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Every materialist rejects the consciousness -- the mind -- as antecedent to
matter and to nature. For thousands, nay millions, of years there was not an
intimation of a living, organic being upon this planet, that is, there was not anything
here of what is called mind or consciousness. Existence, nature, matter preceded
consciousness, preceded spirit and mind.
One must not think, however, that Matter is necessarily something crude,
cumbrous, unclean, while the Idea is something delicate, ethereal and pure. Some,
particularly the vulgar materialists and, at times, simply young people, unwittingly
assert in the heat of argument and often to spite the Pharisees of idealism, who only
prate of the "lofty and the beautiful" while adapting themselves most comfortably to
the filth and meanness of their bourgeois surroundings, that matter is something
ponderous and crude.
This, of course, is a mistaken view. For a hundred and fifty years we have
been learning that matter is incredibly ethereal and mobile. Ever since the Industrial
Revolution has turned the abutments of the old and sluggish natural economy upside
down, things began to move. The dormant was awakened; the motionless was stirred
into activity. In hard, seemingly frozen matter new forces were discovered and new
kinds of motion discerned.
How inadequate was the knowledge of the French materialists, can be judged
from the following. When d'Holbach, for instance, was writing his System of Nature,
he knew less of the essential nature of phenomena than an elementary school
graduate to-day. Air to him was a primary element. He knew as little about air as the
Greeks had known two thousand years before him. Only a few years after d'Holbach
had written his chief work, chemistry proved that air was a mixture of a variety of
elements -- nitrogen, oxygen and others. A hundred years later, towards the end of
the nineteenth century, chemistry discovered in the air the rare gases, argon, helium,
etc. Matter, to be sure! But not so very crude.
Another instance. Nowadays we all use the radio and wireless most diligently.
It renders us great services. Without it we would literally be groping in the dark. Yet a
study of its development shows us its comparatively recent origin -- about twenty-
five years. It was only in 1897 or 1898 that matter revealed to us such unmaterial
attributes that we had to turn to Hindoo theology to find terms to depict them. The
radio transmits signs and sounds. One may be in Moscow and enjoy a concert
broadcast a few thousand miles away. It is only very recently that we have learned
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that even photographs can be transmitted by radio. All these miracles are performed
not through some "spiritual" agency, but by means of very ethereal, and, no doubt,
very delicate, but none the less quite measurable and controllable matter.
The above examples were adduced for the purpose of illustrating the
obsoleteness of some conceptions of the material and the immaterial. They were even
more obsolete in the eighteenth century. Had the materialists of those days had at
their disposal all the recently disclosed facts, they would not have been so "crude,"
and they would not have offended the "sensibilities/index.htm" of some people.
Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) contemporaries among the German
philosophers held to the orthodox point of view. They rejected materialism as godless
and immoral. Kant, however, was not satisfied with such a simple solution. He knew
full well the flimsiness of the traditional religious notions. But he had neither enough
courage nor enough consistency definitely to break with the old.
In 1781 he published his magnum opus the Critique of Pure Reason in which
he established most conclusively that all knowledge was empirical, and that there
were no proofs for the existence of a God, the immortality of the soul, absolute ideas,
etc. We do not know things in themselves, their essences. We can know only the
forms in which these essences manifest themselves to our sensory organs. The
essence of things (noumenon) is concealed behind the form (phenomenon) and it
will forever remain in the realm of the unknown. It appeared that the gulf between
materialism and idealism, between science and religion was bridged. Kant did not
deny the successes of science in the study and the explanation of phenomena. But he
also found a place for theology. The essence was christened with the name of God.
In his double-entry system of bookkeeping, in his determination to offend
neither science nor religion, Kant went even further. In his next work, the Critique of
Practical Reason, he proceeded to prove that though in theory the conceptions God,
immortality of the soul, etc., are not indispensable, in practice one is forced to accept
them, for without them human activity would be devoid of any moral basis.
The poet Heine, who was a friend of Marx and upon whom the latter at one
time had a great influence, depicted very vividly Kant's motives for treading the two
paths. Kant had an old and faithful servant, Lampe, who had lived with, and attended
to, his master for forty years. For Kant this Lampe was the personification of the
average man who could not live without religion. After a brilliant exposition of the
revolutionary import of the Critique of Pure Reason in the struggle with theology and
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with the belief in a Divine Principle, Heine explained why Kant found it necessary to
write the Critique of Practical Reason in which the philosopher re-established
everything he had torn down before. Here is what Heine wrote:
"After the tragedy comes the farce. Immanuel Kant has hitherto
appeared as the grim, inexorable philosopher; he has stormed
heaven, put all the garrison to the sword; the ruler of the world
swims senseless in his blood; there is no more any mercy, or
fatherly goodness, or future reward for present privations; the
immortality of the soul is in its last agonies -- death rattles and
groans. And old Lampe stands by with his umbrella under his
arm as a sorrowing spectator, and the sweat of anguish and tears
run down his cheeks. Then Immanuel Kant is moved to pity, and
shows himself not only a great philosopher, but a good man. He
reconsiders, and half good-naturedly and half ironically says,
'Old Lampe must have a God, or else the poor man cannot be
happy, and people really ought to be happy in this world.
Practical common sense declares that. Well, meinet wegen, for
all I care, let practical reason guarantee the existence of a God.'"
[Heinrich Heine, Collected Works. W. Heineman, London,
1906. Vol. 5, pp. 150-151.]
Kant had a great influence on science, too. Together with the French
astronomer Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), he maintained that the biblical account of
the creation of the world was faulty, that the earth was the product of a prolonged
development, of a continuous evolutionary process, that like all heavenly bodies it
came about as the gradual congealment of a highly rarefied substance.
Kant was essentially a mediator between the old and the new philosophies; he
remained a compromiser in most practical fields of life. Though he was not able
completely to break away from the old, he none the less made a considerable step
forward. His more consistent disciples rejected the Critique of Practical Reason and
made the most extreme deductions from his Critique of Pure Reason.
The philosopher Johann Fichte (1762-1814) impressed Lassalle incomparably
more than he did Marx or Engels. But there was one element in his philosophy which
was absolutely neglected in the Kantian system and which had a tremendous
influence upon the German revolutionary intelligentsia. leant was a peaceful
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