SCIENCE AND THE WORKING CLASS 



Thinking means to develop from the material 

 facts, from the concrete, an abstract generaliza- 

 tion. The material fact is an indispensable basis 

 of thought. It must be present, before the 

 essence, the general, or abstract, can be found. 

 The understanding of this fact contains the solu- 

 tion of all scientific riddles." 



This was, indeed, the crucial point, without 

 which the materialist conception lacked complete- 

 ness. Without it, the building of materialist 

 monism would have been imperfect. True, Marx 

 and Engels were able to show by the data of 

 history itself that material conditions have always 

 shaped human thought, which resulted in his- 

 torical events. But not until Dietzgen had shown 

 that the human mind itself was a product of that 

 greater historical process, of which human his- 

 tory is but a small part, the cosmic process, and 

 that the human faculty of thought produced its 

 thoughts by means of the natural environment, 

 was the historical materialism of Marx fully ex- 

 plained and the riddle of the universe solved so 

 far as human thought processes were concerned. 



This was done for the first time in Dietzgen's 

 " The Nature of Human Brain Work," published 

 in 1869. 



With this work, the socialist philosophy com- 



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