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5.: The Marxist Account of Perception - H.B. Acton, The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophical Creed [1955]

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The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophical Creed (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003).

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5.

The Marxist Account of Perception

According to Marxists, then, matter can be known to exist, and is not reducible to actual and possible sense data. We have now to consider their positive view of it, in so far as this concerns their theory of perception. Lenin wrote that matter is “the objective reality which is . . . copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them,”26 and he considered that this was also the view of Marx and Engels. Engels had written: “The influences of the external world upon man express themselves in his brain, are reflected therein as feelings, thoughts, instincts, volitions. . . .”27 That present-day Marxists have adopted this view of sensations as “reflecting” external realities can be seen from Professor V. Adoratsky’s Dialectical Materialism, where he writes: “Our knowledge contains an absolute (unconditional and unquestionable) truth, viz. that it reflects the external world.”28 In his next sentence Professor Adoratsky writes: “The truth of our knowledge is tested and confirmed by practice.” This last also was the view of Engels and Lenin. Engels emphasized the importance of practice in perception, notably in the introduction to Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, and Lenin followed suit when he wrote: “. . . things exist outside of us. Our perceptions and ideas are their images. Verification of these images, differentiation between true and false images, is given by practice.”29 In the course of a long footnote in which he compares William James’s Pragmatism with Mach’s Phenomenalism, Lenin obviously holds it against James that he had denied that science provides an “absolute copy of reality.”30 The suggestion, therefore, is that being a reflection or copy and being verified by practice are both of them conditions of perceiving correctly. Lenin also quotes with approval the second of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (1845) in which Marx had written: “The question whether objective truth is an attribute of human thought is not a theoretical but a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e. reality and power, the ‘this-sidedness’ of his thinking, in practice.”31 In the Soviet Russian Handbook of Philosophy by Rosenthal and Yudin we read, in the article “Sensation”: “As against mechanical materialism, which tended to conceive sensation as a passive reflection in the mind of things outside, Marxism insists on sensation as an active process arising through the efforts of the organism to satisfy its needs.”32

It will be noticed that some of these quotations refer to perception or sensation, and that others appear to be concerned with the truth of theories. Now these are very different things, since theories are, at the very least, very much less elementary than perceptions or sensations are. We very much more often describe statements or theories as true than we do perceptions or sensations. It is Marxists themselves, however, who group these things together and maintain that copying and practice are involved in both, so that the expositor and critic must commence by following suit. The Marxist view of sensation, therefore, appears to be that there are material things, that among these material things there are organisms with brains, that the material things that surround the organisms with brains act on them, thus producing reflections, impressions, copies, or images, and that the reflections, impressions, copies, or images are verified or rejected as a result of practical activity. Now this view seems at first sight to be liable to an obvious objection that has very often been made against so-called “copy” theories of perception. If the percipient never has direct access to the material realities that exist outside him, but only to the copies that they produce in him, then he can never know which copies are true copies and which ones false, which are like and which are unlike their originals. He is like a Martian who has never seen a human being and is asked to pronounce on whether Gainsborough painted good likenesses.

Now clearly if the Marxist theory is to escape this difficulty it must be by means of the conception of practice, and this, it seems to me, must be the importance of Lenin’s dictum: “Verification of these images, differentiation between true and false images, is given by practice.” The attempt appears to be made in two rather different ways.

The first and most obvious way may be developed by means of an example. While I am very weary and thirsty, I see, as I think, the water of a mountain stream. On the Marxist view this amounts to my having an image, reflection, copy, or impression. Is it a mirage, or is it real water? I approach, dip my hand in the stream, and feel the water running through my fingers. The visual sensation is corroborated by sensations of touch, and I drink and am satisfied. I have not only touched but I have made use of the water. The copy, therefore, was a true one and my deed has proved it. There is the initial sensation, there are expectations, and there is the active putting oneself in a position to obtain sensations that corroborate or disappoint the expectations. Someone who is good at this sort of thing survives and gets pleasure from his life. Those who too often fail are miserable or die. But is there any stage in the process at which I can be said by practice to have broken through the screen of images, reflections, copies, or impressions? It may be answered that I do this when I move toward what I hope is the water. Certainly, when I move to investigate I am not passively receiving sensations, but am deliberately seeking for them. But this deliberate seeking is, on the view we are considering, something that must be terminated in more sensations, not something that enables me to reach beyond them to some material object that is not a sensation. Once Marxists accept the view that perception is by means of images, then there is nothing to distinguish their view from phenomenalism except the wish that it were not.

The other way in which the notion of practice may be thought to function in the Marxist theory of perception can be seen if we suppose the theory to be that there are no mere reflections or mere copies at all, but that each separate sensation is itself active as well as passive. This view, which seems to be suggested in the passage I have quoted from Rosenthal and Yudin, might be recommended for its “dialectical” character. Activity, however, is not necessarily the same thing as practice. The opposite of activity is passivity, the merely being affected by something else, and it is possible to be active without being practically active. A being that is practically active makes changes in the world outside him by means of his practical acts. But it is possible to be theoretically active without making changes in the world by means of the theoretical acts. It is obvious that thinking is something that we do, but it seems equally obvious that, although it may lead to the sort of doing that changes things besides the doer, it is not, in itself, that sort of doing. Now seeing, hearing, and perceiving are activities of living creatures, but they are more like thinking than they are like practical activity, in that they do not consist in changing what is seen, heard, or perceived. No doubt when a creature perceives, changes go on in its body, but these are not activities and therefore not practical activities.

It may be objected at this point that, having accepted the Stoic and Marxist view that skeptical doubts about perception have no practical relevance, I ought also to accept the Marxist view that perception involves practice. The two positions, however, are quite distinct. It is one thing to say that no one in fact doubts the existence of the material world in any way that is relevant to practical action, and quite another thing to say that practical action is involved in perception itself. In the Marxist theory of perception there is a notion that is altogether repugnant to common sense, viz., the notion that we directly perceive the images or copies of things rather than the things themselves. The notion of practice is then introduced in an attempt to overcome the difficulties in this philosophical theory. If it were not being argued that in perception we directly apprehend the images or copies of things, there would be no need to say that it is in practice that we know whether the copies are true ones. The same word “practice” may be used for (a) the difference between a purely theoretical argument and an argument that carries the sort of conviction that emerges in practical action, and (b) an alleged passage from mere awareness of sense data (images, photographs, copies, reflections, etc.) to the perception of independently existing physical things, and it is with (b) that the philosophical difficulties arise.

Some contemporary Marxist writers appear desirous of abandoning the “copy” element in the Engels-Lenin theory of perception while retaining the emphasis on practice. Thus, Mr. Cornforth, in his Science versus Idealism,33 writes that “the objects of sense-perception, the objects known through the senses, are material objects, objects of the objective external world,” and goes on to suggest that we should not suppose “a set of special non-material sense-objects, private to the sentient mind—whether these are called ‘sense-impressions,’ ‘ideas,’ ‘sensations,’ ‘elements,’ or whatever they are called by the philosophers who invented them.” It should be mentioned, however, that in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism Lenin went out of his way to insist on this “copy” relationship. The physicist Helmholtz had suggested that the sensations that physical objects cause in the percipients of them need not be copies of their causes but only non-resembling natural signs or symbols. Lenin, however, would not accept this view (which he called “hieroglyphic materialism”34 ) and wrote: “If sensations are not images of things, but only signs or symbols, which do not resemble them, then Helmholtz’s initial materialist premise is undermined; the existence of external objects becomes subject to doubt; for signs or symbols may quite possibly indicate imaginary objects, and everybody is familiar with instances of such signs or symbols.”35 In support of this, Lenin cites the authority of Engels: “Engels speaks neither of symbols nor hieroglyphs, but of copies, photographs, images, mirror-reflections of things.”36 This would seem to suggest that Lenin believed that the sensations by means of which we perceive material objects are exactly like them, but he goes on to say: “It is beyond doubt that an image cannot wholly resemble the model, but an image is one thing, a symbol, a conventional sign, another. The image inevitably and of necessity implies the objective reality of that which it images. ‘Conventional sign,’ symbol, hieroglyph are concepts which introduce an entirely unnecessary element of agnosticism.”37 This passage shows that Lenin realized that there are different sorts of copy, and different degrees of likeness, and the question therefore arises of the sort and degree of likeness that he thought there must be between a sensation and a physical object. Soviet philosophers generally answer this by referring to the following passage in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: “This is how science views it. The sensation of red reflects ether vibrations of a frequency of approximately 450 trillions per second. The sensation of blue reflects ether vibrations of a frequency of approximately 620 trillions per second. The vibrations of the ether exist independently of our sensations of light. Our sensations depend on the action of the vibrations of ether on the human organ of vision. Our sensations reflect objective reality, i.e. something that exists independently of humanity and of human sensations.”38 On the face of it, ether vibrations and sensations of color are very different from one another, so that it seems odd to suggest that sensed colors are copies, photographs, or mirror-images of vibrations. Soviet philosophers have given some attention to this problem; they reject the “naïve realism” according to which there would exist in the physical world colors and sounds exactly like the colors we see and the sounds we hear, but they have nothing clear to say about what sort of copy or what degree of likeness is involved.39 Lenin was more concerned to proclaim the independent existence of the physical world than to explain how sensations can copy it, and has bequeathed to his followers some pretty intractable material. However that may be, both Lenin and the Soviet philosophers who follow him distinguish between physical occurrences on the one hand and sensations that copy or reflect them on the other, so that Mr. Cornforth must have been expounding his own opinion rather than the accepted Marxist view in the passages I have just quoted.

It is no great reproach to Lenin that he should have failed to put forward a coherent view about a problem that still puzzles scientists and philosophers. I suspect that his difficulties arise from his agreeing so far with his idealist and phenomenalist opponents that in perceiving we must become aware of entities (images, copies, sense contents, sense data) which are not the physical things themselves. Now we all begin by taking it for granted that it is physical things that we directly perceive—that we see and touch and hear such things as mountains, rocks, and thunderstorms. But as the result of two main lines of argument some people come to believe that what we directly perceive are entities the very existence of which we had not hitherto suspected. The first line of argument arises from considering the things that go on in and about our bodies when we perceive. Living beings, or at any rate animals, perceive, but metals, crystals, and machines do not. For in order to perceive, a suitable bodily equipment is necessary (eye, nerves, brain, etc.), and perception takes place when this bodily equipment is acted upon by some external object. It is possible, however, for something that is at any rate very like perception to take place even though there is no external object that affects the perceptive organs. For example, as Descartes pointed out, a man who has no foot may feel as though he still has a foot. This is thought to be because what finally and directly causes a perception is the nerves and brain, and these may be brought into the condition that causes perception either by an external object or by some condition within the body. Thus the perception of a tree normally arises from an organism’s being acted on by a tree, but it may on occasion arise from some injury to the brain causing a perception as if it had been caused by a tree. It is thought that what finally counts in bringing about a perception is the last link in a chain of causation running normally from a stimulus outside the body, but sometimes commencing in some other way. It is therefore concluded that what is directly perceived is never a thing like a tree, nor even a set of wave-frequencies, but something quite different, viz., a sense datum that has for its immediate cause a state of the percipient’s body. This is one line of argument to show that what we directly perceive is sense data. The second line of argument—called by philosophers “the Argument from Illusion”—briefly is that the direct objects of perception must be something other than material things, since the former frequently have properties which do not belong to the latter. For example, as I look at a penny I see, from most angles, various sorts of colored ellipse. The penny, however, is circular, and as what is elliptical cannot be at the same time circular, what I see cannot be a circular penny, but must be an elliptical sense datum. Philosophers who argue in this way then go on to consider how sense data can be related to material things. It will be seen that the common conclusion that the immediate objects of perception are sense data is reached by two different arguments, but this should not lead us to overlook their common preoccupation with illusions. A very important difference, however, is that the word “sense datum” is, in the first argument, defined in terms of physical causes, animal organisms, and their interactions, whereas in the second argument it is, as it is said, ostensively defined as what you see, hear, smell, touch, etc., quite apart from any theories about sense organs and the rest. That is to say, in the second argument “sense datum” is alleged to be defined in such a way that there could not possibly be any doubt that there are such things, since there cannot possibly be any doubt that colored shapes are seen, sounds are heard, and so on.

Some form of the first argument seems to have been accepted by Engels and Lenin, so let us see where it is likely to lead us. As I have just said, in order to say, for the purposes of this argument, what a sense datum is, reference has to be made to material objects, animal organisms, and sense organs. Sense data are entities that arise when certain physical conditions are fulfilled. It would therefore be contradictory to say within the framework of that argument that, while sense data certainly existed, material things were doubtful or non-existent—just as it would be contradictory to say, in ordinary discourse, that gifts certainly existed but that the existence of donors and recipients was a matter for doubt or denial. This is not a play on the derivation of the word “datum,” but a plain statement of how the expression “sense datum” is introduced into the sort of argument we are considering. Marxists, therefore, may be regarded as making the valid point that “sense data” or “sensations” are, in this context, terms that bear their meaning by relation to other terms such as physical stimuli, animal organisms, etc., and so could not, without contradiction, be regarded as sole denizens of the world. Another feature of the argument is that perception of physical things must be indirect because it takes place after a series of causes has come into play commencing with the external object and ending with some supposed physical modification of the brain. But why should perception be regarded as indirect just because the brain’s connection with the external stimulus is indirect? It seems to me that there may well have been confusion between the indirect connection that holds between the first and last members of a chain of physical causes on the one hand, and some allegedly indirect perception on the other. It makes sense to apply the word “indirect” to some sorts of knowledge. I may be said to know a man indirectly when I know someone who knows him but have never met the man myself, and knowledge gained by inference, hearsay, or reading may be called indirect by comparison with perceptual knowledge or with acquaintance generally. But in all these cases I might possibly have had direct knowledge; I might have met the man myself, or have gained the knowledge without inference or hearsay. But direct perception is apparently quite impossible, and this suggests, although it does not prove, that the notion of indirect perception is not a clear one. Such difficulties arise, I think, because we think of a chain of causes that runs as follows: external (physical) object—sense organ—nerves—brain—change in brain cell—sense datum—perception of sense datum. The first five members of this series are physical, and then there is a jump to entities of a different status, to sense data and perceptions. And it is hard to resist the conclusion that there is a jump of this sort, since becoming conscious of something seems to be quite different from any series of merely physical changes. Sir Charles Sherrington is surely right when he says: “It is a far cry from an electrical reaction in the brain to suddenly seeing the world around me . . .,”40 but this is no reason for concluding that we see sense data rather than physical objects. Consciousness is not made any less mysterious by introducing objects of a special, half-way type for it to be directly concerned with.

The second line of argument, the Argument from Illusion, raises rather different problems, and were I to dwell on them I should stretch this already long chapter beyond reasonable bounds. There is one aspect of it, however, on which I should like to comment briefly. The crux of the Argument from Illusion is that it must be sense data, objects distinct from physical objects, that are directly apprehended, since what is directly apprehended usually has features—shapes, sizes, colors, etc.—which are not features of the physical object being perceived. The elliptical shape I see cannot, according to this argument, be the circular penny; the yellow color I see when sick with jaundice cannot be the color of the white walls of my bedroom; the image of it in the mirror is not the penny in my hand; there is no stream the other side of the sandhill—what we saw was a mirage; the mad miser scratching for coins on the pavement was obviously seeing something, but it could not have been real pennies. But perhaps it is a mistake to treat all these cases in the same way. In the first place, mirages and hallucinations appear to involve illusions in a more intensive degree than do perspectival distortions, mirror images, or even jaundice. Indeed, the extension of the term “illusion” to perspectival distortions is probably due to philosophers anxious to discredit sense experience in favor of something else. So far is the word “illusion” from being apt to describe the case of the elliptical appearance of the circular penny, that we may well ask whether we could form any conception of what it would be to perceive a penny or any other physical object without perspectival distortion. How could anything look exactly the same from all sides and distances? What would it be like to see all things the same size no matter how far off they were? Again, it is very difficult to form any notion of what it could be to perceive all the surfaces of something at once, especially if the shape of each surface is always to remain the same. It would seem that physical things are essentially things that reveal themselves differently from different distances and points of view. In the second place, it is misleading in the extreme to regard mirror images as analogies for the perspectives or appearances of physical things. For whereas we can, and frequently do, see at the same time both the object itself and its reflection in a mirror, we can never at the same time see both the penny’s elliptical appearance and its circular shape. Furthermore, perspectival distortions are seen in the mirror, and are for this reason too a different type of thing. Mirrors add to the ways in which physical objects may appear, but there could be physical objects without mirrors, although physical things could not conceivably appear without appearing in different ways from different places. The mirror’s power of multiplying has fascinated the tellers of stories from Ovid to Carroll and Cocteau, and philosophers too have fallen under its spell when they allow it to dominate their account of perception. I suggest, in the third place, that hallucinations should be linked with mental images and with dreams rather than with the sort of case already mentioned—unless, indeed, some mirages are collective hallucinations. For the miser seeing imaginary pennies is like a man dreaming with his eyes open rather than like a man seeing things in a mirror. Nor is he like the man with jaundice, for unlike him he sees what is not there rather than what is there wrongly. When we close our eyes and remember or call up things that we have seen, some representative of it is, as we say, before our minds, and sometimes this representative is a sort of copy like those we experience in dreams. Thus Turner, when a boy, trained himself to form visual images of the prints he saw in shop windows so that he could draw them when he got home. Such images are, so to say, disconnected from their sources in a way in which perspectives and mirror images are not. It is one thing for an object to seem or to appear in a certain way, or even to seem what it is not, and quite another thing for a representative or image to be observed instead of its original. Those who hold that sense data are involved in all perception, and still more those who talk of “copies” or “images,” have been influenced by the spell of the enchanted mirror, and seek to describe waking life in terms of dreams and the dreamlike. I do not think it is out of place to quote, in illustration of this, the following remarks made by d’Alembert about Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous: “At the beginning of the French translation there has been placed an allegorical engraving that is both clever and unusual. A child sees its face in a mirror, and runs to catch hold of it, thinking he sees a real being. A philosopher standing behind the child seems to be laughing at its mistake; and below the engraving we read these words addressed to the philosopher: Quid rides? Fabula de te narratur. (Why are you laughing? The story is being told about you.)”41

That Engels and Lenin held that there were sense data, and that sense data were a sort of reflection, copy, or image of physical things, cannot in the light of the texts be doubted, and I very much doubt whether Marxists today really wish to deny this. However that may be, the view that the immediate objects of perception are sense data is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with a realist account of perception. Thus I do not think that Engels and Lenin succeeded in putting forward an adequate account of the sort of view they wished to establish. They saw that a realist account of perception was a first step in establishing a materialist philosophy, but in stating it they did not get much beyond assertions and wishes. There is little point in repetition of the realist platitude by people who are not really interested in the arguments that have led to its denial. We can easily turn away from philosophical problems, but we can only clarify or solve them by philosophical argument.

There are two historical observations I must make before concluding this chapter.

(1) In the Theses on Feuerbach (which were not written for publication), and in the German Ideology (which was not published until long after Marx and Engels were dead), there are some remarks about perception of the physical world which appear to give the outlines of a theory. In the first of his Theses on Feuerbach Marx says that in all materialism up to his time, including that of Feuerbach, the object apprehended by the senses is understood “only in the form of the object or of perception (Anschauung); but not as sensuous human (sinnlichmenschlich) activity, as practice (Praxis), not subjectively.” And he goes on to say that in his Essence of Christianity Feuerbach had considered only man’s “theoretical behavior” as truly human, and had dealt with practice “only in its ‘dirty Jewish’ manifestation.” Again in the fifth of the Theses he wrote: “Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thought, wants perception (Anschauung): but he does not grasp our faculty of perception (Sinnlichkeit) as practical, human-sensuous activity.” This, I suggest, may be read along with passages in the German Ideology (written about the same time) in which Marx and Engels criticize Feuerbach for not seeing how the “sensible world around him is not a thing given from all eternity, ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society,” and go on to say that “unceasing sensuous labor and production” have made nature into something very different from what it was before man came into it. These passages are obscure, and the last one not a little foolish, but the following appear to be the points that are of importance for our present purpose. Feuerbach, whose Essence of Christianity (1841) greatly influenced Marx and Engels, had criticized Hegel for depreciating the knowledge we gain through our senses and for preferring philosophical thought to it. Furthermore, in his Essence of Christianity Feuerbach maintained that the characteristics that men attribute to God are really human characteristics in an idealized form. In particular he had said the Jewish notion of God as creative will indicated a lower stage of human development than the Christian notion of God as contemplative mind. (The phrase “dirty Jewish” does not occur in the book.) Marx appears to be saying, in his discussion of all this, that Feuerbach was right to see that perception could not be superseded by mere thought but that he should have gone further and concluded that practical activity cannot be superseded by mere theoretical contemplation. A thorough-going materialist, he is suggesting, should not admit the existence of any purely theoretical activity in human beings, since this would presuppose some disembodied spiritual force that in fact could not exist. At first sight it seems ridiculous to criticize anyone for not considering how human practical activity has changed the natural world, for it is so very obvious that it has, and we naturally suppose that work on the one hand and awareness or consciousness on the other are very different things. But Marx, in these passages, appears to assert that awareness or consciousness is somehow (he does not say how) inseparable from physical manipulation of the material world. Some Soviet Marxists in the late twenties interpreted Marx as meaning that consciousness just is behavior, but this view has not remained in favor. Nevertheless, Marx does seem to be saying that whatever consciousness may be, it is inseparable from the manipulative activities of organisms. Views of this sort are not, of course, confined to Marxists, and in recent years interesting theories have been developed in which perception is regarded as a sort of practical achievement. Marx, however, did not elaborate his suggestions, and Marxists have been faced with the necessity of making the most of the “copy” theory that they have inherited from Engels and Lenin.42

(2) In chapter 7 of the Holy Family Marx gave a brief account of the growth of modern materialism, and particularly of the French materialism of the Eighteenth Century.43 He considered Bacon44 to be the founder of the movement and went on to show how Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding was a decisive influence in the minds of the men who created and led the French Enlightenment, a movement which Marx described as both an attack on the Church and its doctrines and a criticism of the metaphysical thinking that had been so prominent in the preceding century. It was within this movement that the materialist views of Diderot, Helvétius, and d’Holbach were developed. Marx, in this chapter, is concerned primarily with the social bearings of French materialism, and so has no occasion to refer to views about the perception of the material world. I think, however, that a very brief account of what was said about this by the leading French thinkers of the period will throw some light on the Marxist theory. Marx, like Feuerbach, thought that the leading thinkers of the French Enlightenment had “seen through” metaphysics, and it is reasonable to suppose that they took much the same attitude to idealist accounts of perception. Now Locke had said that all our knowledge is based on “ideas.” Ideas became naturalized in France as “sensations.” But it soon became apparent that simple-minded theories about sensations and their “external causes” were liable to the criticisms that Berkeley had brought against Locke. Diderot, in his Letter on the Blind for Those Who Can See (1749), wrote: “Idealism is a system which, to the shame of the human mind and philosophy, is the most difficult to overcome, though the most absurd of all.” He therefore urged Condillac to undertake the refutation of idealism on the basis of the current empiricism, and Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations (1754) contained the most notable attempt to do this. In effect, Condillac argued that it is by means of touch that we become aware of an external world, and he tried to show how this happens by reference to the double sensation we have when we touch some part of our own body and the single sensations we have when we touch something external to our body. “Touch,” he wrote, “teaches the other senses to judge about external objects.” This, of course, is no answer to Berkeley’s idealism, and Condillac, not very happy about it, later thought that the sensation of a resisting obstacle provided a better defense of realism. D’Alembert, too, was puzzled by the apparent conflict between empiricism and realism, and, distinguishing the question how we get knowledge of external objects from the question whether such knowledge is demonstrative, answered the first question much as Condillac had done, and the second in the negative. The existence of matter, he said, should be regarded as known to us “by a sort of instinct to which we should abandon ourselves without resistance . . . sensations were given us in order to satisfy our needs rather than our curiosity; in order to make us aware of the relation of external beings to our own being, and not to give us knowledge of those beings in themselves.” Turgot, who in 1750 thought he could refute Berkeley, subsequently gave, in the article in the Encyclopédie entitled “Existence,” a brilliant account of the phenomenalist view. In general, the empiricism of these thinkers led them to phenomenalist conclusions which they mitigated by off-hand references to instinct and practice. The little I have been able to find in the writings of Helvétius and d’Holbach that bears on this matter does not distinguish them from their more eminent contemporaries. All this suggests to me that when Marx and Engels regarded idealism as refuted by practice they meant by “practice” touching and manipulating and the survival value of discriminative sensations, much as their eighteenth century forerunners had done.

II

Marxist Naturalism

[26. ]M. and E-C, p. 192.

[27. ]In Ludwig Feuerbach, pp. 40–41 (London, 1935).

[28. ]International Publishers, pp. 66–67 (New York, 1934). He refers to “knowledge,” but the view applies to sensation.

[29. ]M. and E-C, p. 173.

[30. ]Ibid., pp. 391–92.

[31. ]Printed in The German Ideology, vol. 17 of the Marxist-Leninist Library (London, 1942), p. 197.

[32. ]Edited and adapted by Howard Selsam, New York, 1949.

[33. ]London, 1946, pp. 87–88.

[34. ]M. and E-C, p. 290.

[35. ]Ibid., p. 292.

[36. ]Ibid., p. 290.

[37. ]Ibid., p. 293.

[38. ]Ibid., p. 355.

[39. ]See Gustav A. Wetter, Der Dialektische Materialismus: Seine Geschichte und sein System in der Sowjetunion, pp. 515–24 (Freiburg, 1952). Dialectical Materialism, translated by Peter Heath (London, 1958).

[40. ]The Physical Basis of Mind, ed. Peter Laslett, p. 4 (London, 1950).

[41. ]Oeuvres, II, p. 133 (Paris, An XIII–1805).

[42. ]The Theses on Feuerbach are printed at the end of Professor Pascal’s translation of the German Ideology (London, 1942 reprint), but the translations given above are mine. The passage from the latter about the influence of men on the natural world is from pp. 34–36, but in the first phrase I have rendered sinnlich by “sensible” as the sense seems to require. The above very brief account of the first Thesis is indebted to Professor N. Rotenstreich’s invaluable Marx’ Thesen über Feuerbach (Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, Bern und München, 1951), XXXIX/3 and XXXIX/4. An account of the behaviorist developments of Marx’s views in Soviet Russia in the twenties is given in chapter 5 of R. A. Bauer’s The New Man in Soviet Psychology (Harvard University Press, 1952). Since then, behaviorist theories of mind have been given up there (chap. 6 of the same book).

[43. ]Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (in future to be abbreviated as M.E.G.A.), I, 3, p. 301.

[44. ]He did not but could have quoted with effect Bacon’s statement in Cogitata et Visa (1607): “. . . Truth is shown and proved by the evidence of works rather than by argument, or even sense.”