METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM 



physical idealism and materialism.^ Idealism did justice to the highest 

 manifestations of human social activity, but was absolutely incapable 

 of doing justice to that real objective world on which science must 

 insist. Materialism provided a w^orld congruent with scientific activity, 

 but, since it lacked the secondary qualities, a world so "grey and 

 Cimmerian" (in Goethe's phrase) that only the stoutest-hearted or the 

 thickest-headed could accept it as an account of that real world in 

 which some place had to be found for human values. By their fight 

 against both classical idealism and mechanical materialism, and by 

 their insistence on the successive dialectical levels in nature, the 

 highest of them including all man's highest experiences, Marx and 

 Engels overcame this contradiction for the first time in history. 

 Engels pointed out three limitations in former mechanical materialism; 

 first that it was mechanical "in the sense that it believed in the ex- 

 clusive application of the standards of mechanics to processes of a 

 chemical and organic nature"; second, that it was anti-dialectical, i.e. 

 that it did not allow for the ever-shifting boundaries in nature; and 

 third, that it admitted of the preservation of idealism "up above" in 

 the realm of the social sciences.^ 



In historical events the dialectical process is readily seen.^ The 

 English civil war in the 17th century provides a particularly striking 

 example. The whole feudal systems of ideas, represented by the King, 

 the aristocracy and the Anglican bishops came into sharp opposition 

 against the rising middle class led by the smaller country gentry, the 

 merchants and the City of London. Feudal royal ism found its anti- 

 thesis in the radical puritan republicanism of the Commonwealth 

 period. But the time was not ripe for the ideas of the Levellers and 

 Independents, and the Restoration was a dialectical synthesis in which 

 a constitutional monarchy, or one which was bound to end as such, 

 combined with a triumphant Parliament controlled by the middle 

 class whose interests the civil war had made secure. The protestant 

 coup d'etat of 1688 and the Reform Act of 1832 simply completed 



^ Cf. Lenin On Dialectics in Works, 11, p. 84. Or one might say that Thomas 

 Aquinas made a dialectical synthesis of the points of view represented in earlier scholastic 

 thought by Abelard and William of Champeaux (M. J. Adler, Dialectics, London, 

 1927, p. 72). Clement of Alexandria actually did say, in the Stromata, that Christianity 

 was the synthesis of Greek and Jew. 



^ Cf. Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in Works, 11. p. 297. 



^ As for example by the non-marxist historian H. Butterfield in his interesting book 

 The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), where he combats the moralising 

 attitude to historical conflicts, showing that each side stood for some elements which 

 were embodied in the subsequent synthesis. 



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