forms which idealism and irrationalism,particularly in Germany, have taken, are too numerous to mention,though of great interest.

Otto Spann is simply Hegel without his dialectic and withouthis revolutionary dynamics. Taking the capitalist system as it iswith its false categories of the market, employer and employed,over-production, supply and demand, financial stringency, itregards these as unalterable laws of an unchanging whole, logicalnecessities in which man is for ever trapped. The world is not, asit was for Hegel, a self-changing, self-emancipating whole but apermanent condition of slavery for mankind-a staticcaste system,the corporative state.Klages, the apostle of instinct, exalts animalism as fundamentallife force which determines the nature of society. Every animaldevours and expects to be devoured. All social theories whichassume a different principle for man are beside the point. Thelife force in social life is that tribal spirit which completely swampsand embraces all individuals. The individual surrenders himselfand his reason to the tribe and mass feeling. In getting rid of theindividual we also get rid of all those awkward doctrines of therights of man, justice, equality, humanitarianism, and democracy,which stand in the way of the privilege and absolute authorityof the bosses of the Fascist state.

Fascist thought is thus in continuous oscillation between thetwo poles of Vitalism and Totalitarianism. Both succeed inestablishing that which is the main requirement of Fascist philosophy-the concept of a human society that would not be arelationship of persons. 2

It is clear that Idealism under the constraining influence of asociety in disintegration in which the ruling classes are determinedat all costs to resist social change does not remain a mere intellectualerror which we might regard with disinterested tolerance, itbecomes a powerful weapon of reaction, a mental poison which

See Aure Kolnai, The War gainst the West, Karl Polanyi, The Essence Fascism


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by reinforcing Fascist policies and weakening resistance to them,by inhibiting the mind against policies of rational and hopefulreconstruction, becomes a powerful ideological ally of the worstforces of corruption and self-destruction in the modern world.And this whole philosophy of reaction in its various phasesarises theoretically from an artificial dualism Throughout theUniverse there reigns the union of opposites which is the groundof dualism. Whenever a vicious dualism appears, it is by reason ofmistaking an abstraction for a final fact. l The universe is dualbecause each final actuality known to us is both physical andmental. But if we lose the unity in a divided universe, then out ofthe false dualism arises as one pole that mentalism or idealismwhich is the source of our modern superstitions and irrationalisms.

To bring about and to encourage such illusions is the vital rolewhich idealism plays in preventing human progress. Our falseprophets suspend by their philosophies those processes ofintellectual liberation by which a people is restored to sanity . 2Civilizations , says Laski, have perished before in history; andanyone who examines their destruction will find, I think, that oneof its most fundamental causes is that superstition has taken sofirm a hold upon the mind of the nation that it no longer possesseswithin itself the means whereby the authority of reason can effecta restoration of unity .3Since social forces work not only through economic contra-dictions and political conflicts but through a conflict of ideologiesit is on the plane of philosophy as well as politics that the actualsocial struggle of our time must be fought to a finish.

Whitehead Science and the M odern World. Laski, Faith Reason and Civiliz ion Ibid.


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GLOSS RY PHILOSOPHI L TERMS

DIALECTICThought which is always changing reflecting as it does the changinguniverse and also taking a hand in changing it.DUALISMThe view that there are two ultimate realities which are totally differentfrom one another Mind and Matter. The job is to explain how theyinteract.IDEALISMThe philosophy which holds that mind existed before matter andbrought it into existence or that matter is less real than mind or thatall objects for mind are themselves mental even tho ugh they may notbe merely the ideas of the perceiver.LIFEA function of certain kinds of matter. Not a thing Matter lives whenit respires reproduces repairs itself reacts to stimulus by behaviourbuilds up its own highly complex living substance out of simplerorganic materials.MECHANISTIC MATERIALISMThe philosophy which holds that only matter non-living and nonthinking exists and that it obeys only physical and chemical laws.DIALECTICAL MATERIALISMThe philosophy which holds that matter existed before mind that inthe course of its evolution it became living and subsequently in thebrains of animals thinking.MENTALISMSometimes called su jective idealism the view not a systematicphilosophy which holds that all we know are mental states.METAPHYSICSThe attempt to supply the answer to the question: what is thenature of the universe i.e. what is space what is time what is the mindand matter what do we mean when we say that a thing exists.VITALISMThe theory that explains life and evolution by the intrusion of a vitalforce into the non-living.

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OTHER TITLES IN THIS SERIES

M RX NE ONOMISTMaurice Dobb. 1/

M RXISM NDMODERN RTF. D. Klingender . 1

M RXISM ND THEINDIVIDU LHewlett Johnson 1/

L WREN E WISH RT LTD

Documents

Marxism and Modern Idealism