Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing
House, no year given)
"The fundamental premise of materialism is the recognition of the
external world, of the existence of things outside and independent of
our mind." (p. 78)
"Did Nature Exist Prior to Man? We have already seen that this
question is particularly repugnant to the philosophy of Mach and
Avenarius. Natural science positively asserts that the earth once
existed in such a state that no man or any other creature existed or
could have existed on it. Organic matter is a later phenomenon, the
fruit of a long evolution. It follows that there was no sentient
matter, no 'complexes of sensations,' no self that was supposedly
'indissolubly' connected with the environment in accordance with
Avenarius' doctrine.. Matter is primary, and thought, consciousness,
sensation are products of a very high development. Such is the
materialist theory of knowledge, to which natural science
instinctively subscribes." (p. 69)
"We have seen that the starting point and the fundamental premise of
the philosophy of empirio-criticism is subjective idealism. The world
is our sensation--this is the fundamental premise. . . .The absurdity
of this philosophy lies in the fact that it leads to solipsism, to the
recognition of the existence of the philosophising individual only."
(p. 89)
"Yesterday we did not know that coal tar contained alizarin. Today we
learned that it does. The question is, did coal tar contain alizarin
yesterday?
"Of course it did. To doubt it would be to make a mockery of modern
science.
"And if that is so, three important epistemological conclusions
follow:
"1)Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of
our perceptions, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin
existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that
yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and
received no sensations from it.
"2) There is definitely no difference in principle between the
phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there can be no such
difference. The only difference is between what is known and what is
not yet known. And philosophical inventions of specific boundaries
between the one and the other, inventions to the effect that the
thing-in-itself is "beyond" phenomena (Kant), or that we can or must
fence ourselves off by some philosophical partition from the problem
of a world which in one part or another is still unknown but which
exists outside us (hume)--all this is the sheerest nonsense, Schrulle,
crotchet, invention.
"3)In the theory of knowledge, as in every other branch of science, we
must think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as
ready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges
from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more
complete and more exact."
