Georgi Plekhanov

Essays on the History of Materialism

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Table of Contents

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Note

Preface

I. Holbach - Part One

I. Holbach - Part Two

II. Helvetius - Part One

II. Helvetius - Part Two

III. Marx - Part One

III. Marx - Part Two

III. Marx - Part Three

Note

Plekhanov envisaged his Essays as a series of articles for Neue Zeit, theoretical organ of the German Social-Democrats, already in 1892. The writing took him eighteen months, the work being completed towards the end of 1893.

In May 1893 Karl Kautsky, the editor of Neue Zeit, thanked Plekhanov for his article on Holbach; but two months later, on July 19, 1893, on receiving the article on Helvetius and expecting an article on Marx, Kautsky wrote a letter to Plekhanov in which he expressed his doubt as to the possibility of publishing these essays in Neue Zeit because they were too long; he suggested that they should be published as a separate book. Kautsky’s letter of January 27, 1894 testifies to his having received Plekhanov’s last essay on Marx. The Essays were published then neither in Neue Zeit nor separately. Only in 1896 did they appear in book form in Stuttgart, under the title Beiträge zur Geschichte des Materialismus. I. Holbach. II. Helvetius. III. Marx. The Preface, written by Plekhanov especially for their publication, was signed: “New Year’s Day, 1896.” In 1903, a second German edition was put out by the same publishers. The book did not appear in Russian in Plekhanov’s lifetime.

Preface

In the three essays I am submitting for appraisal by the German reader, I have attempted to interpret and expound Karl Marx’s materialist understanding of history, which is one of the greatest achievements of nineteenth-century theoretical thought.

I am well aware that this is a very modest contribution: to provide convincing proof of all the value and all the significance of that understanding of history a full history of materialism would have to be written. Since I am not in a position to write that work, I have had to limit myself to a comparison, in several monographs, of eighteenth-century French materialism with today’s.

Of all the representatives of French materialism, I have chosen Holbach and Helvetius, who, in my opinion, are in many respects outstanding thinkers who have not been duly appreciated to this day.

Helvetius has been impugned many a time; he has often been slandered, but few have gone to the trouble of trying to understand him. When I set about describing his writings and giving a critique of them, I had to turn virgin soil, if I may be permitted to use the expression. The only guidelines I could use were several cursory remarks I had come upon in the works of Hegel and Marx. It is not for rne to judge in what measure I have made proper use of what I have borrowed from these great teachers in the realm of philosophy.

Even in his lifetime, Holbach, who was less bold as a logician and less of a revolutionary thinker than Helvetius, shocked others far less than the author of De l’Esprit ever did. He was not feared as much as the latter was; he was held in less disfavour, and got more fair play. Yet he, too, was only half-understood.

Like any other modern philosophical system, materialist philosophy has had to provide an explanation of two kinds of phenomena: on the one hand, Nature’s; on the other, those of mankind’s historical development. The materialist philosophers of the eighteenth century – at least, those who stood close to Locke – had their own philosophy of history, in the same measure as they had a philosophy of Nature. To see that, one has only to read their writings with a modicum of attention. Therefore, the historians of philosophy should certainly set forth the French materialists’ ideas on history, and subject them to criticism just as they have done with their understanding of Nature. That task has not been accomplished however. Thus, for instance, when the historians of philosophy speak of Holbach, they usually give consideration only to his Système de la Nature, in which work they investigate only whatever has a hearing on the philosophy of Nature, and morals. They ignore Holbach’s historical views, which are scattered so plentifully throughout Système de la Nature and his other works. There is nothing surprising, therefore, in the public at large having not the least idea of those views, and having an entirely incomplete and false impression of Hoibach. If one also takes into account thai the French materialists’ ethics has almost invariably been misinterpreted, it has to be acknowledged that very much in the history of eighteenth-century French materialism stands in need of amendment.

It should also he remembered that the approach we have mentioned is to be met, not only in general courses in Ihe history of philosophy hut also in specialist writings on the history of materialism (which, incidentally, are still few in number), examples being the classical work of Friedrich Albert Lange, in German, and a book by the Frenchman Jules-Auguste Soury. [1*]

As for Marx, it will suffice to say that neither the historians of philosophy in general nor the historians of materialism in particular have gone to the trouble or even making mention of his materialist understanding of history.

If a board is warped, the distortion can be rectified by bending it in the opposite direction. That is how I have been constrained to act in these Essays: I have had, first and foremost, to describe the historical views of the thinkers I am dealing with.

From the viewpoint of the school of thought I have the honour of belonging to, “the ideal in nothing else than the material world, reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought”. [2*] Whoever wishes to regard the history of ideas from this point of view should try to explain how and in what manner the ideas of any period have been engendered by its social conditions, that is to say. ultimately by its economic relations. To provide such an explanation is a vast and noble task, whose accomplishment will utterly transform the history of ideologies. In these Essays, I have attempted an approach towards the accomplishment of that task. However. I have not been able to devote sufficient attention to it, and that, for a very simple reason: before answering the question why the development of ideas has proceeded in a definite way, one must first learn how that development has taken place. In respect of the subject of these Essays, that means that an explanation of why materialist philosophy developed in the way it did with Holbach and Helvetius in the eighteenth century, and with Marx in the nineteenth, is possible only after it is clearly shown what that philosophy was in reality which has been so often misunderstood and even quite distorted. The ground must be cleared before building can begin.

Another few words. The reader may find that I have dealt at insufficient length with these thinkers’ theory of cognition. To that I can object that I have done all I can to set forth their views in this respect with accuracy. However, since I do not number myself among the adherents of the theoretico-cognitive scholasticism that is in such vogue today, I have had no intention of dwelling on this absolutely secondary question.

Geneva, New Year’s Day, 1896

Notes

1*. Friedrich Lange’s book Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Significance at the Present Time), which appeared in 1866, was an attempt at criticising materialism from neo-Kantian standpoint.

Jules Soury’s Breviaire de l’histoire du materialisme (Handbook on the History of Materialism), published in Paris in 1883, was a similar attempt.

2*. Karl Marx, Capital, Moscow 1974, Vol.I, p.29.

I. Holbach - Part One

We are going to speak of a certain materialist.

But first: what is meant by materialism?

Let us address ourselves to the greatest of modern materialists.

“The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being,” says Frederick Engels in his excellent book Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, (Stuttgart, 1888). “But this question could for the first time be put forward in its whole acuteness, could achieve its full significance, only after humanity in Europe had awakened from the long hibernation of the Christian Middle Ages. The question of the position of thinking in relation to being, a question which, by the way, had played a great part also in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the question: which is primary, spirit or nature – that question, in relation to the church, was sharpened into this: Did God create the world or has the world been in existence eternally?

“The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other... comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to various schools of materialism.” [1*]

Holbach would have accepted this definition of materialism with the utmost readiness. He himself said nothing else. To him, what we call the mental life of animals was nothing more than a natural phenomenon, and, in his opinion, there was no need to emerge from within the borders of Nature in search of a solution to the problems she has confronted us with. [1] This is very simple, and a far cry from the dogmatic assertions so often and so groundlessly ascribed to the materialists. True, Holbach saw in Nature nothing but matter or kinds of matter, and motion or motions. [2] And it is on this that the critics, Ph. Damiron for example, are out to entrap our materialist. They foist upon him their concept of matter arid, proceeding from that concept, attempt triumphantly to prove that matter, alone, is insufficient for an explanation of all natural phenomena. [3]

This is a facile but threadbare device. Critics of this calibre do not understand, or pretend not to understand, that one may have a concept of matter different from theirs. “If, by Nature,” Holbach says, “we shall mean an accumulation of dead substances, without any properties and purely passive, then, of course, we shall be obliged to seek outside of that Nature the principle of her motions; but if, by Nature, we mean what she actually is – a whole, in which the various parts have various properties, act according to those various properties, are constantly acting and reacting upon one another, possess weight, gravitate towards a common centre, while others depart towards the circumference; attract and repel one another, unite and separate, and, in constant collisions and comings together, produce and decompose all the bodies we see – then nothing can make us appeal to supernatural forces for an explanation of how the things and phenomena that we see are formed. [4]

Locke already thought it possible that matter could possess the faculty of thinking. To Holbach, this was a most probable assumption “even in the hypothesis of theology, that is to say, in supposing that there exists an omnipotent mover of matter”. [5] The conclusion drawn by Ifolbach is very simple and really very convincing: “Since Man, who is matter and has ideas only about matter, possesses the faculty of thinking, matter can think, or is capable of that specific modification which we call thought.” [6]

What does that modification depend on? Here Holbach advances two hypotheses, which he finds equally probable. It may be presumed that the sensitivity of matter is “the result of an organisation, a link inherent in an animal, so that dead and inert matter ceases to be dead and becomes capable of sensation when it is ‘animalised’, i.e. when it unites and is identified witli an animal”. Do we not see every day that milk, bread and wine turn into the substance of man, who is a creature endowed with sensitivity? These dead substances consequently become endowed with sensitivity when they combine with a creature that is endowed with sensitivity. The other hypothesis is that dealt with by Diderot in his excellent Conversation with D’Alembert. “Some philosophers think that sensitivity is a universal quality of matter. In this case, it would be useless to seek whence that quality comes to it, which we know by its effects. If one admits that hypothesis, then it will be in the same way as one distinguishes two kinds of motion in Nature – one that is known under the name of living force and another under the name of dead force – then one will distinguish two kinds of sensitivity: one that is active or living, and another that is inert or dead, and then animalising a substance will mean nothing but destroying the obstacles that prevent it from being active and sensitive.” However that may be, and whichever of these hypotheses of sensitivity we accept, “the nonextensive being the human soul is supposed to be cannot be a subject”. [7]

The reader will perhaps claim that neither hypothesis is marked by sufficient, clarity. We are well aware of that, and Holbach realised it no less than we do. That property of matter which we call sensitivity is an enigma that is very difficult of solution. But, says Holbach, “the simplest movements of our bodies are, to any man who gives thought to them, enigmas just as difficult to solve as thought is.” [8]

During a conversation with Lessing, Jacobi once said, “Spinoza is good enough in my opinion, yet his name is a poor kind of salvation for us!” To which Lessing replied, “Yes! If you wish it so!... Yet ... do you know of anything better?” [9]

To all reproaches from their opponents, the materialists can reply in just the same way: “Do you know of anything better?” Where is that something better to be sought? In Berkeley’s subjective idealism? In Hegel’s absolute idealism? In the agnosticism or the neo-Kantianism of our times?

“Materialism,” Lange assures us, “stubbornly takes the world of sensory appearance for the world of real things.” [10]

He wrote this remark apropos of Holbach’s argument against Berkeley. It creates the impression that Holbach was ignorant of many very simple things. Our philosopher could have replied for himself, “We do not know the essence of any being, if by the word ’essence’ one understands that which constitutes the nature that is peculiar to it; we know matter only through the perceptions, the sensations, and the ideas it gives us; it is only later that we judge whether it is good or bad, in accordance with the structure of our organs.” [11]

“We know neither the essence nor the true nature of matter, although we are able to define some of its properties and qualities according to how it affects us.” [12]

“We do not know the elements of the body, but we do know some of their properties or qualities and we distinguish between their different substances according to the effects or changes they produce on our senses, that is to say, by the various changes that their presence brings forth in us.” [13]

Strange, is it not? Here we see our kindly old Holbach as an epistemologist of today. How was it that Lange failed to recognise in him a comrade-in-philosophy?

Lange saw all philosophical systems in Kant, in just the same way as Malebranche saw all things in God. He found it unimaginable that, even before the publication of Kritik der reinen Vernunft [2*], there could have been people, and even among the materialists, who had a knowledge of certain truths, which were, properly speaking, meagre and barren, but, seemed to him the greatest discoveries in contemporary philosophy. He had read Holbach with a prejudiced eye.

But that is not all. There is a vast difference between Holbach and Lange. To Lange, as to any Kantian, a “thing-in-itself” was absolutely incognisable. To Holbach, as to any materialist, our reason, i.e., science, was fully capable of discovering at least certain properties of a “thing-in-itself”. On this point, too, the author of Système de la Nature was not mistaken.

Let us apply the following line of reasoning. We are building a railway. Expressed in Kantian terms, that means we are engendering certain phenomena. But what is a phenomenon? It is the result of a “thing-in-itself” acting upon us. So when we are build ing our railway, we are making a “thing-in-itself” act on us in a certain way that is desirable to us. But what is it that gives us the means of acting upon a “thing-in-itself” in such a manner? It is a knowledge of its properties, and nothing but that knowledge.

Our being able to get a sufficiently close knowledge of a “thing-in-itself” happens to be very useful to us. Otherwise, we could not exist here on Earth, and would most probably have been denied the pleasure of indulging in metaphysics.

The Kantians aver that a “thing-in-itself” is incognisable. That incognisability, in their opinion, gives Lampe, and all the worthies of philistinism, the inalienable right to their own more or less “poetical” or “ideal” God. [3*] Holbach reasoned differently.

“It is being incessantly repeated to us,” he says, “that our senses show us only the outside of things, and that our limited minds cannot conceive a God. Let us admit that is so; but those senses do not show us even the outside of the Divinity ... As we are constituted, that means that we have no ideas about what does not exist for us.” [14]

The almost complete absence of any kind of idea of evolution was undoubtedly a weak point in eighteenth-century French materialism, as it was, in general, in any kind of materialism prior to Marx. True, such people as Diderot sometimes arrived at masterly conjectures which would have done credit to the most outstanding of our present-day evolutionists; such instances of insight, however, were not connected with the essence of their doctrine, but were merely exceptions, which, as such, merely confirmed the rule. Whether they were dealing with Nature, morals or history, the “philosophers” tackled the problem with the same absence of the dialectical method, and from the same metaphysical viewpoint. It is of interest to see how indefatigably Holbach tried to find some probable hypothesis of the origin of our planet and the human race. Problems now conclusively resolved by evolutionary natural science were seen as impossible of solution by the eighteenth-century philosophers. [15]

The Earth was not always the same as it now is. Does that mean that it was formed gradually, during a lengthy process of evolution? No. It might have been as follows: “Perhaps this Earth is a mass detached at a certain moment from some other celestial body; perhaps it is the result” (!) “of the spots or crusts that astronomers observe on the Sun’s disc, whence they could spread in our planetary system; perhaps this globe is an extinct and displaced comet which once occupied a different place in the regions of space.” [16]

Primitive man perhaps differed from his counterpart of today more than a quadruped does from an insect. Like everything else that exists on our globe and on all other heavenly bodies, Man can be imagined as being in a process of constant change. “Thus there is no contradiction in thinking that the species vary incessantly.” [17] This sounds perfectly in the spirit of evolutionism. It should not be forgotten, however, that Holbach saw this hypothesis as probable given “changes in the position of our globe”. Whoever does not accept this condition can consider Man “a sudden result of Nature.” Holbach does not adhere quite firmly to the hypothesis of the evolution of the species. “If one should reject the preceding conjectures, and if one affirms that Nature acts by a certain sum of immutable and general laws; if one should believe that Man, the quadruped, the fish, the insect, the plant, etc., are of all eternity and will forever remain what they are; if one should grant that the stars have shone in the firmament since all eternity” (thus, “a certain sum of immutable and general laws” would consequently preclude any development! – G.P.); “if one should say that it should not be asked why Man is what he is, any more than why Nature is as we see it, or why the world exists – we would not object to all that. Whatever system one adopts, it will, perhaps, reply equally well to the difficulties that embarrass one – It is not given to Man to know everything; it is not given to him lo know his origin; it is not given to him to penetrate into the essence of things or to reach the prime principles.” [18]

All this seems almost unbelievable to us today, but one should not forget the history of natural science. It should be recalled that, long after the publication of Système de la Nature, the great scientist Cuvier was up in arms against any idea of evolution in the natural sciences.

Let us now consider Holbach’s moral philosophy.

In one of his comedies, Charles Palissot, an author who lias been completely forgotten, but attracted considerable attention in the last century, has one of his characters (Valere) say the following:

Du globe ou nous vivons despote universel,
Il n’est qu’un seul ressort, l’intérêt personnel [19]

To which another character (Carondas) replies:

J’avais quelque regret à tromper Cydalise
Mais je vois clairement que la chose est permise. [20]

Thus Palissot tried to hold up the philosophers’ ideas to scorn. “It is a question of achieving happiness, no matter how” – this aphorism of Valère expresses Palissot’s view of the “philosophers’” ethics. Palissot was merely a “miserable ink-slinger”, yet were there many writers on the history of philosophy who advanced any other judgement on the materialist ethics of the eighteenth century? Throughout the present century, this ethics has almost universally been considered something scandalous, a doctrine unbefitting a worthy scholar or self-respecting philosopher; people such as La Mettrie, Holbach and Helvetius were considered dangerous sophists who preached nothing but sensual enjoyment and selfishness. [21] Yet none of these writers ever preached anything of the kind. Any reading of their books with a modicum of attention will bear this out. “To do good, promote the happiness of others, and to come to their aid – that is virtuous. Only that can be virtuous which is conducive to the weal, happiness and security of society.”

“Humaneness is the prime social virtue. It epitomises all the other virtues. Taken in its broadest aspect, it is the sense that gives all beings of our species the rights to our heart. Grounded in a cultivated sensibility, it enables us to do all the good on” faculties render us capable of. It results in love, beneficence, generosity, forbearance and compassion to our fellow-creatures.” [22]

Where does this so groundless accusation spring from? How could it have been believed almost universally?

In the first place, ignorance is to blame. The French materialists are much spoken of, but not read. It is therefore hardly surprising that, having struck deep root, the prejudice lives on.

The prejudice itself has two sources, both equally abundant.

Eighteenth-century materialist philosophy was a revolutionary philosophy. It was merely the ideological expression of the revolutionary bourgeoisie’s struggle against the clergy, the nobility, and the absolute monarchy. It goes without saying that, in its struggle against an obsolete system, the bourgeoisie could have no respect for a world-outlook that was inherited from the past and hallowed that despised system. “Different times, different circumstances, a different philosophy,” as Diderot so excellently put it in his article on Hobbes in the Encyclopédie. The philosophers of the good old days, who tried to live in peace with the Church, had no objections to a morality which claimed revealed religion as its source. The philosophers of the new times wanted morals to be free of any alliance with “superstition”. “Nothing can be more disadvantageous to human morals than having them blended with divine morals. In linking sensible morals, based on experience and reason, with a mystical religion that is opposed to reason and based on imagination and authority, one could only muddle, weaken and even destroy the former.” [23]

This divorcement of morals from religion could not have been to everybody’s liking, and it already provided grounds to revile the materialists’ ethics. But that was not all. “Religious morals” preached humility, mortification of the flesh, and quelling of the passions. To those who suffer here on Earth they promised recompense in the world to come. The new morality reinstated the flesh, reinstated the rights of the passions [[24], and made society responsible for the misfortunes of its members. [25] Like Heine, it wanted “to set up the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth”. [5*] Therein lay its revolutionary side, but therein, too, was its wrongness in the eyes of those who stood for the then existent social structure.

In his Correspondance littéraire [6*], Grimm wrote that, following the publication of Helvetius’s De l’Esprit, a certain comic verse circulated throughout Paris, expressing the apprehension of “respectable folk”:

“Admirez tous cet auteur-la
Qui de ‘l’Esprit’ intitula
Un livre qui n’est que matière.” [[26]

Indeed, all materialist morals were merely “matter” to those who did riot understand them, and also to those who, though understanding them excellently, preferred “tippling wine in secret, while preaching water-drinking in public”. [7*]

This will be sufficient to explain how and why materialist morals, to this day, make the hair of all philistines of all “civilised” nations stand on end.

Yet there were, among the opponents of materialist morals, such men as Voltaire and Rousseau. Were they philistines too?

As for Rousseau, he was no philistine in this instance, but it must be admitted that the Patriarch of Ferney [8*] brought a substantial portion of philistinism into the discussion.

When a man comes into the world, he brings with him only the faculty of sensation, what is known as the intellectual faculties all develop from this faculty. Some of the impressions or sensations a man gets from the objects he meets please him, while others cause him suffering. He approves of some of them, which he wants to last or become renewed in him; he regards others with disapproval, and avoids them as much as he can. In other words, a man likes some sensations and the objects that produce them, and dislikes other impressions and that which evokes them. Since man lives in society, he is surrounded by creatures like himself, who feel exactly what he does. All these creatures seek enjoyment, and fear suffering. They call good whatever gives them enjoyment, and evil whatever causes them suffering. Whatever is of constant use to them they call virtue, while whatever is injurious to them in the make-up of those that surround them is called vice. One who does good to his fellow-men is good; he who causes them harm is evil. Hence it follows, in the first place, that man does not stand in need of divine aid to distinguish virtue from vice; in the second place, for men to be virtuous, the performance of virtue should give them pleasure, be pleasing to them. Man should love vice if it makes him happy. A man is evil only because it is to his advantage to be so. Evil and wicked men are so often to be met in this world of ours only because no government exists that could enable them to find advantage in justice, honesty and charity; conversely, the vested interests everywhere drive them to injustice, evil and crime. “Thus, it is not Nature that creates evil people, but our institutions that make them such.” [27]

Such is the formal aspect of materialist morals, which we have conveyed almost in Holbach’s own words. His thoughts often lack clarity. Thus, it is tautological to say that if vice makes man happy, he should love vice; if vice does indeed make man happy, then he already loves vice. This absence of precision in Holbach often leads to unfortunate consequences. Thus, in one place he says that “interest is the only motivation of human acts”. Elsewhere he gives the following definition: “We call interest that object with which any man, in conformity with the temperament and ideas peculiar to him, links his well-being; in other words, interest is simply what each of us regards as necessary to his happiness”. [28] This is so broad a definition that one can no longer tell the difference between materialist and religious morals [29]; any adherent of the latter could say that his opponents had merely invented a new terminology, and preferred to call self-interested such actions that had previously been called disinterested. However that may be, one can readily understand what Holbach meant by saying that if vice makes man happy he should love vice. He makes society responsible for the vices of its members. [30]

Voltaire fulminates against Holbach for the latter’s alleged advice to people to take to vice if that proves to their advantage. This reminds one of l’abbé de l’Lignac, who made a convert to the new morality reply to the question of whether he should love the interests of his nation, as follows: in the measure in which it is to my advantage. Yet Voltaire knew more of the matter than de Lignac ever did: he knew his Locke very well, and must have seen that materialist morals were merely continuing the English philosopher’s cause. In his Traité de métaphysique, Voltaire himself said far bolder things about morals than Holbach ever did. However, the patriarch felt afraid: he was apprehensive lest the people, after turning into atheists and utilitarian moralists, should become too audacious. “All things considered,” he wrote to Madame Necker (September 20, 1770), “the age of Phaedra and le Misanthrope was a better one.” [9*] Of course it was! The people were held in curb far better then!

What is most comical is that Voltaire contraposes the following argument to Holbach’s morals: “Our society cannot exist without the ideas of the justice and injustice, he (God) has shown us the road to reach them – Thus, for all people, from Peking to Ireland, the weal of society is firmly established as an immutable rule of virtue.” What a discovery for an atheist philosopher to make!

Rousseau’s conclusions were different: he thought that utilitarian morals could not explain the most virtuous of human actions. “What is meant by offering up one’s life in one’s own interests?” he asked, adding that he found repellent that philosophy which was a source of embarrassment to virtuous actions, escaped from any difficulty only by ascribing base intentions and evil motives to virtuous actions, and “is obliged to humiliate Socrates and slander Regulus”. [10*] For an appreciation of what this reproach signifies, we have to advance the following considerations.

In their struggle against “religious morality”, the materialists were out, first and foremost, to prove that people were capable of knowing what “virtue” is, without any aid from Heaven. “Did men need supernatural revelation,” Holbach exclaimed, “to learn that justice is necessary for the preservation of society, or that injustice merely brings together enemies prepared to do injury to one another? Was it necessary that God should speak for them to realise that creatures who have gathered together need to love each other and render each other aid? Was aid necessary for them to discover from on high that vengeance is an evil, an outrage against one’s country’s laws, which, if they are just, see to it that citizens are avenged? ... Is not anyone who values his life aware that vice, intemperance and sensual pleasure shorten his days? Finally, has not experience proved to any thinking being that crime is an object of hatred to his” (i.e., the criminal’s. – G.P.) “fellow men; that vice is injurious to those who aru infected with it; that virtue wins respect and love for those who cultivate it? If men reflect but a little on what they do, on their true interests, and on the purpose of society, they will realise their duty to one another ... The voice of Reason is sufficient for us to learn what our duty is towards our fellow creatures.” [31]

Since Reason is sufficient to teach us our duties, the mediation of Philosophy is indicated to show us that virtue lies in our own and correctly understood interest. It must, also show us that the most illustrious heroes of mankind would not have actetl otherwise if they had had only their own happiness in mind. Thus psychological analysis arises, which does, indeed, often and obviously humiliate Socrates and slander Regulus. Consequently, Rousseau’s reproach was not made without certain grounds; only the “citizen of Geneva” forgot thai the “slandered Socrates” often fell into the same error that the materialists are reproached with. [32]

Whether in Greece or in France, in Germany or in Russia (Chernyshevsky and his followers) – the Enlighteners everywhere made one and the same mistake. They were out to prove what cannot be proved but must be taught by the life of society itself. [33] Mankind’s moral development follows closely in the footsteps of economic necessity, precisely adapting itself to society’s actual needs. In this sense, it can and should he said thai interest is the foundation of morality. However, the historical process of that adaptation takes place behind people’s backs, irrespective of the will and intellect of individuals. A line of behaviour that is dictated by interest seems lo be an injunction of the “gods”, “inborn conscience”, “Reason”, or “Nature”. But what kind of interest is it that dictates one line of behaviour or another to individuals? Is it self-interest? In innumerable cases, it is. However, inasmuch as individuals listen to their voice of their personal interests, it is no longer a question of “virtuous” actions that we are called upon to explain. Such actions reflect the interest of the entity, social interest, and it is the latter that prescribe them. The dialectic of historical development leads, not only to “sense becoming nonsense, and beneficence turning into evil” [12*] but also to the selfish interests of society or a class often turning, in the hearts of individuals, into impulses full of unselfishness and heroism. The secret of that conversion lies in the influence of the social environment. The French materialists were good at appraising that influence; they kept on reiterating that upbringing determines everything, that people become what they are, and are not born that way. Nevertheless, they regarded and depicted this process of moral moulding as a series of reflexions that are repeated at every instant in every individual’s mind and are directly modified according to the circumstances affecting the private interest of anybody who is motivated to action. From this viewpoint, as we have seen, the moralist’s task takes shape of itself. The thinking of individuals should be protected against errors, and the moral “truth” be pointed out to them. In that case, then, what is meant by pointing out the moral truth? It means pointing out where personal interest, as best understood, lies; it means lauding that particular disposition of heart which leads up to some praiseworthy action. It was thus that the psychological analysis which Rousseau rose up against came into being; it was thus that there appeared the interminable hymns of praise in honour of virtue that Grimm called capucinades. [13*] The latter were highly characteristic of some of the eighteenth-century French materialists, while a false analysis of behaviour motivations was a feature of the others. However, the absence of the dialectical method is conspicuous in everything they all wrote, and wreaks vengeance on all of them in equal degree.

In his polemic against materialist morals, Rousseau often appealed to the conscience, that “divine instinct”, “innate feeling”, and the like. It would have been easy for the materialists to explain that feeling as being the fruit of upbringing and habit. For their part, however, they preferred to present it as a series of reflections grounded in a thorough awareness of personal interest. According to Holbach, conscience can be defined as “knowledge of the effects that one’s actions produce on others, and, conversely, on ourselves”. “A guilty conscience is the certitude or the fear of having merited their hatred or their contempt by our conduct towards them.” [34] It is clear that Rousseau could not have been satisfied with such a “definition”; it is just as clear that the materialists could not tolerate his point of view. The least admission of “innate feeling” would have defeated all their philosophy. Today dialectical materialism can easily single out that part of the truth which is contained both in Rousseau’s statements and in those of the French materialists.

And so all moral laws originate from “Reason”. Rut what is Reason guided by in its search after these laws? By Nature, Holbach replies without the least hesitation. “Man is a feeling, intelligent and rational being.” Reason does not have to know anything more than that to endow us with “universal morality”.

The psychology of this appeal to “Nature” can easily be spelt out. Incidentally, it is explained by Holbach himself: “To impose duties on us, and to prescribe to us laws that obligate us, an authority is doubtlessly needed that has the right to command us.” But the materialists were at war with all the traditional authorities, so they appealed to Nature to find a way out of the difficulty. “Can anyone deny this right to necessity? Can one question the claims of that Nature which exercises sovereign rights over all that exists?” All this was very “natural” at the time, but it must be emphasised that, like most of his contemporaries, Holbach was referring only to the nature of “Man”, which is something quite different from the Nature we have to struggle against for our existence.

Montesquieu was convinced that differences in climate produced “variety in laws”. He adduced most inconclusive proof to bear out this relationship, while the materialist philosophers demonstrated it with no great difficulty. “Will one say,” Holbach asked, “that the Sun which shone down on the Greeks and the Romans, who were so jealous of their liberties, does not send the same rays upon their effete descendants?” [35] Basically speaking, however, Montesquieu’s line of thought was not quite erroneous. Today we know the significance the geographical environment has had for the history of mankind, and if Montesquieu was mistaken, that does not at all mean that those who attacked him on this score had a better understanding of what Hegel was later to call the “geographical foundation of world history”. They had not the least knowledge of the matter, neither right nor wrong knowledge. Human nature was the key they expected to use to open all doors in the edifice of morals, politics and history. It is often difficult for us today to have a clear realisation of a point of view so commonly held by eighteenth-century writers.

“The development of the arts,” it was said by Suard, for example, “is subject to the same gradations that one observes in the development of mankind.” We seize eagerly upon this idea, thinking that the author is about to reveal the hidden causes of human development, which, while independent of the human will, give direction to their spirit and enlightenment (“lumières”). There are some who think that, thanks to Suard, they are escaping from the circulus vitiosus the philosophy oE history was revolving in so hopelessly in the eighteenth century. They are, however, too precipitant, and deeply mistaken. The causes that the development of the “arts” is subordinate to are dependent only on the nature of – “man” ... “In childhood man has nothing but his senses, his imagination and his memory; he needs nothing but songs and tales. Then follows the age of passions, and the soul wants to be stirred and agitated; next the mind expands and reason becomes fortified; these two faculties, in their turn, have to be exercised, their activities extending to everything affecting man’s curiosity, tastes, feelings and needs.” [36]

It is now recognised by all natural scientists that the sequence of forms the individual organism passes through, from the embryo to its full development is a repetition of !ho form-changes gone through by the ancestors of the genus the organism belongs to. Embryogenetic development epitomises the genealogical. In the same way, one can regard the sequence of forms that each man’s mind goes through from infancy to full development as a kind of synopsis of the lengthy and slow changes each man’s ancestors underwent in the course of history. Highly interesting research can, in our opinion, be carried out in this field. [37] But what would be said of the natural scientist who would see, in the embryogenetic history of an individual organism, sufficient grounds for changes in a genus? But that is exactly the mode of thinking of Suard and, together with him, of all eighteenthcentury “philosophers”, who had a vague idea of the pattern of mankind’s development.

In this, Grimm is in full accord with Suard. “What people has not started by being a poet, and ended by being a philosopher?” he asks. [38] Helvetius alone understood that this fact could spring from other and deeper causes than Suard thought. But we have not yet come to Helvetius.

Man is a sentient, thinking and rational creature. He is created thus, has always been and will always remain that way, despite all his errors. In this sense, man’s nature is immutable. What, then, is there surprising in the moral and political laws dictated by that nature being, in their turn, of universal significance, unchanging, and constant? These laws have not yet been proclaimed, and it must be admitted that “nothing is more common than to see civil laws in contradiction with those of Nature”. These corrupt civil laws are due to the “perversity of morals, the errors of societies, or tyranny which forces nature to bow to its authority”. [39] Let Nature have its say, you will learn the truth once and for all. Errors arc without number, but there is only one truth. “Morals do not exist for the monster or the madman; universal morals can be established only for rational and normally organised creatures; in them Nature does not change; observation alone is needed to infer the immutable rules that they must follow.” [40]

But how is one to explain that the same Holbach could have written the following lines: “Like all natural bodies, societies undergo transformations, changes, and revolutions; they are formed, grow and disintegrate just like all beings. One and the same laws cannot suit them in different circumstances of development: useful in one period, they become useless and harmful in another.”

It is all very simple. Holbach draws a single conclusion from the above argumentation, namely that obsolete and outmoded laws (the reference is to the laws of France at the time) should be abolished. The entrenchedness of a law speaks rather against it than for it. The example of our forebears is no evidence in its favour. Holbach could have proved this in theory, but only by appealing to “reason”, but, in view of his readers’ prejudices, he pretended to adhere to the historical point of view. The same is true of the history of religions. The “philosophers” have devoted a great deal of attention to this subject, their purpose being to prove that the Christian religion, which claims to be based on revelation, fully resembles all profane religions. This was a blow aimed against the odious Christian faith; when it had been dealt, none of the “philosophers” felt concerned with a study of the comparative history of religions. The times were revolutionary, and all “truths” proclaimed by the philosophers (which very often contradicted one other) had immediately practical aims in view.

We shall remark at this point that “human nature” often led the materialist philosophers much farther than they had expected. “The distinction that was often drawn between physical and moral man was excessively abused.” Man is a purely physical being. Moral man is the selfsame physical creature, only considered from a definite angle, i.e., in respect of some of his faculties as conditioned by his organisation. Hence, “All of men’s errors are physical errors”. [41] Thus, what devolves on medicine, or rather on physiology, is the task of providing us with a key to the human heart. The same science should also explain to us the historical changes that have taken place in mankind. “In Nature, in which everything is interlinked, everything acts and interacts, everything moves and changes, composes and decomposes, forms and is destroyed, there is not a single atom that does not play an important and necessary role; there is not a single imperceptible molecule which, if placed in suitable circumstances, does not lead to tremendous effects ... An excess of acridity in a fanatic’s bile, excessively inflamed blood in a conqueror’s heart, troublesome digestion in a monarch’s stomach, a whim that passes through some woman’s mind” (also a molecule? – G.P.) “are sufficient causes to start wars, send millions of men into the slaughter, destroy fortresses, reduce cities to rubble... and spread desolation and calamity for a long succession of centuries ...” [42]

There is a well-known aphorism about the speck of sand that found its way into Cromwell’s bladder, thus leading to the entire picture of the world being reshaped. There is neither more nor less content in this aphorism than in Holbach’s ideas about “atoms” and “molecules” as the causes of historical events, the only difference being that we owe the aphorism to a pious man. In the latter’s opinion, it was God who introduced the fatal speck of sand into the Protector’s body. Holbach already would have nothing of God, but in everything else he could produce no objection to this aphorism.

Aphorisms of this kind contain a “grain” of the truth, but that truth also relates to the entire truth in just the same way as a “grain” or a molecule does towards all matter in the Universe. Since it is infinitesimal, that truth does not take us a single step forward in our study of social phenomena. And if we did nothing else in historical science but await the advent of the genius that Laplace dreamt of – a genius who, with the aid of molecular mechanics, will reveal to us all the secrets of mankind’s past, present and future – we could indulge in long and calm slumber, for that marvellous genius’s coming will not take place so soon.

“If, aided by experience, we knew the elements underlying the temperament of a man or of most of the individuals a people is made up of, we would know what is to their liking, what laws they need, and what institutions are useful to them.” [43] In that case, however, what would become of “universal morals” and “ policies that are in accord with Nature”? Holbach has nothing to say on that score but comments with ever greater zeal on all the moral, political and social laws which, of necessity, derive from man’s nature as considered in the capacity of a sentient, etc., creature.

It was highly “natural” that, in Holbach’s times, Mother Nature was politically and morally on the side of the very laws that the French bourgeoisie needed at the moment when it was prepared to become “everything”. [15*]

A tacit agreement, a social pact, exists between society and its members. That contract is renewed at every moment, and is designed to ensure the mutual guarantees of citizens’ rights, of which liberty, property and security are the most sacred. Moreover: “Liberty, property and security are Ihe only bonds that attach people to the land they live in. No homeland exists if these advantages have disappeared.” [44] Property is the sonl of this holy trinity. Security and liberty are necessary in society. “But it is impossible for man to keep or make his existence happy if he cannot enjoy the advantages his exertions and his personality (!) have provided him with. Therefore the laws of Nature have granted every man a right which is called property”. Society cannot deprive a man of his property “because it is created to assure that property”. Thus, property is the aim, and liberty and security are the means. Let us examine this sacred right in this light and in greater detail.

Where does it spring from? It is based on the necessary relation that arises between man and the product of his labour. Thus, a field becomes, in a certain way, a part of him who cultivates it, because it is his will, his arms, his strength, his industry, in a word, “his inherent individual qualities, those belonging to his person”, that have made that field what it is. “That field, irrigated with his sweat, becomes, so to speak, identified with him; its yield belongs to him in just the same way as his limbs and his faculties do, for, without his labour, that produce would never have existed or, at least, would not have existed in the way it does.” [45]

Thus Holbach saw bourgeois property in the form of the product of the proprietor’s own labour. This, however, did not preclude his high regard for merchants and manufacturers, those “benefactors, who, in enriching themselves, give occupations and life to all society”. [46] He seems to have had a correct, though not quite clear, understanding of the origins of the manufacturers’ wealth. “... While the labourer” he says, “gains his livelihood by his labour, he is constantly increasing the wealth of those who give him employment.” Now, is that wealth produced only by “inherent individual qualities, those belonging to his person” (“What a multitude of artisans of all kinds turn the wheels of manufactures!”)? [47] Of course, not! But what of that? Manufacturers and merchants are very useful people, so should not a grateful society award wealth and honours to those that serve it, so well? The trouble lies, not in the indisputable fact that the “artisan” promotes the manufacturer’s wealth but in “Gothic and barbarous prejudices” leading to the manufacturer and merchant being held in lower esteem than they deserve. “The peaceable tradesman seems a contemptible object to the stupid soldier, who does not see that this man, whom he looks down on, clothes him, feeds him, and keeps his army supplied.” (Sic!) [48]

Holbach has a different kind of language for feudal property. He regards such proprietors – “the Rich and the Grand” – as “useless and harmful members of Society” and attacks them indefatigably, for it is they who threaten “the fruits of the labours of others”, destroy the liberty of their fellow citizens, and insult their persons. “That is how property is incessantly violated.” [49]

We know that society has been created to preserve property, but the tacit social pact does and should refer to bourgeois property alone. In respect of feudal property, society has but a single duty – -its complete and absolute abolition. Holbach stands for abolition of the nobility’s privileges, obligations to them, taxes, the corvée, feudal rights, and the like. [50] “If the Nobles, whose harmful rights the Sovereign would take away, should make reference to the sacred rights of property, the reply might be given that property is nothing but the right to possession with justice; whatever runs counter to the national weal can never be marked by justice; whatever is injurious to the property of the husbandman can never be regarded as a right, for it is nothing but usurpation, a violation of his rights, whose maintenance is of far greater benefit to the nation than the pretensions of a small number of Seigneurs, who, not content with doing nothing, are opposed to works that are of the utmost importance both to themselves and to Society.” [51]

The nobles “prefer to do nothing”; they perform no useful function in society, this condemning them in the eyes of our philosopher. There was a time when the nobles had to go to the wars at their own expense, and then enjoyed certain privileges on a fair basis of law. But on what legal foundation should they enjoy the same privileges in a society in which the army is maintained by the sovereign, and the nobles are no longer under any obligation to serve? [52]

A time has now arrived when the proletariat is using the same yardstick for the capitalists’ rights as was used over a hundred years ago by representatives of the bourgeoisie in respect of the privileges of the nobility.

It should not be thought that the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the nobility was reflected in Holbach’s mind as one between landowners and urban proprietors of various kinds. Nothing of the kind! Holbach was in no way biased in favour of movable property. On the contrary, it was landed property that he considered as the real thing, property par excellence. “Ownership of land forms the genuine citizen,” he said. The condition of agriculture is the indicator of a country’s economic situation in general. The “poor” are, first and foremost, “husbandmen”; defending them is tantamount to defending the country folk who are oppressed by the “Grand of this world”, i.e., the nobility. Holbach went so far as to say, together with the Physiocrats [16*], that, directly or indirectly, all taxes fall on the land, just like everything else, whether good or bad, that happens to the nation. “It is to defend the possession of land that warfare is designed; it is to keep the fruits of the land in circulation that trade is necessary; it is by assuring lands to their owners that jurisprudence is useful.” [53] The land is the source of a nation’s entire wealth, and it is for that reason that it should be released as soon as possible from the feudal yoke, which is pressing down so heavily on it. Another argument in favour of the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary trends!

“Equality” could contain nothing tempting to a man like Holbach. On the contrary, he thought it an extremely obnoxious chimera. Not all people have the same kind of organisation. They have always been unequal in their physical, moral and intellectual forces. “A man who is feeble in body or mind has always been forced to recognise the superiority of those who are stronger, more industrious, and more intelligent. One who is more industrious cultivates a larger lot and makes it more fertile than can be done by another who has received a weaker body from Nature. Thus, inequality in property and in possessions has existed from the outset.” [54]

To such arguments the l’abbé Mably could well object that they patently contradicted the point of departure of recent political philosophy, to wit, absolutely equal rights for all people, both strong and weak. [55] The time was not yet ripe for “equality”, and Mably himself had to admit that “no human force could today attempt to re-establish equality without causing greater disorder than one would wish to avoid.” [56] The objective logic of social evolution proved to be on the side of the bourgeois theorists.

Foototes

1. Cf. Le bon sens puisé dans la nature, suivi du testament du curé Meslier, à Paris, l’an Ier de la République, I, p.175.

2. “Nature, understood in the broadest sense of the word, is a vast whole resultant from a compound of different substances, their different combinations and different motions, as observed by us in the Universe.” (Système de la Nature ou, des Loix du Monde Physique et du Monde Moral, Londres 1781, I, p.3). Holbach also recognised four elements, which the ancient philosophy recognised before him: air, fire, earth and water.

3. Thus, according to Damiron, matter cannot possess the faculty of thinking. Why? Because “matter does not think, does not cognise, does not act” (Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la philosophie au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1858, p.409).

What, amazing logic! Incidentally, in their struggle against the materialists, Voltaire and Rousseau were also in error in this question. Thus, for instance, Voltaire assured the reader that “any active matter reveals its non-material essence, which acts upon it”. To Rousseau matter was “dead”; he could never “imagine a live molecule”.

4. Système de la Nature, I, p.21. The quotation is from the 1781 edition.

5. Le bon sens, I, p.170.

6. Système de la Nature, I, p.81. Note 26.

7. Système de la Nature, I, pp.90-91. La Mcttrie also considers the two hypotheses almost equally probable. Lange has been totally wrong in ascribing a different opinion to him. This will be seen from a perusal of Chapter VI of Traité de l’âme. La Mettrie even supposes that “the philosophers of all ages” (with the exception of the Cartesians, of course) “recognised that matter had the faculty of sensation” (Cf. Œuvres, Amsterdam 1764, I, pp.97-100).

8. Le bon sens, I, p.177.

9. Jacobi’s Werke, IV, S.54.

10. Geschichte des Materialismus, 2. Aufl., Iserlohn 1873, I, S.378.

11. Système de la Nature, II, pp.91-92.

12. ibid., p.116.

13. ibid., I, p.28.

14. Système de la Nature, II, pp.109-13. Feuerbach said the same thing. In general, his critique of religion contains much that resembles Holbach’s. As for the conversion of a “thing-in-itself” into God, it is noteworthy that the Fathers of the Church denned their God in exactly the same way as the Kantians define their “thing-in-itself”. Thus, according to St. Augustine, God does not fit into any category: “ut sic intelligamus Deum, si possumus, quantum possumus, sine qualitate bonum, sine quantitate magnum, sine indigentia creatorem, sine situ praesidentem, sine loco ubique totum, sine tempore sempiternum”. “So this may be our notion of God, if and so far as it be within our powers, a creator wanting in nothing, good without quality, great without quantity, present without abode, whole everywhere without location, everlasting without time.” (Cf. Ueberweg’s Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, Berlin 1881, II.) We shall refer to Hegel those readers who would like to get an idea of all the contradictions of a “thing-in-itself”. [4*]

15. It is really surprising that Diderot admires the moral doctrine of Heraclitus, hut says nothing of his dialectics, or, if you wish, merely a few insignificant words, in considering his physics. Œuvres de Diderot, Paris 1818, II, pp.625–26 (Encyclopédie).

16. Système de la Nature, I, p.70.

17. ibid., p.73.

18. Système de la Nature, I, p.75. Among the problems whose solution is not given to Man, Holbach also includes the question, “What came first: the animal before the egg, or the egg before the animal?” This is a caution to scholars who like to expatiate on the uncrossablc borderlines of science!

19. [Universal despot of the world we live in and sole motive of everything – personal Interest.]

20. [I have some regret at deceiving Cydalise, But I see clearly that the thing is permitted.]

21. “De La Mettrie and Helvetius are sophists of materialistic ethics” (Hettner, Literaturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts, Braunschweig 1881, II, S.388). “What is fatal to materialism is that it indulges, nourishes and encourages man’s lowest instincts, the baseness out of which he was created” (Fritz Schultze, Die Grundgedanken des Materialismus und die Kritik derselben, Leipzig 1887, S.50).

22. La Politique naturelle ou discours sur les vrais principes du gouvernement, par un ancient magistra (Holbach), 1773, pp.45-46.

23. Système social ou Principes naturels de la morale et de la politique. Avec un examen de l’influence du gouvernement sur les mœurs. Par l’auteur du Système de la Nature, Londres, 1773, I, p.36. Cf. with the Preface to Morale universelle by the same author: “We shall not deal here with religious morals, which do not recognise the rights of reason, since they pursue the aim of leading people along supernatural roads.”

24. “Passions are true counterweights to passions; let us not seek to destroy them but try to give them direction; let us balance those that are detrimental with those that are useful to society. Reason, the fruit of experience, is merely the art of choosing, for our own happiness, the passions we should listen to” (Système de la Nature, I, p.304).

25. “Let them not tell us that no government can make all its subjects happy; no doubt, it cannot please the whims of a few idle citizens who do not know what to think up to dispel their ennui; it can and must, however, engage in satisfying the real needs of the multitude. A society enjoys all the happiness it is capable of when the greatest number of its members are fed, clothed and housed – in a word, can, without excessive labour, satisfy the needs that Nature has made necessary to them.... As a consequence of human follies, entire nations are obliged to toil, sweat, and water the soil with their tears so as to provide for the luxury, whims and corruption of a small number of madmen, a handful of useless people, for whom happiness has become impossible because their unbridled imagination knows no bounds” (ibid., p.298).

26. [Admire this author, all of you, who has entitled his book On the Spirit, though it contains nothing but matter.]

27. Système de la Nature, I, p.306.

28. ibid., p.268.

29. It is not only too broad but also tautological since it says nothing except that man wants only what he wants. This was noted by Turgot in ins analysis of Helvetius’s theory of morality.

30. “In depraved societies one should oneself be depraved to be happy” (Système de la Nature, II, p.237).

31. Le Christianisme dévoilé ou examen des principes et des effets de la religion chrétienne, à Londres 1757, pp.120-28. This book was called “the most horrible that could have appeared on Earth”. It was actually brought out in Nancy, not in London.

32. “And yet, – what Possession (sic!) shall; be placed in Competition with a Friend? What Slave so affectionate to our Persons, or studious of our Interest? What Horse able to render us such Service? From whence, or from whom, can we at all Times and on every Occasion receive so many and such essential Benefits?” (Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, II, Ch.IV). Nothing more “cynical” was ever said by the French materialists. Does that mean that Socrates “slandered” himself?

33. Incidentally, in the eighteenth century this was fully in keeping with the spirit of the times, and the adherents of “religious morality” in no way lagged behind the materialists in this respect, sometimes producing quite amusing “proofs”. Hero is a splendid example. According to Helvetius, the Jesuits initialed the performance of a ballet in Rouen, in the year 1750, “the object of which was to show that ‘pleasure prepares the youth for the true virtues, that is to say, the first act is on the civic virtues, the second – on the military virtues, while the third is on the virtues proper to religion’. In the ballet they tried to prove that truth through the dances. Personified Religion performed a pas de deux with Pleasure and, to give the latter more piquancy, as the Jansenists [11*] said at the time, the Jesuits clad him in trousers. But if, in their opinion, pleasure can do anything with man, what is it that interest cannot do with him? Is not all interest reduced in us to a search after pleasure?” (De l’Homme, I, section II, chap.16.)

34. Système social, I, p.56; cf. also La Morale universelle, I, pp.4-5.

35. Politique naturelle, II, p.10; Système social, III, pp.6-8. For his part, Voltaire never tired of warring against this opinion of Montesquieu, who, incidentally, had said nothing new on this question, but had merely repeated the views of certain Greek and Roman writers. To be fair, we shall add that Holbach often spoke of the influence of climate far more superficially than Montesquieu did. “In its essence, a definite climate organises and modifies people in such a way that they become either very useful or harmful to their race” (!), says Holbach in Système de la Nature.

36. Du progrès des lettres et de la philosophie dans le dix-huitième siècle. In Mélange de litterature, Paris, l’an XII, t.III, p.383.

37. It goes without saying that the closest attention should be paid to the tremendous influence that adaptation to the social environment exerts on the individual’s spiritual and moral development.

38. Correspondance littéraire, août 1774.

39. Politique naturelle, I, p.52.

40. Condorcet, who rebelled against Voltaire’s views on this particular matter, which were diametrically opposite to his own, asserted (Le Philosophe ignorant [14*]; the Patriarch often changed his views) that the ideas of justice and right developed “without fail in one and the same way with all beings endowed with the ability to feel” and acquire ideas. “Therefore they will be the same.” Of course, it is true that people “often change them . but any creature that reasons correctly will arrive at the same ideas in morals as in geometry. Such ideas are the necessary conclusion from the indisputaDle truth that “people are feeling and thinking creatures”. (In a Note to Philosophe ignorant of the Kehl edition of Voltaire’s works.)

41. Système de la Nature, I, p.5.

42. ibid., I, p.214.

43. Système de la Nature, I, p.106.

M. Jules Soury naively remarks about those words: “This idea of Baron d’Holbach’s has in part become a fact.” (!) “Nevertheless, it is moral statistics rather than physiology ttiat seems bound to render the greatest services to the physics o[ morals” (Bréviaire de l’histoire du materialisme, Paris 1881, p.653).

44. Politique naturelle, I, pp.13-14, 38, 125.

“The great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property, to which in tbe state of Nature there are many things wanting ...” (John Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government, [London 1884, Book II], Ch.IX, Of the Ends of Political Society and Government, p.256).

45. Politique naturelle, I, p.39.

46. Morale universelle, II, p.249.

47. ibid.

48. ibid., II, p.240.

49. Politique naturelle, I, p.42.

50. Of course, he makes no exceptions either for guild and other such “privileges”, or for the “wealth of the clergy”.

51. L’Ethocratie ou le Gouvernement fondé sur la morale, Amsterdam 1776, pp.50-51.

52. ibid., p.52.

53. Politique naturelle, I, p.179.

54. ibid., p.20.

55. “If my physical or moral qualities give me no right over a man less endowed than I am with the gifts of Nature; if I cannot demand of him that he should not demand of me – then tell me, I ask you, on what grounds I can claim that our conditions are unequal ... It should he demonstrated to me by virtue of what title I can establish my superiority” (Doutes proposés aux philosophes économistes sur l’ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques, à la Haye 1708, p.21).

56. Politique naturelle, I, p.15.

Notes

1*. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1973, pp.345, 346. Plekhanov cites this passage in his own translation.

2*. Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) appeared in 1781.

3*. Lampe – Kant’s servant; here an embodiment of German petty-bourgeois Philistinism. Plekhanov had in mind the ironical criticism to which Heine subjected the contradictions in Kant’s theory explaining them by the spirit of philistinism which permeated Kant’s philosophy too. After refuting the possibility to prove God’s existence (in his Critique ot Pure Reason), Kant, Heine believed, felt sorry for his poor Lampe and, to make the latter happy, returned to proving the existence of God (in his Critique of Practical Reason).

4*. For Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s teaching on the “thing-in-itself” see his work Science of Logic. The criticism is incomplete, as it is given from an idealist point of view.

5*. Heinrich Heine, Deutschland. Ein Winter Märchen.

6*. Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique (Literary, Philosophical and Critical Correspondence) – a magazine circulated in Paris in manuscript form (15 or 16 copies) from 1753 to 1792. It was issued by Friedrich Grimm, a prominent Encyclopedist, man of letters and diplomat. The magazine was sent to outstanding personalities and the authorities of the time. Scientific, literary and other problems were discussed in its pages. Correspondance appeared in book form in 1812.

7*. From Heinrich Heine’s poem, Deutschland. Ein Winter Märchen.

8*. Patriarch of Ferney – Voltaire. The epithet was derived from the name of his estate near Geneva, where Voltaire spent more than twenty years of his life.

9*. The age of Phaedra and Misanthrope – the seventeenth century, the age of great French dramatists Jean Racine, the author of the tragedy Phaedra (1677) and Jean-Baptiste Molière, the author of Le Misanthrope (1666).

10*. Socrates, who was imprisoned and sentenced to death for his struggle against the Athenean democracy, made no attempt to escape from prison, despite his friends’ entreaties, and took poison.

The Roman general Marcus Atilius Regulus (3rd cent. BC), captured by the Carthaginians in the 1st Punic War, was said to have been sent to Rome to negotiate peace and an exchange of prisoners of war. But on arriving in Rome, he ardently advised the Senate against accepting the Carthaginian terms. Then, as he did not want to break his word, he returned to Carthage, where he was tortured to death.

11*. The Jansenists, named after the Dutch Roman Catholic theologian Jansenius – represented the oppositional trend among the French Catholics in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, expressing discontent in part of the French bourgeoisie with the feudal ideology of official Catholicism.

12*. Words by Mephistopheles from Goethe’s Faust.

13*. Capucinades – commonplace and banal moral admonitions, derived from the name of the order of Capuchines.

14*. Le philosophe ignorant – a philosophical treatise by Voltaire (1766) devoted to the problem of knowledge. It was Condorcet who wrote notes to the Kehl edition of Voltaire’s Works.

15*. The reference is to the following passage in Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’s Quest-ce que le tiers état? published on the eve of the French Revolution in 1789: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. – What was it until now in the political respect? Nothing. – What is it striving for? To be something.”

16*. Physiocrats – a trend in bourgeois classical political economy which arose in the 1750s in France. The Physiocrats were staunch advocates of large-scale capitalist agriculture, and the abolition of class privileges and protectionism. They realised the necessity of doing away with the feudal system but wanted to bring this about through peaceful reforms, without any detriment to the ruling classes and absolutism. In their philosophical views they were close to the French eighteenth-century bourgeois Enlighteners.

I. Holbach - Part Two

Holbach was a thorough-going and even pedantic theorist of the bourgeoisie. He fulminated against “the Pope and the Bishops, who have prescribed holidays and forced the people to become idle.” He was out to show that success in trade and industry was incompatible with the morals of a religion “whose founder anathematised the rich and denied them entry into the Kingdom of Heaven”. For his part, Holbach inveighed against “this innumerable multitude of priests, coenobites, friars and nuns, who have no other functions than raising their idle hands to heaven, and praying night and day to gain favours for society”. He rebelled against the Catholic fasts because “Powers that the Roman Catholics regard as heretical are almost the only ones to profit from the abstinence from meat; the English sell them cod, and the Dutch herrings.” [57] All this was only “natural”. But, when Holbach, like Voltaire and many others, missed no opportunity of referring to the story of the two thousand swine that were drowned by devils with the consent of Jesus Christ; when he reproached the mythical founder of Christianity for his lack of respect for private property; when he spoke in the same tones against the apostles, who often picked ears of corn in fields that did not belong to them; when he became briefly reconciled to Christ for the sole reason that the “Son of Man” did not keep the Sabbath holy [58] – he was being pedantic and most ridiculous, revealing a total absence of any understanding of history.

Holbach saw the bourgeoisie, whose spokesman and defender he was, as the most honest, diligent, noble and educated part of the nation. He would have been horrified by the bourgeoisie of today. “Avarice” (he is referring to “cupidity”) “is an ignoble, selfish and anti-social passion, and is therefore incompatible with genuine patriotism, love of the general weal, and even with true liberty. Everything is venal in a people infected with this iilthy epidemic; the only thing wanted is to strike the right bargain.” [59] This is highly reminiscent of Sallust but we could, at the same time, say that the scandals now following one another in rapid succession in France, Germany and Italy [17*], and generally wherever the bourgeoisie has matured for its termination, were foreseen by our philosopher. “There is nothing crueller in the world than a trader excited by rapacity, as soon as he becomes the strongest, and when he is sure that his useful crimes will be applauded by his country”. [60] Indeed, there is not! We know that far better than our worthy “philosophers” ever did!

In most cases, Holbach regarded “wealth” from the viewpoint of the declamatory reciter, who says, “Riches corrupt morals”. He, who had attacked “religious morals” on behalf of wealth, then rose up against rapacity on behalf of “virtue”.; “Only extreme vigilance”, he says, “can prevent or at least slave off the evils that this passion entails.” [61] While standing for the absolute freedom of circulation “(In a word, commerce demands the fullest liberty; the freer commerce is, the wider its spread. Government should do nothing for the merchant but abstain from interference in his action.” [62]), he tried to prove that politics should do everything possible to prevent any multiplication of its subjects’ needs (“these will end up in becoming insatiable unless prudence places limits to them” [63]). He called for State interference, and became a protectionist, almost a reactionary. “... We shall call useful that commerce which supplies the nations with the things necessary for their subsistence, their prime needs, and even for their comfort and their content; we shall call useless and dangerous that commerce which provides citizens only with things they stand in no real need of, and that are fit only to satisfy the imaginary needs of their vanity.” Holbach would have gone to any length to subdue that “vanity”, which, in his words, spreads even to the countryside, this by the agency of lackeys, and of luxury, which corrupts “morals” (mceurs) and leads to the ruin of the most flourishing nations [64]. The home market’is the most natural one for a country’s industrial products, and industry should be assured that market. Holbach could not understand the “senseless fever to discover new fields of trade”, as a result of which “the globe is no longer vast enough for the frenzied merchant”, and nations are ready to cut each other’s throats for some strips of sand where their greed makes them see treasures. [65] He couldnot find terms strong enough to admonish the “people of Albion”, who, he thought, “have set themselves the extravagant aim of encroaching upon the world’s trade and becoming owners of the seas”. [66] He was afraid of excessive inequality in the distribution of wealth, which he considerd a source of many evils in society. Ho came out in defence of small farms; he thought that British farms were too large, this often leading to the tenant farmers becoming “monopolists”. [67] The interests of the State are always linked with those of the greatest number; they demand that many citizens should be active, usefully occupied, and enjoying circumstances that permit them to supply the needs of the country without detriment to themselves. “There is no Fatherland for a man who possesses nothing ...” [68]

It will easily be seen that our philosopher could not have found to bis liking the social condition of Britain, where the bourgeoisie had already carried out its “Glorious Revolution”. He spoke of that country with the greatest, distaste. “It is not enough to be rich to be happy,” he said. “The ability is also needed to make use of riches in a way conducive to felicity. It is not enough to be free so as to be happy; freedom should not he abused ... it should not be made unjust use of.” In this sense the British left much to be desired. “A people without morals”, “a people unjust towards others”; “a people inflamed by a thirst for gold”, “a conqueror people”, “a people hostile to the freedom of others”, “a venal, vicious and corrupt nation” – that was how Holbach saw the British. It was against them that he addressed one of his capucinades on virtue: “Then, O Britons! Cultivate wisdom and reason; engage in perfecting your government and your laws ... Eschew luxury, which is fatal to morals and to liberty. Dread the effects of religious and political fanaticism,” etc., etc. [69]

Incidentally, the British social scene often impelled him towards a mode of thinking greatly more far-going than what we have just quoted. He insisted, for instance, that the heavy taxation for the benefit of the poor had not, and could not have reduced the number of the British poor. “It is only too true,” he exclaimed, “that nations where the greatest riches are to be found contain a greater number of unfortunate people than happy ones. It is only too true that commerce enriches only a few citizens, while leaving the rest in poverty!” [70]

All these thoughts might well seem muddled and contradictory, but – we shall again note this – it should not be forgotten that we are dealing with a theorist of the bourgeoisie, which was then a revolutionary class and therefore capable of harbouring noble feelings. It – or rather its finest representatives, people with hearts and minds, “thinkers”, as Holbach put it – dreamt of the rule of Reason, universal happiness, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Could they not but feel aversion for the inescapable consequences of their own social leanings? Could not that aversion only make them fall into a contradiction with themselves? Show a beautiful young girl an ugly, untidy and disease-bent old hag. She will be horrified, yet she will be in a hurry to live, i.e., grow old, i.e., horrify others, in their turn. An old but ever new occurrence!

Anybody who wishes to gain a concrete idea of the psychology of the eighteenth-century French philosophers might do well to address himself to Russian writers of a period from the end of the reign of the Emperor Nicholas I down to our own days. He will see the same absence of any understanding of history, the same capucinades, and the same contradictions! True, there have also heen socialists among the Russian writers of this period, such as Chernyshevsky, but there have also been many who have come out against the “bourgeoisie” only by some misunderstanding, since they have been incapable of appraising the significance of their own demands. Our “legal” writers very often want exactly what Holbach and his friends did, but they are naive enough to consider it socialism. The great Frenchmen were prepared to swear that this was philosophy. For our part, we are convinced that the rose has the same scent whatever name it goes by.

While Holbach often held the economic views advanced by the Physiocrats, whom he was constantly lauding [71] he did not share their predilection for “lawful despotism”. He was a zealous supporter of representative government. To him despotism was in no way a form of rule: “Despotism can be regarded only as an unequal struggle between one or several armed brigands, and a defenceless society.” [72] Our philosopher asked himself several “natural questions”, which would have found understanding in the French Constituent Assembly. These highly characteristic questions were as follows:

“Should the whole yield to its part? Should the will of one man sway the will of all? Is there, in any society, a privileged being that can dispense with the duty of being useful? Is the Sovereign the only person free of the ties that bind all the others together? Can one man bind together all the rest, without himself being bound by them? Is thej possession of a Sovereign Power, which is unjust in origin, maintained by force and tolerated only because of weakness, a title that can never be destroyed by justice, reason and force?”

This is reminiscent of the well-known expression: “We shall ourselves become conquerors.” [18*] The following passage reminds one of another scene of the Great Revolution: “The Supreme Power is nothing more than a war of one against all as soon as the Monarch transgresses the bounds prescribed to him by the will of the people.” What could be said in objection to this in a hall for ball games? [19*] Almost all of Holbach’s writings were imbued with an inflexible hatred for despotism. It is palpable that what underlay everything he said on this matter was sad reality, not some kind of abstract theory. In just the same way, it is not abstract theory but rather the sad reality that made him appeal to liberty – that “daughter of justice and law”, “the object of love for all noble hearts”. He often seemed to sense the approach of the political storm. “The citizen,” he wrote, “cannot, without shirking his duty, refuse to side with his country against the tyrant who oppresses it.” Who can tell? Perhaps, before being committed to paper, these words were uttered and taken up at some philosophy discussion at Holbach’s home where, according to Morellet, things were said for which the house would have been struck by lightning at least a hundred times if such flashes could have followed from such causes. Diderot was probably in agreement with Holbach, and went even further. Grimm perhaps applauded in approval ... Poor man! He was to change his views when the storm burst, not in a richly appointed salon but on a vast historical arena.

Indeed, would Holbach’s behaviour have been any better after Augus 10? [20*] Would he have repeated at a Jacobin assembly “is not a tyrant the most odious creature that crime could beget?” [73] Frankly speaking, we have no information on this score, but it is more than probable that he would have had no truck with the “rabid” Republicans and would have regarded them also as tyrants and foes to the Fatherland, fanatics and political frauds.

Holbach had a respect for liberty, but he was afraid of “ disturbances”, and was convinced that, “in politics just as in medicine, drastic remedies were always dangerous”. He would have willingly had dealings with a monarch, if only the latter were in the least “virtuous”. Though he said that such sovereigns were very rare meteors, he was constantly dreaming of a “sage on the throne”. There was a moment, during the ministry of Turgot, when he thought that his dream had come true. He dedicated his book L’Ethocratie to Louis XVI, “just, humane, and beneficent Monarch; friend of truth, virtue, and simplicity; enemy of flattery, vice, pomp, and tyranny; restorer of order and morals; father of his people”, and so on and so forth. He may have consequently changed his opinion of Louis XVI, but his fear of the “disorderly” popular movement remained with him. To Holbach, the people consisted of the “poor”, but “poverty, which so often becomes the plaything of the passions and caprices of power, blights the heart of man or rouses it to fury”. As long as the “poor man” puts up with his condition, “the activity of his soul is completely broken; he despises himself, for he sees himself as the object of general contempt and an outcast”. [74] But it is worse if he rebels. “A cursory glance at the history of ancient as well as modern democracies will show that frenzy and turbulence usually give counsel to the People.” [75] “Wherever the People are in possession of power, the State carries within itself the principle of its own destruction.” [76] If Holbach had had to choose between an absolute monarchy and democracy, he would have given the preference to absolutism. Montesquieu was badly mistaken in calling virtue the motive force in the republican form of the Slate. The republic has another idol: equality, “that equality which is to be met only in novels and is, in essence, nothing but envy”. The tyranny of democracy is “the cruellest and the least reasonable” of all tyrannies. In the class struggle in ancient Athens, Holbach saw only “mob violence”. The first English revolution aroused in him only horror of the “religious fanaticism” of the people. “The people, without any doubt, has not been made to command; it would be incapable of that; too far-going liberty would soon degenerate in it into license ...” It has been created to be “active”; “idleness would pervert it and make it insolent.”[77] The people should be kept in check and protected from its own foolishness.

A constitutional monarchy that gives complete freedom of action to an educated and “virtuous” bourgeoisie – that was our philosopher’s political ideal. A citizen-king (Holbach often makes use of the expression), who has been elected by his fellow-citizens to be the organ and executive of the will of “all”, and a class of proprietors as the interpreter of that “will” – that was what Madame “Nature” calls for through the agency of Holbach. Lange is greatly in error in ascribing a “radical” doctrine [78] to him in politics. Radicalism was something psychologically impossible in eighteenth-century philosophers. We already know what idea they had of the people (and they could have had no other idea, since the French people, like matter with the metaphysicists, was then still a dead and inert mass); consequently, there remained only a philosophising and liberal bourgeoisie. In the first place, however, a consistent and thorough-going radicalism is a doctrine unsuited to the bourgeoisie as a class, even at the most revolutionary moments of its historical life (the French revolution proved that very well). Could an aggregate of “all thinking people” have been very numerous? Could they have been regarded as a political force capable of shaking society from top to bottom? The philosophers were well aware that this was not the case, which was why they were constantly returning to their dream of a “sage on the throne”, who would set about realising their aspirations. Here is an instructive and characteristic fact! When Turgot became minister, the “radical” Holbach, that bitter enemy of despots and tyrants, wrote that absolutism was very useful if it began doing away with abuses, abolishing injustice, correcting vices, and the like. In his view, “Despotism would be the best of governmenls if one could be assured that it always be exercised by Tituses, Trajans, or Antoninuses”, but he could not forget that “it is usually wielded by those that are incapable of using it with wisdom”; at the same time, he thought that the French throne was going to a Titus, and he wanted nothing better. [79]

A social platform is needed if society is to be reformed. Where that does not exist, the “radicalism” of the dissatisfied with the existing authority is far from persistent. We saw that in Russia at the accession of Alexander II to the throne. When he took up the problem of abolishing the serf-owning system, our “radicals”, such as Herzen and Bakunin, declared themselves “conquered” by the emperor’s wisdom and toasted the Russian Titus. Even Chernyshevsky was prepared to admit that despotism was the best form of rule when it “does away with abuses, abolishes injustice, and the like.”

Belinsky, the most brilliant and boldest spokesman for the “Westernisers” [21*] in Russian literature during the reign of Nicholas I, once said, eighteen months before his death, i.e., when he was more of a radical than ever before, that all and any progress came from above in Russia. Nicholas I could resemble anyone in the world but “Titus” or “Trajan”. But what else was there for Belinsky to think? What else was there to pin his hopes on? From the Westerniser’s point of view, the Russian people were an inert and dead mass, worth nothing without guidance by a demiurge. When, several decades later, a revolutionary movement began among the student youth, our “intelligentsia”, they escaped from the quandary by breaking with the “West”, asserting that the Russians were more mature for revolution and “ socialism” than any other people. Thus, the admirers of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky had now become, in essence, contumacious Slavophiles. [22*]

“Many Sovereigns often rule so harshly only because they do not know the truth; they dislike the truth because they do not know its invaluable advantages”, said Holbach. A wise ruler “will never guard his own boundless authority; he will sacrifice part of it so as lo have better use of that which will remain with him”. The same idea was repeated several years ago by Madame Tsebrikova in her celebrated letter to Alexander III. That lady laid no claim to radicalism. [80]

When, early in 1890, the German emperor issued his edicts on the labour question [23*], the Russian liberal and “radical” pres.s was convinced that Germany was ruled by a wise monarch.

A “sage on the throne” was the deus ex machina [24*] of eighteenth century French philosophy, for he could at once solve all the theoretical difficulties and all the contradictions springing from the metaphysical standpoint from which the “philosophers” viewed all social phenomena. How did the French Enlightener see the course of history? He saw it as an endless succession of events, most of them sad, without any inner nexus, and subordinate to no pattern. “You will sometimes see happy times,” Condillac instructed his pupil, “when knowledge, laws and morals have made States prosperous; but you will more often see unhappy times, when ignorance, prejudices, errors and vice have prepared calamities for peoples, and have ruined the most flourishing empires.” [81] Why has that been so? Because “enlightenment” has been lacking. “Born in the bosom of barbarism, the arts and sciences have successively enlightened a small number of privileged nations. This is a luminary which conceals itself from some in the measure that it reveals itself to others, and it always lights up only a limited area.” [82] Voltaire expressed the same ideas more tersely and forcibly in his Essai sur les mœurs. “Reason,” he wrote, “is only beginning to arise.” Thus, the past could witness only unreason and folly, and unreason and folly obey no laws, and are, in general, unworthy of study; it is sufficient to establish their existence. “Their antiquities,” Voltaire wrote of the barbarians of Asia, “merit an historical description no more than the wolves and the tigers of their countries do.” [83] Yet Voltaire was one of the finest students of history, which he gave much time to. He vigorously called in question the opinion held by his “divine Emilie”, who was never able to go through any serious book on the history of modern peoples. [84] Very few people knew history as Voltaire did.

“Man”, said Holbach, “begins by eating acorns and contesting with the beasts for his food; he ends by measuring the heavens. Having tilled the soil and sown it, he invents geometry. To protect himself from the cold, he first covers himself with the skins of animals he has overcome, but at the end of several centuries you see him adding gold to silk. A cave or a tree-trunk was his first dwelling, but he ends up by becoming an architect and building palaces.” [85] In our times, we can, without making mention here of Marx and Engels, refer to Morgan, who has taken as his point of departure the development of mankind’s productive forces, this enabling him to successfully penetrate into the secret of its historical advance. Holbach never even realised that he had set forth the fundamental facts of human history. He had done so only to show the victories scored by “Reason” and to prove, against Rousseau, that civilised life was preferable to the savage state. “When it fell into error, mankind became unfortunate” – this is Holbach’s philosophy of history in a nutshell. [86] If he had had to go into detail, he would have added that the civilisation of antiquity had fallen owing to “luxury”, that feudalism had sprung from “rapine, disturbances and wars”, that “Charles I had to be beheaded because of the religious dissensions and his lack of tolerance”, and that Jesus was an imposter, etc.; he would have been greatly surprised to learn that he saw only the “outside of phenomena”.

The “philosophers” saw in history nothing but the conscious activities of people (more or less “wise”, but very often much the opposite, as we have already seen); however, to discern in history nothing but the conscious activities of people means greatly limiting one’s horizon and being surprisingly superficial. In each great historical movement we see, standing at the head of their contemporaries, men who give expression to their trends and formulate their aspirations. In just the same way, there may appear others who ride the crest of political reaction, struggle against innovative trends, and disapprove of the innovators’ strivings. If history is made up of nothing but humanity’s conscious activities, then it is only “great men” that are, of necessity, the cause of the historical movement. It will then follow that religion, morals and manners, customs and the entire nature of a people are the creation of one or several great men, who have acted with definite aims in view. Let us see what Holbach has to say of the Jewish people.

Moses led the Israelites into the wilderness, he “accustomed them to the blindest obedience; he taught them the will of Heaven, the marvellous fable about their forefathers, and bizarre ceremonies with which the Almighty linked His favours; above all, he inspired in them a most venomous hatred for the gods of other nations, and the most elaborate cruelty against their worshippers. By dint of carnage and harshness, he turned them into compliant slaves to his will, ready to back his passions and to sacrifice themselves to satisfy his ambitious designs. In a word, he turned the Hebrews into monsters of frenzy and ferocity. After having thus instilled in them this spirit of destruction, he showed them their neighbours’ lands and possessions, which God Himself had allotted to them.” [87]

From this point of view, the history of the Jewish people is nothing out of the ordinary. All peoples have had their Moses, although such Moseses have never been as cruel as the Jewish one, since, according to Holbach as well as Voltaire, history never knew so evil a people as the people of Israel. “It was usually from the midst of civilised nations that there emerged personages who brought social habits, agriculture, the arts, laws, gods, creeds and religious opinions to families or hordes that were still scattered and not yet united in national bodies. They tempered their morals, gathered them together, and taught them to turn their forces to account and help one another to satisfy their wants with greater ease. Having thus made their existence more happy, they won their love and veneration, acquired the right to prescribe opinions” (!) “and made them adopt those which they had themselves invented or borrowed from the civilised countries they had come from. History shows us that the most famous lawgivers were men who, enriched with useful knowledge to be found in the midst of refined nations, brought to ignorant and helpless savages arts that the latter had not yet known. Such were the Bacchuses, the Orpheuses, the Triptolemuses,” etc. [88]

Did all the civilised peoples of today pass through the state of savagery in the beginning of their development? This question which can so easily be answered today, disturbed our philosopher not a little. He had no firmly established opinion on the origin of the human race; how, then, could he have given a description of its primitive social condition? It is highly probable that all civilised peoples began from savagery. But how is that condition of savagery itself to be described? At this point there appears a new deus ex machina – the frightful upheavals that took place on our globe. It may be that such upheavals more than once destroyed the greater part of mankind. Those that did not perish were unable to pass on to following generations the knowledge and the arts that had existed prior to such catastrophes. It is thus possible that people were again thrown into backwardness on many an occasion after they had reached a certain level of civilisation. “It was perhaps these periodical renewals of mankind that brought about the profound ignorance in which we see it plunged in matters of the greatest moment to it. That may be the true source of the imperfections of our knowledge and of the shortcomings in political and religious institutions.” [89] We have already seen that it was not given to men to know what came first – the egg or the animal. We know now that it was not given to Holbach to know whether civilisation preceded the savage state, or vice versa.

Holbach was satisfied with the knowledge that “mankind has become unfortunate in consequence of error”, from which it had to be delivered. He grudged neither time nor money to accomplish this noble task, dedicating all his life to a struggle against “prejudices”, of which religion was the most tenacious and pernicious. Our philosopher waged an incessant struggle against it. In his struggle against “l’infâme”, Voltaire spared the “Supreme Being”, and merely tried to call Him to reason. In matters of religion, he was a constitutionalist. What he wanted was to weaken God’s omnipotence through the eternal laws of Nature as interpreted by the “philosophers”. However, in heavenly matters, the French materialists were out-and-out republicans: they guillotined God long before the good Dr. Guillotin. They hated Him as though He were their personal enemy: this wilful, vengeful and cruel despot aroused their noble ire as men and citizens. “It is impossible to love a Being, the idea of whom can arouse nothing but fear,” Holbach exclaimed. “... How can one look without fear, in the face of a God whom one considers barbarous enough to damn us? No man on Earth can have the least spark of love for a God who holds in readiness punishment infinite in duration and severity for ninety-nine-hundredths of his children ... Then, draw your conclusions, O theologians, that, according to your own principles, your God is infinitely more malicious than the most malicious of men.” [90]

Holbach’s English materialist contemporaries were far better disposed towards the God of the ancient Jews, for whom they harboured only a “feeling of love” and “deference”. The social conditions they lived in were quite different. Two bodies that are made up of one and the same elements, only in different proportions, do not possess one and the same chemical properties. Moreover: yellow phosphorus differs considerably from the red variety. That does not surprise any of the chemists, who say that it depends on the molecular structure of one and the same elements. However, surprise is constantly expressed at one and the same ideas not having the same colouring and leading up to dissimilar practical conclusions in different countries which are, on the whole, fairly similar in social structure. The movement of ideas is only a reflection of social movement: the various roads that ideas follow and their constantly changing hues correspond precisely to the various groupings of forces in the social movement. The forms of thinking always depend on the forms of being. [91]

“That the general interests of virtue will be effectually secured by the belief of a sufficient recompense in a future life, for all that has been well or ill done in this, will hardly be denied,” said the English materialist Priestley. [92] The French deist Voltaire held the same opinion. The Patriarch of Ferney wrote a good deal of rubbish on this subject. As for the French materialist Holbach, he reasoned as follows:

“Almost all men believe in a God Who punishes and rewards; yet we find, in all lands, that the wicked are far greater in number than the good. If we would trace the real cause of such widespread corruption, we shall discover it in the religious ideas themselves, and not in the imaginary sources that the different religions of the world have invented so as to explain human depravation. Men are corrupt because they are almost everywhere ill-governed; they are vilely governed because religion has deified Sovereigns; the latter, assured of impunity and themselves perverted, have of necessity made their peoples miserable and wicked. Subdued to irrational masters, the peoples have never been guided by reason. Blinded by priestly imposters, their reason became useless to them ...” [93]

Thus religion is seen as the main driving force in history. What we have before us is Bossuet in reverse! The author of Discours sur l’histoire universelle was convinced that religion arranged all things in the best of fashions while Holbach thought that it brought all things down to the worst of conditions. This difference was the only step forward made by the philosophy of history in the course of an entire century. The practical consequences of this step were tremendous, but it did not in the least help in an understanding of the historical facts. The “philosophers” were unable to escape from a vicious circle: on the one hand, man is a product of his social environment: “It is in education that we must seek the main source of men’s vices and virtues, the errors and the truths that their heads are filled with, the praiseworthy or blamable habits they contract, and the qualities and talents they acquire ...” [94] On the other hand, all the derangements of society spring from an “ignorance of the most obvious principles of politics”. The social environment is created by “public opinion”, i.e., by man. This fundamental contradiction appears time and again, in various forms, in the writings of Holbach, as it does, incidentally, in those of all the other “philosophers”.

Man is a product of the social environment. Hence it follows with all logic that it is not public opinion that governs the world. “Men are merely what they are made by their organisation, as modified by habits, education, the example of others, government, and circumstances, whether lasting or momentary. Their religious ideas and their imaginary systems are forced to yield or to accommodate themselves to their temperament, their propensities, and their interests.” [95] “... if one vouchsafes to examine things coolly, one will find that the name of God has always and only served on Earth as a pretext for human passions.” [96] “Objects about us, fleeting interests, ingrained habits and public opinion have a far greater impact than imaginary beings or speculation, which itself depends on that organisation.” [97] The force of “speculation” and of “imaginary beings” is the more negligible because one could scarcely find two men out of a hundred thousand who would ask themselves what is to be understood by the word “God”, and because people are induced to action, not by the general considerations of reason but by passions, as was already noted by Bayle and, before him, by Seneca. [98]

Man is a product of the social environment. As for the gods, man has created them in his own image. “When he worships God, it is himself that man worships.” [99] (Cf. Feuerbach.) Is it not obvious that a wilful God, susceptible to praise and eager for constant asseverations of devotion from his subjects, has been created in the image of earthly sovereigns? [100]

Man is a product of the social environment. “If we give but a little thought to what passes before our eyes, we shall discern the imprint of administration” (i.e., of “government”; we shall now see why and how, to the “philosophers”, the influence of the social environment was nothing but that of government) “on the character, opinions, laws, customs, education and morals of peoples.” [101] “It is therefore the vices of Society that make its memhers bad.... Man becomes a wolf to his fellows.” [102]

The other side of the antinomy:

The social environment is engendered by “public opinion”, i.e., by men. Hence it follows quite logically that public opinion governs the world, and that mankind has become unfortunate in consequence of error (see above).

“If we consult experience, we shall see that it is in religious illusions and opinions that we should seek for the real source of the host of evils that we everywhere see overwhelming mankind. Ignorance of natural causes has led it to create its Gods; deception has made the latter terrible; a baneful concept of them has pursued man without making him any better, made him tremble uselessly, filled his mind with chimeras, opposing the progress of reason, and hindering the search for happiness. These fears have made him the slave of those who deceived him under the pretext of caring for his good; he did evil when he was told that his Gods called for crimes; he lived in adversity because he was made to hear that his Gods had condemned him to misery; he never dared to resist his Gods or to cast off his fetters, because it was drummed into him that stupidity, the renunciation of reason, spiritual torpor and abasement of the soul were the best means of winning eternal bliss.” [103]

The social environment is engendered by public opinion, i.e., by men. “Nothing less than a Heaven-hallowed frenzy was needed to make beings that loved freedom and were constantly seeking for happiness believe that the depositaries of Public Authority had received from the Gods the right to enslave them and make them miserable. Religions were necessary to endow the Divinity with the traits of a Tyrant so as to make men believe that unjust Tyrants were the earthly representatives of that Divinity.” [104]

The social environment is engendered by public opinion, i.e., by men. “Why do we see Nations that were once noble by nature crushed by the shameful yoke of an oppressive Despotism? It is because public opinion has changed... because superstition, that accomplice of Tyranny, has succeeded in degrading souls and making them cowardly, fearful and unfeeling.... Why do we see Nations intoxicated with the commercial urge and a passion for riches?... It is because public opinion has persuaded them that money alone brings true happiness, though it is nothing but a deceptive substitute arid contributes nothing to the public weal”, etc., etc. [105] “The nations have never known of the true foundations of authority; they have not dared demand happiness of their kings, who are charged with providing them with it; they have thought their sovereigns, wearing the guise of Gods, are entitled by birth to command the rest of mortals ... As a consequence of such views, politics has degenerated into the deadly art of sacrificing the happiness of all to the whims of one man or of several privileged evildoers.” [106]

It is not given to man to know whether the egg came before the animal, or vice versa; it was not given to the eighteenth-century materialists to know whether it is “public opinion” that creates the social environment, or vice versa. Indeed, nothing is harder for one who cannot abandon the metaphysical point of view than to reply to this question.

If, as Locke showed, inherited ideas do not exist; if man is nothing but “sensation”, as the eighteenth-century materialists claimed; if our mental representations, i.e., “the images, the impressions received by our senses” arise thanks to our sensations; if “man is no more free in his thinking than he is in his actions”, then it is very strange to seek in “public opinion” the secret of any action by man. Our mental representations are what they are made by the impressions we perceive. However, it is not Nature alone – in the proper sense of the term – that engenders those impressions in us. From birth, man comes under the power of the social environment, which moulds his brain, the latter being “soft wax adapted to receive all the impressions made on it. [107] Consequently, he who would understand the history of “public opinion” must try to realise clearly what is meant by the history of the social environment, by the development of society. Such was the inescapable conclusion finally arrived at by sensualist materialism. Condillac’s celebrated staluo could calm down only when it had been able to attribute the shifts in its “opinions” to changes in its social relations, the relations with “its like”. [25*]

So it was history that had to be appealed to. However, the “philosophers”, who saw in history only mankind’s conscious activities, could discern nothing in it but human “opinions”. Consequently, they were bound to come up against the antinomy: opinions are consequences of the social environment; opinions are the causes of the various properties of that environment. That antinomy was bound more to confuse the “philosophers’” ideas because they held, as did all the metaphysicians, that effect and cause – at least in respect of social life – were immutable, immobile, and, so to say, petrified notions. It was only in the capacity of a metaphysician that Grimm could say that the influence of opinions is equal to naught.

The interaction between the various aspects of social lifesuch was the highest and “most philosophical” viewpoint that the “philosophers” could achieve. It was Montesquieu’s point of view. However, interaction, that closest truth of the relation between cause and effect, as Hegel called it, explains nothing in the process of historical movements. “If one does not go beyond a consideration of content only from the viewpoint of interaction, then that is, in fact, a mode of consideration that contains’” absolutely no notion; we are then dealing with a dry fact, and the demand for mediation, which is the main motive for the application of the relation of causality, again remains unmet.” [108]

However, things even more unpleasant than this may occur.

Man is a product of the social environment. The nature of the social environment is determined by the actions of “government”. The actions of government and legislative activities pertain already to the field of the conscious activities of men. Such activities, in their turn, hinge on the “opinions” of those who act. One term of the antinomy (the thesis) has imperceptibly changed: it has become fully identical with its old opponent – the antithesis. It will seem that the difficulty has vanished, and the “philosopher” is continuing on the road of his “investigations” with an easy conscience. No sooner reached, the viewpoint of interaction has been rejected.

But that is not all. This seeming resolution of the antinomy is nothing but a complete break with materialism. The human brain, that “soft wax” shaped by the impressions produced by man’s social environment, ultimately turns into the demiurge of the environment to which it owes its impressions. Incapable of any further advance, sensualist materialism retraces its steps along the selfsame road.

In the second place, the author of Système de la Nature would assure us that the influence of government on character, opinions. laws, customs, etc., is easily discernible. Consequently, government exerts an influence on laws. This seems very simple and perfectly obvious, but it means only that any people’s civil law originates in its public law. One law hinges on another; “laws” on other “laws”. The antinomy vanishes, but only because one of its terms, viz., that which was to have formulated the ultimate conclusion to be drawn by materialist sensualism, has proved in fact to be merely trivial tautology.

To end with all these difficulties, the following should have been done:

The metaphysical point of view should have been discarded, which precluded any idea of evolution and helplessly muddled the “philosophers’” logical concepts. Only then would it have been given “to know whether the egg preceded the animal, or the animal the egg, both in the natural and the historical sciences”.

The essential conviction had to be arrived at that the “man’s nature”, which the eighteenth-century materialists operated with, provided no explanation at all of mankind’s historical development. It was necessary to reach a stage above the viewpoint of natural science, i.e., the viewpoint of social science. It had to be realised that the social environment has its own laws of development, which are not dependent on man considered as a “sentient, thinking and rational creature”, and, in their turn, exert a decisive influence on his senses, mental images and thoughts.

That task, as we shall see, was accomplished by nineteenth-century dialectical materialism. However, before speaking of its outstanding discoveries, we would like to review the views of a man whose example and dauntless logic did so much to reveal the insufficiency and paucity of metaphysical materialism. That man was Helvetius.

Foototes

57. Cf. Le Christianisme dévoilé ou Examen des principes et des effets de la Religion Chrétienne, 1757, pp.176, 179, 196, 198, 199, 203.

58. “Perhaps He felt, just as we do, how useful the abolition of a large number of holidays would be to the people” (Histoire critique de Jésus Christ ou Analyse raisonnée des Évangiles, [without a date and place of publication], p.157).

59. L’Ethocratie, p.124.

60. Politique naturelle, II, p.148.

61. Politique naturelle, p.145.

62. ibid., p.150.

63. ibid., p.151.

64. L’Ethocratie, chap.VIII, Système social, III, p.73.

65. Politique naturelle, II, p.154.

66. ibid., p.155.

67. L’Ethocratie, p.122, Note.

68. ibid., p.117.

69. Cf. Système social, t.II, chap.VI.

70. L’Ethocratie, pp.146-47.

71. “Zealous and virtuous writers”, “honest citizens”; “nothing can lie added to the useful views dictated to them by their concern for the public weal” (L’Ethocratie, pp.144-45).

72. Politique naturelle, p.44.

73. ibid., I, p.144. We shall he constantly quoting from this book in setting forth Holbach’s political views. Other sources will be referred to whenever necessary.

74. L’Ethocratie, pp.119-20. “A people, obliged to work for its subsistence, is usually incapable of reflection” (Système de la Nature, II, p.248).

75. Politiqne naturelle, II, p.238.

76. ibid., p.240.

77. ibid., I , p.185; Système sociale, III, p.85.

78. l.c., p.380. Incidentally, Lange refers only to Système de la Nature. He evidently had no knowledge of Politique naturelle, L’Ethocratie, Système social, or Morale universelle.

79. L’Ethocratie, p.6.

80. Mme. Tsebrikova asked the emperor what history would have to say of him if he continued to rule in the same way as before. “What business is that of yours?” was what the tsar wrote in the margin of this woman’s letter.

81. Cours d’études pour I’instruction du prince de Parme, Genève 1779, IV, pp.1-2.

82. ibid., p.2.

83. Essai sur les mœurs, ch.53.

84. See the Preface to Essai sur les mœurs.

85. Système social, I, p.191.

86. Système de la Nature, I, p.32. See also the Introduction to Système social.

87. Le Christianisme devoilé, p.35.

88. Système de la Nature, II, pp.24-25.

90. ibid., pp.25–26.

90. Le bon sens puisé dans la nature, I, pp.89-93.

91. One and the same idea expressed by two men who are pursuing different practical ends often has two quite different meanings. Genuine religion in any country is, according to Holbach, the religion of the hangman. In essence, Hobbes says the same thing. How different is the meaning of these thoughts in the philosophies of these two men!

92. A Free Discussion of the Doctrine of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity, in a Correspondence Between Dr. Price and Dr. Priestley, London 1778, Introduction, pp.VIII-IX.

93. Système de la Nature, II, p.219.

94. Système social, I, p.15.

95. Système de la Nature, II, p.298.

96. ibid., p.294.

97. ibid., p.292.

98. ibid., pp.248 and 295.

99. Le bon sens, I, p.57.

100. Le Christianisme devoilé, p.176.

101. Système social, III, p.5. Grimm went even further in this direction. “The impact of the most bold opinions is usually equal to naught,” he wrote. “Not a single book, however inspired, is capable of corrupting morals, in the same way as, unfortunately, it does not depend on any philosopher ... to perfect morals. Only government and legislation have that power, and it is after action by them that public morality finds its correct level of goodness or curruption; books have nothing to do with the matter” (Correspondance littéraire, Janvier 1772).

102. Politique naturelle, I, pp.11-12.

103. Système de la Nature, I, pp.290-91. Here is how Suard defined public opinion: “By public opinion I mean the result of the truths and errors widespread in a nation, a result that determines its judgements on dignity or contempt, love or hate, a result that makes up its inclinations and habits, its shortcomings and merits – in a word, its morals and manners. It should lie said that it is this public opinion that governs the world” (l.c., p.400).

104. Politique naturelle, II, p.11.

105. Système social, III, pp.9-10.

106. Système de la Nature, I, p.291.

107. Le bon sens, I, p.82.

108. Encyklopädie, erster Theil, herausgegeben von Leopold von Henning, §§ 155-56 und Zusatz.

Notes

17*. Plekhanov has in mind a series of scandalous exposures of large-scale swindling and shady transactions on the part of bourgeois businessmen, bribed members of parliament and the venal press.

In France it was the bankruptcy (1888) of a company that started to build the Panama canal that led to “Panama” trial, which disclosed venality of a number of ministers, senators, deputies, the press and so on. The term “Panama” became a common word denoting large-scale swindling and shady transactions.

In Germany it was the “affair” of the “railway king” Strussberg which ended in a bankruptcy of a number of banks in various countries (1875).

In Italy it was the shady transactions of the owners of the Bank of Rome, who together with a group of ministers and other statesmen made profits at the expense of their clients, the latter becoming utterly ruined after the bank had collapsed (1893).

18*. When, at one of the first sessions of the States General, representatives of the nobility and clergy alluded to the historical right of conquest being the basis of their privileges, the bourgeois theorist abbe Emmanuel Sieyès proudly answered them:

“Rien que cela, Messieurs? Nous serons conquérants à nôtre tour.” (And is that all, gentlemen? We shall become conquerors in our turn.)

19*. On June 20, 1789, representatives of the third estate gathered in a hall for ball games in one of the palaces of Versailles, proclaimed themselves the French National Assembly and swore not to leave the hall until a Constitution was drawn up.

20*. On August 10, 1792 the French monarchy was abolished as a result of a popular uprising. The masses took the royal Tuileries palace by assault and compelled the Legislative Assembly to abolish the royal authority. The king was arrested and imprisoned.

21*. Westernisers and Slavophiles – two trends in Russian social thought of the mid-nineteenth century.

The Westernisers held that Russia would follow the same way of development as Western Europe (hence the name) and would go through the capitalist stage. They stressed the progressive role of the bourgeoisie, their political ideal being the constitutional-monarchical, bourgeois-parliamentary states of Western Europe, in particular, Britain and France. Their attitude towards serfdom was negative, their Left wing (Herzen, Ogaryov, partially Belinsky) sharing the views of utopian socialists.

The Slavophiles put forward the “theory” of the special and exceptional road of Russia’s historical development on the basis of the communal system and Orthodoxy as inherent only in the Slavs. They were radically opposed to the revolutionary movement in Russia and in the West as well, as they maintained that Russia’s historical development precluded any possibility of revolutionary upheavals. While advocating the perpetuation of the autocracy, the Slavophiles thought that a monarch should not ignore public opinion, and proposed the convening of a Zemsky Sobor consisting of elected representatives of all sections of society. However, they were against any constitution and formal restriction of the autocracy. By the end of the fifties and the early sixties, both trends drew closer together on the ground of a common liberal bourgeois ideology.

22*. By contumacious Slavophiles Plekhanov meant the Populists (Narodniks), who maintained that Russia could attain socialism, by-passing the capitalist way of development. They considered the peasant commune an embryo of socialism.

23*. Trying to win popularity, William II declared shortly before the Reichstag elections in February 1890 that he stood for legislative limitation of working hours; he issued edicts on preparations for a state conference on the labour question and for an international conference on labour legislation.

24*. In the theatre of antiquity the tragic denouément was sometimes achieved by the interference of God who made an appearance with the aid of stage machinery (deus ex machina).

25*. To illustrate his theory, Condillac in his main work Traité des sensations (1754) used the image of a statue. Endowing it consecutively with sensations, the philosopher showed that the statue, together with these sensations, acquired all mental and intellectual functions.

II. Helvetius - Part One

“Helvetius, that elegant farmer-general and man of probity, disinterestedness and charity, whom Voltaire, in his flattering historical reminiscences, nicknamed Atticus, took it into his head to write a book; to bring that about, he collected, at gatherings of philosophers, invited by him to his table, their theories, views, and paradoxes; skilled in provoking interesting discussions, he brought into play now the sparkling wit of Diderot, now the sagacity of Suard or the witty and pungent mind of the Abbe Galiani; then he set forth, in a corpus of learning, all the various opinions he had so faithfully recorded. The outcome of these conversations, as heard, analysed and summed up, was the book De l’Esprit, that is to say, materialism in metaphysics, personal interest in morals.” [1]

The reader now knows how Helvetius’s main work came into being. In this particular instance, we can give the greater credence to Demogeot for this tattler merely having repeated a piece of fiction which has, for over a century, been passed on from one old literary gossip to another. Demogeot was a well-disposed gossip: he did not say anything bad of Helvetius; he left the surmising to the reader. There have been other and less welldisposed and more outspoken gossips. From them the reader learns that, in his investigations, our philosopher was motivated by an excessive vanity. It is to that vanity that we owe Helvetius s “sophisms”; it prevented him from creating something firm and fundamental. The gossips are always marked by an extraordinary perspicacity. It befits them greatly and invariably to engage in writing the history of literature and politics; in their exposition everything is plain and clear: you read them with great enjoyment, with little effort, and with tremendous benefit. You prefer themto that brand of writers who, like the good old Hegel, would delve deeper into history than these gossips do. Such writers are fairly dull folk, but ... audiatur et altera pars.

When he spoke of the part played by great men in history, Hegel fulminated against “the petty study of man which, instead of taking as the object of research the general and essential features of human nature, occupies itself mainly with the particular and the fortuitous, with individual motivations, passions, and so on.” In his opinion, “great men wanted that which they did, and did that which they wanted”. The same, of course, “only in other words”, can be said of all those who have worked with greater or lesser success for the benefit of mankind, this in accordance with their understanding of some particular field. It might also be said that “the viewpoint of envy” that Hegel held in such contempt in no way helps us understand and appraise the various periods of history. It might be said ... but then, so much might be said, but will that be listened to? The gossips get a far better hearing. For instance, when they assert that Helvetius was a dangerous sophist, and a vain and shallow man, they remain highly pleased with themselves, their wit and their integrity, and pronounce judgement.

Helvetius comes in for especially scurvy treatment at the hands of the German historians. In France, his character still gets its due at times [2], but inappropriate lenity towards this “dangerous” man is eschewed in Germany. In that country, Helvetius has been reviled oven more than La Mettrie has. Though the latter was quite “dangerous”, His Majesty Frederick the Great of blessed memory was pleased to pronounce some gracious words about him after his death. Voluntas regis suprema lex, German scholars are aware of that more than anybody else, and that because they are scholars.

What a surprising fact! Though Helvetius’s theories alarmed even the “philosophers”, his opponents including men of Diderot’s calibre, he was attacked in France much more after the Revolution than before it. Laharpe acknowledged that his refutation of this man’s “sophisms” in 1788 produced a far weaker impression than it did nine years later, in 1797. Only then was it realised, Laharpe said, that materialist philosophy was an “armed doctrine”, a revolutionary doctrine. In 1797, the bourgeoisie no longer stood in need of such theories, which would be a constant threat to its gains; materialism had to be done with, and done with it was, the question never arising whether the proofs provided by sycophants like Laharpe were really as valid as they had been depicted. New times produce new aspirations, the latter producing new philosophies. [3]

As for the gossips, they had good reason to complain of Helvetius. Only on rare occasions could they understand him, and not merely because his thoughts were beyond the range of their comprehension. Helvetius had an original manner of expressing his theories, one capable of putting the gossips out of countenance. He respected less than any other writer of his time that which Nordau called a conventional lie. A man of the world and a keen observer, he had an excellent knowledge of eighteenthcentury French “Society”; a pungent and satirical writer, he never missed an opportunity of telling that society several home truths that were hard to swallow and had nothing in common with the innocent truths that always “fall so trippingly from the tongue”. Hence the countless misunderstandings that ensued. What he had to say about his contemporaries was taken for his ideal. Madame do Boufflers said of him that he had laid bare every man’s secret. [1*] She thought that therein lay all the value and significance of his De l’Esprit. This quid pro quo also resulted in the following: when the subject of respect for “virtue” arose, Helvetius said that, in “despotic empires’, it was held in contempt, its name alone being paid tribute to. “If it is invoked every day, and if it is demanded of citizens, it is a matter, in this case, of a truth that is asked for on condition that one will be sufficiently prudent to say nothing of it.” This proposition won approval from Madame de Boufflers, who called it correct, witty and delicious, and asserted that it revealed every man’s secret. Helvetius went on to explain why things could not be different from what he said they were. He showed how, in despotic states, people’s interests made them hate “virtue”. Again Madame de Boufflers agreed. Then there would come along some Lampe, usually a German but sometimes a Frenchman, who, in his turn, raised his voice, saying that Helvetius lauded a contempt for virtue. When it came to love, Helvetius said that wherever “the wealthy and the grand” took no part in government, they had to engage in amorous adventures as the best antidote to ennui. At this, Madame de Boufflers smiled archly: this gracious blue stocking was better aware of that than the philosopher was. The latter, however, did not stop at that; he asked himself how love could become an occupation. He found that “love should be surrounded with perils; that a vigilant jealousy should incessantly stand in the way of the lover’s desires, and that the lover should incessantly be finding ways of catching his lady love off her guard”. He arrived at the conclusion that, in such conditions, “a coquette ... is a delightful mistress”. Again Madame de Boufflers agreed. But then there appeared on the scene a Frau Buchholtz [2*], who, pale with indignation, accused our philosopher of glorifying coquetry and attacking womanly virtue, the tested virtue of Frau Buchholtz, and so on and so forth. This kept on being repeated without end, and spreading. Such misunderstanding of Helvetius has lasted down to our days, and is embedded in the minds of those who have never read him. Incidentally, reading Helvetius would hardly change anything, for he would be read only through the eyes of Frau Buchholtz, a very near-sighted lady, though highly virtuous and most reputable.

Was Helvetius, in the strict sense of the word, what might be called a materialist? This is often doubted, because of his reputation.

“The thoughtful and reserved Buffon, the reticent and diplomatic Grimm, and the vain and superficial Helvetius,” said the late Lange, “all stood close to materialism, without adhering to any firm viewpoint or any consistent accomplishment of a fundamental idea, which distinguished La Mettrie, despite all his frivolity of expression.” [4] Jules-Auguste Soury, a French re-echoer of this German neo-Kantian, repeated the same opinion word for word. [5]

We would like to look into the matter with our own eyes.

The question whether there exists in man a non-material substance to which he owes his mental life did not come within the orbit of Helvelius’s studies. He touched upon the matter only en passant, and dealt with it most cautiously. On the one hand, he did not want to irritate the censors, for which reason he spoke with obvious deference of the Church, which had “established our faith on this point”. On the other hand, he disliked flights of “philosophical fancy”. We must follow up an observation, he said, halt at the moment it leaves us. and have the courage not to know what, cannot yet be known. This smacks of “reserve” rather than of “vanity” or the “superficial”. Lange would have sensed and noted this had it concerned some less “dangerous” writer. But since he was dealing with Holvetius, he used a different yardstick: he thought it obvious that the “ram” and “ superficial” author of De l’Esprit could be nothing but “vain” and “superficial”. [6]

In all the fundamental questions of “metaphysics” (for instance: matter, space, the infinite, and the like) Helvetius in fact shared the views of the English materialist John Toland. That can be seen from a comparison of the latter’s Letters to Serena (London, 1704) with De l’Esprit, Discours I, ch.IV. To Lange, Toland was undoubtedly an outstanding materialist, whose ideas he considered as clear as was only possible; as for Helvetius, he had merely “drawn close” to materialism, because his “superficiality” prevented him from firmly adhering to any basic idea. “That is how history is written!” How pernicious is the influence of “ superficial” people: the “soundest of men” grow superficial when they read from the latter.

Is matter capable of sensation? “This subject was debated very long and very vaguely,” said Helvetius. “It was much later that people presumed to ask themselves what the argument was all about, and to attach a precise idea to the word “matter”. If its meaning had been determined in the first place, it would have been recognised that men were, if I might say so, the creators of matter, that matter was not some kind of creature; that there were, in Nature, only individuals that had been given the name of bodies, and that one could understand by the word “matter” only a collection of properties common to all bodies. The meaning of this word having been thus defined, it would remain only to learn ... whether the discovery of such a force as attraction, for instance, could not lead up to the surmise that bodies could also possess several unknown properties, such as the faculty of sensation which, while manifesting itself only in the organised bodies of animals, might nevertheless be common to all individuals. The question having been reduced to this point, one could see that, if it was impossible to demonstrate that all bodies were absolutely insensible, no man unenlightened on this subject by “revelation” (we know the significance of such deference, in the “philosophers”, for “revelation” and Church dogmata in general – G.P.) could solve the problem otherwise than by calculating and comparing the probability of this opinion with that of the contrary opinion.

“Consequently, to end this argument, there was no need at all to construct various systems of the world, lose one’s way in a combination of possibilities, and make prodigious mental efforts, which led, and could not but have actually led, to more or less ingenious errors.” [7]

This lengthy quotation shows equally well both the affinity between the materialism of Helvetius and that of Toland [8], and the nature of what one would like to call Helvetius’s scepticism or probabilism. In his opinion, however, it was not the materialists but the idealists of various schools who engaged in “flights of philosophical fancy”; he recommended to them such things as prudence, caution and due account of probabilities. Such prudence and caution would have shown them that their denial of the sensibility of matter was a figment of their imagination, and that it was not the properties of “bodies” but only the definition of matter, i.e., a single word that was preventing them from uniting the notion of body with the faculty of sensation. Here scepticism was merely a weapon directed against the enemies of materialism. It was the same when Helvetius spoke of the “existence of bodies”. The faculty of sensation in matter was only a probability! Quite true, but what did that prove against the materialists? After all, the very existence of bodies was, in its turn, merely a probability, yet it would be absurd to deny it. That was how Helvetius’s thinking proceeded, and if it did prove anything at all, it was primarily that his sceptical doubts had left him.

Helvetius knew just as well as his contemporaries did that we get a knowledge of bodies only through the sensations they produce in us. This again proves that Lange was in error in asserting that “materialism stubbornly takes the world of sensory appearance for the world of real things.” [9] This, however, did not prevent Helvetius from being a convinced materialist. He quoted a “famous English chemist” whose opinion concerning the sensibility of matter he obviously shared. Here is what that chemist said:

“We distinguish, in bodies, two kinds of properties; those whose existence is permanent and unalterable, such as inpenetrability, weight, mobility, etc. These qualities pertain to general physics. But these same bodies possess other qualities whose fleeting and short-lived existence is successively produced and destroyed by certain combinations, analyses or movements in the internal particles. These kinds of properties form different branches of natural history: chemistry, etc.; they pertain to the special branches of physics. Iron, for example, is composed of phlogiston (inflammable substance) and a special kind of earth. In this state of composition, it is subject to the attractive power of a loadstone. But when iron is decomposed, this property is destroyed. A loadstone has no action on ferruginous earth that has been deprived of phlogiston ...

“Now why is it that, in the animal kingdom, organisation does not produce in like manner the singular quality called the faculty of sensation? All phenomena in medicine aiid natural history clearly prove that this power is the result, in animals, only of the structure of their bodies, that this faculty begins with the formation of their organs, is preserved while they live, and is finally lost by the dissolution of these same organs.

“If the metaphysicians ask me what then happens with the an imal’s faculty of sensation, I will reply that the same thing takes place as with the power of decomposed iron to be attracted by a loadstone.” [10]

Helvetius was not merely a materialist; he was the most “consistent” of his contemporaries in his adherence to the fundamental idea in materialism. He was so “consistent” that he horrified the other materialists, none of whom had the boldness to follow him in his daring conclusions. In this sense, he did indeed only stand “close” to such men as Holbach, since they could merely approach him.

The soul within us is nothing more than the faculty of sensation, the intellect being the outcome of that faculty. Everything in man is sensation. “Physical sensibility is the prime source of his needs, his passions, his sociability, his ideas, judgements, desires and actions – Man is a machine which, put into movement by physical sensibility, must do everything that it performs.” [11] Thus, Helvetius’s point of departure is absolutely identical with that of Holbach. Such was the foundation that our “dangerous sophist” built on. Let us now take a closer look at what was original in his edifice’s architecture.

What is meant by virtue? There was not a single eighteenthcentury philosopher who did not discuss this question after his own manner. To Helvetius, the question was a very simple one: virtue consisted in a knowledge of people’s obligations to one another. Consequently it presupposed the formation of a society.

“Had I been born on a desert island and left to my own devices, I would have lived there without vice and without virtue; I would have been able to manifest neither one nor the other. What, then, is to be understood by these words – virtuous and vicious? Actions that are useful or harmful to society. This simple and clear idea is, in my opinion, preferable to any obscure and highflown bombast about virtue.” [12]

The common weal – such is the measure and the foundation of virtue. Therefore our actions are the more vicious, the more injurious they are to society; they are the more virtuous, the more useful they are to it. Salus populi – suprema lex. Our philosopher’s “virtue” is, first and foremost, political virtue. The preachingof morality leads nowhere; preaching will never produce a hero. Society should be given an organisation that will teach its members to hold the common weal in respect. Corrupt morals mean only a split between the social interest and the private. The legislator who knows how that dichotomy should be done away with is the best preacher of morality.

It is often claimed that John Stuart Mill’s “utilitarianism” as a teaching of morality was far superior to the ethics of the eighteenth-century materialists, since the latter wanted to make personal advantage the foundation of morals, while the English philosopher brought into the foreground the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The reader can now see that, in this respect, John Stuart Mill’s merit is more than doubtful. The happiness of the greatest number is merely a poor copy, without the least revolutionary tinge, of what the French materialists called the “common weal”. If that is so, what is the source of the opinion that sees in John Stuart Mill’s “ utilitarianism” a felicitous modification of the eighteenth-century materialist doctrine?

What is the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people? It is a kind of sanction of human behaviour. In this sense, the materialists could draw upon nothing in Mill’s -celebrated book. However, the materialists were not content with the search for a sanction; facing them was the task of solving a scientific problem: how was man, if he was nothing more than sensation, to learn to appraise the common weal? Through what miracle could he forget his sensory impressions and achieve aims that would seem to have nothing in common with the latter? In the area and within the bounds of this problem, the materialists did actually take personal interest as the point of departure. But doing so meant, in this context, merely reiterating that man is a sentient being, and nothing more. Thus, to the materialists, personal interest was not a moral precept, but only a scientific fact. [13]

Holbach evaded the difficulty of this problem with the aid of obscure terminology. “Thus, when we say that interest is the sole motive of human actions, we want thereby to indicate that every man works in his own manner for his well-being, which he finds in some object, visible or hidden, real or imaginary, and that the entire system of his conduct is designed to obtain it ...” [14] In other words, this meant that personal interest cannot simply be reduced to the demands of his “sensory impressions”. At the same time, however, to Holbach, just as to all eighteenth-century materialists, man was merely sensation. There is a logical leap here, due to which Holbach’s “ethics” evoked less abhorrence in the historians of philosophy than did Helvetius’s ethics. In Lange’s opinion, “Holbach’s ethics is rigorous and pure.” [15] For his part, Hettner saw in it something substantially different from Helvetius’s ethics. [16]

The author of De l’Esprit was the only eighteenth-century philosopher with the courage to touch upon the question of the origin of moral sentiments. He was alone in daring to infer them from man’s “sensory impressions”.

Man is susceptible to physical pleasure and physical suffering. He avoids the latter, and is drawn to the former. This constant and ineradicable avoidance and attraction bears the name of self-love, which is inseparable from man; it is his main sensation.

”Of all the senses, it is the only one of this kind: to it we owe all our desires, all our passions; these are merely the application of the sense of love of self to one object or another” ... “Look into history books arid you will see that, in all countries where certain virtues were encouraged by the hope for pleasures of the senses, such virtues were the most common and conferred the greatest lustre.” [17] Peoples that gave themselves up most to love were the most courageous, “because in their countries women accorded their favours only to the bravest”. With the Samnites, the greatest beauty was the reward for the highest military prowess. In Sparta, the wise Lycurgus, convinced that “pleasure is the sole and universal motive in men”, was able to turn love into an inspirer of bravery. During public holidays, young, fair, and semi-nude Lacedaemonian girls sang and danced at assemblies of the people, the words of their songs reviling the cowardly and lauding the brave. Only men of valour could expect favours from the fair sex. The Spartans therefore tried to be valiant: amorous passion inflamed in their hearts a passion for glory. However, the “wise” institutions set up by Lycurgus did not achieve the limits of the possible. Indeed, let us suppose that “after the example of the virgins consecrated to Isis or Vesta, the fairest Lacedaemonian maidens were dedicated to rewarding merit; that, presented nude at the assemblies, they were carried off by the warriors as the prize for courage, and that the young heroes experienced, at one and the same instant, the double intoxication of love and glory: however strange and far-removed from our morals such legislation may be, it is certain that it made the Spartans more virtuous and valiant, because the strength of virtue is always proportionate to the degree of pleasure assigned as the reward ...”

Here Helvetius speaks of a double intoxication – with love and glory. This should not be misunderstood. Everything in a thirst after glory can be reduced to sensory impressions. We love glory, just as we do wealth, for the sake of the power they confer. But what is power? It is a way to make others serve our happiness. But, in essence, happiness is reducible to sensual enjoyment. Man is nothing but sensation. All such passions as, for instance, a passion for glory, power, wealth and the like, are merely artificial passions which can be derived from physical needs.To better understand this truth, one should always remember that our sensations of enjoyment and suffering are of a double kind – actual enjoyment or suffering, and foreseeable enjoyment or suffering. I suffer the pangs of hunger, and I experience actual suffering; I foresee that I shall starve to death, and I experience foreseeable suffering. “... If a man who loves fair slave girls and beautiful pictures finds a treasure, he will be in transports. It will be said, however, that he does not as yet experience any physical pleasure. That is true, but at that moment he has acquired the means of obtaining the objects of his desires. Now this anticipation of pleasure at hand is already pleasure.”

It goes without saying that foresight does not at all contradict Helvetius’s point of departure. It is merely the result of memory. If I foresee that lack of food will cause me suffering, that is because I have already experienced such suffering. But the memory possesses the property of “exerting on our organs a certain degree, of the same influence” as suffering or enjoyment. “It is therefore evident that all pain and pleasures, which are considered internal, are so many physical sensations, and that by the words internal or external one should understand only impressions evoked either by the memory or by the actual presence of objects.”

Since I am capable of foreseeing, i.e., of sensory impressions, I mourn tho death of a friend, whose conversation helped to dispel my boredom, “that malaise of the spirit which is actually physical pain”; he would have risked his life and fortune to save me from death or suffering; lie always tried, with the aid of pleasures of every kind, to increase my enjoyment. The consciousness that my friend’s death has deprived me of my sources of pleasure .brings the tears to my eyes.

“If one delves into the depths of one’s soul and searches therein, one will see in all these sentiments only the development of physical pleasure or pain.”

However, the objection might be raised, in reply to Helvetius, that your friend was prepared to risk life and fortune to rid you of suffering. You yourself have said so. Consequently, you have admitted that there exist people that are able to turn a deaf ear to your “sensory impressions” in order to achieve an ideal aim.

Our philosopher did not give a direct reply to this objection; it will, however, be readily understood that this would not have embarrassed him. What, he might have asked, is the motive of heroic actions? The expectation of reward. In such actions great dangers are courted, but the greater the danger, the greater the reward. Interest (the sensory impression) suggests that the game is worth the candle. If that is how matters stand with great and glorious exploits, a friend’s self-denial has nothing extraordinary about it.

There are people who are devoted to science, ruin their health in poring over books and suffer all kinds of deprivation in order to amass knowledge. It might be said that love of science has nothing in common with physical enjoyment. That is not true. Why does the miser deny himself the necessities of life? Because he wants to increase his means of enjoyment tomorrow and the day after – in short, in the future. Excellent! Let us accept that the same kind of thing takes place with the scholar or scientist, and we shall have the answer to the riddle.

“The miser wants to have a magnificent castle, and the man of talent a fair woman; riches and a grand reputation are needed to achieve these aims. The two men work, each in his own way to build up – one his treasures, and the other his renown. But if, during the time employed to acquire that wealth or that reputation, they have grown old and have formed habits they cannot break without an effort precluded by their age, the miser and the man of talent will die, the former without his castle, and the latter without his mistress.” [18]

All this was sufficient to evoke indignation in all “decent men” throughout the world and to explain how and why Helvetius acquired his ill fame. It was also sufficient to reveal the weakness in his “analysis”. We shall add another quotation to those already given: “Moreover, in admitting that our passions originally take their source in physical sensibility, one might also think that, in the present conditions in the civilised nations, such passions exist independently of the cause that has produced them. I shall therefore try, in tracing the transformation of physical suffering and pleasure into their artificial counterparts, to show that, in such passions as avarice, ambition, pride and friendship, whose object would seem to least pertain to the pleasures of the senses, it is nevertheless always physical pain and pleasure that we shun or seek after.” [19]

And so, no heredity. According to Darwin, the “intellectual and moral faculties of man are variable; and we have every reason to believe that the variations tend to be inherited.” [20] According to Helvetius, man’s faculties are highly variable, but changes are not passed down from one generation to another, while their basis – the faculty of sensory impressions – remains unchanged. Helvetius was keen-sighted enough to discern the phenomena of evolution. He saw that “one and the same race of cattle grows stronger or weaker, advances or declines, according to the nature or abundance of grazing grounds”. He also noted that the same was true of oaks. “If one sees little oaks and tall ones, oaks growing straight or crooked, no one absolutely resembling the other, why is it so? It is, perhaps, because none of them gets exactly the same cultivation, or is put in the same kind of place, struck by the same kind of wind or sown in the same kind of soil.” This is a very reasonable explanation. But Helvetius did not stop at that, but asked himself: “Do the differences between beings lie in their embryos or in their development?” Such a question could not have arisen in a bigoted mind. Note, however, the content of the dilemma: either in the embryo or in development. Our philosopher did not even suspect that the history of a species can leave an imprint on the structure of the embryo. The history of a species? It did not exist for him or his contemporaries: he was interested only in individual; he was concerned only with individual “nature”, and observed only individual “ development”. We are far from satisfied with Darwin’s theory of the heredity of inborn moral and intellectual faculties; it was just the first page in evolutionary natural science. But we know very well that, whatever results the latter may lead up to, it will meet with success only if the dialectical method is used in the study of phenomena whose nature is essentially dialectical. Helvetius remained a metaphysician even when he instinctively felt drawn to another and quite contrary point of view – the dialectical.

He confessed to “knowing nothing” of whether the difference between beings “lay” exclusively in their (individual) development. Such a hypothesis seemed too bold to him. Indeed, it would have led up to what Lucretius, who was well-known to the materialist “philosophers”, considered an egregious absurdity:

      ... Ex omnibus rebus
Omne genus nasci posset ...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Nec fructus idem arboribus constare solerent
Sed mutarentur: ferre omnes omnia possent. [21]

However, when the problem was a limited one and the question was about a single species, i.e., man, Helvetius no longer entertained such doubts. He stated positively and with the utmost confidence that all “distinctions” between people lay in their development, not in their embryos or heredity: we all possess the same abilities at birth. It is only our upbringing that makes us different from one another. Below we shall see that this idea, though lacking the necessary substantial evidence, proved most revealing. However, he reached it along the wrong avenue, the origin of his thinking being obvious each time he drew upon it, and each time he tries to prove it. This thought shows that Diderot was absolutely right in saying that Helvetius’s statements were far more forceful than his proofs. The metaphysical method in eighteenth-century materialism was constantly wreaking vengeance on the boldest and most logical of its followers.

We always feel an urge towards physical enjoyment and always try to avoid physical suffering. This is an important pronouncement. But how is it proved? Helvetius takes as his point of departure the mature grown-up man, with “passions” whose motivations are extremely numerous and complex and indubitably owe their origin to the social environment, i.e., to the history of the species, and attempts to deduce these “passions” from sensory impressions. Something that arises independently of the mind is presented to us as the immediate instant result of the selfsame mind. Habit and instinct assume the form of reflection evoked in man by one feeling or another. In our essay on Holbach, we established that this error was peculiar to all “philosophers” who came out in defence of utilitarian morality. In Helvetius, however, this error assumed regrettable proportions: in the picture he depicted, reflection, in the proper sense of the word, vanished, yielding place to a number of mental images, all of which, without exception, refer to “sensory impressions”. Indubitably an operative but most distant cause of our moral habits, these become the ultimate cause of our actions. Thus, a fiction is presented as the solution of the problem. It is, however, self-evident that the problem cannot be dissolved in the acid of fiction. Moreover, by his “analysis”, Helvetius would deprive our moral sentiments of their specific features and thus delete that x, that unknown quantity, whose significance he would determine; he wanted to prove that all our sentiments are derived from sensory impressions: to prove his point, he depicted man as being in constant pursuit of pleasures of the flesh, “beautiful slave girls” and the like. In actual fact, his assertion is more telling than the proofs he adduces.

After all these explications, there is no need for us to emphasise, as was done by Laharpe and by many others, that it was not for possession of a beautiful mistress that Newton engaged in his colossal mathematical calculations. Of course, not! This truth, however, does not take us a single step forward either in the science of “man” or in the history of philosophy. There exist matters of far greater moment than the assertion of such “truths”.

Can it be seriously thought that Helvetius could have imagined man only as a sensual and intelligent being? It will suffice to turn the leaves of his writings to see that this was not the case. He was well aware, for example, that there existed people who “transported in spirit into the future and anticipating the eulogies and the esteem of posterity” ... renounced the glory and the esteem of the moment for the sometimes distant hope of winning greater glory and esteem; these were people who, on the whole, “desire only the esteem of estimable citizens”. [22] They realised very clearly that they will not enjoy much sensual pleasure. Helvetius went on to say that there were people who held nothing higher than justice, and explained that, in such people’s memories, the idea of justice was closely linked with that of happiness, the two ideas forming a single and indivisible whole. The habit appeared of recollecting them simultaneously, and “once this habit has become established, it is a matter of pride to be always just and virtuous, and then there is nothing one will not sacrifice to that noble pride.” [23] To be guided by justice, such people, of course, no longer needed to bring up voluptuous pictures in their minds. Moreover, our philosopher voiced the opinion that man is made just or unjust by his upbringing, that the power of the latter is boundless, and that “a man of morality is entirely the product of upbringing and imitation”. [24] He spoke of the mechanism our sentiments and the force of the association of ideas in the following terms: “If, because of the form of government, I have everything to fear from high personages, I shall automatically respect any grandeur, even in a foreign lord who can do nothing against me. If, in my memory, I have associated the idea of virtue with that of happiness, I shall cultivate virtue even when it becomes an object of persecution. I am well aware that these two ideas will ultimately become disunited, but that will be the work of time, even of a long time”. In conclusion he added: “It is only after deep thought on this fact that one will find the solution to an infinity of moral problems that cannot be solved without a knowledge of this association of our ideas”. [25] But what does all this mean? A mass of contradictions, one more howling than another? Indubitably so! The metaphysicians often fall victim to such contradictions. Contradicting themselves at every step is a kind of occupational disease with them, their only way of reconciling their built-in dilemma. Helvetius was far from an exception to this general rule. On the contrary, a lively and searching mind, he paid in this coin more frequently than others for the errors of his method. The fact of this error has to be established, thus showing the advantages of the dialectical method, but it should not be thought that such errors can be eradicated by inappropriate moral indignation, or by several infinitely petty truths, which, into the bargain, are as old as the world.

“One notices, as one reads him,” Laharpe wrote of our philosopher, “that his imagination is inspired only by brilliant and voluptuous ideas: nothing is less befitting to the mind of the philosopher.” [26] This means that Helvetius spoke of “sensory impressions” and made them the point of departure for his research, only because he was excessively inclined to sensual motivations. There are many stories about his love of “beautiful mistresses”; this love was depicted as supplementing his vanity. We shall refrain from any appraisal of such “critical” devices. However, we consider it of interest to draw a comparison, in this respect, between Helvetius and Chernyshevsky. The great Russian Enlightener was anything but an “elegant” man, or a “farmer-general”, or “vain” (nobody ever accused him of this weakness), or a lover of “beautiful slave girls”. Yet, of all the eighteenth-century French philosophers, Helvetius resembles him the most closely. In substantiating some assertion he had made, Chernyshevsky was marked by the same logical fearlessness, the same contempt for sentimentality, the same method, the same kind of tastes, the same rationalist mode of adducing proof, and often by the same conclusions and examples, down to the most minute. [27] Bow is such a coincidence to be accounted for? Is this plagiarism on the part of the Russian writer? Till now nobody has made so bold as to hurl such an accusation against Chernyshevsky. Let us imagine that grounds exist for that. Then we should have to say that Chernyshevsky stole Helvetius’s ideas, which, in their turn, derived from the latter’s voluptuous temperament and boundless vanity. What astounding clarity! What a profound philosophy of the history of human thought!

In taking note of Helvetius’s errors, we should not forget that he was mistaken on the very same point as all idealist (or rather dualist) philosophy had been, which had waged a struggle against French materialism. Spinoza and Leibnitz sometimes made very skilful use of the dialectical weapon (especially the latter in Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain), yet their commonstand remained metaphysical. Besides, Leibnitz and Spinoza played a far from leading role in French official eighteenthcentury philosophy, which was dominated by a more or less modified and vulgarised Cartesianism. The latter, however, contained not the faintest notion of development. [28] Helplessness of method was, in certain measure, something that materialism inherited from its dualist precursors: one should not deceive oneself on that score. If the materialists are wrong, that in no way means that their opponents are right. Nothing of the kind! Their opponents are doubly and trebly mistaken – in short, infinitely more.

What do we learn of the origin of our moral sentiments from Laharpe, who undoubtedly missed no opportunity of aiming all the heavy guns of the good old philosophy against Helvetius? Alas, very little! He assures us that “all our passions are given directly by Nature” that they “are of our nature” (italicised by Laharpe), “though they may become excessive only as a result of the corruption of grand societies”. He goes on to tell us that “society is of a natural order”, so that Helvetius was “utterly mistaken in calling artificial that which results from a natural and necessary order”; that man has “another measure for his judgements than his own interest”, and that “that measure is a sense of justice”; that “pleasure and affliction can be sole driving force in the lower animals alone”; but “God, conscience, and the laws that derive from these two – that is what man should be guided by”. [29] Very profound this, is it not? At last matters have been made quite clear!

Let us now cast an admiring glance at another opponent of our “sophist”, this time a man of the nineteenth century. After reading in De l’Esprit that the common interest is the measure of virtue, that any society considers those actions virtuous that are beneficial to it, and that men’s judgements of the actions of those about them undergo change in keeping with their interests, this man gave vent, with triumphant mien, to a veritable spate of words: “If it is asserted that the public’s judgements regarding individual actions are entitled to infallibility inasmuch as they are hacked by the majority of individuals, then a number of conclusions drawn from this principle have to be recognised, each more absurd than the next one, as, for instance: only the opinions of the majority are in agreement with the truth.... Truth becomes delusion when it ceases from being the opinion of the majority and turns into the opinion of the minority, and, conversely, delusion becomes truth when it becomes the opinion of the majority after having been for long the opinion of the minority.” [30] What a naive man! His refutation of Helvetius, whose theories he was never able to grasp, is indeed marked by “novelty”.

Even people of far greater calibre, such as, for instance, Lange, see in this doctrine nothing but an apologia for “personal interest”. It is considered axiomatic that Adarn Smith’s doctrine of morals has nothing in common with the French materialists’ ethics. These two doctrines are antipodes. Lange, who expressed only disdain for Helvetius, had the highest esteem for Adam Smith as a moralist. “Adam Smith’s inference of morality from sympathy,” he wrote, “although insufficiently grounded even for the time, still remains, down to our days, one of the most productive attempts at a natural and rational substantiation of morality.” Baudrillart, the French author of a commentary on The Theory of Moral Sentiments considered it a healthy reaction against “the systems of materialism and selfishness”. Smith himself felt hardly any “sympathy” for the materialists’ systems of ethics. He must have found Helvetius’s theory, like Mandeville’s, “exuberant”. Indeed, at first glance, Smith’s theory seems the opposite of what wo find in the works of Helvetius. The reader, we hope, has not yet forgotten how the latter accounts for the regret we feel over the loss of a friend. Let us now read what the celebrated Englishman wrote on the matter: “We sympathise even with the dead ... It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more thought of in this world, but to be obliterated in a little time, from the affections, and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and relations ... That our sympathy can afford them no consolation seems to be an addition to their calamity” [31] ..., etc. This is, of course, something quite different! But let us take a closer look at this argument. What is meant by Adam Smith’s “sympathy”? “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it ... That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it.” The source of this sensitivity to the sorrow of others is seen in the following: “... As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in tlie like situation ...” [32] Do you think there is nothing resembling this theory of sympathy in the works of Helvetius? In his book De l’Homme (sect.II, ch.VII) he asks himself what is meant by a humane man. and replies: “One to whom the spectacle of the misery of others is a mournful spectacle.” But what does this ability to feel another’s sorrow derive from? We owe it to memories that teach us to identify ourselves with others. “If the child has acquired the habit of identifying itself with the unfortunate, it is the more moved by their misery that, in deploring their plight, it shows compassion for mankind as a whole, and consequently for itself in particular. An infinity of various sentiments then blend with the initial feeling, the sum of these comprising an overall feeling of pleasure which rejoices a noble soul, while giving relief to the unfortunate, a feeling he is not always able to analyse.”

The reader will agree that Smith regarded the point of departure in his conclusion – sympathy – in exactly the same way. Helvetius, however, associated sympathy with other and less attractive sentiments. In his opinion, “One consoles the unfortunate: 1) to get rid of the physical pangs caused by the view of their sufferings; 2) to enjoy the spectacle of gratitude, which evokes in us at least a vague hope of some distant advantage; 3) to perform an act of power, the exercise of which is always pleasant, because it creates in our minds an image of the pleasures associated with that power; 4) because the idea of happiness is always associated, given good education, with the idea of charity; since that charity, by winning us the esteem and affection of people, can be regarded, like wealth, as a power or means to escape from affliction and derive pleasure.” Of course, this is not quite what Smith said, but it changes nothing in what pertains to sympathy; it shows that Helvetius arrived at results quite the reverse of the conclusions drawn by the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. To the latter, the sense of sympathy is inherent in our “nature”; to Helvetius, our nature contains merely a “sensory impression”. He saw himself constrained to break down into components that which Smith did not even think of touching upon. Smith advanced in one direction; Helvetius chose the opposite direction. What grounds arc there for surprise if they diverged more and more, and ultimately never met again?

No doubt Helvetius was in no way inclined to pass all our feelings through the filter of sympathy as one of the stages of their development. In this respect, he was not “one-sided”. Smith’s “sympathy” made him eschew the utilitarian point of view. To him, just as to Helvetius, social interest provided the foundation and sanction for morality. [33] Only it never occurred to him to deduce that foundation and sanction from the primary elements of human nature. He did not ask himself what formed the foundation of the “supreme wisdom” that controlled the system of human proclivities. He saw a naked fact where Helvetius could already see a process of development. “That whole account of human nature, however,” Smith remarked, “which deduces all sentiments and affections from self-love ... seems to me to have arisen from some confused misapprehension of the system of sympathy.” [34] He should have said that that system was an attempt to reveal the origin of our affections and sentiments, whilst he himself was content with a more or less competent description of them. [35]

The contradictions Helvetius was entangled in were, as we have pointed out several times, a consequence of his metaphysical method. There were also many contradictions caused by his often narrowing his theoretical point of view in order to bring out the possibility and ease of achieving certain practical aims. This, incidentally, is to be seen in the instance of our author’s “slander” of Regulus.

Helvetius was out to prove that, as a military leader and in keeping with ancient Roman customs, Regulus could not have acted otherwise than he did, even were he pursuing his private ends. This was the “slander” that aroused Jean-Jacques’s indignation. However, Helvetius did not at all mean that Regulus had really pursued his own ends. “Regulus’s deed was, no doubt, the effect of an impetuous enthusiasm that induced him to virtue.” What, then, was the purpose of his “slander”? It was intended to show that “such enthusiasm could have been kindled in Rome alone”. The Republic’s most “perfect” legislation could intimately bind its citizens’ private interests to those of the State. [36] Hence the heroism of the ancient Romans. The practical conclusion to be drawn was that if people learnt to act in the same way, then heroic men such as Regulus would certainly appear. For this conclusion to strike the reader, Helvetius showed him only one side of the question, but that is no proof of his having lost sight of the influence of habit, the association of ideas, “sympathies”, ’“enthusiasm”, noble pride, and so on. Nothing of the kind: he only was unable always to find the links between that influence and personal interest, or “sensory impressions”, though he did try to do so, since he never forgot that man is nothing but sensation. If he did not cope with the task, it was only because of the metaphysical nature of the materialism of his times, but it will always stand to his credit that he drew all the conclusions from his fundamental principle.

The same predominance of the practical trend accounted for bis perfunctory attitude to the question of whether all men are born with the same abilities. He could not even pose this question correctly. But what did he wish to say in touching upon it? This was very well understood by Grimm, who was no great theorist. In his Correspondance littéraire (November 1773), be wrote of De l’Homme in the following terms: “Its main purpose is to show that the genius, virtues and talents to which nations owe their •grandeur and felicity are the effects, not of differences in food, temperament or the live senses, on which laws and administration exert no influence, but of education, over which laws and government have full control.” [37] The practical value of this kind of view in times of revolutionary ferment can be readily understood.

If man is nothing but a machine driven by “sensory impressions”, a machine that is obliged to do everything done by the latter, then the role of “free will” in the life of any people or individual is equal to nil. If “sensory impressions” make up the principle of people’s volitions, needs, passions, sociality, ideas, judgements and actions, then it is clear that the key to mankind’s destinies should not be sought in man or his “nature”; if all men are equally endowed spiritually, then the imaginary features of race or national character cannot, of course, explain anything in a nation’s present-day or past condition. These three logically inescapable conclusions are already highly important prolegomena to the philosophy of history as a whole.

According to Helvetius, all nations living in the same conditions have the same kind of laws, are marked by the same spirit, and are impelled by the same passions. “For this reason, we find among the American Indians the customs of the ancient Germans”; for this reason, “Asia, inhabited for the most part by the Malayans, is governed by our ancient feudal laws”; for this reason, “fetishism was not only the first of religions, but its cult, still preserved today in almost all of Africa, ... was once the universal cult”; for the same reason, Greek mythology has many features similar to those in Celtic mythology; for the same reason, finally, the most various peoples often have the same sayings. In general, there exists an amazing similarity in the institutions, spirit and faiths of primitive peoples. Like individuals, peoples resemble one another far more than it seems.

Footnotes

1. J. Demogeot, Histoire de la littérature française depuis ses origines jusqu’à nos jours, 22° edition, Paris 1886, pp.493-94. The book forms part of Histoire universelle which was published by a group of professors under the editorship of V. Duruy.

2. “How illusions horn of the spirit of system should he mistrusted! Helvetius had virtues, but his book is the destruction of all virtue” (La Harpe, Refutation du livre De l’Esprit, prononcée au Lycée républicain, dans les séances des 26 et 29 mars et des 3 et 5 avril, Paris l’an V [1797], p.87).

3. Marat also disliked Helvetius. He considered this philosopher merely “a false and superficial mind”, his “system” absurd, and his book “a continuous tissue of sophisms carefully embellished with a conceited show of a vast erudition”. (Cf. De l’homme ou des principes et des lois de l’influence de l’âme sur le corps et du corps sur l’âme par Jean-Paul Marat, docteur en medicine, Amsterdam 1775, pp.XV, XVI, des Discours preliminaire). This book by Marat does not belong to the revolutionary period of his life. Besides, the opinions of revolutionaries are not always revolutionary opinions. According to Marat, “Man, like any animal, is composed of two distinct substances – Soul and Body” ... “Eternal Wisdom” has placed the Soul in the envelope of the brain (!). “It is the fluid of the nerves that is the link of communications between these two disparate substances”. “The nervous fluid is the prime agent in mechanical acts. In free acts, it is subordinate to the soul and becomes the instrument it uses to perform them” (I, pp.24, 40, 107). All this is amazingly trite. In his interpretation of his predecessors and his irritable self-esteem, Marat is highly reminiscent of Dühring.

4. Geschichte des Materialismus, 2. Aufl., Iserlohn 1873, I, S.360.

5. Bréviaire de l’histoire du materialisme, Paris 1883, pp.645-46.

6. In Helvetius’s opinion, we consider as evident only our own existence, on the contrary, the existence of other bodies is only a probability, “a probability which is no doubt very great and, in practical life, tantamount to manifestnoss, yet is only probability”. Anyone else voicing something of the kind would have been ranked by Lange among the “critical” minds. However, no “criticism” was able to rehabilitate Helvetius and remove the blot of “superficiality”, which was the first to strike the eye of this thorough historian of materialism.

7. De l’Esprit, Discours I, chap.IV.

8. This affinity seems due to Helvetius having had ascribed to him a book entitled Les progrès de la Raison dans la recherche du vrai, which was republished in the Paris edition of his works in 1818. The book does not contain a single page of original writing. It consists partly of a translation of some of Toland’s Letters to Serena to which were appended several passages from Système de la Nature and other more or less known books of the time. All these were carelessly put together and poorly understood by the unknown “author”. Helvetius could not have had anything to do with such a work.

Another book exists, which was ascribed to him: Le vrai sens du Système de la Nature. It may have been written by him but we have no firm evidence on this score, and shall refrain from quoting from it, the more so because it adds nothing to what can be found in his books De l’Esprit and De l’Homme.

9. Geschichte des Materialismus, I, S.378. It is surprising how Lange finds “an element” of the Kantian doctrine in Robinet, who said of a thing-in-itself only what was said by Holbach and Helvetius. It is no less surprising that the author of De la Nature is numbered among the materialists by Lange, while Helvetius is considered merely to have approached them. What a strange criterion Lange was guided by!

10. Quoted from the book De l’Homme, section II, chap.II. In the 1773 edition of this book, it is indicated that the quotation was from A Treatise on the Principles of Chemistry, which we have been unable to locate. However, we can quote what Priestley said in his discussion with Price: “To make my meaning, if possible, better understood, I will use the following comparison. The power of cutting, in a razor, depends upon a certain cohesion, and arrangement of the parts of which it consists. If we suppose this razor to be wholly dissolved in any acid liquor, its power of cuttinsr will certainly be lost, or cease to be, though no particle of the metal that constituted the razor be annihilated by the process; and its former shape, and power of cutting, etc., may be restored to it after the metal has been precipitated. Thus when the body is dissolved by putrefaction, its power of thinking entirely ceases ...” (A Free Discussion of the Doctrine of Materialism, etc., London 1778, pp.82, 83). This was indeed the viewpoint of the chemist quoted by Helvetius. In this case, we are in no way interested in the religious views that Priest leywas able to reconcile with his materialism. Neither is there any need to emphasise that the views on chemistry hold by the materialists of the last century are not the views of our days.

11. De l’Homme, section II, chap.X. Helvctius was well aware that man is endowed with memory. However, the organ of memory, he said, is purely physical, its function consisting in reviving our past impressions. It should therefore evoke actual sensations in us. Thus, it is all a matter of the faculty of sensation. Everything in man is sensation.

12. ibid., chap.XVI, the last note to this chapter.

13. Charles Darwin was well aware of what the moralising philosophers understand but rarely: “It was assumed formerly by philosophers ... that the foundation of morality lay in a form of Selfishness; but more recently the ‘Greatest happiness principle’ has been brought prominently forward. It is, however, more correct to speak of the latter principle as the standard, and not as the motive of conduct”, [Plekhanov is quoting from the German translation of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man] (Die Abstammung des Menschen und die geschlechtliche Zuchtwahl, Stuttgart 1875, S.154).

14. Système de la Nature, London 1781, I, p.268.

15. Geschichte des Materialismus, I, S.363.

16. Literaturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts, Braunschweig 1881, 2. T., S.398.

17. De l’Homme, section IV, chap.IV; De l’Esprit, Discours III, chap.XV.

18. De l’Homme, section II, chap.X.

19. De l’Esprit, Discours III, chap.IX.

20. [Plekhanov is quoting from the German translation of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man] Die Abstammung des Menschen, Stuttgart 1875, S.166.

21. [... From any time
Any genus can be born ...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And trees would always yield
Constant but changing fruit: anything could produce anything.]

22. De l’Homme, section IV, chap.VI.

23. ibid., chap.X, the last note to this chapter.

24. ibid., chap.XXII.

25. ibid., section VIII, chap.IV.

26. Réfutation du livre De l’Esprit, p.8.

27. Helvetius recommended following the example of the geometricians. “If some complex problem in mechanics is proposed to them, what do they do? They simplify it; they calculate the speed of bodies in movement, disregarding their density, the resistance of the surrounding fluids, the friction of other bodies, etc.” (De l’Homme, section IX, chap.I). In almost the same terms, Chernyshevsky recommended simplification of problems of political economy. Helvetius was accused of having slandered Socrates and Regulus. But what Chernyshevsky said of the celebrated suicide of the chaste Lucretia, who did not wish to go on living after her violation, is remarkably reminiscent of Helvetius’s thoughts about the heroic captive of the Carthaginians. Chernyshevsky thought that political economy should deal mainly, not with that which exists but with that which should be. Compare this with what Helvetius wrote in a letter to Montesquieu: “Remember that during a discussion at La Brede” (about Montesquieu’s Principes), “I acknowledged that they apply to the actual conditions; but that a writer who would be useful to people should occupy himself with true maxims in a future and better order of things, rather than with canonising principles that become dangerous from the moment they are taken over by prejudice, with the purpose of utilising and perpetuating them” (Cf. Œuvres complètes d’Helvétius, Paris 1818, III, p.261). Many other examples might be added to this surprising one, but we prefer to show the coincidence in the views of these twowriters, who were separated by almost a century, only inasmuch as the opportunity has presented itself in our account of Helvetius’s theory.

28. “Descartes,” says Flint, “shows incidentally in many passages of his writings that he had looked on social facts with a clear and keen gaze. And so does Malebranche.” But the selfsame Flint acknowledges that “of a science of history Descartes had no notion whatever”, and that “it was only with the decay of Cartesianism that historical science began to flourish in France ...” (cf. The Philosophy of History in France and Germany, Edinburgh and London 1874, pp.76-78).

29. Réfutation du livre De l’Esprit, pp.57, 61 63, 68 et 69.

30. Nouvelle réfutation du livre De l’Esprit, à Clermont-Ferrand 1817, p.46. The anonymous author’s method of adducing proofs reminds one of the arguments used by the highly learned – “learned!” – Damiron. At the beginning of De l’Esprit, Helvetius wrote that man owes his superiority over the animals, among other reasons, to the structure of his extremities. “You think,” Damiron thunders, “that giving the horse man’s hands would endow it with man’s mind. It would give it nothing except making it impossible for it to live as a horse” (Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la philosophie au dix-huitième siècle Paris, 1858, I, p.406). In just the same manner, a certain naive professor of divinity in St. Petersburg disputed Darwin’s theory: “Throw a hen into the water,” he said, “and, according to Darwin, it will grow webs between its digits. I, however, affirm that the poor animal will perish most miserably.”

31. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, London 1873, pp.12, 13. This work published in 1757.

32. op. cit., pp.9, 10.

33. “We do not love our country merely as a part of the great society of mankind: we love it for its own sake, and independently of any such consideration. That wisdom which contrived the system of human affections, as well as that of every other part of nature, seems to have judged that the interest of the great society of mankind would be best promoted by directing the principal attention of each individual to that particular portion of it, which was most within the sphere both of his abilities and of his understanding...” (op. cit., pp.203, 204).

34. ibid., p.281.

35. All this is quite plain, yet seems hard to understand. “Virtue,” said Huxley, “is undoubtedly beneficient; but the man is to be envied to whom her ways seem in anywise playful ... The calculation of the greatest happiness is not performed quite so easily as a rule of three sum ... The moral law ... rests in the long run upon instinctive intuitions...” [Plekhanov is quoting from the French translation of Huxley’s Hume (English Men of Letters).] (Hume, sa vie, sa philosophie, trad, par G. Compayre, Paris 1880, pp.281, 284). If the great English natural scientist wished to disprove, by such considerations, eighteenth-century materialist morality, he was greatly in error and had forgotten his Darwin. Incidentally, he must have been thinking only of lesser men, such as Bentham and John Stuart Mill. In that case, he was right.

36. De l’Esprit, Discours III, chap.XXII.

37. Holbach did not share this opinion of Helvetius’s, though he called him a “celebrated moralist”. It was, in his opinion, “mistaken to think that upbringing can do everything with man; it can only make vise of the material given by Nature; it can sow successfully only in soil provided by Nature” (cf. La morale universelle, section V, chap.III; cf. also op. cit., section I, chap.IV). llolbach does not ask, besides, what part society provided in what he called the individual’s nature. Incidentally, Holvetius was himself well aware that his view could not be precisely proved. He only thought that it could at least be assorted that “this influence” (i.e., that of organisation on the minds of fairly well-developed people) “was so small that it might be considered a negligible quantity in algebraic calculations, so that what had previously been ascribed to the effect of physical properties and had not been accounted for by this cause, was fully explicable by moral causes” (i.e., the influence of the social environment – G.P.). It was almost in the same terms that Chernyshevsky spoke of the influence of race on the destinies of peoples.

Notes

1*. Actually it was Marquise Dudefin who said so; she also, like de Bouffler, held a celebrated literary salon.

2*. Frau Buchholtz – a character from a series of novels by the mid-nineteenth century German humourist Stinde; an embodiment of Prussian philistinism.

II. Helvetius - Part Two

Interest and needs – these are the great and only instructors of the human race. Why is hunger the usual cause of human actions?’ Because, of all of man’s needs, it is the most frequent, the most imperative, and the most keenly felt. Hunger sharpens the intelligence of animals; it forces us to exercise our abilities – us humans, who imagine ourselves far superior to the animals. It teaches the savage to bend the bow, weave nets and set traps. “Again it is hunger that, with civilised peoples, makes all citizens work, till the soil, learn crafts, and perform any duty.” Mankind owes to it the art of making the land fertile and fashioning ploughshares, in just the same way as the art of building and making clothes arose from the need to seek protection from the elements. Without his needs, man would have no incentive to action. “One of the principal causes of the ignorance and the sluggishness of Africans is the fertility of this part of the world; it meets all needs with almost no cultivation of the land. Therefore the Africans have no incentive to thinking, and they do little of it. The same can be said of the Caribs. If they are less industrious than the North American savages, it is because the latter have to work harder to feed themselves.” Needs provide an exact yardstick of the human spirit’s resoluteness. “The inhabitants of Kamchatka, who in certain respects are of an unparalleled stupidity, are marvellously skilful in other ways. If it is a matter of making clothes, they excel Europeans in adroitness. Why? Because they inhabit a region of the world that is most intemperate in climate and where, by consequence, the need for clothing makes itself constantly felt. An habitual need is a constant spur.” [38]

But if we owe the “art of tilling the soil” to the existence of needs, that art, once discovered and practised, begins to exert an important and even decisive influence on our institutions, ideas and sentiments. “The forest-dweller, a naked man, who has no speech, may of course have a distinct idea of strength or weakness, but none of justice and law”. Such ideas presuppose the existence of society; they change together with society’s interests. Why was theft permitted in Sparta? Why were thieves caught there red-handed punished only for their lack of adroitness? What could be stranger than that custom? “However, if one recalls the laws of Lycurgus and the contempt in which silver and gold were held in a republic, where the laws permitted the circulation only of coins of heavy and brittle iron, one will realise that thefts of poultry and vegetables were the only ones that could be committed. Such thievery, always carried out with adroitness and often denied with firmness, confirmed the Lacedaemonians in the practice of courage and vigilance: the law permitting theft could be very useful to such a people ...” Let us see, on the other hand, how matters stood with the Scythians. They considered theft the most heinous of crimes, a view made inevitable by their mode of life. “Their herds grazed unguarded in the steppes; how easily they could have been stolen and what disorder would have ensued if such thefts had been tolerated? Therefore,” says Aristotle, “their laws were designed to protect their herds.” Peoples whose wealth consisted exclusively of cattle stood in no need of private ownership of the land, which first appeared among tillers of the soil, to whom it was wholly essential. Savage peoples that roam the forests knew only fleeting and chance relations between man and woman. Indissoluble marriage was introduced by settled and agricultural peoples. “Whilst the husband breaks the virgin soil or works his fields, the wife feeds the fowl, waters the beasts, shears the sheep, works in the house or the poultry yard, or cooks the meals for her husband, children and servants.” In this case, therefore, the indissolubility of marriage, far from being burdensome, is of the greatest benefit. Marriage laws in the Catholic countries are designed for this kind of relationship, and are therefore adapted to the interests and calling of those engaged in agriculture. On the other hand, they are a burden on people in other callings, particularly the “high-born”, the “wealthy”, and the “idle”, who see in love, not a means of satisfying actual and urgent needs but amusement, a means against ennui. The scenes of family morals among the parasitical classes of society which Count Leo Tolstoy has depicted in his Kreutzer Sonata, as did Fourier before him, are in the main reminiscent of what Helvetius wrote of marriage and love among the “idle”.

An agricultural people necessarily differ from a nomadic in character. “There are, in every country, a certain number of objects with which all people have to deal while they are being brought up, the identical impression from these objects engendering in citizens that similarity of ideas and sentiments that is called the national spirit or character.” It will be readily understood that such “objects”, whose influence is so decisive in education, are dissimilar with peoples living in conditions so different as, for instance, those engaged in agriculture and hunting. It is just as obvious that a people’s character may change. The French are considered of a gay disposition, but they have not always been like that. Thus the Emperor Julian said of the Parisii: “I love them because, their character, like mine, is austere and grave.” [39] But let us consider the Romans. How much strength, virtue, love of liberty and hatred of slavery marked them during the Republic! What weakness, cowardice and baseness when the emperors took the reins! Such baseness was intolerable even to Tiberius. Besides, it is not only together with the historical events that a people’s character undergoes change: in every period it is not the same even with people in different callings. The tastes and habits of warriors differ from those of priests, while the tastes and habits of the “idle” are not the same as those of ploughmen and artisans. All this depends on the upbringing. It is the latter that has subordinated woman to man. That kind of subordination does nol operate in the same way in all social estates. Women who are sovereign rulers (“Women like Elizabeth, Catherine II”, etc. [40]) are in no way inferior to men in intellectual gifts. The same is true of “court ladies” who are “distinguished by the same intellect as their husbands”. The reason is that, with them, despite all the difference in social status, the two sexes “get an equally poor upbringing”.

The different notions of beauty depend on the impressions of childhood. “If I especially admire any particular woman, she impresses herself in my recollection as a model of beauty, so that I shall judge of other women according to their greater or lesser resemblance to thai image. Hence the variety in tastes.” Thus, this is all a matter of habit. But since the habits of any particular people do not always remain the same, their tastes, and their judgements of beauty in objects of art and Nature undergo change too. [41] Why is it that we do not like medieval novels? “Why is it that during Corneille’s lifetime the genre of this illustrious poet was appreciated more highly than it is today?” (Of course, the reference is to Helvetius’s times. – G.P.) “It is because the troubled time of the League and the Fronde [3*] came to an end and minds that were still heated by the fires of the sedition were more audacious, more appreciative of the spirit of daring and more given to ambition; that is why the characters Corneille gave his heroes and the projects he made those ambitions conceive were more in keeping with the spirit of that age than of today, when few heroes are to be met, few citizens and few men of ambition, when a happy calm has succeeded the thunderstorms, and the volcanoes of sedition have everywhere died down.”

For a better understanding of Helvetius’s views on the role of “interest” in the history of mankind, we shall dwell a little longer on the Robinsonade that he thought up. His Robinson is represented by “several families who have retreated to an island”, Their first concern is the erection of cabins and the cultivation of the soil necessary for their subsistence. If the island has more arable land than the first colonists need, they will all be almost equally wealthy; those with the stronger hands and the greater diligence will be the wealthier. Consequently their interests are not very complex and “therefore” it will suffice for them to have “few laws”. If they are obliged to choose a leader, the latter will remain a farmer like all the rest. “The only privilege he may be granted is the choice of a plot of land. Apart from that, he will have no other power.”

But, with the increase in the size and the density of the population, no more free land remains for occupation. What is there to he done by one who lias no landed property at all? Excluding such things as thievery, robbery, or emigration, the only thing he can do is to find refuge in new inventions. A man who is able to invent a new article of consumption or luxury that will find widespread use will make a living by bartering his handiwork for what is produced by the farmers and the artisans. He may possibly found a manufacture, “establishing it in some agreeable site, convenient, and usually on the banks of a river, whose arms stretch far into the interior of the country, thereby facilitating the carriage of his merchandise”. Of course, he will not remain the only manufacturer on the island. The continuing proliferation of the inhabitants will lead to the invention of other articles of luxury or consumption, and new manufactures will arise. Several of these will form, first a settlement and then a considerable town. “This town will soon contain the most wealthy citizens, because the profits from trade are always immense when traders are as yet few in number and there is still little competition.” Wealth gives rise to all kinds of entertainment. The rich landowners leave their estates so as to spend at least several months a year in town, where they are followed by the poorer folk in the hope of finding subsistence there. In short, our town has become a capital.

Thus we now have rich and poor people, employers of labour and ordinary working people. The initial equality has gone. We now have a people made up, under one and the same name, of an “infinity of different peoples whose interests are more or less contradictory”. There are as many nations as there are classes. This process of the formation of classes with differing and even contradictory interests is inevitable in the history of peoples. It takes place more or less rapidly, yet it constantly proceeds and will always do so. “A man who is more hard-working will earn more; the more thrifty saves more and, with the wealth he has already acquired, will acquire yet more wealth. All this is inevitable. Then, there are the heirs, who succeed to large inheritances. There are such merchants that invest large sums in ships, which bring them big gains: that is because, in any kind of commerce, money attracts money. Thus the unequal distribution of money is the inevitable result of its introduction in a State.”

But this necessary consequence brings in its train other and no less necessary effects. Those who possess nothing – and their number will increase constantly as a result of the reproduction of citizens – will compete among themselves more and more in search of some occupation. They will curtail their needs ever more and more. In consequence, the inequality keeps growing, and indigence becomes ever more widespread: “... the poor man sells, the rich man buys”, and the number of proprietors diminishes steadily. The laws then become more and more severe. Mild laws are suited to control a people of proprietors. “With the Germans, the Gauls and the Scandinavians, more or less heavy fines were the only punishments inflicted for various offences.” It is different when non-proprietors form the bulk of the nation. A man who is poor cannot be punished in his possessions; he must be punished in his person; hence corporal punishment. The larger the number of the poor, the more thefts, robberies and crimes are committed. Force has to be used to counter them. A man who has no property can easily change his place of sojourn, so that a guilty person can easily evade punishment. It therefore becomes necessary to arrest citizens with the observance of fewer formalities, often on the first suspicion. “... Arrest is already an arbitrary punishment, which, soon meted out on the proprietors themselves, replaces liberty by slavery.” In its turn, corporal punishment, first practised only against the poor, is then extended to the proprietors. “All citizens come equally under the laws of blood; everything unites to establish them.”

The greater number of citizens leads to the appearance of representative government, since it is no longer possible for all to gather at some one place to discuss public affairs. While citizens are still almost equal among themselves, their representatives adopt laws in accordance with the public interest. But in the measure of the erosion of the initial equality and with the growing complexity of citizens’ interests, the representatives begin to separate their own interests from those of the people they represent; they become more independent of those who have delegated them, and gradually acquire power equal to that of the entire nation. “Is it not clear that in a vast and populated country the division of the interests of the governed will always furnish governments with the means to encroach upon the authority that man’s natural love of power will always make him desire?” Indeed, on the one hand, the proprietors, engrossed in their property, “cease to be citizens”; on the other hand, the non-proprietors become secret enemies of the former, and can be armed by a tyrant or tyrants, whenever he or they so wish, for action against the proprietors. “It is then that the mental indolence of those who delegate authority and the active desire for power in those to whom it is delegated presage vast changes in the State. In such times, everything favours ambition in the latter.” Liberty dies out, and the prospect of despotism grows apace. It is thus that the multiplication in the number of citizens leads to the appearance of representative government. The opposedness of their interests leads to the rule of arbitrariness.

In a certain passage in his book De l’Homme, from which we have, in the main, drawn upon in the aforegoing exposition, Helvetius says that, in the conclusions he has drawn, he has based himself on experience and Xenophon. These are highly characteristic words. Like Holbach and other “philosophers” of his time, he quite clearly saw the role of the class struggle in history, but in his appraisal of that struggle he did not go much further than “Xenophon”, i.e., the writers of antiquity. In his opinion, the class struggle engendered tyranny, mostly tyranny, and nothing but tyranny. To him, the “non-proprietors” were merely a dangerous weapon in the hands of the ambitious rich; they arc capable only of selling themselves to anybody “willing to buy them”, and only of striving to do that. He was referring, not to the proletariat of today, but to that of antiquity, especially of Rome. Consequently, he saw social development only as a closed circle. “A man grows rich through commerce: he adds an infinity of small properties to his own. Then the number of proprietors, and consequently of those whose interests are most closely linked with the national interest, decreases; on the contrary, the number of people with no possessions and without any interest in public affairs increases. If such men are always ready to serve anyone who will pay them, how can one imagine that those in power will never make use of them to subordinate their fellow-citizens to themselves?

“Such is the necessary outcome of the excessive multiplication of people in an empire. This is a vicious circle from which no hitherto known governments have been able to escape.”

Helvetius was very far from regarding the British with the same distrust as Holbach. Incidentally, he found that Great Britain’s social and political conditions left much to be desired in many respects, but he esteemed her as the freest and most enlightened country in the world. Yet he did not consider the British freedom, so much to his liking, very reliable. He thought that the difference of interests which had developed so far in Britain would sooner or later lead to its inevitable consequence – the appearance of despotism. It must be admitted that Irish history, at least has not excessively refuted him.

Our philosopher’s views on the proliferation of humans again go to show how little originality the Malthusian theory contained. We shall not criticise those views here, or Helvetius’s views regarding the origin of property and the family. It will be sufficient for us simply to take note of his overall historico-philosophical point of view. [42] However, to have done with its characteristic, we must also consider some other consequences of the “proliferation of citizens”, or, to put it more correctly, of the constant and inevitable growth of property inequality.

There is nothing more dangerous to society than people without property! Nothing is more to the advantage of the employers than such people, and nothing else will better serve their interests. “The more poor people there are, the less the employers pay them for their labour.” But the employers are now the real power in a “trading country”. The public interest is sacrificed to their “private” interest, which motivates all their actions and is the criterion for their judgements. That is something we see in any society with complex and contrasting interests. It breaks up into small societies, which judge of the virtues, minds and merits of citizens from the angle of their own interests. In the long run, it is the interests of the mighty which dominate the nation and come in for the greatest consideration.

We already know that corruption of morals sets in universally wherever private interest is divorced from the public interest. The ever growing inequality in property must therefore engender and intensify the corruption of morals. Indeed, that is what takes place. Money, which makes for greater inequality, at the same time debases virtue. In a country “where there is no circulation of money”, the nation is the only fair distributor of rewards. “General esteem, that gift of public recognition, can be accorded only to ideas and actions that are useful to the nation; consequently, any citizen sees virtue as a necessity.” “In countries where money circulates, its possessor can give it to any person or persons who provide him with the greatest enjoyment, and he usually does so. However, such a person or persons do not always command the greatest respect, so that rewards are often given for actions that are “useful only to the wealthy but injurious to society”. The rewards given to vice create depraved people, while love of money, which stifles the spirit and all patriotic virtue, produces only base natures, tricksters and intriguers. “Love of riches does not extend to all classes of citizens, without inspiring in the ruling party a desire to steal and annoy. From that time on, the construction of a port, the production of armaments, a business venture, or a war asserted to have started for the nation’s honour – in short, any pretext to fleece the people is seized upon. Then all the vices born of cupidity at once obtrude themselves upon the empire, infect all its members in succession, and finally bring about its ruin.”

As we have already shown in the essay devoted to him, Holbach, too, considered cupidity the mother of all vices and the ruin of a nation. But in Holbach we meet only with declamations on the subject, while Helvetius tried to penetrate into the laws of social development. Holbach fulminated against “luxury”; Helvetius noted that luxury was merely the outcome of the unequal distribution of wealth. Holbach called upon legislators to combat any proneness to luxury; Helvetius found any such struggle, not only useless but highly damaging to society. In the first place, anti-luxury laws, which could easily be evaded, were too grave an incursion into the right of property, that “most sacred of rights”; in the second place, to stamp out luxury, “it is necessary to abolish money”, and “no prince could harbour such a design, and if he did, no nation, in the present condition of Europe, would lend itself to his desires”. Execution of such a plan would mean the complete ruin of the nation.

Luxury exists only where property inequality is very great. In a country with approximately equal property among citizens, luxury cannot exist whatever the degree of prosperity they may achieve, or rather luxury will be, not a misfortune but a great social blessing in such a country. But since wealth is distributed most unevenly, the abolition of luxury would mean an end to the production of a multitude of articles, and would consequently throw a large number of the poor out of work. The final outcome, therefore would be the direct opposite of the original intention. “The moralists’ incensement against luxury springs from their ignorance,” Helvetius infers. [43]

Thus we have here a constant law of social development. From poverty a people rise to wealth, and from wealth arrive at the unequal distribution of wealth, the corruption of morals, luxury and depravity; thence they come to despotism, and from despotism to ruination. “The principle of life which, developing in the majestic oak, raises the sapling, spreads its branches, thickens its trunk and makes it reign over the forest, is at the same time the principle of its withering.” “Under the existing form of government”, the peoples cannot depart from this most dangerous road of development. To slow down their steps along that road is even dangerous to them. Stagnation will lead to incalculable calamities, perhaps to the cessation of life itself.

The number and especially the nature of the textile mills in any country depend on its wealth and the mode of its distribution. If all citizens are well-to-do, they will all wish to be well dressed, which will lead to the appearance of many textile mills producing neither excessively fine nor excessively coarse fabrics. If, on the contrary, most of the citizens are poor, then only such enterprises will exist that cater for the needs of the rich class and will produce only opulent, glossy and not very sturdy fabrics. Thus, “under any form of government, all phenomena depend on one another”.

The production of cotton fabrics is one of the most important branches of present-day industry. Such fabrics are not designed for wealthy consumers. Thus, Helvetius’s view is not in accord with reality. [44] Nevertheless, it remains true that under any “government” all phenomena depend on one another. We have already seen many instances of this, and we shall cite another one.

Their requirements teach people how to cultivate the soil, and it is those requirements that engender the arts and the sciences. Again, it is requirements that lead to the latter’s stagnation or advance in one direction or another. As soon as considerable inequality of property is created, there arise a multitude of arts for enjoyment, designed to entertain the wealthy and dispel their boredom. Interest never ceases from being mankind’s great and sole instructor. How could it be otherwise? It should not be forgotten that: “Any comparison of objects among themselves presupposes attention; any attention presupposes effort, and any effort the incentive that spurs it”. It is indisputable that the promotion of education is in the interests of any society. But since the rewards for services do not always go to those who serve the common interests but very often to those who serve the interests of the mighty, it will be readily understood why sciences, arts and literature adopt a trend that falls in with the latter’s interests. “Why should the sciences and arts not have been bathed in refulgence in a country such as Greece, where they were held in universal and constant veneration?” Why was Italy so rich in orators? Was that due to the influence of her climate, as is asserted by the sapient imbecility of certain academic pedants? An irrefutable reply is to be found in the fact that Rome lost its eloquence and its liberty simultaneously. “Try to discover tbe reasons for tbe accusations of barbarism and stupidity constantly made against the peoples of the East by the Greeks, the Romans, and all Europeans, and you will find that the Eastern nations have been considered barbarians and fools by all the educated peoples of Europe, and an object of contempt on the part of free nations and posterity, for the reason that by the word ’intellect’ these Oriental peoples have understood only separate and disconnected ideas that have been useful lo them, and also because despotism, in almost all of Asia, has banned the study of morality, metaphysics, jurisprudence and politics, in brief, almost all the sciences of interest to mankind.” If, as has been said above, all nations in one and the same conditions have the same laws, the same spirit and the same predilections, then that, should be ascribed to the influence of one and the same interests. It is the combination of interests that determines the development of the human spirit.

The interests of states like both of their private citizens and of human affairs therein, are subject to a thousand transformationsOne and the same laws, and even customs and actions become now useful, now detrimental to one and the same people; from this it follows that one and the same laws are now adopted, now rejected, and that one and the same actions are called now virtuous, now vicious – “a proposition which cannot be rejected otherwise than by allowing that there are actions which at one and the same time are virtuous and detrimental to the state, and that would mean undermining the foundations of all legislation and all society”.

Many primitive peoples have a custom of killing their old people. At hrst glance, nothing could seem more execrable tharr such a custom, but a little thought will lead one to acknowledge that, in the given conditions, such peoples are forced to consider the killing of old people a virtuous act and that their love for their aged and enfeebled parents must make the young people behave in this way. Savages do not have enough to subsist on, and the old are unable to keep themselves alive by hunting, since that calls for considerable physical endurance. They would therefore either be doomed to a slow and cruel death from starvation or else become a burden on their children or all society which, because of its poverty, cannot carry that burden. That is why it is better to cut these sufferings short by the rapid and inescapable killing of parents. “That is the origin of a custom so detestable; that is how a nomadic people, obliged by the need to hunt and the shortage of the necessities of life to spend six months of the year in immense forests, find themselves, so to say, necessitated to perform such barbarous acts; that is why in such countries patricide is inspired and committed after the same principle of humanity which makes us regard it with horror.”

Holbach asked himself why peoples’ positive laws so often fall into contradiction with the laws of “Nature” and “justice”. He came out with a simple answer. “These depraved laws,” he said, “are a consequence of perverted morals, errors committed by societies, or tyranny, which forces Nature to bow to its authority.” [45] Such an answer did not satisfy Helvetius, who considered “real or at least apparent utility” that basis of laws and customs which is so naturally sought in “depravity” or “errors”. “However stupid one may suppose peoples to be,” he said, “it is certain that, guided by their own interests, they could not, have adopted, without sufficient motives, the ridiculous customs one finds established among some of them; the strangeness of such customs springs from the diversity of the interests of peoples. Only those morals and laws are really worthy of hatred which continue to exist after the causes of their introduction hare disappeared and which have thus become injurious to society. “All customs that bring only transient advantages are like scaffolding, which must be pulled down after the palaces have been erected.”

Such is the theory which leaves very little room for natural law and absolute justice, if it leaves them any room at all. At first, that theory seemed dangerous even to such men as Diderot, who considered it a paradox. “It is, indeed, the general and particular interest which metamorphoses the idea of the just and the unjust; but its essence is independent of it.” But what is that idea’s essence? What does it depend on? Diderot said nothing on the matter, merely citing several examples designed to show that justice is absolute. However, these instances are most unconvincing! Will it not always and everywhere be praiseworthy to give water to one who is dying of thirst”? Of course it will, but the most this can prove is that there exist interests common to men everywhere in all times and at all phases of their development. “Giving water to drink!” will take us no further than the following argument by Voltaire: “Let me ask a Turk, a Parsee or a Malabariaii for the money I lent him ... he will acknowledge that it is just that he should pay me ...” Beyond any doubt! But how meagre this absolute morality is, however honoured a goddess it may be. As Locke said, “those who maintain innate practical principles tell us not what they are ...” Helvetius could have said the same of those who stand for “universal morality”.

It is quite obvious that Helvetius’s views on the question of morality fully coincided only with the principles of materialist sensualism. Incidentally, he was merely repeating and developing the ideas of his teacher Locke, who was also the teacher of Holbach, Diderot and Voltaire. “To the English philosopher, good and evil meant only pleasure or suffering. Therefore, in the moral sense, good and evil are only that which coincides with or deviates from the law, through which good and evil are brought to us by the will and the authority of the legislator. “Virtue generally approved, ... because profitable ...,” Locke said long before Helvetius. “He that will carefully peruse the history of mankind, and look abroad into the several tribes of men, and with indifferency survey their actions, will be able to satisfy himself that there is scarce that principle of morality to be named, or rule of virtue to be thought on (those only excepted that are absolutely necessary to hold society together, which commonly, too, are neglected betwixt distinct societies), which is not, somewhere or other, slighted and condemned by the general fashion of whole societies of men, governed by practical opinions and rules of living quite opposite to others.” This is exactly what Helvetius tells us, with the only difference that Helvetius knows how tobe explicit in the right place. On the basis of “pleasure” and “suffering”, he set himself the task of ascribing to interests the historical changes in the legislator’s will. This was perfectly and even too logical for eighteenth-century French “philosophers”, whose party was indeed a militant one. In their struggle against the then existent system, they felt the need to be guided by an authority less debatable than men’s constantly changing interests. That kind of authority they saw in “Nature”. The morality and politics that rested on that foundation were in no wise less utilitarian. The salus populi was no less the suprema lex for them. [46] But that boon, it was thought at the time, was intimately linked with particular immutable laws that applied equally to all “creatures endowed with minds and feelings”. So passionately desired, appealed to, and seen as the ideal expression of the bourgeoisie’s social and political aspirations, such laws were called natural laws. And since the psychological source of the ideas that made such laws desirable was unknown, and their logical source had been forgotten, it was asserted, as Diderot did in the article mentioned above, that their essence was independent of any interest. This took the philosophers back almost to the selfsame innate ideas which had been in such disrepute since the times of Locke.

“No innate practical principles”: no idea is impressed by Nature in the mind. That is what was stated by Locke, who added that any sect regards as innate those principles which are in accord with its faith. The philosophers were not out to achieve anything more. For them to have acknowledged the existence of innate ideas would have been tantamount to bowing to the “sect’s” “principles” held by the supporters of the past, which they, the philosophers, looked down on. Since Nature does not impress anything in our minds, obsolete institutions and obsolete morality do not owe their existence to Nature. Yet there exists a natural law – a universal and absolute law – which can be discovered by man’s reason, with the aid of experience. Reason was on the side of the philosophers. Consequently, Nature had to express herself in favour of their aspirations. “Innate principles” therefore belonged to the “past”, which should be destroyed, while natural law was the future which the innovators were summoning. They did not reject dogmatism, but merely extended its boundaries so asto clear the way for the bourgeoisie. Helvetius’s views presented a threat to this new kind of dogmatism, which was why they were not accepted by most “philosophers”. This, however, did not prevent him from being the most consistent of John Locke’s followers.

In no less degree did his views threaten the view, so widely held in the eighteenth century, that the world is governed by public opinion. We have already seen that, according to Helvetius, men’s opinions are dictated by their interests; we have also seen that the latter do not depend on the human will (let us recall the instance of savages killing their aged because of economic necessity). “The advance of education”, with the aid of which the philosophers would account for the entire course of history, far from explaining anything, itself stood in need of explanation. To find that explanation would mean an actual revolution in the realm of “philosophy”. Helvetius evidently suspected what the consequences of such a revolution would be like. He admitted that, in his study of the human spirit’s road of development, he often felt a suspicion that “everything in Nature occurs and acts of itself”, and that the “perfection of the arts and sciences is less the work of genius than of time and necessity”. The “uniform” progress of the sciences in all countries, he thought, bore out that opinion. “Indeed, if, with all nations, as Hume has observed, people begin to write well in prose only after they have learnt to do that in verse, then I see in the constant advance of human reason the effect of a general and obscure cause.” [47] From everything the reader has learnt of our philosopher’s historical views, this kind of language will no doubt seem highly cautious and indecisive. But it is this very indeterminate language that reveals how vague were the notions that Helvetius’s mind associated with the words interest, needs of people, whose meaning would seem so clear and so unambiguous.

However strange we may find them, laws and customs are always grounded in “real or at least imagined utility”. But what is imagined utility? What does it depend on, and what does it originate from? Obviously, from public opinion. This again brings us back into thai vicious circle from which we wanted to escape: opinion depends on interest, and interest on opinion. What is most noteworthy is that Helvetius could not but return into that circle. True, he linked the origins of the most varied and bizarre laws, customs and opinions witli society’s actual needs, but, in his analysis, he was always confronted with a remainder that none of his metaphysical reagents could break down. That remainder was, first and foremost, religion.

All religions spring from man’s fear of some invisible force, from his ignorance of the forces of Nature. All false religions resemble one another. Whence such uniformity? It is the result of peoples that live in the same conditions always having a similar spirit, similar laws and a similar character. “It is because men who are animated by almost the same interest and having among them almost the same objects for comparison and the same tool, i.e., the same mind for their combination, have of necessity had to arrive at one and the same results ... because, in general, all are pride-ridden ... all look upon man as Heaven’s sole favourite, and the main object of its care.” This pride leads men to believe all the nonsense the tricksters would have them accept. Open the Koran (for the sake of appearance, Helvetius spoke only of “false religions”). It can be interpreted in a thousand different ways: it is vague and incomprehensible. But so great is human blindness that, to this day, this book, so full of falsehood and nonsense, this work, in which (jod is depicted as a tyrant who should be cursed, is still considered sacred. Therefore, the interest that gives rise to religious credulity is one of vanity – an interest of prejudice. Instead of explaining to us where human feelings spring from, that interest is itself an expression of those feelings. The “utility” of religion is merely “imagined utility”. An eighteenth-century philosopher could not possibly have regarded that “vile” enemy of reason in any other way.

Given vanity and ignorance, those precursors of fear, it can readily be understood with what means the ministers of religion build up and preserve their prestige. “In any religion, the prime aim the priests set themselves is to blunt man’s curiosity and to turnaway from his eye the examination of any dogma whose absurdity is too obvious to escape his attention.

“To attain that, it was necessary to flatter human passions; to perpetuate people’s blindness, it was necessary for them to desire to be blind and be interested in being so. Nothing is easier for the bonze”, etc. We see, in the first place, that religious dogmata and rites were deliberately invented by a few cunning, avaricious and bold swindlers; we see, in the second place, that the peoples’ interest, which should have explained to us at least the amazing success of such swindlers, is often merely the “imagined” interest of blind people who wish to remain blind. This is obviously no actual interest, no “need” that engenders all arts and sciences.

Wherever Helvetius set forth his views on history, he was constantly vacillating, without realising it, between these two diametrically opposite interpretations of interest. That was why he was unable to cope with the theory that the world is governed by public opinion. Now he tells us that people owe their intellect to the condition they find themselves in; then he finds it crystal clear that people owe their condition exclusively to their intellect. Now he tells us that hunger is the source of many arts, and that habitual needs are always inventive, i.e., that any more or less important invention is merely the integral of infinitely small inventions; then he assures us, in his polemic with Rousseau, that the art of agriculture “supposes the invention of the ploughshare, the plough, smithery, and consequently an infinite multitude of skills in mining, the art of furnace-building, mechanics and hydraulics”. Thus, this time it is the spirit, science, that is the source of inventions, while in the ultimate analysis, mankind’s progress is determined by “public opinion”. Now Helvetius shows us how a people’s laws, customs and tastes derive from its “condition”, i.e., from the “arts”, from the productive forces at its disposal, and from the economic relations that arise on their basis; then he declares that “it is on the perfection of laws that civic virtues depend, and on human reason that the perfection of those laws depends”. Now he depicts arbitrary authority as the inevitable consequence of constantly growing inequality in the distribution of wealth; then he arrives at the following conclusion: “Despotism, that horrible bane of mankind, is most frequently the result of a nation’s stupidity. Any people begins by being free. What cause can its loss of liberty be attributed to? Its ignorance, its foolish trust in the ambitious. The latter and the people are like the little girl and the lion in the well-known fable. As soon as she has persuaded the animal to let its claws be clipped and its teeth filed, she turns it over to the mastiffs.” Although Helvetius set himself the task of ascribing interest to history, consideringit “people’s sole motivation”, he returned to “ public opinion” which, by endowing objects with greater or lesser interest, ultimately becomes the absolute ruler of the world. “Imagined interest” was the submerged rock that wrecked his truly tremendous attempt to advance a materialist explanation of human development. This problem, both in history and morality, proved unsolvable from the metaphysical point of view.

In just the same way as imagined interest so often took the place of the actual interest Helvetius really wished to deal with, the same fate, as we can see, befell public interest, which yielded place to the interest of “the mighty of this world”. There can be no doubt that, in any society that is divided into classes, the interest of the mighty of this world has always been dominant. But how did Helvetius explain this indisputable fact? Sometimes he spoke of force, but most frequently sought refuge in “public opinion”, realising that force did not explain anything, since in many, if not all, cases it resided in the oppressed. It is the stupidity of nations that makes them obey tyrants, the “idle rich”, those who think only of themselves. Though he was one of the most brilliant representatives of French bourgeoisie at the time of its efflorescence, he did not suspect that, in the historical life of each class of the “mighty of this world”, there comes a time when its “private” interest coincides with that of a progressive movement, and thereby of all society. Helvetius was too much of a metaphysician to discern this dialectic of interests. Though he repeated that any law, no matter how strange it might seem, was or had been based on some actual interest of society, he saw in the Middle Ages nothing but a time when people had turned into beasts, just like Nebuchadnezzar; feudal laws seemed to him “the height of absurdity”. [48]

The discovery of useful arts is brought about by actual needs. Once created and used, any art engenders – with greater or lesser success – new “arts”, that depending on the production relations in the society in which it has appeared. It was only momentarily that Helvetius’s attention was attracted by this phenomenon of “arts” which arise from “actual” needs and engender new needs which are no less actual and which engender no less useful arts. He was too hasty in going over to the “pleasurable arts” designed to entertain the wealthy and dispel their boredom. “How many arts would have been unknown to us were it not for Love!” he exclaimed. That may have been so! But how many arts would have remained unknown without the capitalist production of essential articles!

What is meant by an actual need? To our philosopher, this meant primarily a physiological need. But to satisfy their physiological needs people must produce certain articles; the process of that production must give rise to new needs, just as actual as the preceding but whose nature is no longer physiological, but economic, since such needs spring from the development of production and mutual relations entered into by people in the process of production. Helvetius mentioned some of these economic needs, but only several: most of them escaped his notice. That was why, to him, a most powerful factor of society’s historical development was the multiplication of citizens, i.e., the increase in the number of stomachs that had to be filled and the number of bodies that had to be clothed, etc. The multiplication of citizens meant the growth of the aggregate total of physiological needs. Helvetius did not want to take into consideration that, in its turn, the “multiplication” of citizens depends on society’s economic condition, although he did make several fairly clear pronouncements on the matter. However, he was far from sharing the clear and precise views on this matter held by his contemporary Sir James Steuart, who, in his Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (London, 1767), ascribed the “multiplication of citizens” to “moral”, i.e., social, causes, and already understood that the population law characteristic of any particular society changes together with the mode of production predominant in that society in a given period. Incidentally, Helvetius’s views did not contain such platitudes as Malthus’s.

Everything in Nature occurs and acts of itself: that is the dialectical point of view. Helvetius merely sensed that this point of view was the most productive and correct in science. The reason for the “uniform” progress of the human spirit remained “unclear” to him. He very often stopped giving it thought, appealing to it only when the need arose. “In morality as in the realm of the physical,” he said, “it is only the great that strikes us. One always supposes that great effects spring from great causes. One expects heavenly signs to announce the downfall of empires or revolutions in them. Yet how many crusades have been launched or stopped, how many revolutions carried out or prevented, how many wars begun or ended by the intrigues of some priest, some woman, or some minister! It is only the absence of memoirs or underground anecdotes that prevents the Duchess of Marlborough’s glove from being found everywhere.” [4*] This point of view is the direct contrary of that according to which “everything occurs and acts of itself.

“The principle of life which, developing in the majestic oak, raises the sapling, spreads its branches, thickens its trunk and makes it reign over the forest, is at the same time the principle of its withering.” Here Helvetius is again speaking as a dialectician who understands the absurdity of an abstract and absolute contraposition of the useful and the harmful. Here he again recalls that any process of evolution has its immanent and immutable laws. Proceeding from this standpoint, he arrives at the conclusion that no “specific means” exists against inequality of “ property”, an inequality which, after a long existence, must inevitably destroy any society. But this is not his final conclusion. It is only under the ”actually existing form of government” that a specific means against this evil has no existence. Under a more rational form, very much could be undertaken against it. What, then, is that beneficent form of government? It is one that will be discovered by reason based on experience. Philosophy can very well solve “the problem of perfect and durable legislation” which, once adopted by any nation, can become a source of its happiness. A perfect legislation will not do away with inequality of property, but it will prevent the appearance of its harmful consequences. In the capacity of a “philosopher”, Helvetius sets forth for us, in the form of a “moral catechesis”, the “precepts and principles of justice”, the “utility and truth” [49] of which are proved to us by day-by-day experience and which should serve as the basis of a “perfect” legislation. Moreover, he supplements his catechesis with several other features of such a legislation.

The book De l’Esprit frightened the adherents of natural law, who saw in the author an opponent to that law. Their fears were only half justified, for Helvetius was only a stray sheep that would sooner or later return to the fold. He who, it might have seemed, had left no room for natural law, he who regarded as reasonable laws and customs that appeared most absurd, wound up by stating that the closer the peoples approached in their institutions to natural law, the greater the progress of reason in them. Thus, he reformed and returned to the fold of the philosophical church. Faith, a sacred and redeeming faith in “Reason”, had emerged victorious over any other point of view. “The time has come,” he exclaimed, “for those deaf to all theological contradictions to give ear only to the teachings of wisdom! We have awakened ... from our slumbers; the night of ignorance has passed; the day of science has arrived.”

Let us give ear to the voice of “reason” and turn the pages of the “moral catechesis” of its interpreter:

“Question: What makes this right of property so sacred, and for what reason, under the name of “Term”, has it been turned into a God almost everywhere? [5*]

“Answer: It is because the preservation of property is the moral God of Empires; it is that which maintains domestic peace and makes equity reign; it is because people have united only to ensure their property; it is because juslico, which in itself comprises almost all the virtues, consists in rendering to each man that which belongs to him, thereby being reduced to the upholding of that right of property; finally, because the diverse laws have never boen anything but various means of ensuring citizens that right”.

* * *

“Question: Are there not, among the diverse laws, such which can be given the name of natural laws?

“Answer: As I have already said, these are such that concern property and have become established in almost all civilised nations and societies because societies can be formed only on the basis of such laws.”

* * *

“Question: What should a prince do, supposing he wished to perfect the science of laws?

“Answer: He should encourage people gifted in the study of that science, and charge them with the solution of various problems therein.

“Question: What would happen then?

“Answer: Laws that are changeable and still imperfect would cease from being so, and would become stable and sacred.”

* * *

But enough! With Helvetius, as with Holbach and all eighteenth-century “philosophers”, the utopia of “perfect legislation” is merely a bourgeois utopia. Several features peculiar to our author do not change its essence. We shall cite only several of thesfi, so as to complete our picture of a man whose moral physiognomy has so often been distorted by the ideologists of an ungrateful bourgeoisie.

In his perfect society, Helvetius does not make the workers have such a long working day as is the practice with us. “Wise laws,” he said, “could no doubt create a marvel of universal happiness. If all citizens possess some property, it’ they all enjoy a certain competence, and, by working seven or eight hours, abundantly provide for their needs and those of their families, they will be as happy as can bE ...” “If work is generally regarded as an evil, it is because, in most States, one can acquire necessities only by excessive labour, and because the idea of work is always associated with the idea of drudgery.” [50] Fourier’s idea of attractive work was merely a development of this idea of Helvetius, just as the eight-hour working day is merely the proletariat’s solution of a problem raised by this bourgeois philosopher, the only difference being that the proletariat will not stop at that in its advance towards “happiness”.

Helvetius stood for upbringing by society. In his opinion, there were many reasons for it always to be given preference over private instruction. He quoted only one of these, which will be quite sufficient: it is only upbringing by society that rears patriots because it alone is able to bind together, in the minds of citizens, the idea of personal happiness with that of the nation. This is another idea of this bourgeois philosopher’s to be tackled by the proletariat, which will develop it in keeping with the needs of the time.

But Helvetius himself, as we know, did not expect anything of the proletariat. To whom, then, did he entrust the implementation of his plan? Of course, to some wise prince. But as man is only a product of his environment, and as, further, the environment of princes isjvery depraved, what reasonable grounds have we to expect the appearance of a sage on the throne? Our philosopher was well aware of the difficulty of replying to this question. Finding it hard to find an answer, he resorted to the aid of the probability theory.

“If, as the sages say, all possibilities are given effect within a more or less extended period of time, why should we despair of mankind’s future happiness? Who can prove that the truths established above will always be useless to it? It is rare but necessary that a given time will produce a Penn (!) or a Manco-Capac” (!) “to give laws to emerging societies. But supposing ... that, jealous for new glory, such a man would wish to perpetuate his name in posterity, under the title of a friend of mankind, and that, in consequence, is more occupied with drawing up his laws and with the happiness of the peoples than with enlarging his power, this man would wish to make men happy, and not slaves. Then, no doubt ... he would perceive, in the principles I have just set forth, the embryo of a new legislation, one more in conformity with the happiness of mankind.” [51]

Inasmuch as the “philosophers” engaged in the question of the influence of the environment on the individual, they reduced its operation to the actions of “government”. Helvetius did not act as hastily as the others. There was a time when he saw and clearly stated that a government is, in its turn, merely a product ofjthe social environment; he was able, with greater or lesser success, to deduce the civil, criminal and public laws of his hypothetical island from its economic condition. But as soon as he went over to the study of the development of “education”, i.e., science and literature, he began, as the reader will remember from the preceding exposition, to notice only the influence of government. However, the idea of the irresistible influence of government is a kind of blind alley from which escape is possible only through a miracle, i.e., a government which suddenly decides to heal all the ills created by itself or by preceding governments. Helvetius also appealed to that miracle and, to revitalise his own faith and that of his readers, he sought salvation in a seemingly boundless field – that of “possibilities”.

But theory does not as yet create faith, least of all a theory providing grounds for as little confidence as does the theory of possibilities that take effect over a longer or shorter period. Thus, Helvetius, at least in respect of France, remained a complete nonbeliever. “My country,” he wrote in the Preface to his book De l’Homme, “has ultimately come under the yoke of despotism. From now on, she will produce no more celebrated writers ... no more will the name of Frenchman be made famous by this people. Today, this degraded nation its the scorn of Europe. No salutary crisis will return it its liberty. ...It is said that happiness, like the sciences, wanders about the world. It is now heading northwards: greaT princes are calling genius thither, and genius invites happiness ... It is to such sovereigns that I dedicate this work.” [6*] It seems to us that this mistrust, which found some small counterpoise in hopes placed in Northern sovereigns, enabled him to take his analysis of moral and social phenomena farther than other “philosophers” did. Like Voltaire, Holbach was an indefatigable propagandist; he published a large number of books in which he, in essence, always harped on the same theme. Helvetius wrote only one book De l’Esprit; the other, De l’Homme, is merely a lengthy commentary to it. The author never wanted to have it published in his lifetime. “He who wishes to learn the true principles of morality,” ho wrote, “must rise to the principle of physical sensitivity, and seek, in the needs of hunger, thirst and the like, for the cause that makes men, who have already multiplied, till the soil, join together in society, and enter into conventions whose observance or infraction makes men just or unjust.” Thus, he undertook his analysis with the purpose of discovering the true principles of morality and, at the same time, of politics. In advancing the principle of “sensory impressions”, he showed that he was the most consistent and logical of all eighteenth-century materialists. By seeking in “the needs of hunger, thirst and the like” the causes of mankind’s historical advance, he set himself the task of finding a materialist explanation of that advance. From afar, he saw many truths of far more value than his plan of a perfect legislation or his immutable and absolute “great truths”, which he dedicated to the sovereigns of the “North”. He understood that some “common cause” must exist in human development, but he did not and could not know that cause since he did not possess enough facts or the necessary method. That cause remained “hidden” and “unclear” to him but it did not make him inconsolable, for the utopian in him comforted the philosopher. The main purpose had been achieved: the principles of “excellent” legislation had been drawn up.

Two examples will suffice to show how, in drawing up his utopian plans, Helvetius sometimes used the principle of sensory impressions.

“I am not inimical to theatrical performances,” he said, “and, in this respect, I do not accept Rousseau’s advice. Such performances no doubt provide pleasure. But there is no pleasure which, in the hands of a wise government, could not become a principle conducive to virtue if the latter sees recompense in that pleasure.” [52]

And here is what he said in defence of divorce: “If it is true that a desire for change is, as they say, inherent in human nature, the possibility of such change could be established as a reward for merit. One could then try, by such means, to make warriors more brave, judges more just, workers more industrious and talented people more diligent.” Divorce as a reward for “virtue”! What could be more comical?

We know that if the principles of perfect legislation are ever given effect, then “unstable and as yet imperfect laws will cease from being such and will become immutable”. Thus, society will be in a state of rest. What will be the consequences of such a condition? “Let us imagine that, in each branch of science or art, men will be able to compare among themselves all known objects and facts, and will have finally discovered all the latter’s various relations. Since men will have no more new combinations to make, then what is known as the mind will no longer exist. Then everything will turn into science, and the human mind will be forced into repose until the discovery of unknown facts permits it again to compare and combine them in just the same way as an exhausted mine is allowed to rest until new veins are formed.” [53]

Thus, this repose and this exhaustion of the human spirit should – at least in the realm of social relations – inevitably bring in its train the fulfilment of Helvetius’s moral and political principles. Thus, stagnation was the ideal of this philosopher, who was so fanatical an adherent of progress! Metaphysical materialism was only half-revolutionary. To him, revolution was only a means (and then only in view of the absence of peaceful means) of reaching a safe and calm heaven once and for all ... Within his breast there lived – alas! – two spirits, just as in Faust and in the bourgeoisie, the eighteenth-century materialists being the latter’s most progressive representatives.

Footnotes

38. This leads us up to the question of the influence of climate. As the reader will see, the reference is not to the direct influence of climate on people’s morals, of which Montesquieu spoke. In Helvetius’s opinion, that influence is expressed through the medium of the arts, i.e., thanks to the more or less rapid development of the productive forces. These are two quite different points of view.

39. As for his French contemporaries, Helvetius remarked that the French nation could not he gay because “the misfortunes of the times have forced the princes to impose heavy taxes on the country, so that the peasant class, “who alone comprise two-thirds of the nation, live in poverty, and poverty is never gay ...” He ridiculed the manner of describing national character: “Nothing in general is more ridiculous and more false than the descriptions given of the character of diverse peoples. Some depict their nation after their own society, making it, in consequence, sad, or gay, or coarse or witty ... Others copy what a thousand writers have written before them; they never examine the change that must of necessity take place in the character of a nation, the modifications that take effect in government and in morals” (De l’Esprit, Discours III, chap.XXX).

40. Catherine II was able to gull Helvetius, just as she did many others. He always spoke of her in the warmest terms, and was convinced that this Messalina of the North had attacked Poland in the interests of tolerance.

41. What Helvetius says about our judgement of beauty contains, in some measure, the embryo of Chernyshevsky’s ethical theory, but only the embryo. In this particular sphere, the analysis given by the Russian writer goes much further and leads to far more important results.

42. We shall note, merely in passing, that Holbach considered the “proliferation of citizens” from the diametrically opposite stand. To him it meant only the growth of the stale’s might and wealth. In this ho was in agreement with most eighteenth-century writers.

43. That is how he put it in De l’Homme. In his book De l’Esprit, Helvetius expressed his opinion in vague terms, but there he also intimated that the question of luxury could not be solved as easily as the “moralists” supposed. According to Diderot, the passage dealing with luxury was among the finest in the book. Cf. his Œuvres, t.I, section 1, the article Sur le livre De l’Esprit.

44. Helvetius knows of societies in which “money is in circulation” and others in which it is not. However, to him products always assume the form of commodities in both cases. This seems to him just as natural as private property. In general, his economic views leave much to be desired. Even the best grounded and most mature of them do not rise above the economic views of David Hume.

45. Politique naturelle, London 1773, I, pp.37-38.

46. Incidentally, the populus whose salus was desired did not always mean those who worked and produced. According to Voltaire, the human race could not exist without “a vast number of useful people who possess nothing” ... “There is a need for men who have only their hands and good will ... They are free to sell their labour to anyone who will pay them best” (See Dictionnaire philosophique, art. Egalité et Propriété).

47. De l’Homme, section II, chap.XXIII.

48. Cf. his Pensées et réflections, in Vol.III of his Œuvres complètes, Paris 1818, p.314.

49. De l’Homme, section X, chap.VII.

50. De l’Homme, section VIII, chap.I.

51. ibid., chap.XXVI.

52. De l’Homme, section I, chap.X, note.

53. De l’Homme, section II, chap.XV. Here Helvetius means by spirit “a complex of new ideas”, and by science the acquisition of ideas already known to mankind.

Notes

3*. The League (the Catholic League) – a reactionary union of French Catholics founded in 1576 to combat the Protestants (Huguenots) during the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century.

The Fronde – a movement of nobles and bourgeois against absolutism in France (1648-53).

4*. The famous English soldier and statesman John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), was compelled to leave court following the intrigues and quarrels of his wife, who was in attendance on Queen Anne. Voltaire ascribed Marlborough’s downfall to an episode connected with a pair of gloves.

5*. Term (Terminus, Roman myth.) – god, protector of boundaries, worshipped in the form of a milestone or a milepost. Every milestone was considered sacred, and anyone who moved it was accursed.

6*. By “great princes” Helvetius meant Catherine II of Russia and the Prussian King Frederick II, who assumed the roles of the “enlightened” monarchs – patrons of science and philosophy. La Mettrie and Voltaire lived at the court of Frederick II; Catherine II corresponded with Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, and invited Diderot, d’Alembert, etc., to St. Petersburg.

III. Marx - Part One

The eighteenth-century materialists thought that they had done with idealism. The old metaphysics was dead and buried, and Reason wished to hear no more of it. However, things soon look a new turn: already in the epoch of the “philosophers”, a revival of speculative philosophy began in Germany, and during the first four decades of the current nineteenth century u deaf ear was turned to materialism, which was itself now considered dead and buried. To the entire world of philosophy and literature, the materialist doctrine seemed “drab”, “gloomy” and “deadening,” as it did to Goethe: “it made people shudder as though it were a spectre”. [1] For its part the speculative philosophy thought that its rival had been overcome for all time.

It must be acknowledged that speculative philosophy possessed a considerable advantage over materialism. It made a study of things in their development, their inception and destruction. However, to examine things from this latter point of view meant eschewing a mode of examination so characteristic of the Enlighteners, which, by eliminating from phenomena every internal movement of life, turned them into fossils whose nature and nexus were incomprehensible. Hegel, that nineteenth-century titan of idealism, never ceased from waging the struggle against this mode of examination; to him, it was “not free and objective thinking, since it did not allow the object to freely determine itself from within itself but presupposed it as being ready”. [2] The restored idealist philosophy lauded a method that was the diametrical opposite – the dialectical – and used it with amazing success. Since we have had frequent occasion to mention this method, and since we shall have further to deal with it, it may be useful to describe it in the words of Hegel himself, that master of idealist dialectics.

“Dialectic,” he says, “is usually regarded as an external skill which arbitrarily brings confusion into certain notions and creates in them merely an appearance of contradictions, so that it is not these definitions that are illusory, but this appearance, whereas the definitions of the intellect, on the contrary, are true. Indeed, dialectic is often nothing else but a subjective play which arbitrarily advances now proofs and now denials of a definite proposition – a reasoning in which content is absent and whose emptiness is concealed behind this ingenuity, which creates that kind of reasoning. However, in its real character, dialectic is the genuine own nature of the definitions of the intellect, of things, and of the finite in general. Reflection is in itself a movement of thought which transcends isolated definiteness and correlates it with others, thanks to which this definiteness is brought into a certain connection, but, besides that, preserves its former isolated significance. Dialectic is, on the contrary, an immanent transition of one definition into another, in which it is revealed that these definitions of the intellect are one-sided and limited, i.e., contain a negation of themselves. Everything finite is doomed to self-destruction. Consequently, dialectic is the motive soul of any scientific advance of thought and is a principle which alone brings into the content of science an immanent connection and necessity.”

Everything that surrounds us can serve as an instance of dialectic. “A planet now stands in this place, but in itself tends to be in another place, giving effect to its Otherness by its being in motion ... As for the presence of dialectic in the spiritual world, and in particular, in the legal and moral domains, it should here merely be recalled that, according to the experience of all men, any state of affairs or action carried to extremes changes into its opposite; this dialectic, we shall note in passing, is recognised in many proverbs. Thus, there is a proverb that says: Summuin jus, summa injuria, which means that an abstract right carried to extremes changes into injustice” ..., etc. [3]

The French materialists’ metaphysical method refers to the dialectical method of German idealism in the same way as elementary mathematics stands to higher mathematics. In the former, the notions are strictly limited and separated from one another as by an “abyss”: a polygon is a polygon and nothing else; a circle is a circle and nothing else. Already in planimetry, however, we are obliged to use what is known as the method of limits, which rocks our worthy and immovable notions and strangely brings them close to one another. How is it proved that the area of a circle is equal to the product of the perimeter and half of the radius? It is said that the difference between the area of a regular polygon inscribed in a circle and the area of that circle can be made an arbitrarily small magnitude, given the condition that we take a sufficiently large number of its sides. If we indicate the area, perimeter and diagonal of a regular polygon, inscribed in a circle, by means of a, p, and r, respectively, then we get that a  = p•½r; here a and p•½r are magnitudes that change together with the number of sides but always remain equal among themselves; therefore their limits will also be equal. If we denote by means of A, C and R the area, circumference and radius of a circle respectively then A is the limit of a, C is the limit of p, and R is the limit of r; therefore A = C•½R. Thus, a polygon turns into a circle; it is thus that the circle is considered in thv process of its becoming. This is already a remarkable upheaval in mathematical notions, and it is this upheaval that the higher analysis takes as its points of departure. Differential calculus deals with infinitesimal magnitudes, or, as Hegel puts it, “it has to do with magnitudes which are in the process of disappearing – neither before their disappearance, for then they are finite magnitudes, not after, for then they are nothing.” [4]

However strange and paradoxical this device may seem, it renders mathematics incalculable services, thereby proving that it is the diametrical opposite of the absurdity it might be taken for at first. The eighteenth-century “philosophers” had a high appreciation of its advantages, and they engaged a great deal in the higher analysis. But these very people, who, like Condorcet, for instance, made excellent use of this weapon in their, calculations, would have been greatly surprised to learn that this dialectical device should be applied in the study of all the phenomena science deals with, irrespective of the sphere they pertain to. They would have replied that human nature is at least just as firm and eternal as the rights and duties of people and citizens, which derive from that nature. The German idealists held a different view. Hegel affirmed that “there is nothing that is not a condition ... between Being and Nothingness”.

As long as, in the field of geology, there held sway the theory of cataclysms, sudden upheavals, which with one hammer blow changed the surface of the globe and destroyed the old species of animals and plants to make room for new ones, the mode of thinking was metaphysical. But when this theory was rejected, yielding place to the idea of the slow development of the Earth’s crust under the lengthy influence of the same forces that alsooperate in our days, then the dialectical standpoint was taken up.

As long as it was thought in biology that species are immutable, the mode of thinking was metaphysical. This was the view held by the French materialists, who were constantly returning to it even when trying to give it up. Present-day biology has shed this view once and for all. The theory that bears the name of Darwin is a dialectical theory in its essence.

At this point, the following remark must be made. However healthy the reaction against the old metaphysical theories in natural science was, it created, in its turn, much regrettable muddled thinking. There appeared a trend towards interpreting new theories in the sense of the old expression: natura non facit sal turn, this leading to another extreme: attention was now being paid only to the process of gradual quantitative change in a given phenomenon; its going over into another phenomenon remained quite incomprehensible. This was the old metaphysics but placed on its head. In just the same old way, phenomena remained separated from one another by an unbridgeable gulf. So firmly is this metaphysics established in the minds of the present-day evolutionists that there are now a number of “sociologists” who reveal a total lack of understanding whenever their researches come up against revolution. As they see it, revolution is incompatible with evolution: historia non facit saltum. They are not in the least disturbed if, despite this historical wisdom, revolutions, and even great ones, take place. They hold fast to their theory: so much the worse for revolutions, which disturb its peacefulness; they are considered “maladies”. Dialectical idealism had already condemned this appalling confusion of ideas, and fought against it. Here is what Hegel says in respect of the above-mentioned expression: “It is said natura non facit saltum; and ordinary imagination, when it has to conceive a becoming or passing away, thinks it has conceived them when it imagines them as a gradual emergence or disappearance”. However, dialectic most convincingly shows that “changes of Being are, in general, not only a transition of one quantity into another but also a transition from the qualitative into the quantitative and conversely: a process of becoming something else which breaks off gradualness and is qualitatively something else as against the preceding being. Water, on being cooled, does not become hard little by little, gradually reaching the consistency of ice after having passed through the consistency of a paste, but is suddenly hard; when it has already attained freezing-point, it may, if standing still, be wholly liquid, and a slight shake brings it into the condition of hardness.

“The notion of the gradualness of becoming is based upon the idea that that which becomes is already, sensibly or otherwise, Actually there, and is imperceptible only on account of its smallness; the gradualness of vanishing is based on the idea that Notbeing or the Other which is assuming its place is equally there, only is not yet noticeable; there, not in the sense that the Other is contained in itself in the Other which is there, but that it is there as Determinate Being, only unnoticeable.” [5]

Thus:

all that is finite is such that cancels itself, is transmuted into its opposite. This transition is effected with the aid of the nature inherent in every phenomenon, which contains forces that engender its opposite.

The gradual quantitative changes in a given content ultimately turn into qualitative distinctions. The features of that conversion are those of a leap, a break in the gradualness. It is highly erroneous to think that Nature or history makes no leaps.

Such are the characteristic features of the dialectical worldoutlook, which it would be useful to note here.

In its application to social phenomena (and we are dealing with them alone), the dialectical method has created a veritable revolution. It will be no exaggeration to say that to it we owe an understanding of human history as a law-governed process. The materialist “philosophers” saw in the history of makind merely the conscious acts of more or less wise and virtuous people, but in the main of not very wise and quite unvirtuous people. Dialectical idealism surmised the existence of necessity where a first glance reveals merely the unordered play of chance, merely an endless struggle between individual passions and purposes. Even Helvetius, who, with his “assumption” that in history, just as in Nature, everything “occurs and acts of itself” (these are his own words), drew closer to the dialectical point of view; even he accounted for historical events only through the qualities of individuals in possession of political power. In his opinion, Montesquieu was in error when, in his book Sur la grandeur et la décadence des Romains, he ignored the fortunate play of circumstances that had been of service to Rome. He said that Montesquieu “fell into the shortcoming, all too common with reasoners, of wishing to ascribe Reason to everything, while at the same time falling into the error of all armchair scholars who, forgetful of mankind, ascribe with excessive ease constant views and uniform principles to all bodies” (Helvetius is speaking here of political “bodies” such as the Roman Senate) “while very often it is an individual who conducts to his own liking the grave assemblies called Senates”. [6]

How different from this is the theory of Schelling, who asserts that, in history, freedom (i.e., the conscious acts of people) turns into necessity, while necessity turns into freedom. Schelling regards the following question as the most important problem of philosophy: “what is it that, parallel with our acting perfectly freely, i.e., with full consciousness, leads to something arising in us in the form of something conscious, which has never existed in our minds and could never have arisen if our freedom were granted full play?” [7]

To Hegel, “world history is progress in the consciousness of freedom, a progress we have to cognise in its necessity”. Like Schelling he thinks that “in world history, thanks to the acts of men in general, results are also obtained which are somewhat different from those which they have striven for and achieved, from results they have immediate knowledge of, and wish; they are out to ensure that their interests are met, but, thanks to that, something further is realised, something that is latent in them, but is not consciously realised and formed no part of their intention”. [8]

It is clear that, from this point of view, it is not men’s “ opinions” that “govern the world”, and it is not in them that one should seek for a key to historical events. In its development, “public opinion” obeys laws which mould it with the same necessity that determines the movement of celestial bodies. It was thus that a solution was found for the antinomy that the “ philosophers” were constantly coming up against:

Public opinion governs the world; it determines the relations among members of society; it creates the social environment.

Man is a product of the social environment; his opinions are determined by the features of that environment. [9]

Everything depends on legislation, the “philosophers” reiterated, firmly convinced that any people’s mores depend on its legislation. On the other hand, they reiterated just as often that it was corrupt morals that led to the downfall of the civilisation of antiquity. What we have here is just another antinomy: 1) legislation creates morals; 2) morals create legislation. Such antinomies comprised, so to say, both the essence and the misfortune of eighteenth-century philosophical thought, which was incapable of solving them, getting rid of them, or comprehending the causes of the horrible muddle in which it found itself again and again.

The metaphysician considers and studies things one after another and in their isolation from one another. When he feels the need to provide an overall picture, he examines things in their interaction; at this point he comes to a halt, and does not, and cannot, go any further, since to him things remain separated from one another by a gulf, and since he has no conception of their development to explain either their origins or the relations existing between them.

Dialectical idealism crosses these borders, which the metaphysicians find impassable. It regards both aspects of the relation of interaction, not as “directly given” but as “moments of something tertiary and higher, which is Notion”. Thus, Hegel examines the morals and state structure of Sparta. “If, for example,” he says, “we consider the mores of the Spartan people as the result of their state structure and, conversely, their state structure as the result of their mores, this mode of examination may be correct, yet it does not give final satisfaction, because in fact we have understood neither the state structure nor the mores of this people. That is possible only if it is realised that these two aspects, and also all the other aspects revealed by the life and history of the Spartan people, have a Notion as their foundation.” [10]

The French philosophers harboured only contempt, or rather only hatred, for the Middle Ages. Helvetius looked upon feudalism as the “height o/ absurdity”. Though Hegel was very far from any romantic idealisation of the mores and institutions of medieval times, he regarded the latter as a necessary element in mankind’s development. Moreover, he already saw that the internal contradictions of medieval social life had given rise to present-day society.

The French philosophers saw in religion merely a mass of superstitions springing from mankind’s own stupidity and the fraud practised by the priests and the prophets. They could only wage a struggle against religion. However useful this kind of work was for their times, it made not the least contribution to the scientific study of religion. That study was prepared by dialectical materialism. It will suffice merely to compare Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu with Holbach’s Critical History of Jesus Christ to see the vast step forward made in the philosophy of religion under the beneficial influence of Hegel’s dialectical method. [11]

When the “philosophers” made a study of the history of philosophy they did so to cull therein arguments supporting their views, or else to destroy the systems of their idealistic predecessors. Hegel did not dispute his precursors’ systems, which he considered various stages in the development of a “single philosophy”. Any particular philosophy is a daughter of its times; “the most recent philosophy is the outcome of all preceding philosophies and’must therefore contain the principles of all of them; therefore, if only it is a philosophy, it is the most developed, richest and most concrete philosophy”. [12]

A “perfect legislation” was one of the favourite subjects studied by the philosophers, each of whom had his own Utopia on this score. Dialectical idealism cold-shouldered such studies. “A State,” says Hegel, “is an individual totality, of which you cannot take any particular side, even a supremely important one, such as its political constitution; and deliberate and decide on it in isolation.... One must understand the spirit of a people from which everything in the State springs; it develops of itself, and in its development one can distinguish certain periods, for each of which a certain constitution is necessary, which is not a matter of choice but is in keeping with the spirit of the times ... Second and further: it is not only the constitution that is determined by the spirit of a people, but that spirit of a people is a link in the course of the development of the World Spirit, in which individual constitutions occur.” [13]

In a word, dialectical idealism regarded the Universe as a single whole “developing jrom its own Notion”. A cognition of that integrity and a revelation of the process of its development – such was the task that philosophy set itself – a noble, majestic and admirable task! A philosophy that set itself such a task could not seem “drab” or “deadening” to anybody. Quite the reverse: it evoked universal admiration by the fullness of its life, the irresistible force of its movement, and the beauty of its brilliant colours. Yet the noble attempt launched by idealistic dialectical philosophy remained uncompleted; it did not and could not complete it. After rendering the human spirit invaluable services, German idealism fell into decline in order, as it were, to provide fresh proof for its own theory, and show from its own example that “all that is finite is such that cancels itself, is transmuted into its opposite”. Ten years after Hegel’s death, materialism again appeared on the arena of philosophical development, and to this day has not ceased from scoring victories over its old opponent.

What is that Notion, that Absolute Idea, that World Spirit of which German speculative philosophy kept on speaking? Is there any means of cognising that mysterious being which, it was thought, gives movement and life to everything?

Indeed, there exists such a means, and a very simple one at that; only it calls for careful examination. If that is given, a most wonderful transformation takes place. That Absolute Idea, which is so irresistible in its movement, so luscious and fiuitful, mother to everything that has been, is and will be in future centuries, loses all lustre, becomes immovable, proves a pure abstraction and, very far from being able to explain anything, humbly asks for the least explanation of itself. Sic transit gloria ... ideae.

The Absolute Idea, with all its immanent laws, is merely a personification of the process of our own thinking. Anyone who appeals to that Idea for an explanation of the phenomenon of Nature or social evolution abandons the firm soil of facts and enters the realm of shadows. That is exactly what happened to the German idealists.

In a book that came out in Frankfort on the Main in 1845 and was written by two men whose names won fame in the second half of the nineteenth century, we find a splendid exposure of the “mystery of speculative constructions”.

“If from real apples, pears, strawberries and almonds I form the general idea ‘Fruit’, if I go further and imagine that my abstract idea ‘Fruit’, derived from real fruit, is an entity existing outside me, is indeed the true essence of the pear, the apple, etc., then – in the language of speculative philosophy – I am declaring that ‘Fruit’ is the ‘Substance’ of the pear, the apple, the almond, etc. I am saying, therefore, that to be a pear is not essential to the pear, that to be an apple is not essential to the apple; that what is essential to these things is not their real existence, perceptible to the senses, but the essence that I have abstracted from them and then foisted on them, the essence of my idea – ‘Fruit’. I therefore declare apples, pears, almonds, etc., to be mere forms of existence, modi, of ‘Fruit’. My finite understanding supported by my senses does, of course, distinguish an apple from a pear and a pear from an almond, but my speculative reason declares these sensuous differences inessential and irrelevant. It sees in the apple the same as in the pear, and in the pear the same as in the almond, namely, ‘Fruit’. Particular real fruits are nomore than semblances, whose true essence is ‘the Substance’ – ‘Fruit’.” [14]

In essence, however, German speculative philosophy did not adhere to the viewpoint of substance. “Absolute substance,” says Hegel, “is truth, but it is not yet all the truth; it must also be understood as effective and living of itself, and for that reason be denned as Spirit”. Let us see how this higher and more truthful point of view is achieved.

“If apples, pears, almonds and strawberries arc really nothing: but ‘the Substance’, ‘the Fruit’, the question arises: Why does ‘the Fruit’ manifest itself to me sometimes as an apple, sometimes as a pear, sometimes as an almond? Why this appearance of diversity which so obviously contradicts my speculative conception of ‘Unity’; ‘the Substance’; ‘the Fruit’?

“This, answers the speculative philosopher, is because ‘the Fruit’ is not dead, undifferentiated, motionless, but living, selfdifferentiating moving essence. The diversity of the ordinary fruits is significant not only to my sensuous understanding, but also for ‘the Fruit’ itself and for speculative reason. The different ordinary fruits are different manifestations of the life of the ‘one Fruit’; they are crystallisations of ‘the Fruit’ itself. Thus in the apple ‘the Fruit’ gives itself an apple-like existence, in thepear – a pear-like existence. We must therefore no longer say, as one might from the standpoint of the Substance: a pear is; ‘the Fruit’, an apple is ‘the Fruit’, an almond is ‘the Fruit’, but ‘the Fruit’ presents itself as a pear, ‘the Fruit’ presents itself as an apple, ‘the Fruit’ presents itself as an almond; and the differences which distinguish apples, pears, and almonds from one another are the self-differentiations of ‘the Fruit’ and make the particular fruits different members of the life-process of ‘the Fruit’ ...

“We see that if the Christian religion knows only one Incarnation of God, speculative philosophy has as many incarnations as there are things, just as it has here in every fruit an incarnation of the Substance, of the Absolute Fruit. The main interest for the speculative philosopher is therefore to produce the existence of the real ordinary fruits and to say in some mysterious way Ilial there are apples, pears, almonds and raisins ...

“It goes without saying that the speculative philosopher accomplishes this continuous creation only by representing universally known qualities of the apple, the pear, etc., which exist in reality, as determining features invented by him, by giving the names of the real things to what abstract reason alone can create, to abstract formulas of reason, finally, by declaring his own activity, by which he passes from the idea of an apple to the idea of a pear, to be the self-activity of the Absolute Subject, ‘the Fruit’.” [15]

This materialist criticism of idealism is as harsh as it is just. The “Absolute Idea”, the “Spirit” of German speculative philosophy, was nothing but an abstraction. However, an abstraction which is considered the ultimate solution of the most profound problems of science, can he only detrimental to the latter’s progress. And if those thinkers who addressed themselves to this abstraction rendered great services to human thought, they did so despite that abstraction, not thanks to it, inasmuch as it did not hamper their study of the actual movement of things. We find splendid thoughts in Schelling’s philosophy of Nature. lie possessed considerable knowledge in the realm of the natural sciences, but to him the “material universe” was nothing but the “revealed world of Ideas”. Perhaps he was not contradicting himself when he asserted that “magnetism is a universal act of inspiration, the implanting of unity in multiplicity, of notion in difference” and that “that very intrusion of the subjective into the objective, which in the ideal ... is self-consciousness, is here expressed in being”. But does this take us a single step towards a cognition of magnetic phenomena or an understanding of magnetism’s nature? Not only have we failed to make any progress but we run tremendous risk of denying actual facts to please a theory which may seem to us more or less ingenious but in any case is absolutely arbitrary.

The same may be said of the history of mankind. As Sir Alexander Grant once put it, to borrow philosophy from Hegel’s History of Philosophy is tantamount to borrowing poetry from Shakespeare, i.e., is almost inevitable. In certain respects, a study of Hegel’s philosophy of history, or of his aesthetics, his philosophy of law or his logic, is necessary at present too. But it is not the idealist point of view that gives all these works their value. On the contrary, that point of view is quite barren: it is fruitful only in respect of engendering confusion. Thus, for instance, Hegel describes, with an ingenuity that would do credit to an expert, the influence of the geographical environment on the historical development of human societies. But is he able to explain anything at all when he says that “the Determinate Spirit of a people, since it is active and its freedom derives from Nature, bears a specific geographical and climatic impress thanks to the latter”? Or – to take up an example he himself makes use of – does he bring us a single step closer to an understanding of the history of Sparta when he says that the mores of that country, like its State structure, were merely moments in the evolution of notion? It is true, of course, that the viewpoint of the “French philosophers”, against whom he cites this example (the viewpoint of interaction, which remains an insurmountable boundary of their most fruitful researches), is quite insufficient. It is, however, not enough to reject this point of view; what is essential is to show in what measure a “Notion” can be a secret mainspring promoting social progress. Not only was Hegel never able to reply to this perfectly lawful question but he seems to have been little satisfied with the light notion allegedly shed on the history of mankind. He felt the need to stand on firm ground and make a careful study of social relations, so he ended up by categorically stating that “property inequality was the main cause of Lacedaemon’s decline.” All this is true, but that truth does not contain a jot of absolute idealism. [16]

Try to imagine that someone has explained to us with amazing” clarity the mechanism of the movements of animals but then goes on to say, with the utmost gravity, that the vital and concealed cause of all these movements is to be found in the shadows cast by moving bodies. That someone is an “absolute” idealist. Perhaps, we shall share the views of this idealist for a certain, time, but I hope that in the final analysis we shall understand the science of mechanics and bid “a long farewell” to his “philosophy of mechanics”.

That, at least, is how various disciples of Hegel behaved. Though they were capable of a high appreciation of the advantages provided by the great thinker’s method, they went over to the materialist point of view. The excerpts from The Holy Family cited above will suffice to show how definitive and ruthless their criticism of idealist speculative philosophy was.

The dialectical method is the most characteristic feature of present-day materialism; therein lies its essential distinction from the old metaphysical materialism of the eighteenth century. One can therefore form an opinion of the profundity of the views and the seriousness of those historians of literature and philosophy who have not deigned to notice that distinction. The late Lange divided his History of Materialism into two parts – materialism before and after Kant.

Another kind of division must of necessity suggest itself to anyone who has not been blinded by the spirit of some school or by cut-and-dried concepts: materialism after Hegel was no longer what it had been prior to him. But could anything else have been expected? To judge of the influence nineteenth-century idealism has had on the development of materialism, one should first and foremost realise what the latter has become today. This was something that Lange never did. Though in his book he spoke of all and sundry, even of nonentities like Heinrich Szolbe, he made no mention at all of dialectical materialism. This learned historian of materialism did not even suspect that there wore contemporary materialists who were remarkable in quite a different way than Messrs. Vogt, Moleschott and Co. [17]

The ease with which dialectical materialism was able to overcome idealism should seem inexplicable to anyone who lacks a clear understanding of the fundamental question separating the materialists from the idealists. People guided by dualist prejudices usually think, for example, that there are two completely different substances in man: body or matter, on the one hand, and on the other, the soul, the spirit. Though they do not know and often do not even ask how one of these substances can affect the other, people nevertheless consider that they are fully aware it would be “one-sided” to explain phenomena with the aid of only one of these two substances. Such people are smugly aware of their superiority over the two extremes, and are neither idealists nor materialists. However venerable the age of this longstanding mode of considering philosophical questions may be, it is in essence worthy only of the philistine. Philosophy has never been able to feel satisfaction with such “many-sidedness”: on the contrary, it has tried to rid itself of the dualism so beloved of eclectic minds. The most outstanding philosophical systems have always been monist, i.e., have regarded spirit and matter merely as two classes of phenomena whose cause is inseparably one and the same. We have already seen that the French materialists regarded the “faculty of sensation” as one of the properties of matter. To Hegel, Nature was merely an “otherness” of the Absolute Idea. This “otherness” is in certain measure the Idea’s Fall from Grace; Nature is the creation of the Spirit, existing only thanks to its favour. This imaginary Fall in no way precludes the identity in substance between Nature and Spirit; on the contrary, it presupposes that identity. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit is not the limited spirit of the philosophy of limited minds. Hegel was well able to ridicule those who saw in Matter and Spirit two different substances “just as mutually impenetrable as any matter is assumed to be in respect of another, existing only in their mutual non-being in each other pores, just like with Epicurus who gave the gods sojourn in the pores of the Cosmos, but quite consistently burdened them with no communion with the world”. Despite his hostility towards materialism, Hegel appreciated its monist trend. [18] But if we have adopted the monist point of view, it is experience itself that should decide which of the two theories – idealism or materialism – provides the better explanation of the phenomena we encounter in the study of Nature and human societies. It will easily be seen that even in the field of psychology, a science studying facts that can be called mostly phenomena of the spirit, our work proceeds with greater success when we accept Nature as primary, and consider the actions of the spirit as necessary consequences of the movement of matter. “Surely no one,” says agnostic Huxley, “who is cognisant of the facts of the case, nowadays doubts that the roots of psychology lie in the physiology of the nervous system. What we call the operations of the mind are functions of the brain, and the materials of consciousness are products of cerebral activity. Cabanis may have made use of crude and misleading phraseology when he said that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile; but the conception which that much-abused phrase embodies is, nevertheless, far more consistent with fact than the popular notion that the mind is a metaphysical entity seated in the head, but as independent of the brain as a telegraph operator is of his instrument.” [19] In the area of the social sciences as understood in the broad sense of the term, idealism, as we have already pointed out, has often arrived at a consciousness of its incapacity, and resorted to a purely materialist explanation of historical facts. We shall again emphasise that the great revolution in German philosophy in the fifth decade of our century was greatly fostered by the essentially monist nature of German idealism. “It is, in fact, the case,” Robert Flint says, “that Hegelianism, although the most elaborate of all idealistic systems, presents only the feeblest of barriers even to materialism.” This is perfectly true, though Flint should have said “as a consequence of being” instead of “although”.

The selfsame Flint is quite right when he goes on to say the following: “It is true that thought is placed by it” (Hegel’s system. – G.P.) “before matter, and matter is represented as the stage of a process of thought; but since the thought which is placed before matter is unconscious thought – thought which is neither subject nor object, which is therefore not real thought, nor even so much as a ghost or phantasm of thought – matter is still the first reality, the first actual existence, and the power in matter, the tendency in it to rise above itself, the root and basis of spirit subjective, objective, and absolute.” [20] It will easily be understood how this inconsistency, inevitable in idealism, facilitated the revolution in philosophy we are referring to. This inconsistency makes itself particularly felt in the philosophy of history. “Hegel is guilty of being doubly half-hearted: firstly in that, while declaring that philosophy is the mode of existence of the Absolute Spirit, he refuses to recognise the actual philosophical individual as the Absolute Spirit; secondly, in that he lets the Absolute Spirit as the Absolute Spirit make history only in appearance. For since the Absolute Spirit becomes conscious of itself as the creative World Spirit only post festum in the philosopher, its making of history exists only in the consciousness, in the opinion and conception of the philosopher, i.e., only in the speculative imagination.” These lines come from Karl Marx, the father of present-day dialectical materialism. [21]

The significance of the philosophical revolution brought about by this man of genius was expressed by him in the following brief words: “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ’the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ’the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” [22]

Before setting forth the results Marx obtained with the aid of this method, we shall make a cursory review of the trends that emerged in French historical science during the Restoration.

The French “philosophers” were convinced that it was public opinion that governed the world. When they recollected that, according to their own sensualist theory, man, with his opinions, is a product of the social environment, they averred that “everything depends on legislation”, supposing that this brief but instructive reply settled the question. Further, to them “legislation”’ meant first and foremost public law, the “government” of each particular country. During the first decades of our century, this point of view was ever more rejected. It was beginning to be asked whether it would not be more correct to seek for the roots of political institutions in civil law. [23] The replies to this question were now affirmative.

“It is through an examination of political institutions,” Guizot wrote, “that most writers, scholars, historians or publicists have sought to understand the condition of society, and the degree or brand of its civilisation. It would have been wiser to begin with a study of society itself in order to ascertain and understand its political institutions. Prior to becoming cause, institutions are an effect; society creates them before itself being modified by their influence and, instead of trying to discover in the system or forms of government what the condition of a people has been, one should first and foremost examine the condition of a people to learn what its government should or could be ... Society, its composition, the way of life of individuals according to their social standing, the relations between various classes of individuals, and finally the status of individuals – this is assuredly the first question that attracts the attention of the historian who wishes to know how peoples lived, and of the publicist writer who wishes to learn how they were governed.” [24]

What we have here is a complete revolution in the historical views of the “philosophers”. But Guizot goes even farther in his analysis of the “composition of society”. In his opinion, the civil life of all modern peoples is intimately linked with landed-property relations, which is why the latter should be studied before civil life. “To understand political institutions, one should know the various social conditions and their relations. To understand the various social conditions one should know the nature and relations of landed property.” [25] It was from this point of view that Guizot examined the history of France under the Merovingians and the Carolingians. In his history of the English Revolution, he took a new step forward in regarding that event as an episode in the class struggle of modern society, making property relations rather than landed-property relations the backbone of political movements.

Augustin Thierry arrived at the same views. In his writings on the history of England and France, he regarded the development of society as the motivation of political events. He was very far from thinking that the world was governed by public opinion, which to him meant only a more or less appropriate expression of social interests. Here is an example of his understanding of the struggle waged by Parliament against Charles I.

”Anyone whose ancestors came over with the Conqueror, left his castle for the Royalist camp to take a position in keeping with his rank. The townsmen flocked to the opposite camp ... Idlers and those who wanted only enjoyment without labour, irrespective of the caste they belonged to, joined the Royalist forces to defend their own interests; at the same time families of the caste of former conquerors who had made good in industry joined the Parliamentary party. On both sides the war was conducted for these positive interests. All the rest was merely a semblance or a pretext. Those who defended the cause of the subjects were mostly Presbyterians, i.e., were opposed to all and any subordination even in religion. Those who supported the opposite cause belonged to the Church of England or the Catholic faith. That was because, even in the realm of religion, they wanted power and the right to tax others.” [26]

This is fairly clear, but seems clearer than it actually is. Political revolutions are indeed a consequence of the struggle that classes wage for their positive interests, their economic interests. But what is the cause that gives the economic interests of a particular class one form or another? What is the cause that gives rise to classes in society? True, Augustin Thierry speaks of “manufactures”, but with him this concept is very vague, and to cope with this difficulty, he goes back to the Norman Conquest. Thus, the classes whose struggle gave rise to the English Revolution owed their descent to the Norman Conquest. “All this began with the Conquest,” he says, “and it is the Conquest that underlies the whole matter.” But what is to be understood by conquest? Does it not return us to the activities of “government”, for which we have attempted to find an explanation? Even if we disregard all this, the fact of conquest can never account for the nodal consequences of that conquest. Prior to the conquest of Gaul by the Barbarians, it had been conquered by the Romans, but the social consequences of these two conquests were quite different. Wherein lay the cause? Without any doubt, the Gauls of Caesar’s times lived in conditions different from that of the fifth-century Gauls; neither can there be any doubt that the Roman conquerors in no way resembled the “Barbarians” – the Franks and the Burgundians. But can all these distinctions be accounted for by other conquests? We can enumerate all kinds of known and all possible conquests. Nevertheless, we shall remain within a vicious circle; each time we return to the inescapable conclusion that there is, in the life of peoples, a something, an x, an unknown quantity, to which the “strength” of the peoples themselves and of the various classes existing in them owes its origin, its direction and its modifications. In short, it is clear that such “strength” is based on a something, so that the question can be reduced to a definition of the nature of that unknown quantity. [27]

Guizot is also hemmed in by the selfsame contradictions. What do the “property relations” in the peoples spoken of in his Essais owe their origin to? They stem from the actions of conquerors: “After the conquest, the Franks became landowners ... The absolute independence of their landed property was their right, just as the independence of their persons was; that independence had no other guarantee than the strength of the possessor but, in using his strength to defend it, he thought he was exercising his right”, etc. [28]

It is no less characteristic that, for Guizot, civil life was closely linked with “landed-property relations” only in the case of “modern peoples”.

Neither Mignet nor any other French historian of the time (and the French historians of the time were outstanding in more than one respect) was able to extricate himself from the difficulty that brought Guizot and Augustin Thierry to a standstill. They were already well aware that the cause of society’s development should be sought in its economic relations. They already realised that underlying political movements were economic interests, which were paving a way there. After the French Revolution, that epic struggle waged by the bourgeoisie against the nobility and the clergy, [29]] it would have been hard to fail to understand that. However, they were unable to explain the origin of society’s economic structure. Whenever they dealt with this subject, they addressed themselves to conquest, harking back to the viewpoint held in the eighteenth century, since the conqueror was also a “legislator”, only from without.

Thus, Hegel, against his will, so to say, arrived at the conclusion that the solution of the mystery of the peoples’ historical destinies should be sought in their social conditions (in “property”). The French historians of the Restoration, for their part, deliberately referred to “positive interests”, to economic conditions, as an explanation of the origin and development of various forms of “government”. However, neither of them – neither the idealist philosopher nor the positive historiographers – were able to solve the grand problem that inescapably confronted them: on what, in its turn, did the structure of society, property relations, depend. As long as this grand problem remained unsolved, all research into what was called in France les sciences morales et politiques was not built on any genuinely scientific foundation, it was with full justice that these pseudo-sciences could be contrasted with mathematics and the natural sciences as the sole “exact” sciences, those specifically termed sciences.

Thus the task of dialectical materialism was determined in advance. Philosophy, which had in past centuries rendered vast services to natural science, now had to lead social science out of the labyrinth of its contradictions. On accomplishing that task, philosophy might say: “I have fulfilled my duty, and can now depart”, since exact science is bound, in the future, to render the hypotheses of philosophy quite useless.

The features of a new understanding of history, excellently formulated and set forth with the utmost clarity, are already contained in articles by Marx and Engels in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Paris 1844; The Holy Family by the same two authors; The Condition of the Working Class in England by Engels; The Poverty of Philosophy by Marx; Manifesto of the Communist Party by Marx and Engels, and Wage Labour and Capital by Marx. However, we find a systematic if brief outline in Marx’s book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Berlin 1859.

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines] their consciousness.” [30]

But what is meant by relations of production? It is what is called in legal parlance property relations, of which Guizot and Hegel spoke. In explaining the origin of these relations, Marx’s theory thus replies to a question that the representatives of science and philosophy prior to him had been unable to answer.

Man, together with his “opinions” and “education”, is a product of his social environment as was well known to the French materialists of the eighteenth century, though they often lost sight of this. The historical development of “public opinion”, like the entire history of mankind, is a law-governed process, as was stated by the German idealists of the nineteenth century. This process, however, is determined, not by the properties of the “World Spirit”, as such idealists thought, but by the actual conditions of man’s existence. The forms of “’government”, of which the philosophers had so much to say, are rooted in what Guizot tersely called society, and Hegel civil society. But the development of civil society is determined by the development of the productive forces at men’s disposal. Marx’s understanding of history, called narrow-minded and one-sided by the ignoramuses, is in fact the lawful outcome of centuries of development of historical ideas. It contains them all, inasmuch as they possess genuine value; it places them on far firmer ground than they ever stood on during any period of their efflorescence. That is why, to use an already quoted expression of Hegel’s, it is the most developed, rich and concrete of them.

Footnotes

1. See Book XI of Dichtung und Wahrheit, in which Goethe describes his impression of Système de la Nature.

2. Encyklopädie herausgegeben von L.v. Henning, § 31.

3. ibid., § 81 and Supplement.

4. Wissenschaft der Logik, Nürnberg 1812, I. Band, I. Buch. S.42.

5. Logik, I. Band, I. Buch, S.313.

6. Cf. Pensées et réflexions d’Helvetius, in Vol.III of his Œuvres complètes, Paris 1818, p.307.

7. System des transcedentalen Idealismus, Tübingen, 1800, S.426 und f.

8. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 9. Bd. der Hegelschen Werke, herausgegeben von E. Gans, S.22, 30. Cf. Schelling, op. cit., S.424.

9. Cf. our essay on Holbach.

10. Encyklopädie, I. Teil, § 156, Zusatz.

11. Incidentally, instead of reading Holbach’s book, the German reader might turn the pages of Leben Jesu (H.E. Paulus, Heidelberg 1828), which sets forth the same point of view. Only the German Enlightener tries to laud that which the French philosopher fought against so passionately. Paulus sees a miracle of goodness and wisdom in a person who produced on Holbach the impression of an ignorant and depraved idler.

12. Encyklopädie, § 13.

13. Philosophie der Geschichte, S.50-51.

14. Die heilige Familie, oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik. Gegen Bruno Bauer and Konsorten. Von F. Engels und K. Marx, Frankfurt a.M. 1845, S.79. [1*]

15. Die heilige Familie, S.80-84. [2*]

16. For other examples of the same kind we shall refer the reader to our article For the Sixtieth Anniversary of Hegel’s Death, Neue Zeit 1891-92, Nos.7, 8, 9. [3*]

17. In this respect, incidentally, Lange followed the views and customs of all learned writers belonging to “good society”. In his turn, Hettner often compared the doctrine of Diderot with that of the modern materialists. But whom did he consider as representative of modern materialists? Moleschott! Hettner knows so little of the condition of modern materialism that he is sure ho is expressing something very profound in writing: “In the doctrine of morality, materialism has not yet risen above such miserable attempts (i.e., those made by the eighteenth-century materialists. – G.P.). If materialism would adduce proof of its viability, then its immediate and most important task lies in evolving a doctrine of morality” (Literaturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts, 2. Teil, Braunschweig, 1881, S.402).You are late to recall it, dear Sir!

18. “Yet one should recognise in materialism an enthusiastic striving to emerge from the limits of a dualism which assumes two different worlds as equally substantial and true, and to do away with the sunderance of the initial unity.” (Encyklopädie, III. Teil, § 389 und Zusatz). We shall note, in passing, that in his History of Philosophy Hegel gave in a few words a better appraisal of French materialism and of such men as Helvetius than the professional historians of materialism did.

19. [Plekhanov is quoting from the French translation of Huxley’s Hume. (English Men of Letters)] Hume, sa vie, sa philosophie, trad. de l’anglais par G. Compayré, Paris 1880, p.108. It would be correct to say that, despite everything, agnosticism is simply a cowardly materialism that tries to preserve an air of decency.

20. Philosophy of History in France and Germany, Edinburgh and London 1874. p.503.

21. Die heilige Familie, S.127. [4*]

22. Das Kapital, I. Band, 3. Aufl., Vorwort zur 2. Aufl., S.XIX. [5*]

23. Following the events of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, it was no longer so easy to think that “it is public opinion that governs the world”: those events often revealed the impotence of public opinion. “So many events decided by force; so many crimes absolved by success; so many virtues branded by censure; so many misfortunes insulted by might; so many generous sentiments made the butt of mockery; so many vile calculations hypocritically commented on; all these wore down hope even in those who were most devoted to the cult of reason ...”, wrote Mme. de Staël in the eighth year of the French republic (De la littérature considerée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, t.I, p.IV, Introduction). Indeed, all the utopians of the Restoration [6*] and Louis-Philippe period were convinced that public opinion governed the world. This was the underlying principle of their philosophy of history. However, we shall not deal here with the psychology of the utopians.

24. Essais sur l’Histoire de France, 10e ed., Paris 1860, pp.73-74. The first edition of these Essais appeared in 1822.

25. Essais sur l’Histoire de France, pp.75-76.

26. Œuvres complètes de M. Augustin Thierry, VI tome, 10 éd., Paris 1866, p.60. The article we are quoting from – Vues des révolutions d’Angleterre – was published in Censeur Européen in 1817, i.e., several years before the appearance of Guizot’s Essais.

27. Augustin Thierry owed the clearest of his historical views to Saint-Simon, who did very much to explain mankind’s historical development. However, he was unable to define the x we have mentioned above. To him, human nature was in essence a sufficient cause of mankind’s development. He came up against the same stumbling block as the eighteenth-century materialist philosophers. Incidentally, we hope to be able to set forth SaintSimon’s views in a special essay. [7*]

28. Guizot, op. cit., pp.81-83.

29. The liberal French historians of the Restoration often spoke of the class struggle and, moreover, made sympathetic reference to it. They were not even horrified by the spilling of blood. “... So I repeat that war, that is to say the revolution, was necessary,” Thiers exclaimed in a note to his History of the French Revolution (éd. de 1834, t.I, p.365). “God has given people justice only at the price of struggle.” As long as the bourgeoisie had not yet completed its struggle against the aristocracy, the theorists of the bourgeoisie had no objections to the class struggle. The appearance on the historical scene of the proletariat, with its struggle against the bourgeoisie, brought considerable changes into the views of those theorists, who today find the standpoint of the “class struggle” too “narrow-minded”. Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis!

30. Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Vorwort, S.V. [8*]

Notes

1*. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol.4, Moscow, 1975, pp.57-58.

2*. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol.4, Moscow 1975, pp.58-59.

3*. See present edition, Vol.I, pp.401-26.

4*. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol.4, Moscow 1975, p.86.

5*. Karl Marx, Capital, Moscow 1974, Vol.I, p.29.

6*. This refers to the period of the restoration of the Bourbons (1814-30) interrupted by Napoleon’s Hundred Days (1815).

7*. Plekhanov did not write a special essay on Saint-Simon though he devoted several pages to the latter in his articles Utopian Socialism in the Nineteenth Century and French Utopian Socialism of the Nineteenth Century.

8*. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow 1970, pp.20-21.

III. Marx - Part Two

The eighteenth-century philosophers were incessantly referring to human nature, which was called upon to explain the history of mankind and specify the qualities that a “’perfect legislation” should possess. This was the idea underlying all utopias: in their ideal conceptions of a perfect society, the utopians always proceeded from argumentations regarding human nature. Augustin Thierry’s and Guizot’s “conquest” also takes us back to human nature, i.e., to the more or less well imagined, the more or less arbitrary “nature” of the conqueror. [31] But if human nature is something constant, then it is patently absurd to wish to explain, with its help, mankind’s historical fortunes, which are changeable in their essence; if human nature is given to change, then one should ask oneself the following question: why does that change take place? The German idealists, those past masters of logic, have already admitted that human nature is a piece of most egregious fiction. They have tried to establish the motivation of historical development outside of man, who, in their opinion, obeys only the irresistible urges of that cause. To them, however, that motive force was the World Spirit, i.e., one aspect of human nature that had passed through the filter of abstraction. Marx’s theory has now put an end to all such fictions, errors and contradictions. Through the impact of his labour on Nature, which exists outside of him, man changes his own nature. Consequently, human nature, in its turn, has its own history; to understand that history, one has to understand how man’s impact takes place on Nature, which exists outside of him.

Helvetius made an attempt to explain the development of human societies by basing it on men’s physical needs. This attempt was doomed to failure because, strictly speaking, what should have been examined was not man’s needs, but the ways in which they could be satisfied.

An animal has physical wants just as man has. However, animals do not produce anything; they simply gain possession of objects, whose production is, so to speak, left to Nature. To gain possession of such objects, they use their organs – teeth, tongue, limbs, and so on. That is why an animal’s adaptation to its natural environment is effected through a transformation of its organs, by changes in its anatomical structure. Matters are not so simple as that with the animal that proudly calls itself Homo sapiens. “He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his wants.” He is a producer and uses tools in the process of production. “Leaving out of consideration such ready-made moans of subsistence as fruits, in gathering which a man’s own limhs serve as the instruments of his labour, the first tiling of which the labourer possesses himself is not the subject of labour but its instrument. Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible.” [32] It is thus that his struggle for existence differs substantially from that waged by the oilier animals: the tool-making animal adapts himself to his natural environment by changing his artificial organs. In comparison with these changes, those in his anatomical structure have lost all significance. Thus Darwin says that Europeans who have settled in America very soon undergo physical changes. However, in the opinion of Darwin himself, these changes are “most insignificant”, they are quite negligible as compared with the innumerable changes in the Americans’ artificial organs. Thus, as soon as man becomes a toolmaking animal, lie enters a new phase of his developmeiit: his zoological development comes to an end, and his historical life road commences.

Darwin questions the view that there are no animals that make use of tools. He cites many instances to prove the reverse: in its natural state, the chimpanzee uses a stone to split hard-shelled wild fruit; in India, trained elephants break branches off trees and use them to keep flies away. All this may be perfectly true, but it should not he forgotten, in the first place, that quantitative changes turn into qualitative distinctions. With animals, the use of tools, is to bo met only in an embryonic state; their influence on animals way of life is infinitesimal; conversely, the use of tools exerts a decisive influence on man’s way of life. It is in this sense that Marx says: “The use and fabrication of instruments of labour, although existing in the germ among certain species of animals, is specifically characteristic of the human labour-process.” [33]

It is self-evident that man does not only use mechanical means of labour, but Marx considers the latter more characteristic of him: they comprise what he calls the bone and muscle structure of production. Their relics have the same significance for an appraisal of extinct economic social systems as the remains of bones have for the study of extinct species of animals. “It is not the articles made, hut how they are made, and by what instruments, that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs.” [34] Prior to Marx, the historians and “sociologists”, who were full of idealist prejudices, did not even suspect how valuable a means for most important discoveries this fossil technology could be. “Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter.” [35]

The present-day historians of culture speak facilely of the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, a division of pre-historic times that is based on the main materials used for the production of weapons and and utensils. These epochs are subdivided into various periods, e.g., those of chipped stone and of polished stone. Consequently, the historians do not completely close their eyes to fossil technology, but they regrettably limit themselves in this area to general remarks that can lead to nothing but the commonplace. They withdraw into this area only for want of something better, and abandon it as soon as the discovery is made in history, in the proper meaning of the term, of other facts that seem more worthy of man and his mind. In this respect, they follow in the main the example of the eighteenth century, behaving in the way Condorcet did a hundred years ago.

Condorcet’s celebrated Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain begins with a description of the development of primitive man’s productive forces from the most uncouth “arts” to the rudiments of agriculture. Condorcet goes so far as to state that “the art of making weapons, cooking food, and obtaining the utensils needed for that cooking, preserving the cooked food for a certain time for provision against the seasons when it was impossible to find fresh food ... was the first feature distinguishing human society from the societies of other species of animals”. At the same time, Condorcet was fully aware that so important an “art” as agriculture was bound to have a vast influence on the structure of society. However, his “third epoch” of the history of mankind already includes “the progress of agricultural peoples until the invention of alphabetical writing”; the fourth is that of the progress of the human spirit in Greece until the division of the sciences in the age of Alexander; the fifth is marked by the progress of the sciences, and so on. Quite unwittingly, Condorcet completely changed the principle of his division, at once revealing that he first spoke only of the development of the productive forces because he had no other choice. In exactly the same way, it emerges that the “progress” achieved in the held of production and people’s material life in general was seen by him only as a measure of the progress of the spirit, to which they owed everything, without repayment of anything of the same kind.

To Condorcet, the means of production were an effect, while man’s spiritual abilities, his spirit, were a cause. Since, as a metaphysician, lie remained blind to the dialectics inherent in any process in Nature or in society, according to which any cause is a cause only after it lias been an effect, and any effect, in its turn, becomes a cause; since lie noted the existence of such dialectics only when manifested in the special form of the relation of interaction, it was natural for him to prefer taking the bull by the horns and – insofar as he was able, and not obliged, to act otherwise – to address himself to cause. To him, the human spirit was the prime mover of historical development. It was to that spirit that Condorcet, like all “philosophers”, attributed a “natural” proclivity towards progress. This was of course a highly superficial point of view, but we shall be fair, and ask: have the present-day historians of culture departed very far from Condorcet’s point of view? [36]

It is as clear as day that the use of implements, however imperfect, presupposes the relatively tremendous development of the intellectual faculties. A lot of water had run under the bridge before our ape-man ancestors achieved that degree of the development of the “spirit”. How did they achieve it? Wo should put that question, not to history but to zoology. For the latter, the reply has been given by Darwin, who has at least shown how man’s zoological evolution could have reached the point that interests us. True, the ape-man “spirit” plays a fairly passive role in Darwin’s hypothesis, since that hypothesis docs not deal with its allegedly natural trend towards progress, inasmuch as the latter is effected through a conjuncture of circumstances whose nature is not very elevated. Thus, according to Darwin, “Man could not have attained his present dominant position in the world without the use of his hands, which are so admirably adapted to act in obedience to his will.” [37] This was already asserted by Helvetius: he considered the development of the limbs – horribile dictu – the cause of the brain’s development, and what is far worse, that the development of the limbs was brought about, not by the ape-mau’s spirit but by the influence of the natural environment.

However that may be, zoology passes its Homo on to history as already possessing faculties necessary for the invention and employment of the most primitive implements. That is why history should merely trace the development of artificial organs and establish their influence on the development of the spirit, as has been done by zoology in respect of the natural organs. Since the latter’s development took place under the influence of the natural environment, it can be readily understood that things were the same with artificial organs.

The inhabitants of a country that has no metals cannot invent implements that are better than stone tools. For man to have domesticated the horse, cow, sheep and other animals, which have played such an important part in the development of his productive forces, he had to live in lands in which these animals – or rather their zoological ancestors – were to be found in a wild state. It was not in the steppes, of course, that the art of navigation arose, and so on. Consequently, the natural environment, the geographical environment, its poverty or wealth, exerted an indisputable influence on the development of industry. Moreover, the character of the geographical environment played another and even more remarkable role in the history of culture.

“It is not the mere fertility of the soil”, says Marx, “but the differentiation of the soil, the variety of its natural products, the changes of the seasons, which form the physical basis for the social divisions of labour, and which, by changes in the natural surroundings, spur man on to the multiplication of his wants, his capabilities, his means and modes of labour. It is the necessity of bringing a natural force under the control of society, of economising, of appropriating or subduing it on a large scale by the work of man’s hand, that first plays the decisive part in the history of industry. Examples are, the irrigation works in Egypt, Lombardy, Holland, or in India and Persia where irrigation by means of artificial canals, not only supplies the soil with the water indispensable to it, but also carries down to it, in the shape of sediment from the hills, mineral fertilisers.” [38]

Thus, man obtains from his natural environment the material for his artificial organs, with the aid of which he wages a struggle against Nature. The kind of environment that surrounds him determines the character of his productive activities, his means of production. But the means of production just as inevitably determine the mutual relations among men in the process of production, as an army’s weapons determine all its organisation and all the mutual relations of the individuals it is made up of. But then the relations between people in the social process of production determine the entire structure of society. Consequently, the influence exerted on that structure by the natural environment is indisputable: the character of the natural environment determines the character of the social environment.

An illustration: “The necessity for predicting the rise and fall of the Nile created Egyptian astronomy, and with it the dominion of the priests, as directors of agriculture.” [39]

But this is only one aspect of the matter. To avoid arriving at quite erroneous conclusions, another aspect has to be taken into account at the same time.

Production relations are an effect; productive forces are a cause. In its turn, however, an effect turns into a cause; production relations become a new source of the development of the productive forces; this brings about a double result.

1) The interaction between production relations and productive forces is a cause of social movement, which has its own logic and laws that are independent of the natural environment.

For example: at the first stage of its development, private property is always the result of the labour of the proprietor himself, as can well be seen in the Russian countryside. But there comes, of necessity, a time when private property acquires a character opposite to what it previously possessed: it presupposes the labour of another man, and becomes capitalist private property as can also be daily observed in the Russian countryside. This phenomenon is a consequence of the inherent laws of the evolution of private property. All that the natural environment is capable of effecting in this case consists in the acceleration of that development, by favouring the development of the productive forces.

2) Since social evolution has its specific logic, which is independent of any kind of direct influence on the part of the natural environment, it may happen that one and the same people, though it lives in one and the same country and maintains its physical features with almost no change, can possess, in various periods of its history, social and political institutions that bear little resemblance to each other and may even be quite their opposites. Attempts have been made to draw the conclusion therefrom that the geographical environment exerts no influence on the history of mankind. This conclusion, however, is quite erroneous. [40] The peoples that inhabited England in the times of Julius Caesar experienced the influence of the same geographical environment as did the English in the times of Cromwell. However, Cromwell’s contemporaries possessed productive forces far more powerful than the peoples of Caesar’s time. The geographical environment exerted a different influence, since Cromwell’s contemporaries had a quite different impact on the natural environment. The productive forces in seventeenth-century England were the outcome of her history; however, throughout that history, the geographical environment never ceased from exerting an influence, though always in different ways, on the country’s economic development.

The interrelation between social man and the geographical environment is greatly subject to change. It is affected by each new step made in the development of man’s productive forces. In consequence, the influence of the geographical environment on social man leads to differing results at different phases of the development of those forces. Yet there is nothing fortuitous in the changing interrelations between man and his habitat: in their succession, those relations form a law-governed pattern. To understand that process, one should not forget that the natural environment becomes an important factor in mankind’s historical development, not as a result of its influence on human nature but because of its influence on the development of the productive forces.

“The temperature of this land” (the reference is to the temperate zone of Asia. – G.P.), “in respect of the seasons of the year, which do not show any intemperate variations, mostly approaches the temperature of spring. But it is impossible for men in such a country to he courageous and vigorous, to stand up to labour and fatigue ... If the Asians are timid, without courage, less warlike and of a milder disposition than Europeans are, it is again in the nature of the seasons that the main cause should be sought. With the former, far from experiencing any great changes, they are very much alike, and pass from heat to cold in an imperceptible manner. Now in such a temperature, the spirit does not experience the powerful impacts, or the body the violent changes that naturally impress on man a sterner, more inflexible and more mettlesome character than when he has to live in a temperature that is always equable, because it is rapid changes from one extreme to another that arouse man’s spirit and wrest it out of a state of complacency and lassitude.”

These lines were written very long ago, for they belong to Hippocrates. [41] But even today there are quite a number of writers who have made no further advance in their appraisal of the influence of the geographical environment on mankind: it is the habitat that determines race, morals, science, philosophy, religion and, as an inevitable consequence, the social and political institutions. [42]

This may sound like the truth, but is in reality just as superficial as are all other attempts to explain the phenomena of social evolution with the aid of some concept of human nature.

As Buckle has very well put it, the influence of climate and soil on man is indirect; “... they have ... originated the most important consequences in regard to the general organisations of society, and from them there have followed many of those large and conspicuous differences between nations, which are often ascribed to some fundamental difference in the various races into which mankind is divided.” [43] Buckle willingly subscribed to a remark made by John Stuart Mill that “... of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences”. However, in speaking of Nature’s influence on mankind’s historical development, the selfsame Buckle commits the same errors with which he has reproached others so strongly and with full justification.

“Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are more frequent and more destructive in Italy, and in the Spanish and Portuguese peninsula, than in any other of the great countries” (of Europe – G.P.), “and it is precisely there that superstition is most rife, and the superstitious classes most powerful. Those were the countries where the clergy first established their authority, where the worst corruptions of Christianity took place, and where superstition has during the longest period retained the firmest hold.” [44]

Thus, as Buckle sees it, the habitat influences, not only the intensity of the inhabitants’ religious sentiments but also the clergy’s social standing, i.e., the entire social structure of society. But that is not all.

“Now it is remarkable that all the greatest painters, and nearly all the greatest sculptors, modern Europe has possessed, have been produced by the Italian and Spanish peninsulas. In regard to science, Italy has no doubt had several men of conspicuous ability; but their numbers are out of all proportion small when compared with her artists and poets.” [45]

Thus, a country’s physical features are of decisive importance to the development of the sciences and arts in it. Have any of the most ardent supporters of the “vulgar” theory of races said anything more bold and less grounded?

The scientific history of mankind’s spiritual development has yet to be written; for the time being, we have to be content with more or less ingenious hypotheses. However, there are different kinds of hypotheses. Buckle’s hypothesis on the influence of Nature does not hold water.

Indeed, ancient Greece was famed for her thinkers just as much as for her artists, yet Nature in Greece is hardly less majestic than in Italy or Spain. Even if we assume that her influence on the human imagination was stronger in Italy than in the homeland of Pericles, it will suffice to recall that “Greater Greece” included Southern Italy and the neighbouring islands, which did not prevent her from “producing” many thinkers.

Just as anywhere else, the fine arts in present-day Italy and Spain have their history. Italian painting flourished over a very short period of not more than fifty or sixty years. [46] In Spain, too, painting flourished for a brief period. We are quite unable to indicate the causes for Italian painting having flourished just during that period (from the last quarter of the fifteenth century until the first third of the sixteenth century) and not in any other epoch, for instance, fifty years earlier or later: what we do know very well is that Nature in the Italian peninsula has nothing to do with the matter, for it was the same in the fifteenth century as it was in the thirteenth or seventeenth. If a variable magnitude changes, that does not happen because a constant remains unchanged.

To what Buckle has to say on the influence and power of the clergy in Italy, we can object that it would be hard to find an instance more contradictory in essence to the proposition it is called upon to reinforce. In the first place, the role of the clergy in Catholic Italy in no way resembled the role of the priests in ancient Rome, though the country’s physical features underwent no appreciable changes in the interim. In the second place, the Catholic Church being an international body, it is obvious that the Pope, that head of a “superstitious class”, owed the greater part of his power in Italy to causes that had nothing in common either with the physical features of the country or with its own social structure. [47] Often expelled by the inhabitants of Rome, the “Holy Father” was able to return to the Eternal City only thanks to help from the transalpine states. Though Rome’s quite exclusive position as the abode of the head of the Church exerted a powerful influence on the role of the clergy in all Italy, it should not be thought that the Italian clergy were always more powerful than their counterparts in the other European countries, in Germany, for example. That would be a gross error. [48]

Students of the history of religions have been prone, right down to our days, to clutch at racial features each time they have come up against any peculiarity in the religious doctrine of some people, the origins of which are difficult to establish. Nevertheless, they have to admit, since it is obvious, the initial similarity of the religions of savages and barbarians inhabiting areas that are quite different in character. [49] In the same way, they have been forced to acknowledge the tremendous influence that any people’s way of life and means of production have on the nature of their religious doctrines. [50] That is why science would only stand to gain by abandoning all kinds of vague and “hypothetical” reasoning on the direct influence of the geographical environment on any property of the “human spirit”, and by trying, first and foremost, to determine the role played by that environment in the development of the productive forces and, through those forces, in the entire social and spiritual – in a word, the historical – development of peoples.

But let us go further:

“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what lie thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.” [51]

Everything finite is that which cancels itself, goes over into its opposite. The reader will see that, according to Marx, the same holds true of both social and political institutions. Any social institution is, first and foremost, a “form of development” of the productive forces. It is, so to speak, the finest period in its life. It gains strength, develops and flourishes. People instinctively become attached to it, and declare it “divine” or “natural”. But old age gradually draws closer and decrepitude sets in. People begin to notice that not everything in a particular institution is as splendid as was previously thought; they engage in a struggle against it, declare it “born of the devil” or “contrary to Nature”, and ultimately abolish it. This takes place because society’s productive forces are no longer the same, because they have taken a new step forward, as a result of which changes have taken place in human relations and in the social process of production. Gradual quantitative changes turn into qualitative distinctions. The limes of such changes are marked by leaps, a break in continuity. That is the same dialectics that we know from Hegel but yet it is not the same. In Marx’s philosophy, it turned into the complete opposite of what it had been with Hegel. To Hegel, the dialectics of social life, like any dialectics of the finite in general, ultimately had a mystical cause, the nature of the Infinite, Ahsolute Spirit. With Marx, it depends on absolutely real causes: the development of the means of production at the disposal of society. Mutatis mutandis. Darwin took up the same stand to explain the “origin of species”. Just in the same way as, since Darwin’s times, there has been no more need to appeal to trends towards “progress” as “inborn” in organisms (trends whose existence was considered possible by Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin) for an explanation of the development of species, we today no longer need to appeal, in the field of social science, to mystical “trends” in the “human spirit” so as to understand its “progress”. Men’s way of life is sufficient for us to find an explanation of their sentiments and thoughts.

Fichte complained bitterly that “it is easier to drive most people to consider themselves pieces of lava on the Moon than their own selves”. Any good philistine of today will also sooner admit that he is a “piece of lava on the Moon” than accept a theory according to which all his ideas, views and customs owe their origin to the economic relations of his time. He would appeal to human freedom, to reason and innumerable other no less excellent and estimable things. The good philistines do not even suspect, when they wax indignant with Marx, that it was this “narrow-minded” man who alone solved the contradictions that had tormented science for at least a whole century.

Let us consider an example. What is literature? Literature, the good philistines reply in chorus, is an expression of society. This is an excellent definition, but it has a shortcoming: it is so vague tliat it says absolutely nothing. In what measure does literature express society? And since society itself develops, how is social development reflected in literature? What literary forms correspond to each phase of mankind’s historical development? These inevitable and perfectly legitimate questions, however, remain unanswered in the definition just mentioned. Besides, since literature is an expression of society, it is evident that, before speaking of the development of literature, one must gain an understanding of the laws of social development and the hidden forces whose consequence that development is. The reader will see that the given definition has some value only because it presents us with a problem to which the “philosophers” of the times of Voltaire, as well as nineteenth-century historians and philosophers, already approached, namely: what does social development ultimately depend on?

The ancients knew very well that, for instance, eloquence depends in considerable measure on society’s mores and political structure (cf. Dialogue de oratoribus, which is attributed to Tacitus). Writers of the last century knew that just as well. As we have shown in our preceding essay, Helvetius often addressed himself to the condition of society for an explanation of the origin of trends in aesthetic taste. In 1800 there appeared a book by Mme. do Stael-Holstein: De la littérature considerée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales. During the Restoration and under Louis Philippe, Villemain Sainte-Beuve and many others declared for all to hear that literary revolutions arose only as a consequence of social evolution. On the other side of the Rhine, great philosophers, who regarded literature and the fine arts, like everything else, in the process of becoming, already held firm views – this despite all their idealism on the close link between any art and the social milieu that brings forth the artist. [52] Finally, to avoid an excess of examples, we shall only point out that Hippolyte Taine, that outstanding critic and historian of literature, advanced the following rule as the basic principle of his scientific aesthetics: “The major changes that take place in the relations between people gradually produce the corresponding changes in people’s thoughts”. It might have been thought that this statement provided a complete solution of the question and clearly indicated the road of a scientific history of literature and the fine arts. Yet, strangely enough, we see that our present-day historians of literature do not have a clearer picture of mankind’s spiritual development than was the case a hundred years ago. How is one to explain this amazing philosophical sterility in people who lack neither diligence nor, and especially, learning?

One does not have to seek far afield to discover the reason. However, to understand that reason, one must first establish wherein lie the merits and demerits of contemporary scientific aesthetics.

According to Taine, “it differs from the old aesthetics in its being of an historical, not dogmatic nature, i.e., in its stating laws, and not issuing instructions”. That is excellent, but how can such aesthetics give us guidance for a study of literature and various arts? How does it operate in the study of laws? How does it consider a work of art?

Here, we shall quote from the same writer and, to preclude any misunderstanding, we shall let him speak forth in detail.

After stating that a work of art is determined by the general state of minds and the predominant morals, and citing historical examples, he goes on to say:

“In the various cases we have examined, you have noticed, first of all, a general situation, that is to say, the universal presence of certain boons and certain evils, a condition of servitude or of freedom, a state of poverty or wealth, a definite form of society, a definite brand of religion; in Greece, free cities, warlike and well provided with slaves; in the Middle Ages, oppression, incursions, feudal plunder, and an exalted Christianity; in the seventeenth century, life at court; the industrial and learned democracy of the nineteenth; in short, a sum of circumstances that men have to how to, and obey ... This situation develops in them corresponding requirements, distinct aptitudes and particular sentiments ... Then this group of sentiments, requirements and aptitudes, when it manifests itself in its entirety and with brilliance in one and the same soul, produces a predominant type, i.e., a model that contemporaries admire and like: in Greece, this was the handsome and nude young man of fine race, accomplished in all bodily exercises; in the Middle Ages, the ecstatic monk and the enamoured knight; in the sixteenth century, the perfect courtier; in our days, a Faust or a Werther, insatiable and sad. But since this type is the most interesting, the most important and the most outstanding, as compared with all others, it is him that artists present to the public, now concentrating him in a single image when their art – as in painting, sculpture, the novel, the epic or the theatre – is imitative, now splitting him up into components when their art – such as architecture and music – evokes emotions without creating images. Therefore all their work can be expressed in saying that they either depict this predominant type or address themselves to him, as in the symphonies of Beethoven and in the rose-windows of cathedrals; they represent him in the Meleager and the antique Niobides, and in Racine’s Agamemnon and Achilles. It follows that all art depends upon him, because art applies itself entirely to pleasing him or giving him expression. A general situation, which gives rise to distinct propensities and faculties; a predominant type created by the power of those propensities and faculties; sounds, forms, colours and words which make that type alive or are in accord with the propensities and faculties that go to make it up – such are the four terms of the series. The first brings in its train the second, which brings up the third, and the latter, the fourth, so that the least change in any of the terms of the series leads up to a corresponding alteration in those that follow and reveals a corresponding change in the preceding, permits a descent or an ascent, through pure reasoning, from one to the other. As far as I can judge, this formula leaves nothing beyond the confines of its hold.” [53]

Actually, this “formula” does not cover very many important things. Certain remarks might be made on the arguments that accompany it. Thus, one might claim with good reason that the Middle Ages did not have only ecstatic monks and enamoured knights [54] in the capacity of “predominant types”. It might also be affirmed, with great probability, that “in our days”, it is not only Faust and Werther that inspire our artists. But, however that may be, it is obvious that Taine’s “formula” advances us considerably along the road towards an understanding of the history of art, and tells us far more than the vague definition that “ literature is an expression of society”. In using this formula,Taine made an important contribution to the study of the history of the fine arts and literature. But, when reading his finest writings, such as his Philosophie de l’art, from which we have just quoted, his essay on Racine, and his Histoire de la littérature anglaise, one asks oneself: does all this satisfy? Of course, it does not! Despite all his talent and all the indisputable advantages of his method, the author gives us nothing but an outline, which, taken even as such, leaves much to be desired. His Histoire de la littérature anglaise is more of a series of brilliant characterisations than a history. What Taine tells us about ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy or the Netherlands acquaints us with the main features in the art of each of these countries, but explains nothing of their historical origins, or does so in a most inconsiderable degree. It should be noted, that, in this case, it is not the author who is at fault hut his point of view, his understanding of the history of literature.

Inasmuch as it is claimed that the history of art is closely linked with that of the social milieu, and inasmuch as the opinion is expressed that any major change in men’s relations engenders a corresponding change in their ideas, the necessity is recognised of the need to first establish the laws of the evolution of the social milieu and gain a clear understanding of the causes of major changes in men’s relations, so as then to correctly establish the laws of the evolution of art. In short, “historical aesthetics” should he based on a scientific understanding of the history of societies. Has Taine done that in any satisfactory manner? No, he has not. A materialist in the field of the philosophy of art, he is an idealist in his understanding of history. “Just as astronomy is ultimately a problem of mechanics, and physiology a problem of chemistry, history is ultimately a problem of psychology”, [55] he asserts. He regards the social milieu he is constantly appealing to as a product of the human spirit. Consequently, we find in him the same contradiction as we have met in the French eighteenth-century materialists: man’s ideas owe their origin to man’s condition; man’s condition ultimately owes its origin to man’s ideas. At this point, we shall ask the reader: can one use the historical method in aesthetics if one has such a confused and contradictory understanding of history in general? Of course not. One may possess extraordinary ability and yet be very far from accomplishing a task one has set oneself, if one makes do with an aesthetics which is only semi-historical.

The French eighteenth-century philosophers wanted to provide an explanation of the history of the arts and literature by addressing themselves to the properties of human nature. Mankind goes through the same phases of life as does the individual: childhood, youth, maturity and so on; the epic corresponds to childhood; eloquence and the drama to youth; philosophy to maturity, and so on. [56] In one of our preceding essays, we pointed out that such a comparison is quite groundless. It may also be added here that Taine’s “historical” aesthetics in no way prevented him from making use of “human nature” as a key to all doors that failed to open for analysis at the first attempt. With Taine, however, the reference to human nature took another form. He did not speak of the phases in the evolution of the human individual; instead, he often – regrettably, only too often – spoke of race. “What is called race,” he said, “is the inborn and hereditary dispositions that man brings into the world with himself.” [57] Nothing is easier, in shrugging off all difficulties, than to ascribe pnenomena just a little more complex to the operation of such inborn and inherited dispositions. However historical aesthetics can only suffer great detriment therefrom.

Henry Sumner Maine was firmly convinced of the profound difference existing between the Aryan race and races of “other origins”, in everything bearing upon social evolution. less, he expressed a noteworthy wish: “It is to be hoped that contemporary thought will before long make an effort to emancipate itself from those habits of levity in adopting theories of race which it seems to have contracted. Many of these theories appear to have little merit except the facility which they give for building on them inferences tremendously out of proportion to the mental labour which they cost the builder ...” [58] One can only hope that this wish will be achieved as soon as possible. Unfortunately, that is not as simple as might seem at first glance. “Many,” says Maine, “perhaps most, of the differences in kind alleged to exist between Aryan sub-races are really differences merely in degree of development ...” This is beyond dispute. However, to no longer need the main key in the theory of race, one should evidently have a correct understanding of the features of the various stages of development. That is impossible without a contradiction-free understanding of history, an understanding Taine did not possess. But then, do many historians and critics possess it?

Lying before us is Geschichte der deutschen Nationalliteratur by Dr. Hermann Kluge, a book which seems to be read fairly extensively in Germany, but presents nothing out of the ordinary as use-value. What is deserving of our attention therein is the periods into which the author divides the history of German literature. We find seven periods given in this book (pp.7-8, 14th edition):

from the most ancient times down to Charlemagne (800 AD). In the main, this was an epoch of the ancient pagan folksongs, a period which saw the appearance of the ancient paladin legends;

from Charlemagne till the early twelfth century (800-1100 AD), a period in which the ancient national paganism yielded place to Christianity, this after a fierce struggle. Literature came mostly under the influence of the clergy;

the first outpouring of German literature (1100-1300 AD), when poetry was mostly cultivated by the knights;

the development of poetry by the estate of burghers and craftsmen (1300-1500 AD);

German literature during the Reformation (1500-1624 AD);

poetry under the control of the scholars; an epoch of imitation (1624-1748);

the second outpouring of German literature, commencing with 1748.

More competent than we are, the German reader can judge for himself as to the details of this division. To us it seems absolutely eclectic, i.e., based, not on a single principle, which is an essential condition of any scientific classification and division, but on several principles that are incommensurable with one another. In the first periods, literature, it is asserted, developed under the exclusive influence of religious ideas. Then came the third and the fourth periods, in which its development was determined by the .social structure, the condition of the classes that “cultivated” it. From 1500, religious ideas returned as the main factor of literary evolution; the reformation set in. However, this hegemony of religious ideas lasted only 150 years: in 1624, the scholars took over the role of creators of German literature, etc. This division into periods is, to say the least, just as unsatisfactory as that used by Condorcet in his Esquisse d’un tableau des progrès de l’esprit humain. The reason is the same. Like Condorcet, Kluge does not know what social evolution and its effect – mankind’s spiritual evolution – depend on. Thus, we were right in saying that our century has seen very modest progress in this field.

But let us return to Hippolyte Taine. To him, the “general situation” under whose influence a work of art arises means the general existence of certain boons and certain evils, a condition of freedom or servitude, a state of poverty or wealth, a definite form of society, and the definite brand of religion. But a condition of freedom or servitude, of wealth or poverty, and, finally, the form of society are all features denoting the actual position of men in “the social production of their existence”. Religion is the fantastic form in which men’s actual condition is reflected in their minds. The latter is a cause, and the former an effect. If one adheres to idealism, one may, of course, affirm the opposite, namely that men owe their actual condition to religious ideas, in which case what we accept only as an effect should be considered a cause. At all events, I hope, it will be agreed that cause and effect cannot be equated in characterising the “general situation” in any given epoch, since that would lead to utter confusion: men’s actual condition would be constantly confounded with the general state of their morals and their spirit, or, in other words, an understanding of the expression “general situation” would be lost. This is exactly what happened with Taine as well as with a large number of historians of art. [59]

The materialist understanding of history finally relieves us of all these contradictions. True, it provides us with no magic formula, but it would be ridiculous to demand one to enable us at a moment’s notice to solve all the problems in mankind’s spiritual history; yet it leads us out of the vicious circle by indicating the correct road of scientific study for us to follow.

We are sure that many of our readers will be sincerely amazed to learn from us that, to Marx, the problem of history was, in a certain sense, a psychological problem, as well. Yet that is beyond dispute. Marx wrote as far back as 1845: “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism – but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such.” [60]

What is the meaning of these words, which, in certain measure, contain the programme of present-day materialism? It is that, if materialism does not wish to remain one-sided, as it has been till now; if it does not wish to eschew its own principle by constantly returning to the idealistic views; if it does not wish thereby to recognise that idealism is stronger in a definite area, it must provide a materialist explanation of all aspects of human life. The subjective aspect of that life means that very psychological aspect, “the human spirit”, men’s sentiments and ideas. To examine this aspect from the materialist point of view means, inasmuch as the reference is to a definite species, explaining the history of ideas through material conditions of the existence of people through economic history. Marx had to speak of a solution of a “psychological problem” all the more for his clearly seeing the vicious circle from which idealism, which was studying the problem, could not escape.

Thus Marx said almost the same as Taine did, only in somewhat different words. Let us see how Taine’s “formula” should be modified in accordance with those different words.

A given degree of the development of the productive forces; men’s relations in the process of social production, as determined by that degree of development; the form of society that expresses those relations; a definite state of the spirit and morals corresponding to that form of society; religion, philosophy, literature and art in accordance irith the abilities, directions of taste, and the propensities engendered by that state – we do not wish to say that this “formula” embraces everything – not at all! – but we would say that it has the unquestionable advantage of being a better expression of the causal link between the various “terms of the series”. As for the “ narrowness” and “one-sidedness” that the materialist understanding of history is usually reproached with, the reader will not find any trace of them here.

Footnotes

31. In his above-cited Essais, Guizot often makes direct reference to tho “needs of human nature”. In the second chapter of his hook De la proprieté, Thiers attempts to prove that “... observation of human nature is the true method to be followed to demonstrate man’s rights in society”. None of the eighteenth-century “philosophers” would have raised the least objections to this kind of “method”. Moreover, the communist and socialist utopians Thiers was opposed to would have had nothing against it either. Their arguments on social organisation were always based on one understanding or other of human nature. In this respect, the utopians’ point of view in noway differed from those of their opponents. It goes without saying that this did not at all prevent them from “deducing” human rights that were different from those “deduced” by Thiers, for instance.

32. Das Kapital, 3. Aufl., S.157. [9*]

33. ibid., S.158 [10*]

34. Das Kapital, 3. Aufl., S.158. [11*]

35. ibid., S. 374–75, Anmerkung 89. [12*]

36. Incidentally, the economists do not lag hehind the historians of culture in this respect. An instance is provided by what Michel Chevalier has to say about the progress achieved in labour productivity: “Man’s productive force develops constantly in the succession of epochs of civilisation. That development is one of the numerous and most attractive forms taken by the progress of society itself” (Weltausstellung von 1867. Berichte des internationalen Jury. Einleitung von Michel Chevalier, S.21-22). Thus, it is progress that takes mankind forward, a certain metaphysical entity which, among its numerous forms, also adopts the form of the development of the productive forces. This is the same old story of the idealist embodiment of the objects of thought, of the products of abstraction, the same old story of the shadows cast by moving bodies and called upon to explain to us the mystery of the latter’s movements.

37. The Descent of Man, etc., Part I, Ch.II.

38. Das Kapital, S.525, 526. [13*] “Consequently, while lands in the tropical zone possess natural wealth, lands in the temperate zone are most favourable for the development oi man” (Géographie physique comparée considerée dans ses rapports avec l’histoire de l’humanité, par Arnold Guyot, Nouvelle edition, Paris 1888, p.256).

39. Das Kapital, I, S.525. [14*] In Asia, as in Egypt, “civilisation develops in easily cultivated plains with alluvial soil ... and equally tends to develop along big rivers” (Guyot, op. cit., p.277. Cf. Metschnikoff, La civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques, Paris 1889).

40. Voltaire also superficially rejected the influence of the geographical environment on human societies as accepted by Montesquieu. We have seen that Holbach, entangled in contradictions stemming from his metaphysical inethod, now accepted, now denied that influence. In general, the confusion brought into this question by metaphysicians of all shades is doubtlessly one of the most striking illustrations of the untenability of this method.

41. Des airs, des eaux et des lieux, trad., avec texte en regard, de Coray, Paris 1800, pp.76-85.

42. Just as East Asia has its own characteristic physical nature, it possesses its own characteristic race – the Mongolian ... “This race seems to be, in the main, of a melancholy temperament; its mediocre intellectual capacities are exercised on details, and never rise either to general ideas or to profound speculation in the area of the natural sciences or philosophy. Skilled, inventive and ingenious in the practical arts that create the comforts of daily life, the Mongol is quite unable, however, to generalise their application. For him, who is totally absorbed in earthly matters, the world of great thoughts ami lofty visions is sealed off. All his philosophy and religion boil down to a code of social morals, which is nothing but an expression of the principles of immediate experience, without the observance of which society cannot exist” (Arnold Guyot, op. cit., p.269).

43. History of Civilisation in England, Leipzig (Brockhaus) 1865, Vol.1, pp.36-37. Incidentally Buckle has said nothing new here, just as anywhere’ else. Long before him and far better than he has done, the absolute idealist Hegel was able to appraise Nature’s int’luence on man through the productive forces and, in particular, through the social organisation (cf., for example, his Vorlesungen über die Philosopliie der Geschichte, hrsg. von Gans, S.99, 100). To acknowledge the direct influence of the geographical environment on “human nature” or, which is the same thing, on the nature of race, is so groundless, that those writers who have acknowledged that influence are dhliged at every step to reject that point of view. For instance, here is what Guyot has added to the lines quoted in the previous footnote: “The main habitat of the Mongolian race is the central Asiatic plateau. The nomadic way of life and the patriarchal form of these societies” (created by the Mongols. – G.P.) “are a necessary consequence of the barren and arid nature of the localities they inhabit.” In just the same way, Hippocrates considered that the Mongols’ lack of courage was, at least in part, a “consequence of the laws they obey” (op. cit., p.86). The Asian peoples’ form of rule is monarchical, he says, but “of necessity, people are very cowardly where they are ruled by kings” (op. cit., p.117). “Convincing proof of what I say is to be seen in the fact that in that same Asia, all Greeks and Barbarians, who are governed by their own laws, without obedience to tyrants, and who therefore work for themselves, are most warlike people” (op. cit., p.88). This is not yet the full truth but nevertheless an approximation to it.

44. ibid., p.113.

45. ibid., p.114.

46. “Within these narrow confines there flourished such accomplished artists as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolomeo, Giorgione, Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Correggio. These confines were very narrow; if you depart from them in either direction you will find incomplete art, on one side, and on the other, decadent art” (Hippolyte Taine, Philosophie de l’art, 5e édition, t.I, Paris 1893, p.126).

47. Regarding the social causes that have produced this international organisation of the clergy, see the first part of the excellent book by Karl Kautsky, Thomas More and His Utopia.

48. It was St. Bernard who advised Pope Eugene III to abandon the Romans and exchange Rome for the entire world (urbem pro orbe mutatam).

49. “We could quote a countless number of examples ol distinctions created by habitat and racial features. However, no distinction of principle can be drawn from that. Uncivilised man’s religion is the same everywhere, no matter whether it develops into forms that are absurdly crude or poetically beautiful. We everywhere find naturism, animism, sorcery, fetishism or idolatry, food offerings, anticipation of a life after death” (the author we are quoting from is a Christian – G.P.), “the perpetuation of the forms and conditions of actual life, a cult of the dead and their burial in keeping with that belief” (Les réligions des peuples non-civilises, par A. Reville, Paris 1883, t.II, pp.221-22).

50. “... On the lowest rung stands the religion of the Australian root-eaters, who engage in hunting in which they show little skill, and the religion of the Bushmen who live mainly by plunder. Mild with the Khoi-Khoin or Hottentots, and with the Kaffirs, who are mostly pastoralists, religion has shown itself bloody and cruel among certain warlike Negro tribes, while with those Negroes engaged mostly in industry and trade without, however, neglecting cattle raising and tilling the soil, the divinity cult is far more humane and civilised, the spirit of trade usually finding expression in certain ruses in respect of the spirits. The Polynesian myths immediately reveal a people of land cultivators and fishermen... (Tiele, Manuel de l’histoire des réligions, traduit du hollandais par Maurice Vernes, Paris 1880, pp.17-18). “In a word, it is indisputable that the cycle of holidays setup both by the law of Jehovah and by the book of Deuteronomy was determined by agriculture – that overall foundation of life and religion” (Revue du l’histoire des réligions, t.II, p.43). We could cite any number of similar quotations, one more characteristic than the other.

51. Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Vorwort, S.V-VI. [15*]

52. Pertinent in this respect, for example, is what Hegel says ahout Dutch painting: “Satisfaction with the existing way of life, which is also expressed even in the most ordinary and petty things, stems, with the Dutch, from their having been obliged to achieve, through great efforts that which other peoples receive from Nature directly and gratis ... On the other hand, they are a people of fishermen, sailors, townsmen and peasants; in consequence, they have known from the very outset the value of that which is necessary and useful in the biggest and smallest things, and have managed to achieve it through their zealous and diligent efforts”, etc. (Vorlesungen über die Aestherik, hrsg. von H.G. Hotho, II, S.222; cf. I, S.217).

53. Philosophie de l’art, 5e édition, Paris 1890, t.I, pp.110-19.

54. Even if no mention is made hero of folk art, the poetry of the peasants and petty burghers, it may well be said that the medieval warriors were not always “enamoured knights”. Thus the paladin in the celebrated song of Roland was “enamoured” only of his sword Durandal.

55. Histoire de la litérature anglaise, 8e edition, Introduction, p.XLV.

56. This analogy was frequently used by Mme. de Staël: “In examining the three different epochs of Greek literature, one perceives very distinctly the natural advance of the human spirit. It was in the remote period of their history that the Greeks were above all illustrious for their poets. Homer characterises the first epoch of Greek literature; during the age of Pericles one sees the rapid progress of dramatic art, eloquence, morals and the beginnings of philosophy; in the times of Alexander, a deep study of the philosophical sciences became the main occupation of outstanding men of letters”, etc. (op. cit. I, pp.7-8). All this is true, but the “natural advance of the human spirit” in no way explains the causes of that advance.

57. ibid., p.XXIII.

58. Henry Sumner Maine, Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, 6th ed., pp.96-97.

59. Here, for instance, is what Charles Blanc says about Dutch painting: “To sum up, three major causes: national independence, democracy and Protestantism made their mark on the Dutch school. Once free of the Spanish yoke, the Seven Provinces now had their painting, which, in its turn, cast off the alien style ... the republican form, once recognised, liberated them from the purely decorative art, prescribed at the courts and by princes, from what one calls the painting of ostentation” (“peinture d’apparat”) ... “Finally, the family life which was fostered by Protestantism ... gave rise to innumerable and charming tableaux de genre, which made Batavian painting illustrious for all time, this because it was necessary to adorn the walls of their intimate dwellings, which had become sanctuaries of rarities.” (Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, Paris 1861, t.I, pp.19-20). Hegel said something very similar: “In religion, the Dutch – and this is very important – were Protestants, and only Protestantism has the faculty of wholly invading the prose of life and endowing it, taken in itself, and irrespective of religious relations, with full significance, and allowing it to develop with unrestricted freedom.” (Aesthetik, II, S.222.) It would be simple to quote from Hegel himself to show that it would be far more logical to consider that it was not Protestantism that elevated the “prose of life” but, on the contrary, that it was the “prose of bourgeois life”, after reaching a definite degree of development and strength, that engendered Protestantism in the process of its struggle against the “prose” or, if you please, the poetry of the feudal regime. If that is so, one should not see in Protestantism sufficient cause for the development of Dutch painting. One should go further, to something “ tertiary” and “higher”, which gave rise both to the Protestantism of the Dutch and their government (the “democracy” Charles Blanc speaks of), and also to their art, etc.

60. See the Supplement to Ludwig Feuerbach, by F. Engels, Marx on Feuerbach. [16*]

Notes

9*. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.I, Moscow 1974, pp.173, 175.

10*. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.I, Moscow 1974, p.175.

11*. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.I, Moscow 1974, p.175.

12*. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.I, Moscow 1974, p.352. p. 144

13*. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.I, Moscow 1974, p.481.

14*. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.I, Moscow 1974, p.481.

15*. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow 1970, p.21.

16*. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol.1, Moscow 1973, p.13.

III. Marx - Part Three

In their time, the great German idealists, those sworn enemies of any eclecticism, considered that all aspects of a people’s life are determined by a single principle. To Hegel, that principle was the definiteness of the people’s spirit, “the overall imprint of its religion, the political system, its morality, its system of law, its morals, science, art, and also technical abilities”. The materialists of today regard that people’s spirit as an abstraction, a product of thought, which explains absolutely nothing. Marx overthrew the idealist understanding of history but that does not mean that he returned to the viewpoint of simple interaction, which explains still less than the viewpoint of the people’s spirit does. His philosophy of history is also monist, but in a sense that is the diametrical opposite of Hegel’s. It is as a consequence of its monist nature that eclectic minds see nothing but narrowness and one-sidedness in it.

The reader may have noticed that, in modifying Taine’s formula according to the Marxist understanding of history, we have excluded what the French author has called the “predominant type”. We have done that on purpose. The structure of civilised societies is so complex that, in the strict sense, one cannot even speak of a state of the spirit and morals that is in keeping with a given form of society. The state of the spirit and the morals of town-dwellers is often quite distinct from that of peasants, while the state of the spirit and morals of the nobility bears very little resemblance to that of the proletariat. That is why a “type” that is “predominant” in the perception of some particular class is in no way predominant as seen by another class: could a courtier of the times of Le Roi-Soleil have served as an ideal for the French peasant of the same times? To this, Taine would no doubl have objected that it was not the peasants but rather aristocratic society that left an impress on eighteenth-century French literature and art. lie would have been quite right. The historian of French literature of that century can regard the stale of the peasants’ spirit and morals une quantite negligeable. But let us take another epoch, for example, that of the Restoration. Was one and the same type “predominant” in the minds of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie of that period? Of course not. Out of contradiction to the adherents of the aucien regime, the bourgeoisie not only rejected the ideals of (lie aristocracy, but also idealised the spirit and the morals of the Empire, the epoch of the Napoleon it had utterly rejected only several years earlier. [61] Even before 1789, the bourgeoisie’s opposition to the spirit and morals of the aristocracy manifested itself in the line arts by the writing of domestic dramas. “What do the revolutions in Athens and Rome mean to me, a peaceable subject of a monarchist state in the eighteenth century? Can I find any true interest in the death of some Peloponnesian tyrant or the sacrifice of a young princess at Aulis? All this has nothing to do with me; no morals can move me,” said Beaumarchais in his Essais sur le genre dramatique sérieux. What he says is so true that one asks oneself in surprise: how could the adherents of pseudoclassical tragedy have failed to see it? What “did they see in all this”? What moral did they find here? Yet the explanation is very simple. It was only for the sake of appearance that pseudo-classical tragedy depicted “Peloponnesian tyrants” and “Aulis princesses”. In reality, it was, to quote from Taine, merely a refined depiction of the aristocratic world, whose admiration it evoked. The imminent world, that of the bourgeoisie, esteemed such tragedy only by tradition, or else rose up openly against il since it was also up in arms against the “aristocratic world” itself. The champions of the bourgeoisie saw in the rules of the old aesthetics something instilling to the dignity of the “citizen”. “Should one depict people of the middle class as suffering or unfortunate? No, no, they should be only ridiculed!” Beaumarchais exclaimed ironically in his Lettre sur la critique du Barbier de Seville. “Ridiculous subjects and unfortunate kings – that is the only existing and only possible theatre. For my part, I have taken note of that.”

The citizens who were Beaumarchais’s contemporaries were, at least in most cases, descendants of the French bourgeois who, with an assiduity worthy of a better cause, had aped the nobles and had therefore been held up to ridicule by Molière, Dancourt, Regnard and many others. Thus, we see at least two substantially different epochs in the history of the spirit and morals of the French bourgeoisie: one of imitation of the nobility, and another of contradiction of the latter. Each of these epochs corresponded to a definite phase of the bourgeoisie’s development. The propensities and the trends in the tastes of any class consequently depend on the degree of its development and even more on its attitude to the superior class – an attitude which is determined by that development.

That means that the class struggle plays an important part in the history of ideologies. Indeed, so important is that part that, with the exception of primitive societies in which no classes exist, it is impossible to understand the history of trends in the tastes and ideas of any society without an acquaintance with the class struggle taking place within it.

“It is not simply the immanent dialectics of speculative prin’ciple that are the very essence of the entire process of the development of modern philosophy,” says Ueberweg, “but rather a struggle and an urge towards reconciliation, on the one hand, between traditional religious conviction, one deeply entrenched in the spirit and sentiments and, on the other hand, knowledge in the sphere of the natural sciences and the humanities achieved in modern studies.” [62]

Were Ueberweg somewhat more attentive, he would realise that, at any given moment, speculative principles have themselves been the outcome of the struggle and the urge towards reconciliation that he speaks of. He should have gone further and asked himself the following questions: 1) have the traditional religious convictions not been the natural outcome of certain phases of social development? 2) have the discoveries in the field of the natural sciences and the humanities not sprung from the preceding phases of that evolution? 3) finally, was it not one and the same evolution, more rapid at some place or in some period of time, whilst elsewhere and in another period slower in rate and modified by a multitude of local conditions, that led both to the struggle between faiths and the new views acquired by modern thinking, and to the truce between the two forces waging that struggle, forces whose speculative principles translate the terms of that truce into the “divine language” of philosophy?

To view the history of philosophy from this angle means doing so from the materialist point of view. Though Ueberweg was a materialist, he did not seem to have had any idea of dialectical materialism, this despite all his learning. What ho has given us is nothing else but what the historians of philosophy have already proposed – a simple succession of philosophical systems: a certain system has engendered another, the latter in its turn bringing forth a third system, and so on. However, any succession of philosophical systems is merely a fact, something given, to quote from present-day parlance, something that calls for explanation but cannot be explained by the “immanent dialectics of speculative principles”. To people of the eighteenth century everything was accounted for by the activities of “legislators”. [63] However, we already know that it has been caused by social development; can it be that we shall never be able to establish the link between the history of ideas and that of society, the history of the world of ideas and the world of reality?

“The kind of philosophy a man chooses for himself depends on the kind of man he is,” says Fichte. Cannot the same be said of any society or, more precisely, of any given social class? Are we not entitled to say with the same firm conviction: the philosophy of a society or social class depends upon what kind of society or class it is.

Of course, we should never forget that if the ideas predominant in any class at a given time are determined in content by the social position of that class, the form of those ideas is closely connected with those predominant during the previous epoch in the same class or a higher one. “In all ideological domains tradition forms a great conservative force” (Frederick Engels).

Let us take socialism as an example.

”Modern socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wageworkers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the eighteenth century. Like every new theory, modern socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.” [64]

The formal but decisive influence of an existent set of ideas does not make itself felt only in a positive sense, i.e., not only in the sense that, for instance, the French socialists of the first half of our century made reference to the very same principles, as the Enlighteners of the preceding century did; that influence also assumes a negative nature. If Fourier was engaged in a constant struggle against what he ironically called perfectible perfectibility, he did so becaviso the doctrine of man’s perfectibility played an important part in the Enlighteners’ theories. If most of the French utopian socialists were on friendly terms with a merciful God, that sprang from an opposition to the bourgeoisie, whose youth was marked by considerable scepticism in this respect. If, however, the utopian socialists sang the praises of political indifferentism, the source was an opposition to the doctrine that “ everything depends on legislation”. In short, both in the negative and the positive sense, the formal aspect of the doctrine of French socialism was equally determined by the theories of the Enlighteners, theories which we should in no way lose sight if we wish to understand the utopians correctly.

What was the link between the economic condition of the French bourgeoisie during the Restoration and the warlike appearance that the petty-bourgeois of the time, those knights of the tape measure, loved to assume? No immediate link existed; their beards and spurs in no way changed that condition either positively or negatively. However, as we already know, that amusing vogue was indirectly engendered by the bourgeoisie’s status in respect of the aristocracy. In the field of ideologies, many phenomena can be only explained indirectly by the influence of the economic advance. This is very often forgotten, not only by the opponents but also by the supporters of Marx’s historical theory.

Since the evolution of ideologies is determined, in essence, by economic development, these two processes always correspond to each other: “public opinion” adapts itself to the economy. That does not mean, however, that, in our study of the history of mankind, we have equal grounds to take as our point of departure either of these aspects – public opinion or the economy. While, in its general features, economic development can be sufficiently explained with the aid of its own logic, the road of spiritual evolution finds explanation only in the economy. A single example will make our idea clear.

During the times of Bacon and Descartes, philosophy displayed great interest in the development of the productive forces. “... Instead of the speculative philosophy taught at schools,” Descartes says, “one can find a practical philosophy, with the aid of which, given a knowledge of the force and the operations of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies that surround us. just as distinct as our knowledge of the diverse crafts of our artisans, we might employ them in the same fashion for all the usages proper to them, thereby making ourselves masters and possessors of Nature.” [65] All of Descartes’s philosophy bears traces of this great interest. Thus the aim pursued by the studies of contemporary philosophers seemed to have been clearly deiined. But a century passed and materialism which, we might add, is the logical consequence of Descartes’s doctrine, became widespread in France; it was under its banner that the most progressive part of the bourgeoisie marched, and an ardent polemic flared up, but ... the productive forces were lost sight of: the materialist philosophers hardly ever spoke of them, for they now had quite different propensities, philosophy seemed to have set itself quite different tasks. What was the reason? Was it because France’s productive forces had already achieved sufficient development? Had the French materialists come to disregard that mastery of man over Nature that Bacon and Descartes had dreamt of? Neither of these was the case! However, in Descartes’s times, France’s production relations – if we limit ourselves here to France alone – still fostered the development of the productive forces, while, a century later, they became a hindrance to them. They had to be destroyed, and, to that end, so had the ideas that hallowed them. All the energies of the materialists, that vanguard of the bourgeoisie’s theorists, were focnssed on this point, their entire doctrine assuming a militant character. The struggle against “superstition” and in the name of “science”, and against “tyranny” and in the name of “natural law” became philosophy’s most important and most practical (in the Cartesian sense) task; the immediate study of Nature with the aim of increasing the productive forces as rapidly as possible receded into the background. When the aim was achieved and the obsolete production relations had been destroyed, philosophical thought took a now direction, with materialism losing its importance for a long time to come. The development of philosophy in France was following in the footsteps of changes in her economy.

“Science, unlike other architects, builds not only castles in the air, but may construct separate habitable storeys of the building before laying the foundation stone ...” [66] This method may seem illogical but it finds justification in the logic of social life.

When the eighteenth-century “philosophers” recalled that man is a product of his social environment, they denied any influence whatsoever on that environment on the part of that very “public opinion” which, as they declared in other instances, governs the world. Their logic stumbled at every step against one or the other side of this antinomy, which was, however, solved with ease by dialectical materialism. Of course, to the dialectical materialists, human opinion governs the world, inasmuch as, according to Engels, “... all the driving forces of the actions of any individual person must pass through his brain, and transform themselves into motives of his will ...” [67] But this does not contradict “public opinion” being rooted in the social environment and ultimately in the economic relations; neither does it contradict any given “public opinion” beginning to age as soon as the mode of production that has given rise to it becomes decrepit. It is the economy which shapes the “public opinion” that governs the world.

Helvetius, who attempted to analyse the “Spirit” from the materialist angle, met with failure because of the fundamental shortcoming in his method. To remain faithful to his principle that “man is nothing but sensation”, Helvetius was obliged to assume that the most celebrated giants of the spirit and the most glorious heroes of self-sacrifice for the public weal, in just the same way as the most miserable sycophants and most unworthy egoists, were guided only by a desire for sensual pleasures. Diderot protested against this paradox, but could not escape from the conclusion arrived at by Helvetius; he found refuge only in the realm of idealism. However interesting Helvetius’s attempt may have been, he nevertheless compromised the materialist understanding of the “Spirit” in the opinion of the general public and even of many “scholars”. It is usually held that, in this question, the materialists can only repeat what has already been said by Helvetius. However, it is necessary merely to understand the “Spirit” of dialectical materialism to see that the latter is insured against the errors made by its metaphysical forerunner.

Dialectical materialism considers phenomena in their development. From the evolutionary point of view, however, it is just as absurd to say that people consciously adapt their ideas and their moral sentiments to their economic conditions as to assert that animals and plants consciously adapt their organs to the conditions of their existence. In both cases, we have an unconscious process, which has to be provided with a materialist explanation.

The following was said of “moral sentiment” by a man who was able to provide that explanation for the origin of species:

”It may be well first to premise that I do not wish to maintain that any strictly social animal, if its intellectual faculties were to become as active and as highly developed as in man, would acquire exactly the same moral sense as ours. In the same manner as various animals have some sense of beauty, though they admire widely different objects, so they might have a sense of right and wrong, though led by it to follow widely different lines of conduct. If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duly to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless, the bee, or any other social animal, would gain in our supposed case, as it appears to me, some feeling of right or wrong, or a conscience. For each individual would have an inward sense of possessing certain stronger or more enduring instincts, and others less strong or enduring; so that there would often be a struggle as to which impulse should be followed; and satisfaction, dissatisfaction, or even misery would be felt, as past impressions were compared during their incessant passage through the mind. In this case an inward monitor would tell the animal that it would have been better to have followed the one impulse rather than the other. The one course ought to have been followed, and the other ought not; the one would have been right and the other wrong ...” [68]

These lines evoked a great deal of censure of their author on the part of the “respectable” public. Thus a certain Mr. Sidgwick wrote in the London Academy that “a superior bee, we may feel sure, would aspire to a milder solution of the population question ...” We are prepared to admit this in respect of the bee but certain books on economy which are held in high esteem by “respectable” people testify to the British bourgeoisie, and not only the British, having failed to find a “milder” solution of this question. In June 1848 and in May 1871 [20*], the French bourgeois were not at all as mild as the “superior bee”. The bourgeois murdered and ordered the murdering of their worker “brothers” with unparalleled brutality and – and this is of even greater interest to us – without any qualms of conscience. No doubt they told themselves that they were obliged to follow this particular “road” and “no other”. Why was that so? It was because the bourgeoisie’s morality was prescribed to them by their social position, their struggle against the proletarians, in the same way as animals’ “line of conduct” is dictated to them by their conditions of existence.

The selfsame French bourgeois consider the slavery of antiquity immoral, and probably condemn the massacre of rebel slaves practised in ancient Rome as unworthy of civilised people and even of mind-endowed bees. The bourgeois comme il faut is quite “moral” and devoted to the common weal; in his understanding of morality and the common weal, he will never cross the borderline prescribed to him, irrespective of his will and consciousness, by the material conditions of his existence. In this respect, he differs in no way from members of other classes. In reflecting, in his ideas and sentiments, the material conditions of his existence, he merely shares the common fate of all “mortals”.

“Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting-point of his activity ...” [69]

Jean Jaurès recently attempted to “radically reconcile economic materialism and idealism in their application to historical development”. [70] This outstanding orator came out somewhat belatedly, since the Marxist understanding of history leaves no room for “reconciliation” in this field. Marx never turned a blind eye to moral sentiments, which have a part to play in history; he only explained the origin of those sentiments. For Jaurès to gain a better understanding of the meaning of what he prefers to call “Marx’s formula” (and Marx always ridiculed formula-ridden people), we shall quote for him yet another passage from the book we have just cited from.

The reference is to the “Democratic-Socialist” party, which arose in France in 1849.

“The peculiar character of the Social-Democracy is epitomised in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not form the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within the frame of which alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position, they may be as far apart as heaven from earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class, and the class they represent.” (Ibid., p.29). [22*]

The superiority of the dialectical method of Marx’s materialism is most distinctly to be seen where it is a matter of providing a solution of problems of a “moral” nature, which nonplussed eighteenth-century materialism. However, a correct understanding of that solution calls, first and foremost, for metaphysical prejudices to be cast off.

Jaurès had no grounds to assert the following: “I do not wish to place the materialist understanding on one side of the partition, and the idealist on the other”; he returns to the selfsame system of “partitions”: he places the spirit on one side, and on the other matter; here we have economic necessity, and there moral sentiments, and then he goes on to catechise them both, attempting to prove that they must permeate each other, just as “in man’s organic life the mechanism of the brain and the conscious will penetrate each other”. [71]

But Jaurès is not just another man. He possesses great knowledge, good will and outstanding abilities. You read him with enjoyment (we have never had the pleasure of hearing him speak), even when he is in error. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of many opponents of Marx, who vie with one another in attacking him.

Herr Doktor Paul Barth, author of the book Die Geschichtsphilosophie Hegel’s und der Hegelianer bis auf Marx und Hartmann, Leipzig 1890, has understood Marx so little that he has been able to refute him. He has proved that the author of Capital contradicts himself at every step. Let us take a closer look at his method of reasoning.

”In respect of the end of the Middle Ages, Marx himself has provided material for his refutation in declaring (Kapital, Bd.I., S.737-50 [23*]) that one of the main causes of the primitive ‘accumulation’ of capital was the expropriation of the English peasants from the land by the feudal lords who, in view of the rising prices of wool, turned their arable land into pastures for their sheep, with very few shepherds, the ‘enclosures’, and turned those peasants into free proletarians who placed themselves at the disposal of the developing manufactures. Although, according to Marx, this agrarian revolution was caused by the rise of wool manufacture, the feudal forces, as he has himself depicted it, those landlords so eager for profits, were its forcible influence (Kapital, Bd.I, S.747), i.e., political force became a link in the chain, of economic upheavals.” [72]

As we have often had occasion to say, the eighteenth-century philosophers were convinced that “everything depends on legislation”. But when it was recalled, in the early years of the present century, that the legislator, who was thought to be capable of “everything” was, in his turn, a product of the social environment, when it was understood that any country’s “legislation” is rooted in its social structure, the trend to fall into the opposite extreme began frequently to appear: the role of the legislator, which had previously been overestimated, was now often underestimated. Thus, for instance, Jean-Baptiste Say wrote in the Introduction to his Traité d’économie politique: “For a long time, politics in the proper sense of the term, the science of the organisation of societies, was confused with political economy, which teaches how the wealth that meets the needs of society arises, is distributed and is used. Yet wealth is essentially independent of the political organisation. Under any form of government, the State can prosper if it is well administered. One has seen nations become rich under absolute monarchs: one has seen them ruined under national assemblies. If political freedom proves more favourable to the development of wealth, it is so indirectly, in the same way as it is more favourable to education.” The utopian socialists went even further, proclaiming from the house tops that the reformer of social organisation has nothing in common with politics. [73] What these two extremes have in common is that they both spring from a failure to properly understand the link between a country’s social and political organisation. Marx discovered that connection, so that it was easy for him to show how and why any class struggle is at the same time a political struggle.

The ingenious Doktor Barth saw only one thing in all this, i.e., that, according to Marx, a political act, one of “legislation”, could have no effect on economic relations; that, in the opinion of that selfsame Marx, any such act was merely a semblance, so that any English peasant forcibly deprived of his land by the landlord at the “end of the Middle Ages”, i.e., stripped of his former economic position upset, like a house of cards, the entire historical! theory of the celebrated socialist. Voltaire’s bachelor of arts from Salamanca could not have displayed greater ingenuity! [24*]

And so, Marx contradicts himself in his description of the “clearing of estates” in England. An excellent logician, Herr Barth makes use of that clearing to prove that law “has an independent existence”. But since the aim of the juridical action by the English landlords had very little in common with their economic interests, the esteemed Herr Doktor has voiced an assertion that is indeed free of any one-sidedness: “Thus, law has an existence of its own, though not an independent one.” An existence of its own, though not an independent one, forsooth! This is a many-sided statement and, what is still more important, protects our Herr Doktor from all kinds of “contradictions”. If one sets out to prove to him that law hinges on the economy, he will reply: that is because it is not sovereign. If one tells him that the economy is determined by law, he will exclaim that that is exactly what he is out to say in his theory of the independent existence of law.

Our ingenious Herr Doktor says the same thing about morals, religion and all other ideologies. Without exception, they all stand on their own legs though they are not independent. As you see, this is the old but always new story of the struggle between eclecticism and monism, the same story about “partitions”: here we have matter, and there spirit – two substances with an existence of their own, though one that is not independent.

But let us leave eclectics and return to Marx’s theory, about which we have several more remarks to make.

Savage tribes already have relations – peaceable or non-peaceable – between themselves and, should the opportunity arise, with barbarian peoples and with civilised Stales. These relations naturally exert an influence on the economic structure of any society. “Different communities find different means of production, and different means of subsistence in their natural environment. Hence, their modes of production, and of living, and their products are different. It is this spontaneously developed difference which, when different communities come in contact, calls forth the mutual exchange of products, and the consequent gradual conversion of those products into commodities.” [74] The development of commodity production leads to the disintegration of the primitive community. Within the clan there arise new interests, which ultimately engender a new political organisation; the class struggle begins, with all its inevitable consequences in the sphere of mankind’s political, moral and intellectual evolution. Its international relations become ever more complex and give rise to phenomena which at first glance seem to contradict Marx’s historical theory.

In Russia, Peter the Great brought about a revolution which exerted a tremendous influence on that country’s economic development. However, it was not economic needs but those of a political nature, the requirements of the State, which induced that man of genius to take revolutionary measures. In the same way, it was Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War [26*] that forced Alexander II’s government to do everything it could for the development of Russian capitalism. History teems with such examples, which seem to testify in favour of the independent existence of international, civil and any other kind of law. But let us take a closer look at the matter.

Wherein lay the strength of those West-European States which awakened the genius of the great Muscovite? It lay in the development of their productive forces. Peter understood that very well, since he bent every effort to speed up the development of those forces in his country. Where did the means he used come from? How did that power of an Asiatic despot arise, which he used with such fearful energy? That authority owed its origin to the economy of Russia; those means were restricted by the production relations in Russia at the time. Despite his awesome authority and his iron will, Peter did not and could not succeed in turning St. Petersburg into an Amsterdam, or in making Russia a naval power, which was his unswerving ambition. Peter the Great’s reforms gave rise to an original phenomenon in Russia. He tried to implant European manufactures in Russia, which did not have the workers, so he used the labour of state serfs there. Industrial serfdom, a form unknown in Western Europe, existed in Russia until 1861, i.e., until the abolition of serfdom.

No less characteristic an example was the serf condition of the peasants in East Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomerania and Silesia, beginning with the mid-sixteenth century. The development of capitalism in the Western countries was constantly undermining the feudal forms of the exploitation of the tiller of the soil. It was only in this part of Europe that capitalist development preserved those forms for a fairly lengthy period of time.

Slavery in the European colonies is also, at first glance, a paradoxical example of capitalist development. This phenomenon, like those mentioned above, cannot be explained by the logic of economic life in the countries it was to be met in. The explanation is to be sought in international economic relations.

Thus we have, in our turn, returned to the standpoint of interaction; it would be stupid to forget that this is not only a legitimate but an absolutely essential point of view. It would, however, be equally absurd to forget that this standpoint does not of itself explain anything, and that, in using it, we should always seek a “third”, the “very highest”, that which Notion was to Hegel, and to us the economic condition of peoples and countries whose mutual influence must be established and understood.

In any civilised country, literature and the fine arts exert a more or less considerable influence on the literature and the fine arts of other civilised countries. This mutual influence is aresuit of similarity in such countries’ social structures.

A class that is struggling against an enemy gains a definite position in its country’s literature.If the same class in another country comes into motion, it absorbs the ideas and forms created by its more advanced counterpart. However, it modifies them or goes farther than they do, or else lags behind them, this depending on the difference in its own condition and that of the class that provides it with a model.

We have already seen that the geographical environment has had an important influence on the historical development of peoples. We now know that international relations perhaps have an even greater influence on that development. The joint influence of the geographical environment and international relations explains the vast difference we find in the historical fates of peoples, although the fundamental laws of social evolution are everywhere the same. So we see that the Marxist understanding of history, far from being “limited” and “one-sided”, opens up a vast field of research to us. Very much hard work, patience and love of the truth are needed to properly cultivate even a very small part of that field, which, however, belongs to us; the acquisition has been made, the work has been begun by matchless craftsmen, and it only remains for us to carry on the good work. And we must do that if we do not wish to convert, in our minds, Marx’s masterly idea into something “drab”’, “gloomy”, and “deadening”.

“When thinking remains standing at the generality of Ideas,” as Hegel puts it so very well, “as is of necessity the case in the first philosophies (for example, in the Being of the Eleatic school, in lieraclitus’s Becoming, etc.) it is justly reproached with formalism. It may happen that in a more developed philosophy, too, only abstract propositions and definitions are conceived, and only they are repeated; that, for example, everything is oneness in the Absolute, that the subjective and the objective are identical, in any consideration of the particular.” [75] We could with good reason be reproached with such formalism if, in respect of any given society, we merely repeated that the anatomy of that society is rooted in its economy. That is indisputable, but it is insufficient; a scientific idea must be put to scientific use; one must be aware of all these vital functions of that organism, whose anatomical structure is determined by the economy; one must understand how it moves and is nourished, how the sensations and concepts that arise in it thanks to that anatomical structure become what they are; how they change together with the changes that occur in that structure, and so on. It is only on that condition that we can make progress, and it is only by observing that condition that we can be confident of it.

People often see in the materialist understanding of history a doctrine which proclaims man’s subordination to the yoke of a remorseless and blind necessity. Nothing could be more false than that idea! It is the materialist understanding of history that shows people the way that will lead them from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

In the field of morality, the philistine – that eclectic par excellence – always proves to be an “idealist”. The more stubbornly he clutches at his “ideal”, the more helpless his mind feels against the drab prose of social life. That mind will never triumph over economic necessity; that ideal will always remain an ideal; it will never come true, since it has “an existence of its own but one that is not independent”, because it is incapable of emerging from behind its “partition”. On one side we have spirit, the ideal, human dignity, fraternity and the like; on the other, matter, economic necessity, exploitation, rivalry, crises, bankruptcies, and universal and mutual deception. Reconciliation between these two realms is impossible. The present-day materialists can regard such “moral idealism” with nothing but contempt. They have a far loftier idea of the power of human reason. True, the latter advances in its development thanks to economic necessity, but that is exactly why what is genuinely reasonable should not always remain in the condition of an “ideal”. What is reasonable becomes actual, and the achievement of that purpose is assumed by the irresistible force of economic necessity.

The eighteenth-century “philosophers” repeated ail nauseam that the world is governed by public opinion, which is why nothing can stand opposed to Reason, which is “ultimately always right”. Nevertheless, those same philosophers often expressed considerable doubt about the force of Reason, such doubt logically springing from another aspect of a theory characteristic of those “philosophers”. Since everything depends on the “legislator”, the latter either allows Reason to triumph, or else extinguishes its torch. Therefore, anything is to be expected of the “legislator”. In most cases, the legislators and the monarchs who control the destinies of their peoples show very little concern for the triumph of Reason. Thus, the latter’s prospects have become infinitesimal! It only remains for the philosopher to rely on chance, which sooner or later will place power in the hands of a “sovereign” who is well disposed towards Reason. We already know that Ilelvetius actually counted on some fortunate chance alone. Let us see what another philosopher of the same epoch has to say on the matter.

“The most obvious principles are often the most contested; they have to combat ignorance, credulity, stubbornness, custom and vanity in people, in a word, the interests of the great and the stupidity of the people which make them remain attached to their old systems. Error defends its territory inch by inch, and it is only with the aid of struggle and perseverance that one can tear the least of its conquests away from it. Let us not think for that reason that the truth is useless: once sown its seed lives on, it will yield fruit with time, and like seeds which, before emerging, lie buried in the earth for a long time, it awaits the circumstances which will let it develop ... It is when enlightened sovereigns govern nations that truth yields the fruits one is entitled to expect of it. It is ultimately when nations are tired of the poverty and innumerable calamities that their errors have engendered that necessity makes them resort to truth, which alone can protect them against the misfortunes that deception and prejudice have made them suffer so long.” [76]

Here we have the same faith in “enlightened sovereigns” and the same doubt about the power of “Reason”! Compare with these barren and timid hopes the nnshakeable conviction shown by Marx, who says that there neither is, nor will there ever be a monarch capable of effectively preventing the development of his people’s productive forces and consequently its liberation from the yoke of obsolete institutions, and then tell me who has greater faith in the power of Reason and its ultimate triumph? On one hand, we have a cautious “perhaps”; on the other, a confidence that is as unshakeable as that given us by mathematical proofs.

The materialists could only harbour a half-belief in their god – “Reason”, since, in their theory, that god was constantly coming up against the iron laws of the material world, blind necessity. “Man reaches his end”, says Holbach, “without being free for a single moment, beginning with his birth and ending with his death.” [77] The materialist has to make this assertion since, according to Priestley, “the doctrine of necessity ... is the immediate result of the doctrine of materiality of man; for mechanism is the undoubted consequence of materialism.” [78] But until it was learnt that this necessity could give rise to man’s freedom, one could not but be a fatalist. “All events are connected among themselves,” says Helvetius. “A forest felled in the North changes the direction of the winds, the state of the crops, the arts in a country, its mores and government”. Holbach speaks of the incalculable consequences that the movement of a single atom in a despot’s mind can have for a country’s fate. The determinism of the “philosophers” went no further in the understanding of the role of necessity in history, which is why, to them, historical development was also subordinate to chance, that coin which served as necessity’s small change. Freedom remained something opposed to necessity, while materialism, as Marx pointed out, was incapable of understanding human activity. The German idealists very clearly saw this weak side of metaphysical materialism but it was only with the aid of the Absolute Spirit, i.e., with the aid of a fiction, that they were able to join freedom and necessity together. The contemporary materialists of the Moleschott type are caught up in the contradictions of the eighteenth-century materialists. It was Marx alone, who, in his consideration of “human practice”, was able to reconcile “Reason” and “necessity”, without for a moment rejecting the theory of “man’s materiality”. Mankind “sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at, least in the coarse of formation.” [79]

The metaphysical materialists saw necessity subordinating people to itself (“a forest felled ...”, etc.); dialectical materialism shows how necessity will free them.

“The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that einanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.” [80]

Though allegedly fatalistic, Marx’s theory is one that, for the first time in the history of economic science, put an end to the fetishism of the economists, according to which they explained economic categories – exchange-value, money and capital – by the nature of material objects, and not by the nature of relations among people in the process of production. [81]

We cannot here set forth what Marx did for political economy, but shall only note that, in this science, he used the same method, and, in dealing with political economy, he adopted the same standpoint as in his explanation of history – that of the relations of people in the process of production. Therefore, one can form a judgement of the intellectual level of those people – so numerous in present-day Russia – who “recognise” Marx’s economic theory but “reject” his historical views.

Anyone who has understood what the dialectical method of Marx’s materialism means can also form a judgement of the scientific significance of arguments that appear from time to time as to which method Marx used in his Capital – the inductive or the deductive.

Marx’s method is simultaneously both inductive and deductive. Moreover, it is the most revolutionary of all the methods ever used.

“In its mystified form,” says Marx, “dialectic became tlie fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdorn and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.” [82]

Holbach, one of the most revolutionary representatives of French philosophy of the last century, was frightened by the drive for markets, without which the modern bourgeoisie cannot exist. He would willingly have checked historical development in this direction. Marx welcomed that drive for markets, that eagerness for profits, as a force destructive to the existing order of things and as a preliminary condition of mankind’s emancipation.

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

“The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.

“National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature ...” [83]

In rebelling against feudal property, the French materialists sang the praise of bourgeois property, which they held to be the innermost soul of any human society. They saw only one aspect of the question, considering bourgeois property the fruit of the labours of the proprietor himself. Marx shows what the immanent dialectic of bourgeois property leads up to:

“The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence – But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.” [84]

However revolutionary the French materialists were, they appealed only to the enlightened bourgeoisie and to the “ philosophising” nobles who had gone over to the camp of the bourgeoisie. They had a stark fear of the “rabble”, the “people”, the “ignorant mob”. But the bourgeoisie was and could be only semi-revolutionary. Marx addressed himself to the proletariat, a class that is revolutionary in the full sense of the word.

“All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.” [85]

In their struggle against the then existing social system, the materialists were constantly appealing to the “mighty of this world”, to “enlightened sovereigns”. They tried to show the latter that their theories were quite innocuous in essence. Marx and Marxists hold a different stand in respect of “the mighty of this world”.

“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” [86]

It is quite obvious that such a doctrine could not meet with a favourable reception from the “mighty of this world”. The bourgeoisie of today has become a reactionary class: it is out to “turn back the wheel of history”. Its ideologists are incapable of even understanding the tremendous scientific importance of Marx’s discoveries. But then, it is the proletariat that uses his historical theory as the best guide in its struggle for emancipation.

This theory, which frightens the bourgeoisie with its alleged fatalism, instils boundless energy into the proletariat. In defending the “doctrine of necessity” against attack by Price, Dr. Priestley, among other things, said the following: “To say nothing of myself, who certainly, however, am not the most torpid and lifeless of all animals; where will he find greater ardour of mind, a stronger and more unremitted exertion, or a more strenuous and steady pursuit of the most important objects, than among those of whom he knows to be necessarians?” [87]

Priestley was speaking of his contemporary English “Christian necessarians” [35*], to whom he could ascribe that kind of ardour with or without good grounds. But talk a little to Messrs. Bismarck, Caprivi, Crispi or Casimir Perier, and they will tell yon marvels about the activities and exertions of the “necessarians” and “ fatal of our times – the Social-Democratic workers.

Footnotes

61. “Government officials, craftsmen and shopkeepers no doubt considered it their duty to have solemn faces and wear moustaches to display their liberalism. By their behaviour and certain details of costume they intended to show themselves as relics of our heroic army. The assistants at shops of fashion did not confine themselves to moustaches; to complete their metamorphosis, they attached spurs to their boots, which jingled martially along the roadways and pavements of the boulevards” (A. Perlet, De l’influence des mœurs sur la comédie, 2e édition, Paris 1848, pp.51-52). Here we have an example of the influence of the class struggle in an area which, at first glance, might seem to depend only on whim. It would he interesting to study, in a special work, the history of vogue from the viewpoint of the psychology of classes.

62. Ueberweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, hrsg. von Dr. Max Heinze, Berlin 1880, 3. Teil, S.174.

63. “But why is it that letters have times of quietude, when minds are no longer productive, when nations seem to be exhausted by an excessive fertility? It is because despondency is often occasioned by imaginary errors, by the weakness of men in office ...” (Tableau des révolutions de la littérature ancienne et moderne, par l’abbé de Cournand, Paris 1786, p.25).

64. F. Engels, Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, Leipzig 1877, S.1. [17*]

65. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, chap.VI.

66. Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, S.35. [18*]

67. Ludwig Feuerbach, S.57. [19*]

68. The Descent of Man, London 1883, pp.99-100.

69. Karl Marx, Der 18. Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, S. 26. [21*]

70. See his paper on the idealist understanding of history (Neue Zeit, XIII, 2, S.545ff.).

71. The reader who is curious enough to learn how economic necessity permeates the “idea of justice and law” will have great pleasure in reading an article by Paul Lafargue Recherches sur les origines de l’idée du bien et du juste published in No.6 of Revue philosophique, 1885. We do not understand with full clarity what is meant by the permeation of economic necessity by the idea named above. If thereby Jaurès understands that we must try to reorganise the economic relations in bourgeois society in keeping with our moral sentiments, we shall reply as follows: 1) That is self-understood, but it is hard to find in history any party which set as its task the triumph of that which, in its own opinion, contradicted its “idea of right and good”. 2) I to does not clearly realise the meaning of the words he uses: he speaks of morals which, as Taine puts it, issue directions, while the Marxists try to state laws in what can be called their moral doctrine. In those conditions, a misunderstanding is quite inevitable.

72. op. cit., pp.49-50.

73. “In our civilised world, we have every possible forms of government. But are Western countries, which lean more or less towards the democratic form of state, less afflicted by spiritual, moral and material poverty than Oriental countries, which have a more or less autocratic form of rule? Or did the Prussian monarch take less closely to heart the plight of the poorer classes of the people than did the French Chamber of Deputies or the king of the French? The facts prove the opposite to us with such force and thought convinces us of the opposite so much that wo arc inore than indifferent to all politically liberal strivings, which have simply become repulsive to us” (M. Hess in Gesellschaftsspiegel, 1846).

74. Das Kapital, 1, S.353. [25*]

75. Encyklopädie, I. Teil, § 12, Einleitung.

76. Essais sur les préjugés, de l’influence des opinions sur les mœurs et sur le bonheur des hommes etc., Liege 1797, p.37. This book is ascribed to Holbach or to the materialist Dumarsais, whose name stands on the title sheet.

77. Le bon sens puisé dans la nature, I, p.120.

78. Priestley, A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism, etc., p.241.

79. Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Vorwort, S.VI. [27*]

80. ibid., S.VI. [28*]

81. “To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour, is shown, amongst other ways, by the dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange-values. Since exchange-value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an object, Nature has no more to do with it, than it has in iixing the course of exchange.

“The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois production. It therefore makes its appearance at an early date in history, though not in the same predominating and characteristic manner as now-a-days. Hence its Fetish character is comparatively easy to be seen through. But when we come to more concrete forms, even this appearance of simplicity vanishes. Whence arose the illusions of the monetary system? To it gold and silver, when serving as money, did not represent a social relation between producers, but were natural objects with strange social properties. And modern economy, which looks down with such disdain on the monetary system, does not its superstition come out as clear as noon-day, whenever it treats of capital? How long is it since economy discarded the physiocratic illusion, that rents grow out of the soil and not out of society?” (Das Kapital, I, S.52-53). [29*]

82. Das Kapital, I, 3. Aufl., Vorwort zur 2. Aufl., S.XIX. [30*]

83. Manifesto of the Communist Party, Ch.I. [31*]

84. Communist Manifesto, Ch.II. [32*] The law of wages that Marx speaks of here is more precisely formulated in Capital, where he shows that it is actually even more unfavourable to the proletarian. However, what the Manifesto says, is enough to destroy the illusion the nineteenth century inherited from its predecessor, or rather predecessors.

85. Communist Manifesto, Ch.I. [33*]

86. ibid., Ch. IV. [34*]

87. Dr. Priestley, op. cit., p.391.

Notes

17*. F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow 1975, p.23.

18*. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow 1970, p.57.

19*. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol.3, Moscow 1973, p.369.

20*. The reference is to the suppression of the June 1848 insurrection of workers in Paris and of the Paris Commune in May 1871.

21*. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol.1, Moscow 1973, p.421.

22*. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in three volumes. Vol.1, Moscow 1973, pp.423-24.

23*. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.I, Moscow 1974, pp.671-85.

24*. Bachelor of arts from Salamanca – a character from Voltaire’s philosophical story Histoire de Jenni ou l’athée et le sage.

25*. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.I, Moscow 1974, p.332.

26*. The reference is to Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War of 1853-56 which showed the rottenness and impotence of the serf-owning system in the country and made its government abolish serfdom and carry out a series of reforms in the 1860s-70s, these hastening Russia’s bourgeois development,

27*. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow 1970, p.21.

28*. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow 1970, pp.21-22.

29*. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.I, Moscow 1974, p.86.

30*. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.I, Moscow 1974, p.29.

31*. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol.1, Moscow 1973, pp.111-12.

32*. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol.1, Moscow 1973, pp.121, 122.

33*. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol.1, Moscow 1973, p.118.

34*. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol.1, Moscow 1973, p.137.

35*. Christian necessarians – a Christian sect which maintained that the will is not free and that moral creatures do not act freely but according to necessity.