SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION 



This acknowledgment was made by Marx and 

 Engels, in " The Holy Family," in these words : 

 " Just as Cartesian materialism leads to French 

 natural science, so the other school of French 

 materialism leads directly to socialism and com- 

 munism. It requires no great keenness of per- 

 ception to realize that the doctrines of materialism 

 relative to the original goodness and equal in- 

 tellectual endowment of men, to the omnipotence 

 of experience, habit, education, and the influence 

 of external circumstances on men, the great im- 

 portance of industry, the justification of enjoy- 

 ment, etc., lead necessarily to a connection with 

 communism and socialism. If man gets all his 

 knowledge and feeling, etc., from the world of 

 sense perceptions and his contact with it, then 

 the thing to do is to arrange matters in the 

 material world in such a way, that he gets truly 

 human impressions from it, acquires them as 

 habits, and realizes his human nature. If the 

 correct understanding of material interests is 

 the basic principle of all morality, then the private 

 interests of man must be made to coincide with 

 general human interests. If the human race is 

 unfree in the sense that the materialists use this 

 term, that is to say if man is free, not so much 

 by his negative power to avoid this or that, but 



