LENIN’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE AS THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHYSICS

S. G. Suvorov

I

This year marks forty years since the publication of V. I. Lenin’s brilliant work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a work whose profound meaning is revealed ever more fully as the struggle between materialism and idealism, between the ideology of the new, socialist society and that of the old, capitalist society, becomes ever sharper.

Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism is a document of Party struggle, called upon to resolve the urgent tasks of the workers’ movement that confronted the Party. History has shown that its significance went far beyond the limits of those tasks which were immediate at the time of its writing. This document was, and remains to this day, a powerful ideological weapon of our Party.

The book was written by Lenin at a time when the revolution of 1905 had suffered defeat and tsarism was conducting an offensive against the working class and its Party. It was a period of ideological vacillation among part of the intelligentsia, manifested in politics (liquidationism), in art and literature (a departure from realism, decadence), in natural science (a departure from materialism toward idealism), and in other spheres of ideology (for example, god-seeking, god-building, etc.). The struggle against Marxism became fashionable. Ideological vacillation also affected that part of the Party intelligentsia which had never been ideologically firm. A group of intellectuals (Bogdanov, Bazarov, Lunacharsky, who at that time were close to the Bolsheviks, and the Mensheviks Yushkevich and Valentinov), calling themselves Marxists, attempted to “renovate” Marxism by correcting it with the “achievements” of the “newest philosophy of twentieth-century natural science,” propagated by Mach and his followers. The Russian Machists, “who wished to be Marxists,” as Lenin ironically calls them, contributed to the appearance of a multitude

S. G. SUVOROV

translations into Russian of the books of Mach, Avenarius, Petzoldt, and other leaders of foreign idealism, and also published a number of their own books and collections revising Marxism.

Against these revisionists of Marxism, who hypocritically appeared under the banner of Marxism but in fact strove to undermine it, Lenin came out in his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. In it Lenin routed not only the Russian exponents of idealist philosophy, but also their ideological teachers.

The great significance of Lenin’s book consists in the defense of the theoretical foundations of Marxism—dialectical and historical materialism, in its development under new historical conditions. In this respect Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism is ideologically connected with Comrade Stalin’s work Anarchism or Socialism, written in 1906–1907.

Lenin’s book, Comrade Stalin indicates, is at the same time “a materialist generalization of all the important and essential things acquired by science and, above all, by natural science over an entire historical period, the period from Engels’ death to the appearance of Lenin’s book.”⁴ In the field of physics this period was characterized by “gigantic, dizzying” (Lenin) successes, by major discoveries that made it possible to penetrate into the depths of the atom. It was a period of the stormy breakdown of a number of concepts that had taken shape in classical physics, a period when the inadequacy of mechanistic materialism became obvious in the matter of generalizing the new discoveries in physics, when idealism raised its head in it.

Dialectical materialism was discovered by Marx and Engels on the basis of a generalization primarily of the social sciences, as well as the natural sciences. But at that time it did not become the world outlook of natural scientists. Engels, who already in the contemporary course of the development of natural science foresaw its future features, tirelessly called upon natural scientists consciously to pass over to the positions of dialectical materialism, and warned them that otherwise they would find themselves defenseless before the onslaught of idealist philosophy. However, these appeals did not reach natural scientists. During the lifetime of Marx and Engels the questions of applying dialectical materialism in natural science did not arise with the acuteness with which they arose later, in Lenin’s epoch, and they were less developed. The book planned by Engels as the broadest dialectical generalization of the development of natural science was not completed by him, and its fragments were not known before the Great October Socialist Revolution.

The majority of nineteenth-century physicists in their investigations proceeded from materialist views. These views were not deeply theoretically substantiated by them, and were distinguished by a certain primitivism. Physicists spontaneously believed that outside us there exists nature, the cognition of which constitutes the aim of natural science.

By the beginning of the last quarter of the 19th century they naively supposed that they were already on the eve of completing the edifice of their science, when the last foundations of all natural phenomena, the last and simplest “bricks of the universe,” would be known. M. Planck bears witness to the attitudes of physicists of that time: “When I began my physical studies and asked my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly for advice about the conditions and prospects of my studies, he presented physics to me as a highly developed, almost completely mature science, which must soon assume its final stable form after it had, in a certain sense, been crowned by the discovery of the principle of conservation of energy. Of course, here and there it might still be possible to notice or remove a speck of dust or a bubble, but the system as a whole stands fairly firmly, and theoretical physics is noticeably approaching that degree of perfection which geometry has possessed for centuries.”^8

The structure of the “last foundations” of the universe seemed simple: many physicists imagined them in the form of homogeneous, indivisible particles—atoms—between which unchanging forces of attraction and repulsion act. The program of reducing all physical phenomena to this scheme was expressed, for example, by Helmholtz.^9 The greatest discovery of natural science—the law of conservation and transformation of energy—was wrongly interpreted by physicists as proof of the possibility of reducing all forms of the motion of matter to mechanical motion. The affirmation of these same views was promoted by the successes of the kinetic theory of matter, as well as by a number of brilliant predictions in the field of optics (for example, conical refraction of light) and astronomy, made on the basis of a mechanistic conception of nature. True, there were difficulties connected with elucidating the structure of the ether and, in general, the theory of the emission and propagation of light; in particular, the ether did not fit into Helmholtz’s scheme. However, physicists still hoped that these were difficulties of a temporary order and that they too would be resolved, if not within Helmholtz’s scheme, then nevertheless in a mechanistic spirit.

The materialist position of 19th-century physicists was the progressive side of their worldview. Materialist physicists had before them a simple and clear goal—the study of the laws of the external objective world, ultimately for practical purposes.

But the spontaneity of the materialist position of physicists concealed enormous weaknesses. Physicists did not rise above an elementary, metaphysical form of materialism. They had no conception of cognition as a process in which we draw ever nearer to objective, absolute truth, never exhausting it. The ideal structure of science was conceived as a completed structure, from initial postulates to final conclusions. The metaphysical materialism of natural scientists was connected with a definite

...the physical conception of nature as a mechanical system consisting of immutable, structureless elements whose motion obeys the laws of mechanics. It was precisely for this reason that the metaphysical materialism of natural scientists could persist only so long as the ground beneath the mechanistic view of nature was not seriously shaken in physics.

In the last quarter of the 19th century the mechanistic conception of nature was destroyed. The first serious blows to it were dealt by the emergence of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic processes and the collapse of mechanical models of the ether. Proceeding from Faraday’s idea of action at short range, Maxwell created a theory of electromagnetic processes as certain physical processes propagating in space in finite time. The equations of this theory connected the change of the electric intensity \(E\) and the magnetic intensity \(H\) at neighboring points of space. Yet no material carriers of these intensities, in the form of charged or magnetized particles at these points of space, were observed. Maxwell’s hypothesis that they were manifestations of certain mechanical deformations of the ether was not confirmed. Not a single mechanical model of the ether was confirmed, although physicists persistently, but unsuccessfully, constructed many of them. Later, when after Michelson’s experiments it became clear that mechanical models of the ether could not explain electromagnetic processes and that it was not detected by experiments, the idea of the existence of the world ether as a homogeneous elastic mechanical medium was abandoned—though, to be sure, not without a struggle.

At the same time, the theory of electromagnetic processes was brilliantly justified. The electromagnetic waves predicted by the theory were discovered in 1888 by H. Hertz, and seven years later, thanks to the inventions of A. S. Popov, they received practical application in modern radio engineering. The electromagnetic nature of light was also established, and the connection predicted by the theory between the optical and electromagnetic constants of bodies was experimentally confirmed. The conclusions following from electromagnetic theory concerning the existence of light pressure were brilliantly confirmed by the classical experiments of P. N. Lebedev.

However, the enormous successes of the theory of electromagnetic processes were not epistemologically comprehended by physicists. Before them stood a theory that quickly became the basis of technology, one that could not be ignored; but the processes it described could occur in “emptiness,” in which there was no matter familiar to physicists—substance, with those properties with which classical mechanics endowed it. For the first time in the history of physics there had been created a “strikingly successful, but completely incomprehensible” theory, in which there were equations describing motion, but “there was no matter that would be moving,” that is, the new theory did not rest upon the mechanistic conception of substance and its displacement. Academician A. F. Ioffe relates...

from a personal conversation the account of the greatest physicist of that time, H. A. Lorentz, who stood, as is known, on spontaneously materialist positions: “Having sensed the enormous significance of this theory (Maxwell’s.—S. S.), he began to study it, but became convinced that he understood nothing in it except the formulas, and could derive nothing from this theory. Learning that a French exposition of Maxwell’s theory had appeared, he immediately went to Paris, expecting that the author who had expounded Maxwell evidently understood him. But the author of this exposition told him that Maxwell’s theory could not be understood at all, that it had in it a purely mathematical, completely abstract form, and that Maxwell’s theory could have no physical meaning.”^10

Physicists who reflected on the fate of their science acutely experienced this moment of its development. They complained that with Maxwell’s theory there appeared in physics, and then spread widely throughout all its branches, a new, “undesirable spirit”—an incomprehensible hypothesis. The confusion of physicists, who had not been able philosophically to comprehend the new stage in the development of physics, is conveyed by one of their contemporaries in the following words: “With an instrument incomprehensible to him in his hands, the scientist performs miracles, begins to understand much that had earlier been incomprehensible, discovers new phenomena, unites the disparate, hoping that in time he will understand the sense and significance of his miracle-working instrument. However, all the scientific victories achieved in this way evoke, alongside feelings of delight and astonishment, a feeling of profound dissatisfaction. We see that a new scientific building is being erected, but its foundation is incomprehensible to us and arouses the greatest doubts.”^11

Thus, in the consciousness of physicists, the conception of a form of matter previously unknown to them—the field—was born in torment.

But this was only the beginning of the collapse of the mechanistic view of nature, only the first “underground tremors” of a great revolutionary upheaval. At the same time new views of the nature of matter were maturing and, by the end of the nineteenth century, had finally taken shape. The law of periodicity of the chemical properties of the elements, already discovered by the great D. I. Mendeleev (1869), testified to the complex structure of atoms. Ideas about their complex structure were also confirmed by the discovery in the atoms of various elements of individual emission spectra, and became quite obvious after the discovery of radioactivity (1896) and a number of other phenomena. The conceptions of finite immutable entities, created by metaphysical thought, collapsed.

Thereby the physicists’ hope of completing the edifice of science, of establishing in the near future the last “bricks of the universe,” the “ultimate causes of all causes,” also collapsed. It is easy to understand the psychological disappointment of people who had all but reached the “final goal,” and now had to continue a “journey” to which no end was visible!

Moreover, the new discoveries showed that the nature of atoms is not mechanical, that their structure is determined by electromagnetism charac-

ter of the interaction of the charges entering into atoms (as was indicated by the phenomena of radioactivity, the ionization of atoms, spectral regularities, and the dependence of spectra on electric and magnetic fields). It also turned out that elementary charges—electrons—possess a variable mass, dependent on the velocity of their motion, and that, at least in part, this mass is of electromagnetic origin. Newtonian mechanics was losing its absolute character.

Under the influence of new experimental discoveries that did not fit within the framework of classical physics, and of the collapse—caused by these discoveries—of physicists’ dreams of a completed picture of the universe, ideas of relativism began increasingly to penetrate their midst. Metaphysical materialism proved unable to explain either the new discoveries not reducible to mechanics or the dialectics of the new concepts. In the face of the new facts, physicists found themselves disarmed philosophically, just as Engels had foreseen. It now became clear to everyone that the concepts with which science operates are mobile and changeable, and that the picture of our conception of the world is changeable. It became impossible to move forward without physicists clarifying the question of what, properly speaking, is the subject matter of science. Theoretical physics came right up against problems of a theoretical-cognitive order.

Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, physicists found themselves at a crossroads. Where they would go further—toward dialectical materialism, which sees in our relative concepts stages in the cognition of absolute truth, or toward absolute relativism—the complete denial of the objective value of concepts and laws, i.e., idealism—was determined in the final analysis by the acuteness of the class struggle. The whole social and political situation by the end of the nineteenth century was no longer what it had been before. Capitalism had entered the imperialist stage of its development, characterized by the sharpening of all the contradictions of capitalist society and, above all, by the sharpening of the class struggle. The gravedigger of capitalism—the working class—came out ever more organized against its class enemy and, by the time under consideration, already had behind it the experience of seizing political power and temporarily establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat (the Paris Commune). Marx and Engels applied the propositions of dialectical materialism to the phenomena of the life of society, and thereby they developed historical materialism, proved the inevitability of the collapse of capitalist society; historical materialism became the guiding theory of the revolutionary transformation of class society. In Russia a broad workers’ movement unfolded, and at the very beginning of the twentieth century Lenin and Stalin created a Marxist party of a new type, which defended historical materialism against its distortion by revisionists and made it an effective weapon in the struggle for the cause of the working class. The Revolution of 1905 sharpened the ideological struggle and accelerated the demarcation of class forces.

LENIN’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE—THE BASIS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHYSICS

The political situation was pushing the bourgeois professorial circles into the embrace of idealism. To overthrow materialism “below” meant for them to overthrow materialism “above” as well, that is, to refute the materialist explanation of the development of society and the conclusion as to the inevitability of its revolutionary reconstruction. This also explains why, in the last quarter of the 19th and in the first decade of the 20th century, there appeared an enormous number of idealist works which, together with metaphysics, sought to bury materialism in natural science as well. Mach, Avenarius, Jerusalem, Petzoldt, Pearson, Kleinpeter, Ostwald, Helm, Schuppe, Willy, Duhem, Poincaré, Volkmann, and many other representatives of various schools and currents viciously slandered materialism, striving to destroy it as a “survival of the past.”

In this stream of idealism, the Machist tendency played a special role. The peculiarity of Machism consists in the fact that it does not come out directly against materialism in favor of idealism, but pretends that it stands above materialism and idealism, that it is clearing science of everything unscientific, that it is concerned only with an analysis of the methods of cognition “from the point of view of contemporary science,” so as “not to fall into metaphysics.” This is the most refined form of idealism. For those physicists who had become doubtful of metaphysical materialism but had not arrived at dialectical materialism, and who were still afraid of direct, crude idealism as obviously incompatible with science, Machism made it easier to depart from materialist traditions. Those natural scientists who could not overcome, on the materialist path, the theoretical-cognitive difficulties that undoubtedly arose in the course of the development of physics fell into the disguised nets of Machist philosophy.

Lenin emphasized that contemporary bourgeois philosophy had specialized in gnoseology. For understanding the new situation and the tasks of the ideological struggle in the 20th century, Lenin’s assessment of two historical periods in the struggle for dialectical materialism against idealism is exceptionally important: the first of these periods belongs to the time of Marx and Engels, and the second—to the time of Lenin’s struggle against Machism.

“Marx and Engels,” wrote Lenin, “growing out of Feuerbach and maturing in the struggle against the petty scribblers (Büchner, Vogt, Moleschott, Dühring.—S. S. are meant), naturally devoted their greatest attention to finishing the philosophy of materialism at the top, i.e. not to materialist gnoseology, but to the materialist conception of history. For this reason Marx and Engels, in their works, emphasized dialectical materialism more than dialectical materialism; they insisted more upon historical materialism than upon historical materialism. Our Machists, who wish to be Marxists, approached Marxism in a historical period entirely different from this one; they approached it at a time when bourgeois philosophy had especially specialized in gnoseology and, assimilating in a one-sided and distorted form certain”

component parts of dialectics (for example, relativism), paid preferential attention to the defense or restoration of idealism below, and not of idealism above. At least positivism in general, and Machism in particular, were far more concerned with the subtle falsification of gnoseology, disguising themselves as materialism, hiding idealism behind supposedly materialist terminology—and comparatively little attention was paid to the philosophy of history” (315—316)*).

Lenin devoted his work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism to the analysis of the theory of knowledge of dialectical materialism and Machism, to the struggle against the revision of Marxism under the banner of the “newest natural-scientific philosophy.” In this work Lenin unfolded before our eyes a “laboratory” of the application of the materialist theory of knowledge to the concrete problems of physics that confronted it in the period of crisis.

As a masterful demonstration of how the materialist theory of knowledge is applied to the generalization of the newest achievements of physics, Lenin shattered the pretensions of idealism to become a “natural-scientific” theory of knowledge. It is precisely in the elaboration of the materialist theory of knowledge in connection with new physical problems, in which many physicists had become entangled, that the principal significance of Lenin’s work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism for natural science consists.

II

Machism attempted to use the radical breakdown of a number of classical concepts in physics in order to impose upon natural scientists its own “theory of physical knowledge.” The Machists asserted that for them, properly speaking, it had long since been clear that classical physics was built on anti-scientific “metaphysical” foundations, that its basic concepts and substantiations were a delusion, to which the development of the new physics had put an end. They referred to the fact that Mach had criticized the concepts of Newtonian physics—mass, force, inertia, absolute motion, space, time, and so on—long before the new discoveries. Physicists, the Machists argued, ought to think about where the concepts of classical physics had come from, why they were collapsing, and what concepts in general represent.

According to the empirio-critical theory of knowledge, the primary thing with which man has to do is sensation, or the “facts of experience” given in sensations. A concept is only a mnemonic device, an auxiliary technique used in order to make it easier for memory to preserve a multitude of separate facts of perception. Such too is the significance of laws and theories. For example, Galileo’s law of falling bodies is a brief record of a multitude of facts of perception of the positions of a body,

*) Here and below the figures in parentheses after quotations indicate the pages of the work, the title of which is given in the list of cited literature.

LENIN’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE—THE BASIS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHYSICS

comparable with the positions of the hands of clocks. One must always remember this auxiliary function of concepts, the Machists say, and not abuse them. Classical physics, however, saw in concepts not an auxiliary device, but something more: it set something existing outside man in correspondence with concepts and, according to the Machists, paid dearly for this with a “universal collapse of principles.”

But what solution did empiriocriticism propose for the difficulties that physics was experiencing? It proposed to physicists... not to strive to go beyond the circle of their own sensations, from which man allegedly has no paths of exit, and it tried to convince them that the cognition of sensations and their connections is, in fact, the aim of science. Lenin mercilessly exposed this “natural-scientific” “theory of knowledge of the twentieth century” as the age-old Berkeleyan-Humean mold.

For Machism, cognition is a unitary act in which perception, as a form of consciousness, and the object of perception directly coincide with one another. The role of thought is reduced to establishing connections between perceptions, an “economical function” that facilitates the classification of perceptions and their memorization. In the Machist theory of knowledge there does not arise the problem of verifying knowledge; for Machism one fact of perception is no better and no worse than another: “the most absurd dream is a fact, no worse than any other” (125)1.

The Machists, of course, could not obtain from modern natural science a single argument to substantiate their theory of knowledge. Bourgeois philosophy has for many centuries been moving in a vicious circle of the same problems: how is the transition possible from sensation to the object causing the sensation, if such an object exists? Berkeley, in justification of his philosophy, already advanced the “argument”: a sensation can resemble only a sensation, and not some thing outside it. Kant agreed with this premise of Berkeley’s, but, unlike him, nevertheless acknowledged that he believed in the existence of “things in themselves,” and that there is a correspondence between “things in themselves” and sensations; sensations do not resemble “things in themselves,” but they are symbols, hieroglyphs of the latter. The Machists returned to Berkeley and Hume, denying the existence of the objective world.

The greatest discovery of the philosophical materialism of Marx and Engels was the doctrine of the active role of man in the process of knowing the objective world, and of knowledge as a process of movement toward objective absolute truth through relative truths. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin, relying on this doctrine in the struggle against the empiriocriticists, developed it into a coherent system, the theory of the reflection of the objective world in human consciousness, and applied it to the contemporary problems of natural science.

Sensation, perception, is the initial moment of cognition. It does not coincide with the object of cognition, but neither is it its hieroglyph, its conventional sign. Since it leads to the knowledge of the objective

world, it is its image, its reflection in human consciousness. “There has not been, nor can there be, a single case, so far as we know,” says Lenin, “in which we would be compelled to conclude that our scientifically verified sense perceptions produce in our brain representations of the external world which, by their very nature, diverge from reality, or that between the external world and our sense perceptions of it there exists an inherent disharmony” (98)¹. The Machists, however, although they like to declaim that they represent the world of reality as it is given to us in the indications of our sense organs, in fact “do not sufficiently trust the indications of our sense organs,” for they “do not see in sensations a true image of this objective reality” (116)¹.

But the process of cognition of the objective world only begins with sensation and is not limited to it. In this process man appears not as a passive recipient of external influences, but as an active subject. On the basis of the material supplied by the sense organs, human thought forms concepts, theories—in other words, images (and not auxiliary mnemonic devices!) of the objective processes of nature, whose validity is verified by the practical activity of man. Lenin says that “in Engels all living human practice breaks into the very theory of knowledge, providing an objective criterion of truth: so long as we do not know a law of nature, it, existing and acting independently of, outside our knowledge, makes us slaves of ‘blind necessity.’ Once we have come to know this law, which acts (as Marx repeated thousands of times) independently of our will and of our consciousness, we are the masters of nature. Mastery over nature, manifested in the practice of mankind, is the result of the objectively correct reflection in the human head of the phenomena and processes of nature, is proof that this reflection (within the limits of what practice shows us) is objective, absolute, eternal truth” (177)¹. Sensation, thought, and the practical activity of man are component moments of a single process of the reflection of nature in human consciousness. The question of whether sensation resembles the object that evokes it is metaphysical if one assumes that cognition ends there, that it is a single act of passive perception. In that case it is possible to “prove” any philosophy.

A brilliant illustration of the Marxist doctrine of cognition as a process of movement through relative truths toward absolute truth is the breaking down of classical concepts in physics.

How did Lenin regard this breaking down of concepts? What, for him, was classical physics, and what was the new physics?

Lenin considered the latest discoveries in physics and the consequences flowing from them not as a catastrophe, but as “the latest revolution in natural science,” whose advent was entirely lawful. Together

Thus the transition from classical physics to the new one meant for Lenin not a transition from error to truth, but only a transition from one stage of the penetration of human consciousness into the essence of nature to another stage of deeper penetration. This is a link in the infinite process of the ever more exact reflection by consciousness of the essence of objectively existing nature, the process of the infinite movement of knowledge through relative truths toward absolute truth; infinite, above all, because nature itself is infinite, inexhaustible.

Lenin wrote in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: “The ‘essence’ of things, or ‘substance,’ is also relative; it expresses only the deepening of human knowledge of objects, and if yesterday this deepening did not go beyond the atom, and today does not go beyond the electron and ether, dialectical materialism insists on the temporary, relative, approximate character of all these milestones in the knowledge of nature by the progressive science of man. The electron is as inexhaustible as the atom; nature is infinite, but it exists infinitely, and it is this sole categorical, sole unconditional recognition of its existence outside the consciousness and sensation of man that distinguishes dialectical materialism from relativistic agnosticism and idealism” (249)1.

The collapse of metaphysical notions of the allegedly immutable essence of things, of the last “bricks of the universe,” to the disclosure of which natural science is now supposedly approaching, was used by Machism for the struggle against materialism. It declared that modern physics had supposedly proved the collapse of matter, that recognizing as the source of our sensations something existing independently of sensations is “metaphysics,” a transition from the realm of science into the realm of unscientific speculations whose correctness man can never prove.

Machism declared that it was equally opposed to idealist “metaphysics”—the admission of the existence of spirit, soul, and so forth. Thus Machism tried, and tries, to assume the pose of a “natural-scientific theory of knowledge,” supposedly standing “above” materialism and “above” idealism.

Lenin left not one stone upon another of all these constructions of Machism. He at once transferred the question to the field of gnoseology. What is the basic essence of the struggle between materialism and idealism? “Whether to take nature, matter, the physical, the external world as primary—and to regard consciousness, spirit, sensation (experience, according to the widespread terminology of our time), the psychical, and so forth as secondary—that is the fundamental question which in fact continues to divide philosophers into two great camps. The source of thousands upon thousands of errors and confusions in this field consists precisely in the fact that behind the outward appearance of terms, definitions, scholastic deductions, and verbal artifices these two fundamental tendencies are overlooked” (321)1.

The establishment of the essence of the struggle between materialism and idealism, the clarification of the fundamental task of philosophy, is the merit of the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels. Bourgeois philosophical systems have always tried to confuse this question, so as to smuggle in their speculations under cover of the commotion.

Lenin emphasizes with all force this essence of the philosophical struggle and, further developing the teaching of Marx and Engels, gives the definition of matter as a philosophical category. “Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man in his sensations, which is copied, photographed, reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them,” says Lenin (117)¹. Our concrete conceptions of the structure of matter are only a historically determined stage in the cognition of the objective world. The transition from established conceptions of the structure of matter to new ones is only evidence of the deepening of our knowledge of objective reality, and not the collapse of materialism, not the disappearance of objective reality itself: “Matter disappears”—this means that the limit up to which we have known matter until now disappears, our knowledge goes deeper; such properties of matter disappear which formerly seemed absolute, immutable, primordial (impenetrability, inertia, mass, etc.) and which are now discovered to be relative, inherent only in certain states of matter. For the sole “property” of matter, with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up, is the property of being objective reality, of existing outside our consciousness” (247)¹.

Lenin shows that space, time, motion, law-governedness (causality) are also philosophical categories denoting objective forms of the existence of matter, our physical conceptions of which are likewise historically conditioned, relative, changeable. But these relative conceptions, like the concept of matter, correspond to an objective truth independent of our consciousness and, in this sense, absolute.

Philosophical materialism is not connected, therefore, with any special “picture of the world,” mechanical or electromagnetic or any other. It does not say to physicists: do not dare go further, for there are revealed there “curious,” unusual properties of matter. On the contrary, philosophical materialism opens before physicists inexhaustible possibilities for the development of physical theories, which are limited by the sole, but decisive, scientific criterion—their capacity to reflect the objective material world.

The commotion of the idealist schools over the alleged “collapse of materialism” in connection with the collapse of the mechanical picture of the world, the chatter about the discovery of a new philosophy supposedly standing above materialism and idealism, is nothing more than a swindler’s trick.

a device by which the “diplomaed lackeys of clericalism” try to confuse natural scientists who do not know philosophical materialism, and to impose upon them their own disguised idealism. Lenin tore the mask from Machism, revealed its idealist essence, and in the light of Lenin’s criticism the attempts of the Machists to occupy a “special” line in philosophy, to stand “above” materialism and idealism, proved pitiful.

Consistently carried through, Machism is solipsism. The theory of knowledge of Machism contradicts contemporary natural science. Lenin convincingly exposes this, showing how the Machists answer two simple questions: does man think with the aid of the brain, and did the earth exist before man? In Berkeley’s time the clericalist philosophers could still evade these questions; in our time entire sciences have developed—physiology of the brain, geology, paleontology, and others—on the basis of the natural scientists’ firm conviction that the human brain is the material substratum of thought, and that the earth existed even at times when man could not have existed. The achievements of these sciences have firmly entered the basis of man’s practical activity, and they cannot be thrown out of the arsenal of the natural sciences. With the searchlight of merciless criticism Lenin illuminates the unsightly picture of how the Machists wriggle, resorting to every kind of trick in order to preserve their solipsistic arguments and, at the same time, to maintain the appearance of agreement with the conclusions of natural science. The Machist Willy even had to invent the consciousness of a worm, whose “experience” was the earth before man appeared and it became man’s “experience.”

Machism is internally contradictory. Striving to become the “theory of knowledge of contemporary natural science,” it cannot fail to reckon with the fact that natural science, like any practical activity of man, develops on the basis of people’s conviction in the existence of an objective world. Therefore Machism cannot remain in its initial positions of subjective idealism and makes the “illegitimate” attempt “secretly to drag in materialism” (48)\(^1\). As a cover for the contradictions and wretchedness of their eclectic philosophy, the Machists use various verbal artifices, such as Mach’s “elements of the world,” Avenarius’s “introjection” and “counter-terms,” and so forth. In reality all this verbiage turns out to be merely new colored plumage on the old scarecrow of idealist philosophy. Summing up such artifices, Lenin lays bare the whole insignificance of this, by your leave, philosophy: “Result. Before us there have appeared three empirio-critical augurs, who have labored in the sweat of their brow to reconcile their philosophy with natural science, to patch the holes of solipsism. Avenarius repeated Fichte’s argument and substituted an imaginary world for the real world. Petzoldt moved away from Fichtean idealism and moved closer to Kantian idealism. Willy, having suffered a fiasco with the ‘worm,’ waved his hand and inadvertently blurted out

truth: either materialism, or solipsism, or even the non-recognition of anything except the present moment” (69–70)1.

But if solipsism is to the liking of Willy and those like him, then one asks: what has modern natural science to do with this, if modern natural science leads to materialist conclusions; and what has the “newest” philosophy of empiriocriticism to do with this?

In the light of the materialist theory of knowledge Lenin also examined the crisis of physics. Bourgeois natural scientists saw the crisis of physics in the breaking-up of physical concepts. But the very breaking-up of concepts does not yet constitute a crisis of physics; it is a necessary process of the deepening of our knowledge of the objective world. The breaking-up of old physical laws is a necessary moment of the crisis, but it does not exhaust the content of the crisis. Lenin pointed out that “from the philosophical standpoint, the essence of the ‘crisis of modern physics’ consists in the fact that the old physics regarded its theories as ‘real knowledge of the material world,’ i.e. a reflection of objective reality. The new trend in physics regards theory as only symbols, signs, marks for practice, i.e. denies the existence of objective reality independent of our consciousness and reflected by it... The essence of the crisis of modern physics consists in the breakdown of the old laws and basic principles, in the rejection of objective reality existing outside the mind, i.e. in the replacement of materialism by idealism and agnosticism” (243–245)1.

The departure of a section of physicists toward idealism—this is the main thing that determines the content of the crisis of physics. The development of physics, the limitation of old physical concepts, and the appearance of new ones always take place with every new great discovery, whereas a crisis of physics arises only under definite conditions of social struggle.

The breaking-up of physical concepts, and the inability of natural scientists, with their metaphysical thinking, to comprehend this breaking-up materialistically, constitute the gnoseological basis of the crisis of physics.

It is known that contemporary physical theories assume an extremely abstract mathematical form. These abstractions have meaning and advance knowledge only when they reflect the properties of the objective material world, when they do not tear themselves away from matter. Lenin pointed out that one of the gnoseological causes of the crisis is the mathematicians’ forgetting of matter. “Matter disappears, only equations remain,” says Lenin.

“Another cause which gave rise to ‘physical’ idealism is the principle of relativism, the relativity of our knowledge, a principle which, with particular force, obtrudes itself upon physicists in the period of the abrupt breakdown of old theories, and which—if dialectics is not known—inevitably leads to idealism. This question of the relation between relativism and dialectics is perhaps the most important in explaining the theoretical misadventures of Machism” (295)1. Elsewhere Lenin writes: “The new physics has slipped into idealism, chiefly precisely because

LENIN’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE—THE BASIS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHYSICS

Physicists did not know dialectics. They struggled against metaphysical (in the Hegelian, and not in the positivist, i.e., Humean, sense of the word) materialism, with its one-sided “mechanistic” character—and in doing so threw the baby out with the bathwater. Denying the immutability of the elements and properties of matter known up to that time, they slid into denying matter, that is, the objective reality of the physical world. Denying the absolute character of the most important and fundamental laws, they slid into denying any objective law-governed regularity in nature, into declaring a law of nature to be a mere convention, a “limitation of expectation,” a “logical necessity,” and so on. Insisting on the approximate, relative character of our knowledge, they slid into denying the object, independent of cognition, which is approximately and relatively correctly reflected by this cognition. And so on and so forth without end” (248–249)^1.

This analysis of the gnoseological roots of idealism is of exceedingly great importance for understanding why the progress of science by itself still does not exclude idealism.

Let us take, for example, the question of the relativity of our knowledge, on which many physicists who did not know dialectics stumbled. The defenders of relativism may say that relativism is not an invention, that the facts prove the relativity of our knowledge. The latter is, of course, true, but relativism does not follow from the relativity of our knowledge. Dialectics, Lenin said, “includes within itself the moment of relativism, of negation, of skepticism, but is not reducible to relativism. The materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels undoubtedly includes relativism within itself, but is not reducible to it; that is, it recognizes the relativity of all our knowledge not in the sense of denying objective truth, but in the sense of the historical conditionality of the limits of the approximation of our knowledge to this truth” (124)^1. Lenin indicated under what conditions one or another moment of cognition becomes the starting point of idealism. One must not exaggerate a moment of cognition to the significance of the basis of the theory of knowledge—this is what Lenin criticized Chernov and other Russian Machists for, who, following Mach, Avenarius, and Petzoldt, repeated that they were relativists. “This is precisely where your mistake lies,” Lenin declared. “For to make relativism the basis of the theory of knowledge means inevitably to condemn oneself either to absolute skepticism, agnosticism and sophistry, or to subjectivism. Relativism, as the basis of the theory of knowledge, is not only the recognition of the relativity of our knowledge, but also the denial of any objective measure or model, existing independently of humanity, to which our relative knowledge approximates” (124)^1. Lenin repeatedly emphasized that idealism is not groundless, that it has its gnoseological roots. In the brief but exceptionally profound note “On the Question of Dialectics” (1915–1916), Lenin instructively and vividly showed the process of the birth of idealism on “the living tree,”

the living... objective, absolute human cognition.” He wrote: “Philosophical idealism is only nonsense from the standpoint of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. On the contrary, from the standpoint of dialectical materialism, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated, überschwengliches (Dietzgen) development (inflation, swelling) of one of the features, aspects, facets of cognition into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature, deified... Human cognition is not (resp. does not follow) a straight line, but a curved line, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, section, bit of this curved line can be transformed (one-sidedly transformed) into an independent, whole, straight line, which then (if one does not see the forest for the trees) leads into a quagmire, into priestcraft (where it is anchored by the class interest of the ruling classes). Straightforwardness and one-sidedness, woodenness and ossification, subjectivism and subjective blindness voilà (there. Ed.) are the epistemological roots of idealism.”[^2]

But the epistemological roots of idealism create only the possibility of a crisis in physics. This possibility would not have been realized and would not have turned into actuality if the social situation had not assisted it. The epistemological possibility of overcoming absolute relativism in physics at the moment when the crisis arose was fully present: by that time dialectical materialism had already been discovered and developed in the works of Marx and Engels. Why was this possibility not realized in the course of the development of physics? Lenin shows the reasons for this using the example of the physicist A. Righi, who spontaneously holds to the reality of the material world, strives to fence himself off from positivist tendencies, seeks a way out and does not find one. “If this physicist were acquainted with dialectical materialism, his judgment about the error opposed to old metaphysical materialism would perhaps become the starting point of a correct philosophy. But the whole milieu in which these people live pushes them away from Marx and Engels, throws them into the embrace of vulgar official philosophy” (250)1.

Lenin repeatedly returned to the analysis of the influence of the conditions of capitalist society on the intelligentsia, in particular on the scientific intelligentsia, both in the book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and in other works. In the well-known article “On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” Lenin wrote in 1922, with regard to J. Dietzgen’s harsh assessment of professor-philosophers as “graduated flunkeys of clericalism”: “It is enough to look even slightly into the state, then the general-economic, then the everyday and every other dependence of the contemporary educated people on the ruling bourgeoisie in order to understand the absolute correctness of Dietzgen’s sharp characterization. It is enough to recall the vast majority of fashionable philosophical trends which so often arise in European countries, beginning, if only, with those which were connect-

given with the discovery of radium, and ending with those who now strive to cling to Einstein—in order to imagine the connection between the class interests and class position of the bourgeoisie, its support for all manner of forms of religion, and the ideological content of fashionable philosophical trends”³.

Summing up the exposure of the essence of empirio-criticism, Lenin wrote: “... behind the epistemological scholasticism of empirio-criticism one cannot fail to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the final analysis expresses the tendencies and ideology of the hostile classes of modern society. The newest philosophy is just as partisan as it was two thousand years ago” (343)¹.

All philosophy (and, consequently, any theoretical science from which philosophical conclusions are inevitably drawn) is partisan—such is the most important conclusion of Lenin’s brilliant work. This conclusion obliges scholars who wish to defend Marxism in their science to examine carefully the philosophical interpretation and substantiation of natural-scientific theories. “The task of the Marxists,” Lenin wrote, “is here too to be able to assimilate and rework for themselves those acquisitions which are made by these ‘clerks’ (...), and to be able to cut away their reactionary tendency, to be able to pursue one’s own line and to fight against the entire line of the forces and classes hostile to us” (328)¹.

Marxists must not be misled by the well-meaning character of the subjective aspirations in the sphere of theory of one scholar or another. Lenin taught that what is essential is not the subjective aspirations of scholars, but the social tendencies of their theories. When A. Lunacharsky, in the so-called Essays on the Philosophy of Marxism, made the reservation in advance: “Perhaps we are mistaken, but we are seeking,” Lenin at once showed the worthlessness of these reservations, shifting the discussion onto the plane of evaluating social tendencies: “It is not you who are seeking, but you are being sought—that is the trouble! You do not approach every turn of bourgeois-philosophical fashion from your own, i.e. Marxist (for you wish to be Marxists), point of view; rather, this fashion approaches you, foists upon you its new counterfeits in the taste of idealism: today à la Ostwald, tomorrow à la Mach, the day after tomorrow à la Poincaré.

Those silly ‘theoretical’ devices (with ‘energetics,’ with ‘elements,’ ‘introjection,’ and so forth), in which you naïvely believe, remain within the bounds of a narrow, miniature little school, while the ideological and social tendency of these devices is immediately caught by the Wards, the neo-criticists, the immanentists, the Lopatins, the pragmatists, and serves its service” (328)¹.

In this comparison of the well-meaning subjective aspirations of the Russian Machists, who wished to be Marxists, with the objective tendencies of their statements, which are caught up by hostile classes and parties, Lenin laid bare with utmost clarity the essence of the partisan approach to every question.

Thus, Lenin repelled the attempt of modern idealists to cling to the new discoveries of physics; he defended philosophical materialism in the new circumstances of the crisis in physics that had begun with the entry of capitalism into the imperialist stage of development. Lenin showed that the materialist theory of knowledge gives answers to all the philosophical questions of natural scientists, resolves all the gnoseological difficulties that confront modern natural science, and serves as the methodological basis for its conscious movement forward. He further developed philosophical materialism, brought the theory of reflection in human consciousness of the objective material world into a coherent system, and gave a definition of matter and of its forms of existence as philosophical categories. At the same time Lenin proved that idealism contradicts modern natural science, as a result of which idealism in science seeks to appear not openly, but under the mask of an “objective,” “natural-scientific” theory of knowledge. But, as Lenin showed, it is impossible to take any “middle,” intermediate line between materialism and idealism; Machism in fact does not occupy such a line either, for in reality it is only a new disguised form of smuggling old idealism into natural science. In theory there are no “middle” lines, no “objective” positions; there is the struggle of classes and parties. Therefore Lenin bequeaths to materialists that in theory they must “know how to pursue their own line and fight the entire line of forces and classes hostile to us.”

III

The development of physics in the subsequent forty years confirmed Lenin’s predictions regarding the deepening of our knowledge of the objective material world.

Our conception of the forms of matter and of its motion has become richer. For example, for the modern physicist-materialist, the field, just like substance, is one of the forms of matter. Both substance and field are concrete physical manifestations of objectively existing nature, between which there are no impassable boundaries, but rather their dialectical unity. The electromagnetic field, for example, is transformed into electron–positron pairs, and vice versa. Physicists are becoming ever more convinced that substance and field are relative concepts—in the sense that matter manifests itself as substance, as an aggregate of particles, in some relations, and as field, conditioning the interaction of particles of another kind, in other relations (photons, which condition interactions between electric charges; mesons, as “transmitters” of nuclear interactions; and so forth).

The motion of matter increasingly ceases, in the consciousness of physicists, to be only an external attribute of matter, as it was conceived when only macroscopic bodies and the mechanical form of motion—consisting solely in the displacement of a macroscopic body—were known.

In microphysics, motion is not only simple displacement, but a more complex form of change in the state of a micro-object, one that is essentially connected with the concrete kind of matter. Outside the definition of the law of motion of a material object, we can say nothing about it.

In modern physics the inseparable connection of space and time with matter is becoming clearer; it is becoming ever clearer why the founders of philosophical materialism called space and time the form of existence of matter.

Knowledge of the physical structure of the material world has advanced far. Physics is already studying the structure of atomic nuclei and of the fields acting in them. The “picture of the world” has in fact turned out not to be electromagnetic, but much more complex, more precisely, not reducible to a single “picture,” as Lenin pointed out in his time. Today physicists are beginning to understand the full correctness and profundity of Lenin’s assertion about the “inexhaustibility” of the electron. The conclusion at which the dialectical materialist Lenin arrived, by virtue of his understanding of the laws of the materialist cognition of nature, even at the dawn of the discovery of electrons, contemporary physicists are beginning to assimilate under the pressure of the contradictions that have arisen in their theories. It proved impossible to construct such an exhaustive physical theory in which elementary particles are represented in the form of structureless points. Physics stands on the threshold of discoveries of the manifold properties of the electron*). The situation is analogous with other “elementary” particles discovered after the publication of Lenin’s book. It is now becoming ever clearer to physicists that the nature of matter is inexhaustible, and that our physical theories are only stages in the cognition of it, reflections of the objective world in human consciousness.

Lenin’s predictions are justified in yet another respect: modern physics is giving birth to dialectical materialism in a very painful way. These births, besides a living and viable creature, “inevitably yield certain dead products, certain refuse, which is to be sent to the room for impurities” (299)1. The social causes of the crisis of physics are acting in the capitalist countries with ever increasing force.

This, of course, does not preclude the fact that in the capitalist countries more and more progressive scholars are appearing who have risen to the conscious acceptance of dialectical materialism; there are such scholars among physicists as well (Joliot-Curie, Blackett, the now deceased Langevin, and others). But they have to work in an atmosphere of the fiercest persecution on the part of the ruling bourgeoisie. The progressive forces are irresistibly growing, but so too are the dark forces of the obsolescent, yet still ruling, classes.

*) It already knows many properties of the electron. In the last year reports have appeared in the specialist press on the discovery of a change in the mass of the electron as a result of its interaction with the electromagnetic field of the vacuum12.

Empirio-critics of various shades over the last 15 years have united in one direction—logical empiricism. They have been joined by English, as well as German, logicians (Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Reichenbach, and others). Forty years ago Lenin, criticizing American pragmatism, perceptively noted that “the differences between Machism and pragmatism are just as insignificant and ten-degree from the point of view of materialism as the difference between empirio-criticism and empirio-monism” (327)1. Now the pragmatists themselves (Morris, Feigl, Nagel, and others) declare their ideological connection with the neo-Machists and appear together with them in a single campaign. In their hatred of the progressive materialist worldview, the enemies of materialism themselves acknowledge as insignificant the small nuances in their views. Since 1935 the logical empiricists have begun convening regular “international congresses for the unification of science,” publish a journal, an encyclopedia, and many books according to a plan worked out in advance. The logical empiricists enlist prominent foreign theoreticians of natural science in their activity for the Machist “grounding” of natural science. At the second international congress of logical empiricists, specially devoted to questions of causality in the light of contemporary science, one of the main speakers was the head of the Copenhagen school of physicists, Niels Bohr (the congress took place in Copenhagen). Niels Bohr is also a member of the Advisory Board for the publication of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science—the encyclopedia of logical empiricism now appearing in the USA; the aim of this encyclopedia is to establish the supremacy of logical empiricism in all sciences.

It is characteristic that many neo-Machists from Central European countries in recent years have found refuge in American universities (Frank, Reichenbach, and others). This is yet another illustration of Comrade Zhdanov’s words that the center of the struggle against Marxism has now shifted to America and England.

The present ideological heirs of Mach are trying to “modernize” Machism and continue to develop Mach’s idealist theory of knowledge at a new stage in the development of physics*). In the conditions of an intensification of the political and ideological struggle, the reactionary tendencies of bourgeois theoretical schools in physics are growing stronger. As if from a horn of plenty, numerous “principles of contemporary physical knowledge” are being poured down upon the heads of readers: the “concept of complementarity,” the principle of fundamental observability, operationalism, the theory of equivalent descriptions, the principle of anomaly, and others.

*) Below we consider it essential to dwell on criticism only of logical empiricism or of trends closely connected with it, for the reason that logical empiricism is openly acting under the obsolete ideological banner of “renewed” Machism, and also because the influence on physicists of masked idealism, that is, logical empiricism, is considerably greater than the influence of straightforward idealists of the Eddington or Jeans type.

The largest, Copenhagen, school of foreign physicists, some of whose representatives have made major discoveries, “substantiates” theoretical physics from the standpoint of logical empiricism or positivism. In particular, the “concept of complementarity” propagated by this school is a direct offspring of positivist views.

Historically, the concept of complementarity arose from an interpretation of the so-called uncertainty relation, which, as is known, expresses that the product of the standards of the coordinates \(q\) and momenta \(p\) of microparticles cannot be less than a certain constant quantity:

\[ \Delta q \Delta p \geq \frac{\hbar}{2}, \tag{1} \]

where \(\hbar\) is Planck’s constant divided by \(2\pi\).

The uncertainty relation itself follows not at all from the limitedness of our knowledge of microphenomena, allegedly due to the principally uncontrollable interaction of the instrument with the micro-object, as the Copenhagen school asserts, but from the same experimental facts that substantiate the quantum relations:

\[ \begin{aligned} \varepsilon &= \hbar \omega,\\ \mathbf{p} &= \hbar \mathbf{k}, \end{aligned} \tag{2} \]

that is, above all from the fact of the diffraction of microparticles; consequently, it is a direct consequence of the nature of quantum objects, that is, an objective property of matter, a reflection of an objective regularity of the microworld. This relation also characterizes the development of the concepts of momentum and coordinates in quantum mechanics. In this article we are compelled to confine ourselves to these brief remarks and to emphasizing that the uncertainty relation is a physical relation, revealing certain properties of micro-objects.

But, as has been said, the Copenhagen school, falsely interpreting this relation, builds upon it an entire “concept of complementarity.” We shall see from what follows that the concept of complementarity is a whole system of views, a theory of knowledge of a positivist type. It is not identical with relation (1) and does not follow from it necessarily. The authors and defenders of the concept of complementarity speak of the identification of relation (1) with the concept of complementarity only insofar as they need to convince one that this concept must be accepted with the same inevitability as a physical law. In essence, however, in the form of the concept of complementarity they smuggle in a system of idealist views on the subject and method of cognition, which are not contained in relation (1), when it is correctly interpreted*.

* This was reflected above all in the name of the relation: in reality it is a fully definite cognition of the properties of nature, that is, it introduces no uncertainties whatever into cognition.

The concept of complementarity formulated by Bohr, as is well known, consists in the following assertion: by virtue of “the difference between essentially different experimental arrangements and processes of measurement, of which some permit an unambiguous application of the concept of spatial localization, while others permit a lawful application of the theorem of conservation of momentum,” “with each arrangement of an experiment there is connected a renunciation of one of the two aspects of the description of physical phenomena.”¹³

Thus, the space-time characteristic of microphenomena and their momentum-energy characteristic are, according to Bohr, mutually exclusive and mutually complementary; hence the name of the concept.

It is known that classical physics proceeded from the idea of causality as an unambiguous connection of the states of particles, states that are determined by exact simultaneous values of \(q\) and \(p\). Having accepted this mechanical conception of causality as the only existing one, and referring to relation (1), Bohr declared that, by virtue of the nature of experimental arrangements, the space-time and causal descriptions are also complementary. “In accordance with the essence of quantum theory, we must, consequently, regard the space-time representation and the requirement of causality, the combination of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but mutually exclusive features in the description of the content of experience—as features symbolizing the idealization of the possibilities of observation and, correspondingly, of definition,” writes Bohr (308).¹⁴

Thus, with the proclamation of the concept of complementarity there began a campaign against the space-time form of existence of the material world, against causality as an objective law-governed character of nature. They are reduced to the status of “mutually exclusive complementary aspects”... in the description by man of physical phenomena, that is, to the status of subjective categories.

We see in Bohr’s formulations that the Copenhagen school determines as the starting point of cognition not the object and its properties, but the procedure of measurement and the “mutually exclusive classes” of instruments. From this the following conclusion is drawn: what we perceive in an experimental arrangement depends on the class of this arrangement; consequently, the instrument creates the object of cognition—“physical reality.”

These views are out-and-out Machism (positivism), the positions of which are consciously defended by the Copenhagen school. “Positivism teaches us the view that true physical reality is only the totality of experimental results,” declares Jordan (123).¹⁵ Only the results of experimental measurements in classical instruments are observed; theory has the task of connecting these results with one another; judgments about material objects existing independently of measurements and manifesting their properties in the process of measurement,

the essence of judgments about unobservables, whose existence cannot be proved—such is the position of positivism or logical empiricism in physics. This positivist position is expressed in Bohr’s assertion that it is “impossible to ascribe an independent physical reality in the ordinary sense either to the phenomenon or to the means of observation” (307)¹⁴. Frank writes of the same thing: “Strictly speaking, a particle by itself, without a description of the entire experimental arrangement, is not a physical reality. But ‘a particle passing through the diaphragm at a definite point’ is a description of physical reality; ‘a particle imparting a definite momentum to the diaphragm’ is also a description of physical reality” (48)¹⁶.

In these statements of the Copenhagen school about physical reality, the point is by no means that, in the process of interaction, the instrument affects the state of physical reality, which exists independently of it and of human perception, as some physicists naïvely think; the readings of the experimental arrangement—this is “physical reality,” according to the views of the Copenhagen school. Frank explains quite clearly what exactly he understands by physical reality; he says that no one, of course, can be prevented from “adhering to the Newtonian conception of physical reality (i.e., materialism.—S. S.) and considering Bohr’s ‘principle of complementarity’ as a temporary state of science. But with equal justification one may also allow another way of describing the world, in which the ‘position of a particle’ cannot be used without a description of the instrument by means of which this position is measured. If this description is ‘simple and practical,’ we may with equal justification ascribe ‘physical reality’ to the objects of our new mechanics, provided that we designate ‘reality’ in an operational, and not in a metaphysical, sense” (53)¹⁶. And Frank, in his articles, repeatedly explained that the “metaphysical understanding of reality” means the “materialist understanding of reality,” independent of perception, while the “operational meaning of some object” means “the definability of the object by some measuring operation.” But in order to leave no doubts in the understanding of the meaning of the term “physical reality,” Frank dots all the i’s; he writes: “An electron passing through a diaphragm should not be called an ‘observable object,’ if we wish to avoid ambiguities. An electron is a set of physical quantities introduced by us for establishing a system of principles from which we can logically derive the indications of the pointer of a measuring instrument. If we call these instruments ‘physical objects,’ then ‘electrons’ or ‘photons’ can be called so only by virtue of a certain change in the meaning of the term ‘physical object.’ But we must never forget that there is no sense whatever in the question of what the ‘reality’ of a physical object is” (54)¹⁶.

Similar formulations can also be found among other members of the Copenhagen school; in essence, all its representatives proceed from one and the same position, and adopt one and the same idealistic interpretation of physical reality.

The concept of complementarity is laid by the Copenhagen school at the foundation of all quantum mechanics and is presented by it as an expression of the essence of quantum mechanics. It was even proposed, “by analogy with the term ‘theory of relativity,’” to call modern quantum mechanics the “theory of complementarity.”^17

These claims are untenable already because the uncertainty relation, on the basis of which the concept of complementarity was developed, applies only to the so-called noncommuting quantities. It does not cover, for example, such essential characteristics of micro-objects as mass, charge, spin; it does not render indefinite the energy of microsystems in a stable state, and so on. The concept of complementarity in quantum mechanics itself does not lead to an expansion of our physical knowledge of nature. Quantum mechanics is not only not a “theory of complementarity,” but it is by no means based on this concept. From the concept of complementarity one cannot derive either the wave function, or the equations to which this function is subject, or any physical consequences.

The Copenhagen school of physicists strives to turn the “concept of complementarity” into a kind of universal theory of knowledge, which allegedly resolves the difficulties in the development of modern physics. It is known that modern physics reveals the contradictory (discrete-continuous) nature of micro-objects, which is expressed by relations (2). This contradictory nature of theirs cannot be represented visually with the aid of any mechanical models. It can be understood only from the totality of all the experimental facts embraced by a single theory, in which the contradictory tendencies of nature are also reflected. However, the positivist does not recognize theory as a reflection of the objective world, the existence of which is independent of human perception. For the Copenhagen school of physicists, theory is merely an auxiliary apparatus that helps predict the results of measurements. Therefore it does not recognize objective contradictory tendencies in nature. Frank openly fights against the recognition that in nature there exist micro-objects possessing contradictory properties: “Others think that the new mechanics introduces a physical object which is both a particle and a wave. Some authors speak of it as ‘a particle and/or a wave,’ and some, in order to designate this hybrid object, even invent new words such as ‘wavicle’ (‘wavicle’). In reality no such object, resembling a centaur, which was half-man and half-horse, exists in the new mechanics. There exist only some experimental arrangements which can be described by means of the term ‘position of a particle,’ and other arrangements which can be described ...”

defined by means of the terms “momentum” or “wavelength.” All misunderstandings arise because one reasons about the object instead of speaking about the mode of use of certain words” (55)¹⁴.

We see once again that, in the conception of this school, physical reality is reduced to “experimental results.” And here the difficulties of representing contradictory tendencies are resolved, in the opinion of the representatives of the Copenhagen school, by the conception of complementarity. “The enlightening power of this idea,” writes Jordan, “consists in the resolution of the seemingly insoluble riddle and contradiction which is clearly demonstrated in the famous problem of the dualistic nature of light. The properties of light connected with its wave nature, on the one hand, and the properties connected with its corpuscular nature, on the other, are ‘complementary’ with respect to one another in the sense that they can never manifest themselves in one and the same experiment at one and the same time (and consequently enter into active direct contradiction).... By virtue of this remarkable mechanism of complementarity, nature unites in one and the same physical object properties and regularities which contradict one another, in such a way that they can never exist directly at one and the same time” (131—132)¹⁵.

Here we see a new, broader interpretation of the conception of complementarity, no longer connected at all with relation (1), namely: it supposedly resolves the riddle of the contradictory development of nature by... transforming reality into the readings of instruments, in which contradictions will never again be encountered! It is precisely this banishment from micro-nature of the contradictory tendencies of development that makes it possible, in the opinion of the Copenhagen school and in particular of Bohr, to use in microphysics the concepts of classical physics—some in one experiment, and their opposites in another.

But contradictory tendencies are the law of development of all nature and society. Therefore the “key” to the “riddle of contradictions” is useful in all sciences. Choking with delight, Jordan writes: “This idea of complementarity may be regarded as the most important result for philosophy that has crystallized out of modern physics; it represents an absolutely new scientific method of thought, which differs fundamentally from the classical scientific mode of thought. Following the mental achievement in the understanding of atomic physical phenomena, which were completely inaccessible to previous methods of representation and became possible thanks to it, the justified belief seems to exist that it may in the future acquire epoch-making significance (!! S. S.) in other fields of the natural sciences” (131)¹⁵.

This interpretation of the conception of complementarity inevitably led the Copenhagen school to attempts to extend it far beyond the limits of quantum mechanics and physics in general: to biology, psycho-

...theology, sociology. In the article “On the Notions of Causality and Complementarity” N. Bohr writes: “The epistemological lesson that we have received from the new development of physical science, where the problems admit of a comparatively concise formulation of the principles, may also suggest lines of approach in other fields of knowledge, where the situation is of a substantially less accessible character. An example is biology, in which mechanistic and vitalistic arguments are applied in a typical manner of complementary ideas. And in sociology such a dialectic can often be useful, especially in problems that confront us in the study and comparison of human cultures, where we must reckon with the element of complacency inherent in every national culture and manifested in prejudices which, obviously, cannot be acceptable from the point of view of other nations. Recognition of the relation of complementarity is no less required in psychology, in which the conditions for the analysis and synthesis of experience show a striking analogy with the situation in atomic physics. In fact, the use of such words as ‘thoughts’ and ‘feelings’ is equally necessary in order to illustrate the diversity of physical experience bearing on mutually exclusive situations, characterized by a different drawing of the line of demarcation between subject and object. In particular, ... situations in which we sense freedom of will are incompatible with psychological situations in which causal analysis is reasonably undertaken” (317–318)18.

In unison with Bohr, Ph. Frank writes: “Judgments that human actions are causally determined and that the will can decide freely are essentially two complementary descriptions of human actions. But they are applicable to two completely different experimental situations which exclude one another” (23)19.

The last example, with freedom of will and necessity, clearly shows the difference between the Marxist understanding of the dialectical unity of opposites and the treatment of opposites by the method of complementarity. For the positivists Bohr and Frank, their conception of complementarity leads to empty sophistry, to the mutual exclusion of the concepts of freedom of will and necessity (just as it led to the mutual exclusion of contradictory aspects in micro-objects). Marxism knows them in unity; it reveals that freedom of will is cognized necessity, “the ability to make decisions with knowledge of the matter” (Engels). The positivist conception of complementarity does not lead science forward, but hampers it. Marxism, on the contrary, leads science forward, for it establishes that “freedom does not consist in an imagined independence from the laws of nature, but in the cognition of these laws and in the possibility, based on this knowledge, of systematically making the laws of nature act for definite purposes” (175)1.

But it is just as impossible metaphysically to separate the contradictory tendencies in the objects of microphysics. We shall refer here to the testimony of de Broglie. In a recent article “On Complemen-

“LENIN’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE—THE BASIS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHYSICS”

...the individuality of the ideas of the individual and the system,” L. de Broglie points out that when a physical system is formed from components, the latter lose their individuality in favor of the higher unity of the system, whereby a new quality—a “system”—is formed. “It is clearly felt,” writes de Broglie, “that here we have a certain compromise between the idea of a particle, an isolated unit endowed with individuality, and the idea of a system, which absorbs in a higher unity the individuality of its components. Thus we arrive at the assumption of the existence of a relation of complementarity between these two opposite images.”^20

Let us note in passing that in de Broglie’s example, i.e. already in quantum mechanics, the idea of complementarity broke away from relation (1) and turned into an attempt to resolve the question of the relation of contradictory tendencies in the object of investigation.

In the cited article de Broglie correctly observed that quantum mechanics takes a step toward solving the problem of the formation of systems with a new quality not reducible to the quality of the components; knowledge of this is the movement of science forward. But de Broglie came to this conclusion not through the idea of complementarity, but thanks to a concrete analysis of the essence of quantum mechanics*). Moreover, the conclusions of de Broglie’s analysis contradict the idea of complementarity, for, discussing not the measurement procedure and the classes of instruments (which is characteristic of supporters of the idea of complementarity), but the properties of objects, de Broglie is compelled to make the valuable admission that the idea of a component in a system and the idea of a system (it would be better to say not the idea, but the properties) appear in pure form only in limiting cases. “In the general case reality proves to be intermediate between these two limiting idealizations and can be approximately described with the help of the image of corpuscles preserving their individual masses in the depths of a system whose total mass is not equal to the sum of these individual masses.”^20 This statement by de Broglie expresses the thought of the unity of the contradictory properties of nature. However, this understanding does not fit into the scheme of the conception of complementarity, with which the knowledge of one side of the object of investigation is always connected, and the refusal to know the other because of its exclusion by measuring instruments. W. Pauli not without reason did not agree, in an editorial article, to recognize that de Broglie’s idea of the complementarity of components and system is correct.^23

It is no accident that, extending the idea of complementarity to various systems, the positivists reduce the properties of a system to the sum of the properties of its components and see complementarity in reasoning which expresses—

*) Ideas about the relation of the whole and the parts, about the irreducibility of the properties of a system to the sum of the properties of its components, are becoming very topical in contemporary physics; they are being developed especially by Soviet physicists, of course, outside any connection with the conception of complementarity—for example, in the works of A. A. Vlasov on the theory of many particles,^21 and also by R. Ya. Shteinman on the development of the concept of matter in quantum mechanics.^22

…exposes the following sophistry: the system is complementary to its components, for the study (measurement) of the components destroys the system. Of course, if one wants to study the properties of the components, one must necessarily isolate them from the system. But is the study of the properties of components the way to study new qualitative regularities, which in fact create the system? If the assertion cited above is meant to say that, in order to study the regularities of a system, one should not destroy it, then this assertion has no scientific significance whatever; in that case the positivists would have no need of the concept of complementarity. But when, together with this assertion, it is not indicated whether there exist, and what they are, ways of studying the system other than the rejected way of destroying the system into its constituent components, then the assertion itself acquires an agnostic meaning—allegedly, it turns out to be impossible to know the system. In that case it becomes clear that the purpose of the concept of complementarity is determined by the aims of ideological struggle.

One example of such sophistry is the attempt to extend the concept of complementarity to biology.

Arguing that the vital processes of an organism and its physical study stand in a relation of complementarity, Ph. Frank writes: “In order to describe a living organism in a physically exact way, it is necessary to test the state of every atom… A living organism, Bohr thinks, would be killed by operations much weaker than the operations necessary in order to observe the state of an electron. Therefore a living organism cannot be physically described even with such precision as the atoms of inorganic matter, in which position and velocity can be established, of course not exactly, but ultimately within the limits given by Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation” (24)19.

But on what grounds, in the middle of the twentieth century, is the vulgar notion of the vital process as a totality of motions of separate electrons or atoms being propagated? More than 70 years ago Marxism defined life as a regularity of organized matter; Engels wrote: “Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies, and this mode of existence consists essentially in the constant self-renewal of the chemical constituents of these bodies,”6. The further development of biology confirmed Engels’s definition. Biology has always studied the general regularities characterizing the integral organism, and not the motion of the atoms composing it.

P. Jordan approaches this question “more subtly”; he writes that macroscopic vital functions are only controlled by more refined processes: “there is reason to suppose that the ‘ultimate’ controlling dependencies are of an absolutely atomistic-physical order… Thus, the investigation of heredity, which reveals that individual organisms are constructed mosaically (!? S. S.) from their hereditary factors, has shown as …

...a completely general regularity: an elementary discontinuity in the change of hereditary factors. It is clear that here, too, we come into contact with the atomic and quantum-physical discontinuity of elementary events. If the assumption is correct that the reactions controlling organisms are of an atomistic-physical character, then it is obvious, in accordance with our present knowledge, that vital reactions possess an element of fundamental incalculability and unpredictability” (152)15.

Thus, according to Jordan, vital phenomena in the final analysis (through the controlling mechanism) are reduced to the quantum laws of motion of microparticles and thereby become incalculable and unpredictable! In all cases the agnostic side of the concept of complementarity comes to the fore. In the above-cited arguments of Jordan, as also in the pretentious little book of his like-minded associate Schrödinger, What Is Life?, we see the convergence of the positivist Copenhagen school of physicists with the reactionary direction of Weismannist-Morganists in biology.

The concept of complementarity also has yet another reactionary side, especially evident in its application to social phenomena, but just as essential with regard to the phenomena of nature. As is known, the Marxist dialectical method does not merely register the presence of opposite tendencies, but establishes “that the struggle of these opposites, the struggle between the old and the new, between that which is dying away and that which is being born, between that which is perishing and that which is developing, constitutes the inner content of the process of development...” (Stalin) (104)4.

In the course of this struggle the new, the developing, triumphs; as a result of the victory of the new over the old, the given contradictions find their resolution. Thus, the class struggle is resolved as a result of the victory of the working class over the classes of exploiters, and this victory leads to a new society, to communism.

But the concept of complementarity only registers the presence of mutually exclusive contradictory sides (“in experiments mutually excluding one another”!). These “complementary” sides are not the dialectical contradictions whose struggle leads to development and which are resolved in the course of struggle. This expresses the reactionary meaning of the concept of complementarity both in theory and in practice. This reactionary meaning is especially clearly visible in Bohr’s assertion about complementarity in the development of national cultures (see p. 28). In essence his assertion means that national forms of cultural development mutually exclude one another, that this is an eternal law of the development of society in which national states exist. Thus the concept of complementarity becomes the “theoretical” basis of bourgeois cosmopolitanism: either a single culture outside national forms of development (of course, under the aegis of American imperialism), or many cultures, national in form but mutually excluding one another, antagonistic. But now already...

Not only Marxist theory, but also the practice of socialist society in the USSR has shown the possibility of the development of the cultures of peoples, national in form but unified in their socialist content. Bourgeois would-be theorists close their eyes to the fact that, under the conditions of socialist society, nations of a new type are developing—socialist nations, “which are far more cohesive than any bourgeois nation, for they are free from the irreconcilable class contradictions that corrode bourgeois nations, and are far more all-national than any bourgeois nation.”5a No, the development of contemporary society proceeds in no way in the spirit of the concept of complementarity!

Relations of type (2), in which the contradictory nature of micro-objects is expressed; the new approach of quantum mechanics to the problem of the relation between a system and its components; finally, all questions connected with the mutual transformations of matter and field—all this imposes upon the contemporary investigator the necessity of passing over to dialectical forms of thought for the purpose of a more precise reflection of dialectical nature.

It is appropriate to recall Lenin’s words that “the new physics has slipped into idealism, chiefly because the physicists did not know dialectics” (248–249)1 and that the condition for overcoming the crisis of physics is the indispensable replacement of metaphysical materialism by dialectical materialism.

The concept of complementarity is an attempt to justify the theory that the transition to dialectical forms of thought is supposedly not necessary, that the nature of the organs of human perception is macroscopic, that thought too moves within the framework of classical (i.e. metaphysical) concepts, and that therefore man, by his very nature, is incapable of establishing any objective content behind relations of type (2), which express contradictory tendencies.

Therefore the concept of complementarity blocks the path to an understanding of the dialectical nature of the objective world. We have seen how this is done in physics: by assigning fundamental significance to the measuring operation, by the subsequent subjectivization of physical reality, and by asserting that there exists only such an object of investigation in which, owing to the nature of the instruments (of their various classes), there is no unity of dialectical contradictions, but only mutually exclusive complementary aspects that appear to us under different experimental circumstances.*

* However, the dialectics of nature imposes itself upon natural scientists with compelling force. We have seen this in the example of de Broglie: as soon as he reflected on the question of what essentially new contribution quantum mechanics had made to the development of physics, he came to the problem of the formation of new qualitative systems, to the conclusion that reality is not reduced to limiting cases but represents their unity.

The necessity of passing over to thinking in the categories of the unity of “limiting cases” is reflected (though as in a distorting mirror) in numerous—

Thus the concept of complementarity has fully revealed its true essence as a “fundamental concept of logical syntax” (Frank), i.e., as a modern form of the positivist theory of knowledge, whose principal purpose is to be a weapon in the struggle against dialectical materialism and its theory of knowledge, to serve as a “theoretical” bulwark of reactionary ideas.

From the same positivist positions, but in a somewhat different way, H. Reichenbach develops a “modern theory of physical knowledge.” H. Reichenbach, formerly the head of the Berlin group of neo-Machists, which united with the “Vienna Circle,” has now moved to the USA and is a professor of philosophy at the University of California. He has developed the so-called “theory of equivalent descriptions” of the microworld.

Strictly speaking, Reichenbach states, in the epistemological sense not a single event in quantum mechanics is observable. “They are all derived from macroscopic data, which constitute the only basis accessible to observation by means of human sense organs” (20)24. However, events in quantum mechanics can be divided into two classes: phenomena and interphenomena. Phenomena are the class of events that are connected with macroscopic events by means of short causal chains; therefore we say that they can be verified “directly” by such instruments as a Geiger counter or a Wilson chamber. Interphenomena are the class of events that are introduced by means of chains of inference of a far more complex kind; they are constructed in the form of interpolations within the world of phenomena. Such are: the motion of electrons, the motion of light from the source to its collision with matter. Phenomena and interphenomena are, according to Reichenbach, the quantum-mechanical analogy between the observable and the unobservable.

Can one pass from the observable to the unobservable? Does it exist at all? Such are the questions posed by Reichenbach. In other words, he poses the philosophical question of whether phenomena—for example, those observed in the Wilson chamber—have an objective meaning.

in the forms of three-valued logic (Reichenbach, Neumann, Birkhoff, and others) that exist in our time. The authors of these logics proceed from the assumption that there can be not two true judgments, as in Aristotelian logic (either $A$, or not-), but three (besides the first two, also an intermediate one). Reichenbach attempts to use quantum mechanics in terms of this three-valued logic24, 25. Pauli33 testifies that physicists, like himself, do not recognize the new logic; Bohr, not agreeing with this logic, opposes to it the concept of complementarity. The emergence of three-valued logics is merely evidence that at the contemporary stage of the knowledge of nature it is impossible for thought to advance in the categories of formal logic. But three-valued logic, a new form of the third true judgment for formal logic, continues to remain within the limits of metaphysical categories, and therefore cannot be the logic of modern natural science. The new logic has long since been discovered: it was developed by the labors of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin; it is dialectical-materialist logic.

3 Uspekhi fiz. nauk, vol. XXXIX, no. 1

Many foreign theoreticians mask their idealistic conception by motivating the posing of such questions with the peculiarities of the microworld in a gnoseological respect. Reichenbach drops all fig leaves; he asserts that such a problem—whether the unobserved exists—has a place both in classical physics and in everyday life in general. Does a tree exist, for example, when we cease to look at it, and if it does exist, then in what form? To this question, according to Reichenbach, no unambiguous answer can be given. One may say that when we cease to observe the tree, it does not exist, or that it splits in two, or even in four. It is logically impossible to prove that this is not so, even if, while not observing the tree, we see its shadow, provided, however, that one rule is observed: in accordance with the answer, we shall have to alter the physical laws in order to justify the presence of one shadow. All these various descriptions of the unobserved are equivalent, and they constitute a “class of equivalent descriptions.”

Reichenbach transfers these arguments also to the cognition of the microworld. It is possible, says Reichenbach, to reject any description of interphenomena, or, translating this into plain language, one may refuse to acknowledge the existence of an objective microworld that causes definite phenomena, for example, in a Wilson chamber or some other physical apparatus. These will be, according to Reichenbach, “restrictive interpretations” of quantum mechanics. But it is just as legitimate to create broader “exhaustive interpretations” of quantum mechanics. For example, one may recognize that interphenomena exist in the form of particles; this is the “corpuscular interpretation.” Then, when considering diffraction at one slit, the physical laws will be the same for phenomena and for interphenomena alike; that is, it will not be necessary to change the physical laws in passing to the world of the unobserved. Instead of the corpuscular interpretation, one may adopt the “wave interpretation” of interphenomena. It is completely equivalent to the first, but in this case the physical laws for interphenomena must be changed; a “causal anomaly” will appear in them: a wave, in some unknown way, produces a flash at one point. When considering diffraction by two slits, a causal anomaly will appear in the physical laws under the corpuscular interpretation as well: the expression “the particle passed through this slit” loses its meaning. The interpretation of interphenomena, according to Reichenbach, may in general be of any kind—for example, in the form of a combination of the corpuscular and wave interpretations, according to which the motion of corpuscles is controlled by guiding waves. This interpretation has its own anomalies in the existence of a field that obeys laws different from the laws valid for other kinds of waves; in particular, this field does not possess energy, since energy is supposed to be concentrated in the particles.

But whatever the interpretations may be, Reichenbach asserts, in the general case no interpretation can avoid a “causal-

nal anomaly.” Such is the inevitable fate of physical theories of interphenomena, or of the microworld. The bourgeois professor cannot refrain from proclaiming, as the result of his “profoundly thoughtful” investigations, a new principle of quantum mechanics—the so-called “principle of causal anomaly,” “which must be added to Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty” (35) ²⁵.

W. Pauli has already hastened to agree that the interpretation of quantum mechanics developed by the Copenhagen school “is also in agreement with Reichenbach’s principle of anomaly” ²³. It goes without saying that the purpose of this new “principle of anomaly” is to exclude every form of causality as an objective regularity of nature, and to prove the limited possibility of knowledge in atomic physics.

The adherents of the so-called “principle of observability,” defended with particular zeal by Heisenberg, are precisely, in Reichenbach’s terminology, followers of the “restrictive interpretation,” who assert that “the description of interphenomena is not necessary.” The reader is probably aware that this point of view was already expressed by Mach, who more than 75 years ago declared that the aim of natural science is the establishment of connections between phenomena and nothing more ²⁶. It follows from the refusal to recognize the existence, outside man, of an objective material world.

Reichenbach considers that this point of view is quite sufficient for the purposes of natural science. He merely finds that it “cannot be regarded as proof that exhaustive interpretations must be rejected. We must clearly realize that neither of the two conceptions can be proved true. These conceptions represent volitional decisions concerning the forms of physics; each of them is justified just as much as the other” (33) ²⁴.

In this, if one may say so, “theory of physical knowledge,” we see clearly to what monstrous pillars of absurdity Mach’s ideological heirs arrive. Denying the existence of an objective material world, hating the materialist theory of knowledge, according to which physical theory is an ever more precise image of the material world, they have offered natural scientists a “convenient” solution to all the difficulties arising in the course of the development of science: physical theory is an arbitrary, “volitional” interpretation of phenomena and interphenomena; any theory may be admitted, provided only that the established “rules of the game” are observed.

How “new” this “modern” “theory of physical knowledge,” allegedly arising from the results of quantum mechanics, is can be seen from the following episode. Lenin, forty years ago, already thundered against analogous ideas of “Hans Number Two” (Kleinpeter; the “first Hans” was Cornelius), who in 1905 (also in “The Theory of Knowledge of Modern Natural Science”) wrote that of one and the same domain of physical facts many theories may be given, and that “this fact

connected with the volitional character of our thinking; and in it is expressed the unconnectedness of our will with external circumstances (209)1. If Hans Reichenbach (Hans number three) repeats in 1946–1948 the idealistic fads of his predecessors, then one asks: what has contemporary physics to do with it?

Present-day physical idealism seeks to make use not only of the results of quantum mechanics. It also tries to rely on the general methods of physics, presenting them as a justification for an idealistic theory of knowledge. Among the trends that set themselves such a goal, the greatest role is played by so-called operationalism, whose ideological sources go back directly to Mach.

Operationalism establishes rules for introducing concepts into physics. According to operationalism, a concept has substantive content, and consequently can be introduced into physics, only if there corresponds to it an operation of measurement, even if only a mental one. This requirement is justified by the claim that it frees physics from fetishes, from metaphysical (in the sense of positivism) concepts, which allegedly penetrate into it from non-scientific domains*).

Many physicists are sympathetic to operationalism, regarding its requirements as a condition for the necessary precision of judgments. Undoubtedly, physical concepts constitute a unity of qualitative and quantitative moments, and therefore are connected with measurement. But they can never be expressed completely through the operations of measurement that are made the basis of their definitions. In fact, by defining concepts through a certain operation of measurement, operationalism essentially introduces into science a certain extrahistorical category, given once and for all and immutable. But the real world cannot be reflected, and in fact is not reflected, in immutable concepts. The history of any natural science knows the development of concepts, taking place as our knowledge of the real world deepens. Meanwhile, the original, formal-operational definition of a concept restricts its content to the expression of those operations which are known at a certain historical moment in the development of physics. By virtue of this, a concept defined according to the method of operationalism receives only a local significance. We thus see that operationalism restricts the possibilities of knowledge, and does not expand them.

*) Positivism regards concepts as metaphysical if one cannot prove the existence of that which constitutes the content of the concept. Positivism recognizes as existing only what is immediately given in perceptions—sensations, instrument readings, operations of measurement. Naturally, with the aid of such initial premises the adherents of this philosophy revolve in a vicious circle of purely subjective categories. Among metaphysical concepts the positivists include, along with the concepts of absolute motion, space, and time, also the concepts of matter and of the objective forms of its existence, as well as of spirit, life after death, etc.

In proof of the correctness and cognitive power of the operationalist method, its defenders adduce “arguments” of a historical kind. They set forth the history of the development of physical theories in the following way. Classical physics did not analyze the method of introducing concepts into physics, did not connect it with the obligatory requirement that a definite measuring operation be associated with physical concepts. Because this requirement was absent, concepts were introduced into classical physics arbitrarily and unscientifically, from the naïve notions of everyday life. Thus were introduced the concepts of absolute space, time, and motion. Mach was the first to advance the operation of measurement as the criterion of the value of a physical concept. Relying on this criterion, modern physics at once discovered the fictitiousness, the metaphysical character (in the positivist sense) of a number of concepts of classical physics, and had to eliminate them. Thus, it is said, the theory of relativity arose, and all of physics took its stand on more real ground and became a more fruitful science.

It is not difficult, however, to see that this presentation of the history of physics does not correspond to its actual course.

First, even in classical physics concepts were not introduced arbitrarily, from the naïve notions of everyday life. For example, the concept of velocity at a point, introduced already by Galileo, was taken not at all from the notions of ordinary life, but from the scientific analysis of the continuously increasing action of a body falling from different heights. The classical concepts of space, time, and motion are not empty fictions; in an implicit form they are contained in the Galilean transformation equations, the limited character (and not the fictitiousness) of which was proved by modern physics.

Second, as is known, what led to the emergence of the theory of relativity was by no means operationalist rules for defining concepts, but the need to resolve the real contradictions of classical electrodynamics with the experimentally established fact of the independence of the speed of light from the motion of its source.

These distortions of the history of the development of physical concepts and theories are needed by the operationalists in order to strengthen their position in physics.

The inflation of one of the moments of cognition—the process of measurement—to the rank of a certain epistemological principle, as in all similar cases, leads directly into the swamp of idealism. In this case, the criterion of the value of a concept becomes not its capacity to reflect the objective material world, but the operation of measurement. Operationalists regard a concept not as an image of the objective material world, but identify it with the very operation of measurement. The founder of operationalism in its contemporary form, the well-known researcher in the field of high-pressure physics, who writes much on questions of the philosophy of physics, P. W. Bridgman, declares: “In general, by means of any concept we denote nothing other than a series of operations; the concept is a synonym corresponding to a series of operations…”

operation»^27. What is determined not through operations of measurement is declared to be in principle unobservable, subject to expulsion from physics as unscientific “metaphysics.” Operationalism flows completely in the direction of logical empiricism (logical positivism). “The difference between operationalism and logical positivism is a difference of emphasis,” write the logical positivists in their Philosophical Dictionary^28.

From what has been said it follows that the “basic ideas” of operationalism coincide completely with the philosophical ideas of the Copenhagen school of physicists, which, as noted above, likewise identifies physical reality with the description of experimental results and the experimental arrangement. These are not two, but one idealist current, whose ideological banner is the defense of idealism in physics.

We see, therefore, that contemporary Machists are characterized by the same features that Lenin criticized in the Machist theory of knowledge: the undermining of the objective meaning of physical concepts, laws, and theories, and the limitation of man’s cognitive capacities. Like Mach, his present-day ideological heirs put themselves forward pretentiously, under the guise of theories of knowledge of “modern natural science.” These “theories” grow on the living tree of cognition as a result of blowing up separate aspects of cognition into an absolute, torn away from nature; they cannot be substantiated by modern natural science any more than Machism could be substantiated by references to the contemporary development of physics.

The division of the world into the observable (macro-world) and the unobservable (micro-world), about which we allegedly can construct only arbitrary schemes; cognition of the world with a well-known limitation, not in its objective contradictory tendencies of development, but in mutually exclusive concepts of complementarity; the interpretation of reality as the results of measurement—all these are idealist speculations, a malignant tumor parasitizing on the physical features of the new field of knowledge—atomic physics. This idealist speculation obscures the essence of contemporary physical achievements, presents the laws of the objective world in a distorted form, and thereby hampers its cognition.

The problems of cognition, contrived by present-day physical idealism, as though revealed in the course of the development of atomic physics as “insoluble,” are in fact resolved by Lenin’s materialist theory of knowledge, which is the only theory leading to the disclosure of the genuine laws of the atomic world, to the rapid progress of science.

IV

Lenin showed the inseparable connection of philosophy and theoretical science with politics, with the struggle of classes and parties. He mercilessly tore the mask from the bourgeois professors who claimed to occupy an “objective,” “non-party” position in science, for in reality

It served as a cover for the position of definite classes and parties. Lenin pointed out that in a class society there can be no ideology that does not have a party character, that does not serve the interests of some class or other. Materialism obliges one, Lenin wrote, in every appraisal of events to take directly and openly the standpoint of a definite social group.

In our days, when the struggle of two irreconcilable ideologies has become extraordinarily acute, when we face the task of showing the advantages of socialist ideology over decayed bourgeois ideology, Bolshevik party-mindedness has become the guiding principle of all our ideological work. In a period when Soviet society is building communism, and the forces of capitalism, under the leadership of the Anglo-American imperialists, are waging a fierce ideological war, preparing a military campaign against the country of socialism and the countries of people’s democracy, the questions of the struggle against the survivals of capitalism in the consciousness of Soviet people have arisen with unprecedented sharpness.

The decisions of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) on ideological questions, as well as the directives of the CC VKP(b) in the discussion of G. F. Aleksandrov’s book The History of Western European Philosophy and the speeches of the party press that exposed the bourgeois cosmopolitans, direct our attention to the task of educating Soviet people in the spirit of patriotism, of struggle against rootless cosmopolitanism, servility before bourgeois culture, bourgeois “objectivism,” in the spirit of upholding the party position in all questions of science, literature, and art.

To fight for the party-mindedness of science in our socialist society ultimately means: in all questions of the development of science to be guided by the interests of the Soviet people. These interests are, of course, highly diverse. They consist in having science help the party and the government solve the tasks facing the socialist state, in having it be effective and practically purposeful, in having the rates of its development outstrip the development of foreign bourgeois science; the interests of the Soviet people consist in having men of science fight for the dialectical-materialist, Marxist-Leninist worldview in theory, against bourgeois idealist ideology, in having them fight for the priority of national science, help to bring the people broadly into contact with science, and educate young scientific cadres in a socialist spirit.

The profound significance of party-mindedness in the natural sciences was shown by last year’s August session of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences named after V. I. Lenin, which routed the representatives of Weismannist-Morganists in Soviet science and highly raised the banner of the great transformer of nature, the materialist I. V. Michurin. Now it is already clear to everyone that the persistent struggle of T. D. Lysenko and his school for the party-mindedness of biological science has helped and is helping the party to mobilize the broad masses of collective-farm...

...of the peasantry to the solution of the most important tasks of transforming nature and raising agriculture to a new level on the basis of advanced science. That the victory of Michurin biology has international significance is evident already from the way our enemies abroad are acting, organizing the persecution not only of Soviet Michurinites but also of that progressive part of foreign scientists who support the foundations of the biological doctrine of Michurin—Lysenko.

Comrade Molotov said that the discussion on questions of heredity “emphasized the creative significance of materialist principles for all fields of science, which should promote the accelerated advance of scientific-theoretical work in our country.” The Party, Comrade Stalin, demand of all workers on the theoretical front, of theoretical natural scientists, a militant offensive spirit in theoretical work, a conscious, creative application to their science of the materialist theory of knowledge, the ruthless exposure of lackey-like servility of bourgeois scientists before bourgeois ideology, of sliding into idealism, of theoretical narrowness that retards the development of science. Our scientists must clearly realize what enormous pressure is now being exerted on natural scientists in the countries of capitalism by the foulest ideology of the ruling classes, how a hundredfold there has increased there the state, economic, everyday, and every other dependence of the professoriat on the dominant bourgeoisie, in order to understand that one cannot in every bourgeois professor see first of all an ally by profession, and only then an opponent in philosophical views.

The Party teaches us that, in the present situation, for the Soviet scientist a general recognition of the progressiveness of philosophical materialism is no longer sufficient; it is necessary to make it the guiding method of work in one’s professional field. This must find its reflection also in the general evaluation by Soviet physicists of contemporary physical theories and their various interpretations.

Lenin called the process of the formation of modern atomic physics the newest revolution in natural science. Atomic physics reveals new possibilities for transforming nature for the benefit of man. A major step forward is modern quantum mechanics. It generalized an enormous amount of experimental material, explained many physical facts that had found no explanation in the laws of classical physics, and predicted new phenomena. Quantum mechanics explained many essential regularities: chemical (especially homopolar) bonds, the basic spectroscopic regularities (especially the fine structure of spectra), the electrical and magnetic properties of bodies, their heat capacities, and much else. In quantum mechanics, more profoundly than in classical physics, the properties of matter and its motion are expressed, and herein lies the basis of its success.

In our time quantum mechanics is becoming the foundation of the engineering sciences, the basis of new technology. This means that it is indeed a reflection of the objective laws of nature. We must direct this argument against the foreign idealist agnostics who are trying to use the peculiarities of cognition of the microworld and the consequent breaking-up of a number of concepts in order to deny the possibility of knowing it; and also against those who, while combating idealism by primitive methods, prefer, just in case, to reject modern physical theories and their achievements.

Or let us take the theory of relativity. Its concrete physical conclusions prove to be essential precisely in atomic physics, where we encounter various fields and enormous velocities of atomic particles. The latest atomic technology has already reached such a level of development that at every step it is faced with the necessity of taking relativistic effects into account. It is known, for example, that experimental physics encountered an upper limit to the power of cyclotrons, which could not be overcome until the relativistic effect of the change in the mass of electrons at high velocities was taken into account. Conversely, taking account of the relativistic change of mass made it possible to overcome this limit and to increase the power of accelerator installations by at least an order of magnitude. The limiting influence of the relativistic effect in accelerators of the former type was first pointed out in 1944 by the Soviet physicist V. I. Veksler; he also calculated the design of a new type of accelerator (the phasotron), in which the relativistic effect is taken into account and the power of the installation is increased[^29]. Relying on the conclusions of the theory of relativity, the Soviet physicists D. Ivanenko and I. Pomeranchuk predicted in 1944[^30] that electrons moving at high velocities along a circular path in accelerators should give rise to electromagnetic braking radial radiation; for high energies this radiation has intense components in the visible part of the spectrum, so that it is possible to observe the moving electrons visually, which was accomplished in 1947, fifty years after the discovery of the electron. This relativistic effect also has to be taken into account in the design of accelerators, since the loss of energy to radiation sets a limit to the powers of nonlinear accelerators.

However, recognition of the enormous importance and fruitfulness of modern physical theories does not mean that we can uncritically accept them in the form and interpretation in which they are developed by foreign schools. The progress of physics in itself does not yet rid physicists of idealism. Lenin constantly emphasized that “reactionary encroachments are engendered by the very progress of science” (294)1.

Among some Soviet physicists there is a simplified approach to the task of overcoming physical idealism in the theories of foreign schools. They reason as follows: nature (or experience) imposes on phys—

...certain physical theories by physicists, and there can be nothing idealistic in them. Idealism, they say, is generated not by physicists but by philosophers, when they declare that a physical theory reflects not the objective world but, say, our sensory perceptions, or when they erect idealistic superstructures upon physical theories. But we, they say, are insured against these dangers; we know very well that idealistic superstructures must be discarded, leaving only the physical theory itself, which must be regarded as a reflection of the objective world and not assigned to the world of sensory perceptions. As for the content of the physical theory itself, it is known, they say, that Lenin did not connect materialism with the recognition of a definite form of matter; therefore, the development of physical theories may proceed along any paths, outside the influence of philosophy.

But such judgments are incorrect in two respects.

First, this is an incorrect use of Lenin’s ideological legacy, the acceptance in it of only one side—the doctrine of matter as an objective philosophical category. Objecting to such methods—to accept one thing in Marxism and reject another—Lenin wrote: “In this philosophy of Marxism, cast from a single piece of steel, one cannot remove a single basic premise, a single essential part, without departing from objective truth, without falling into the embraces of bourgeois-reactionary falsehood” (312)1. Criticizing Bazarov for having, on the question of space and time, gone over to the position of the idealist Pearson and the confused idealist Mach, considering their views on space and time compatible with Marxism, Lenin wrote: “To tear Engels’ doctrine of the objective reality of time and space away from his doctrine of the transformation of ‘things in themselves’ into ‘things for us,’ from his recognition of objective absolute truth, namely, objective reality given to us in sensation,—from his recognition of the objective law-governedness, causality, necessity of nature,—means to turn an integral philosophy into a hodgepodge” (172)1. In exactly the same way one cannot accept from Lenin his doctrine of matter as a philosophical category and forget his doctrine of the forms of existence of matter, of the transformation of “things in themselves” into “things for us,” i.e., the whole materialist theory of knowledge, the question of the paths by which material nature is reflected in our consciousness.

Second, Soviet physicists cannot reassure themselves with the argument that idealism in physics appears in the form of external “superstructures,” “annoying appendages,” which are immediately visible and can easily, without further logical analysis, be thrown out automatically, so to speak. That matters are not so—that contemporary idealism disguises itself as the “newest, natural-scientific” theory of knowledge—was taught to us by Lenin, especially in the book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism; this is taught to us by the instructions of Comrade Stalin and of the Party. This is evident, in particular, in the example...

vivacity among some Soviet physicists of the conception of complementarity, which appears as a “conclusion” from the newest physics and constitutes, as we have seen, an entire theory of knowledge of an idealistic kind. This conception has existed for two decades already, but only now are individual physicists beginning to criticize it*).

That idealism can be rooted in the very interpretation of physical theories, of their initial propositions, their postulates, their justification, is evident from the following particular example of the development of the theory of relativity. As is known, Einstein, in developing the general theory of relativity, established the equivalence of the fields of acceleration and gravitation. For small regions this relation has a rational meaning. However, Einstein, considering the theory not as a reflection of the objective world but as a purely mathematical construction, interpreted it as a universal law, valid also for infinite space; hence there already followed the direct Machist conclusion about the universal relativity of all coordinate systems and that the struggle between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus, in the light of modern science, is supposedly meaningless. Can one say that these Machist conclusions of Einstein are only “annoying appendages” to the general theory of relativity, and not a logical consequence of the incorrect interpretation of the physical theory itself, of what problems it has solved, and of what the limits of its validity are? Can one confine oneself to mechanically cutting off the “annoying appendage” and completely accept the entire interpretation of the general theory of relativity? It is clear that the Machist “appendage” is connected with the entire interpretation of this science**).

Modern schools of foreign theoretical physicists regard the process of measurement as the justification of physical theories. The problem is turned upside down: the results of measurement are regarded not as an expression of the properties of material objects, but as the initial and final points of cognition, as the only existing “reality.” This exaggeration of measurement as the determining moment of theory leads to an incorrect conception of

*) It should be noted that K. V. Nikol’skii was one of the first physicists to oppose his own interpretation of quantum mechanics to the subjectivist interpretation of the Copenhagen school; however, he still believed that there is “a valuable idea” in the conception of complementarity81.

One may welcome the fact that, in the second edition of his textbook, which has just appeared, D. I. Blokhintsev included a critical analysis of the position of the Copenhagen school and, in particular, for the first time in Russian illuminated the well-known discussion between Bohr and Einstein82. Valuable critical considerations were expressed recently by Ya. P. Terletskii83.

) In Soviet literature, criticism of the illegitimacy of Einstein’s extension of the idea of equivalence to infinite space (because of the contradiction with the so-called boundary conditions at infinity) was given as early as 1939 in the article “The Theory of Relativity,” in BSE. V. A. Fock expressed and developed analogous arguments84.

object of the theory, which is subjectivized in the idealist sense. But thereby the very essence of physical theory is distorted.

Thus, foreign schools present quantum mechanics to us as a theory of complementarity in microphysics. Is it not time for us to understand that by this very fact the true content of quantum mechanics is impoverished, its physical meaning is obscured and distorted, and a basis is created for idealist exercises?

But the same also applies to the evaluation of the essence of the theory of relativity. It was said above that Einstein’s interpretation of “the general theory of relativity” comes into contradiction with the properties of the objective world and with logical inevitability leads to idealist conclusions. V. A. Fock rightly sees, in the “general theory of relativity,” a content different from Einstein’s: according to Fock, it is a “geometrical theory of gravitation.”[^34]

Do not these examples already show that Soviet physicists face the task of comprehending, in their own way, materialistically, the true content of modern physical theories, those properties of the objective material world which they reflect?

The application of Lenin’s materialist theory of knowledge in physics obliges us correctly to evaluate classical and modern physics as different stages of the historical approximation to absolute truth. With respect to classical physics this means that it cannot be regarded simply as a stage already passed through, and its basic concepts—as outworn fictions. In that definite degree of approximation which is required in a vast range of practical problems, the laws discovered by classical physics play an essential role, independently of the gigantic development of modern physics. The substantiation of the classical theories and the concepts elaborated by them are, of course, modified, for they themselves become limiting cases of other, more generalizing theories.

But modern physical theories, too, are not a final stage, but express only a historical degree of knowledge of absolute truth. Attempts to present them as truths in the final instance are anti-Marxist; they promote the fetishization of modern theories and the uncritical acceptance of both their merits and their limitations*). It is now becoming ever clearer that the present state of physics requires other, more general theories, which will include the quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity known to us as limiting cases. In this connection the limited character of a number of concepts of modern physics will be revealed, just as was the case with the concepts of absolute space and time of classical physics. Already now the limited character of the concepts—

*) In S. E. Khaikin this was expressed in the form of interpreting the relation between classical mechanics and relativistic mechanics as between an approximate and an exact science.[^35]

of point particles in the theory of relativity. It comes into contradiction with the facts of the mutual transformability of particles and leads to absurd conclusions about the infinity of the magnitude of the particles’ own energy. Lenin’s materialist understanding of the infinity of nature enabled him, almost at the very dawn of the discovery of the electron, to formulate the proposition of the inexhaustibility of the electron. Physicists who dogmatized the theory of relativity arrive at this same conclusion many decades later, having passed through the severe “disease of infinities.”

The historical limitation of contemporary physical theories is already expressed in the fact that they rest on postulates substantiated by a simple reference to experience (for example, the theory of relativity rests on the postulate of the limiting character of the speed of light). But the positivists regard the experimental fact itself as something immediately given, requiring no further explanation. Marxists, however, consider the experimental fact in its necessity. Lenin says that “theoretical knowledge must give the object in its necessity, in its comprehensive relations, in its contradictory movement an-und für sich (in and for itself. — Ed.)” (183)². Until we have come to know the necessity of the limiting speed of light, i.e., have not disclosed the essence of the physical process of the propagation of light, neither the limits of validity of this experimental fact nor of the theory of relativity as a whole can be clear to us. Cognition of the experimental fact in its necessity inevitably leads to the creation of new, more general theories, to the expansion of knowledge as a whole.

Thus, Marxists and positivists have a different approach to the substantiation of science: if the positivist is satisfied with limited empirical experience, until he runs up palpably against another experience, then the Marxist consciously sets himself the task of expanding experience, since, not being satisfied with the mere ascertainment of a fact, he wants to know its necessity. In contrast to the positivist, the Marxist organically combines experiment, theory, and practice, which are moments of the process of man’s cognition of objective nature. Positivistically interpreted experience and the Marxist understanding of practice as a moment of cognition are different concepts.

We see, therefore, that theoretical physics, like every theoretical science, already in the very essence of its physical theories (and not in superstructures) treats such questions as the object of cognition and the paths of cognition, the relation of our concepts and theories to the object of cognition, i.e., it discusses the most fundamental problems of cognition, the problems of philosophy. And in questions of philosophy, as Lenin taught us, one must not trust a single word of a bourgeois professor.

That is why the Soviet physicist, the physicist-Marxist, must, in his own way, from the standpoint of philosophical materialism, comprehend the interpretation of every physical theory, the representation of the object created by it, the questions of the substantiation of the theory, the interconnection of theories with one another, and the question of the limits of applicability of a theory, beyond which it

ceases to reflect nature and leads to absurd physical and philosophical conclusions.

Soviet theoretical physicists owe a great debt to the people, since many of them, in their own field of science, have not yet taken up advanced positions in the struggle against bourgeois idealist ideology. The persistent struggle of physicists against mechanism, as a reflection in physics of obsolete classical views, was for many years conducted one-sidedly, and this one-sidedness brought some physicists into a single camp with foreign positivists. Some theoretical physicists did not understand that the chief enemy of philosophical materialism is not mechanism, but idealism; that the struggle against mechanism itself would have been more successful if it had been combined, in their work, with a powerful united front of struggle against idealism in physics. But physicists conducted the fire against idealism much more weakly. Academician S. I. Vavilov writes that “one cannot close one’s eyes to the fact that among some of our physicists idealist survivals are still preserved to this day, supported chiefly by an uncritical perception of the literature of the capitalist countries”[^35]. This uncritical perception testifies to their lack of a sense of the dignity of a Soviet scientist, of pride in the most progressive national science in the world, and to the kowtowing of individual scientists before foreign “authorities” and their ideas.

For some Soviet physicists, taking a correct position with respect to the physical theories of foreign bourgeois schools is hindered by a weak assimilation of the foundations of Marxism and, as a consequence of this, the circulation among them of a number of incorrect “theories” and assessments.

Some physicists, for example, have not understood the assessment of the general development of physics abroad over the last forty years, the question of how matters stand with the crisis of physics at the present time. There exists an opinion that the crisis of physics was resolved 20 years after the publication of Lenin’s book by the “synthesis of quantum mechanics,” and that at present physics has entered a period of a new, second crisis.

Such judgments are possible on the condition of understanding the essence of the crisis of physics as purely physical difficulties, as the emergence and resolution of contradictions within physics. However, this understanding is fundamentally incorrect; it contradicts Lenin’s understanding of the crisis of physics. Lenin saw the essence of the crisis not in the presence of physical difficulties in explaining a new domain of facts, not simply in the breaking down of old laws and basic principles, but, as we have seen, in the replacement of materialism by idealism and agnosticism accompanying this breaking down. The social situation in the countries of capitalism now, to an even greater degree than forty years ago, sharpens the struggle of idealism against materialism. We have seen (see Section III of the present article) that in the last decade and a half or two decades this struggle has been taking on an ever more organized form, and that many foreign theoretical physicists are taking a close part in it. It is naïve to think that the crisis of physics could be resolved in this

... situation, a “synthesis of quantum mechanics.” The actual history of the development of physics and philosophy after the emergence of quantum mechanics says the opposite. It was precisely the successes of quantum mechanics that were used by philosophers and physicists of the bourgeois countries for attacks on the reality of the objective world, on causality, on the spatio-temporal form of the existence of matter, on the law of the conservation and transformation of energy, for the “substantiation” of the “unobservability and unknowability of the microworld”; Reichenbach attempts to rely on it in his “theory of equivalent descriptions,” and so on, and so forth.

One must not forget that bourgeois society sets two tasks before theoretical natural science: to promote the development of technology and thereby the mastery of the laws of external nature, in order to secure the domination and profit of the ruling classes, and to substantiate idealist ideology, i.e. to prove that nature does not exist outside man, for the purpose of deceiving the people. These tasks are contradictory, but this is a living contradiction of capitalist society.

It is a different matter in the Soviet country, which has built socialism, the country of victorious Marxism, where natural scientists have no tasks other than the cognition of nature with the aim of placing it at the service of the interests of the people. In our country there are no causes whatever that would engender a crisis of physics. We are dealing only with foreign influences of bourgeois ideology upon a certain part of our physicists, owing to the presence in their consciousness of survivals of capitalism. Taking into account the vitality of these survivals, we are obliged to intensify the ideological struggle against them. We have all the conditions for overcoming these survivals—the existence of a united socialist society and an advanced theory—philosophical materialism.

An incorrect understanding of the paths of development of physics in the countries of capitalism in the period after the publication of Lenin’s book, a failure to understand that foreign theoretical physics is in a state of continuous crisis, contributes to an uncritical attitude toward the theoretical production of foreign physical schools, to ideological disarmament in the face of physical idealism.

On this soil, on the soil of a failure to understand the present stage of the struggle between imperialism and socialism, of servility before foreign schools, concepts are hatched among some physicists as though the foundations of the theories of these schools are objectively correct and may be accepted, but need only be given a materialist interpretation. This conception lay at the basis of the well-known statement by M. A. Markov in defense of the views of the Copenhagen school on the “nature of physical knowledge,” in defense of the “concept of complementarity.”⁷ M. A. Markov believed that the views of the Copenhagen school are an indisputable result of the latest physical research. The attempt at a “materialist interpretation” of these views led him by a direct path to a revision of the materialist theory of knowledge, to Kantian hieroglyphism. Such is the essence of Kantianism: anyone who strives to pri-

to reconcile idealism with materialism inevitably falls into its swamp. Markov failed to take into account the classical lesson of applying the materialist theory of knowledge to contemporary problems of physics, given by Lenin in his immortal work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

However, the Party’s work in the ideological education of Soviet people, in particular the exposure of idealism in the biological sciences, has had a beneficial influence also on scientists working in the field of theoretical physics. The majority of Soviet scientists understand that in “physical concepts” they encounter definite methods for solving problems of cognition. They are convinced that, even at the present stage in the development of natural science, however complex the problems may be, the Leninist materialist theory of knowledge resolves all the philosophical questions of contemporary physics, serves as a support in the struggle against the idealist aspirations of foreign schools, and is a powerful instrument for the conscious and rapid development of science.

Soviet physicists are guided by the Party’s instruction: to develop scientific-theoretical work in our country at an accelerated pace on the basis of the creative application of materialist principles, so that along this path “not only to catch up with, but also to surpass in the near future the achievements of science beyond the borders of our country” (Stalin).

The defense and further development by Lenin of dialectical materialism are of exceptional significance, for this is the forging of the theoretical weapon of the working class in the struggle for communism, for cognition and the revolutionary transformation of society and nature. Comrade Stalin defined Lenin’s work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as the theoretical preparation of the party of a new type—the Bolshevik Party.

Comrade Stalin, together with Lenin and after him, defended and developed the teaching of Marxism. In the well-known work Anarchism or Socialism?, which appeared in the same period as Lenin’s book, Comrade Stalin upheld and developed the theoretical foundations of the Marxist party—dialectical and historical materialism. In the classical encyclopedia of Marxist science—the Short Course of the History of the CPSU(b)—Comrade Stalin gave a scientific generalization of the gigantic historical experience of the Bolshevik Party, showed Marxism-Leninism in action, and developed this teaching further under the new conditions of the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolutions, the epoch of the victory of socialism and the construction of communist society. Developing dialectical materialism as the worldview of the Marxist-Leninist party, Comrade Stalin showed with the utmost clarity the inner connection between the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism and practical revolutionary activity, the policy of the Bolshevik Party. The great strength of the Party, which directs the revolutionary transformation of society,

consists in the fact that in its activity it proceeds from the precise and reliable data of science on the laws of the development of society. The historical victories to which the Soviet people, our Party, and Comrade Stalin have led us are victories of Marxist science.

The strength of Marxism is irresistible, for “Marxism is the scientific expression of the fundamental interests of the working class” (Stalin)\(^5\). The ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin are taking ever greater possession of the consciousness of the working people of all countries.

Philosophical materialism, developed in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, is victorious also in natural science. Truly boundless are the prospects for the rapid development of the natural sciences when scientists are armed with the mighty, progressive weapon of materialist knowledge of nature, when science serves the tasks of building communist society!

CITED LITERATURE

1. V. I. Lenin, Works, 4th ed., vol. 14, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
2. V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, Gospolitizdat, 1947, p. 183.
3. V. I. Lenin, Works, 3rd ed., vol. XXVII, p. 183.
4. History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course, OGIZ, Gospolitizdat, 1946, p. 98.
5. J. V. Stalin, Questions of Leninism, 11th ed., Gospolitizdat, 1945, p. 484.
   5a. J. V. Stalin, The National Question and Leninism, Works, vol. 11.
6. K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. XIV, Anti-Dühring, p. 81.
7. V. M. Molotov, The 31st Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Report at the solemn meeting of the Moscow Soviet, November 6, 1948.
8. M. Planck, From the Relative to the Absolute, Severnyi Pechatnik, Vologda, 1925, pp. 15–16.
9. H. Helmholtz, On the Conservation of Force, GTTI, 2nd ed., 1931, Introduction.
10. A. F. Ioffe, The Development of Atomistic Views in the Twentieth Century (report at a session of the Institute of Philosophy of the Communist Academy in 1931).
11. O. D. Khvolson, A Characterization of the Development of Physics over the Last 50 Years, Gosizdat, 1924.
12. Cf. review: Ya. A. Smorodinsky, The Mixing of Terms of Hydrogen-like Atoms and the Anomalous Magnetic Moment of the Electron (to be printed in forthcoming issues of UFN).
13. V. A. Fock, A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, N. Rosen, N. Bohr, Can the Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete? UFN, XVI, 4 (1936), pp. 451–452.
14. N. Bohr, The Quantum Postulate and the New Development of Atomistics, UFN, VIII, 3 (1928).
15. P. Jordan, Physics of the 20-th century, Philosophical library, New-York, 1944.
16. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol. I, No. 7, Ph. Frank, Foundations of Physics, University of Chicago Press, 1946.
17. V. Pauli, General Principles of Wave Mechanics, OGIZ, Gostekhizdat, 1947, p. 17.

1. N. Bohr, On the Notions Causality and Complementarity, Dialectica, 7/8 (v. 2, 3/4), 1948.

2. Ph. Frank, Interpretations and Misinterpretations of Modern Physics. Paris, Hermann C-ie Editeurs, 1938.

3. L. de Broglie, Sur la complémentarité des idées d’individu et de système, Dialectica, 7/8 (v. 2, 3/4), 1948, p. 32.

4. See, for example, A. A. Vlasov, “The New Content of the Many-Particle Problem,” ZhETF, 18, 840, 1948.

5. R. Ya. Shteinman, “On the Development of the Concept of Matter in Contemporary Physics,” report in the natural-science section of the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences (unpublished).

6. W. Pauli, Editorial, Dialectica, 7/8 (v. 2, 3/4), 1948.

7. H. Reichenbach, Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. University of California Press, 1946.

8. H. Reichenbach, The Principle of Anomaly in Quantum Mechanics, Dialectica, 7/8 (v. 2, 3/4), 1948.

9. E. Mach, The Principle of the Conservation of Work (1872), St. Petersburg, 1909, p. 52.

10. P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics. New York, 1928, p. 5.

11. The Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. by Dagobert Runes, 4th ed., New York, 1942.

12. V. Veksler, DAN 43, Nos. 8 and 44, No. 9 (1944); Journ. of Phys. USSR 9, 133 (1944).

13. D. Ivanenko and I. Pomeranchuk, DAN 44, 315 (1944); Phys. Rev. 65, 343 (1944).

14. K. V. Nikolsky, Quantum Processes, Gostekhizdat, 1940, pp. 147–154, etc.

15. D. I. Blokhintsev, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, 2nd ed. Gostekhizdat, 1949, § 129.

16. Ya. P. Terletsky, Problems of Philosophy, 3 (5), 1948 (published in June 1949).

17. V. A. Fock, “The Copernican System and the Ptolemaic System in the Light of the General Theory of Relativity,” in the collection Nikolai Copernicus, USSR Academy of Sciences Publishing House (1947).

18. S. E. Khaikin, Mechanics, Gostekhizdat, 1947, ch. XXII.

19. S. I. Vavilov, “Lenin and the Philosophical Problems of Contemporary Physics,” Pravda, May 12, 1949.

20. M. A. Markov, “On the Nature of Physical Knowledge,” Problems of Philosophy, No. 2 (1947).

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