time: the refreshing river 



Criticism. Lenin showed that the Machians were really disguised 

 philosophical idealists, not merely affirming the existence of some 

 distortion in our apprehension of the external world, but tending to 

 deny its very existence or to make all science the purely subjective 

 study of an unknowable noumenon. He elucidated the confusion 

 which the Machians had introduced between the objective-subjective 

 antithesis on the one hand, and the absolute-relative antithesis on the 

 other. Scientific truth is certainly relative, since all formulations are 

 imperfect, though approaching, perhaps asymptotically, to the truest 

 possible account of the regularities of external nature; but it is equally 

 certainly objective, in that it deals with real external events, even 

 through the "optic glasses" of our human limitations.^ Relativity of 

 scientific truth is taken care of in dialectical materialism, since 

 it is constantly approximating dialectically to truth; but subjectiv- 

 ism, if it be pure, is nothing else than metaphysical idealism in 

 disguise. 



The seemingly endless process of the improvement of human 

 knowledge was very much in my mind when the essays of SB and GA 

 were written.^ Because of my doubt whether any "philosophia prima'* 

 could ever be found to reconcile the different forms of human ex- 

 perience, I emphasised all the more the practice of activities themselves, 

 never doubting that each was undergoing progressive advance and 

 refinement. Hence the quotation from the Nicomachean Ethics of 

 Aristotle with which SB was headed: "The greatest good which man 

 can know is the active exercise of the spirit in conformity with virtue." 

 There is a parallel to this in the seemingly endless process of the 

 improvement of human society. Those whose conscious or unconscious 

 interest it is to minimise the achievements of social evolution generally 

 choose one of two ways of attack; saying either that the art and 

 thought of the ancients has had no equal since, or that no matter 

 what changes the further development of human society may bring, 

 it will never approach that perfection which has long been imaginable. 

 The first point of view is the product of a distorted time-scale. The 

 second is the most superficial of all pessimisms. Whether or not 

 human suffering will always exist, it is always our duty to work to 

 decrease it, and the course of social evolution hitherto gives us every 

 confidence for the future. Social, as well as scientific, ethos is summed 

 up in the words of G. E. Lessing (a favourite passage of the great 



^ Cf. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, pp. 185, 199, 363. 

 2 SB, pp. 7, 33 ff. 



22 



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