SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION 



other school started out from Locke, and led di- 

 rectly to Socialism. Descartian materialism be- 

 came the father of that mechanical materialism 

 which characterizes the bourgeois materialists of 

 the 1 8th and iQth centuries, who were either ig- 

 norant of evolutionary materialism, or opposed to 

 it. It furnished at first the basis for the natural 

 science of France, and, combined with theistic 

 idealism, it became the stronghold of those who, 

 like Cuvier and Agassiz, clung to the Mosaic idea 

 of creation and to the theory of fixed species, in 

 opposition to the introduction of the idea of devel- 

 opment by the interaction of physical and chem- 

 ical movements. The followers of Locke, on the 

 other hand, cultivated the evolutionary branch of 

 French materialism. 



" The immediate disciple and French inter- 

 preter of Locke, Condillac, directed the point of 

 Locke's sensationalism at once against the meta- 

 physics of the 1 7th century," writes Karl Marx 

 in the " Holy Family," in which he and Fred- 

 erick Engels exposed the shallowness of the 

 Young-Hegelians of the Bruno Bauer stripe. 

 " He proved that the French justly rejected meta- 

 physics, because it was merely a handiwork of 

 imagination and theological prejudices. He pub- 

 lished a refutation of the systems of Descartes, 



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