V.I.

Lenin

MATERIALISM and EMPIRIO-CRITICISM

Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy

Chapter Five:

The Recent Revolution in Natural Science and Philosophical Idealism

A year ago, in Die Neue Zeit (1906–07, No. 52), there appeared an article by
Joseph Diner-Dénes entitled “Marxism and the Recent
Revolution in the Natural Sciences.” The defect of this
article is that it ignores the epistemological conclusions which
are being drawn from the “new” physics and in which we are especially interested at present. But it is precisely this
defect which renders the point of view and the conclusions of the
author particularly interesting for us. Joseph Diner-Dénes,
like the present writer, holds the view of the “rank-and-file Marxist,” of whom our Machians speak
with such haughty contempt. For instance, Mr. Yushkevich writes
that “ordinarily, the average rank-and-file Marxist calls
himself a dialectical materialist” (p. 1 of his book). And
now this rank-and-file Marxist, in the person of
J. Diner-Dénes, has directly compared the recent
discoveries in science, and especially in physics (X-rays,
Becquerel rays, radium, etc. [1] ), with Engels’
Anti-Dühring . To what conclusion has this comparison led him? “In the most varied fields of natural
science,” writes Diner-Dénes, “new knowledge has been acquired, all of which tends towards that single point which
Engels desired to make clear, namely, that in nature ‘there
are no irreconcilable contradictions, no forcibly fixed boundary
lines and distinctions,’ and that if contradictions and
distinctions are met with in nature, it is because we alone have
introduced their rigidity and absoluteness into nature.” It
was discovered, for instance, that light and electricity are only
manifestations of one and the same force of nature. [2] Each day it
becomes more probable that chemical affinity may be reduced to
electrical processes. The indestructible and non-disintegrable
elements of chemistry, whose number continues to grow as though in
derision of the unity of the world, now prove to be destructible
and disintegrable. The element radium has been converted into the
element helium. [3] “Just as all the forces of nature have been reduced to one force, so all substances in nature have
been reduced to one substance ” (Diner-Dénes’ italics). Quoting the opinion of one of
the writers who regard the atom as only a condensation of the
ether, [4] the author exclaims: “How brilliantly does this confirm the
statement made by Engels thirty years ago that motion is the mode
of existence of matter.” “All phenomena of nature are motion, and the differences between them lie only in the fact that
we human beings perceive this motion in different forms. . . . It
is as Engels said. Nature, like history, is subject to the
dialectical law of motion.”

On the other hand, you cannot take up any of the writings of the
Machians or about Machism without encountering pretentious
references to the new physics, which is said to have refuted
materialism, and so on and so forth. Whether these assertions
are well-founded is another question, but the connection between
the new physics, or rather a definite school of the new physics,
and Machism and other varieties of modern idealist philosophy is
beyond doubt. To analyse Machism and at the same time to ignore
this connection—as Plekhanov does [5] —is to scoff at the
spirit of dialectical materialism, i.e., to sacrifice the method of Engels to the letter of Engels. Engels says
explicitly that “with each epoch making discovery even in
the sphere of natural science [“not to speak of the history of mankind”], materialism has to
change its form” (Ludwig Feuerbach, Germ. ed.,
p. 19). [6] Hence, a revision of the
“form” of Engels’ materialism, a revision of his natural-philosophical propositions is not only not
“revisionism,” in the accepted meaning of the term, but, on the contrary, is demanded by Marxism. We criticise the
Machians not for making such a revision, but for their purely revisionist trick of betraying the
essence of materialism under the guise of criticising its form and of adopting the fundamental precepts of
reactionary bourgeois philosophy without making the slightest
attempt to deal directly, frankly and definitely with assertions
of Engels’ which are unquestionably extremely important to
the given question, as, for example, his assertion that
“. . . motion without matter is unthinkable” (Anti-Dühring,
p. 50). [7]

It goes without saying that in examining the connection between
one of the schools of modern physicists and the rebirth of
philosophical idealism, it is far from being our intention to
deal with specific physical theories. What interests us
exclusively is the epistemological conclusions that follow from
certain definite propositions and generally known discoveries. These epistemological conclusions are of themselves
so insistent that many physicists are already reaching for
them. What is more, there are already various trends among the
physicists, and definite schools are beginning to be formed on
this basis. Our object, therefore, will be confined to explaining clearly the essence of the difference between these
various trends and the relation in which they stand to the
fundamental lines of philosophy.

1. The Crisis in Modern Physics

In his book Valeur de la science [Value of Science], the famous French physicist Henri Poincaré says that there
are “symptoms of a serious crisis” in physics, and he devotes a special chapter to this crisis (Chap. VIII,
cf . p. 171). The crisis is not confined to the fact that “radium, the great revolutionary,” is
undermining the principle of the conservation of energy. “All the other principles are equally
endangered” (p. 180). For instance, Lavoisier’s principle, or the principle of the conservation of mass, has
been undermined by the electron theory of matter. According to
this theory atoms are composed of very minute particles called
electrons, which are charged with positive or negative electricity and “are immersed in a medium which we call
the ether.” The experiments of physicists provide data for
calculating the velocity of the electrons and their mass (or the
relation of their mass to their electrical charge). The velocity
proves to be comparable with the velocity of light (300,000
kilometres per second), attaining, for instance, one-third of
the latter. Under such circumstances the twofold mass of the
electron has to be taken into account, corresponding to the
necessity of over coming the inertia, firstly, of the electron
itself and, secondly, of the ether. The former mass will be the
real or mechanical mass of the electron, the latter the
“electrodynamic mass which represents the inertia of the
ether.” And it turns out that the former mass is equal to
zero. The entire mass of the electrons, or, at least, of the
negative electrons, proves to be totally and exclusively
electrodynamic in its origin. [8] Mass disappears. The foundations of
mechanics are undermined. Newton’s principle, the equality
of action and reaction, is undermined, and so on.

We are faced, says Poincaré, with the “ruins” of the old principles of physics, “a general debacle of
principles.” It is true, he remarks, that all the mentioned departures from principles refer to infinitesimal
magnitudes; it is possible that we are still ignorant of other
infinitesimals counteracting the undermining of the old
principles. Moreover, radium is very rare. But at any rate we
have reached a “ period of doubt .” We have already seen what epistemological deductions the author draws
from this “period of doubt": “it is not nature which imposes on [or dictates to] us the concepts of space and time,
but we who impose them on nature"; “whatever is not thought, is pure nothing.” These deductions are idealist
deductions. The breakdown of the most fundamental principles
shows (such is Poincaré’s trend of thought) that these principles are not copies, photographs of nature, not
images of something external in relation to man’s consciousness, but products of his consciousness. Poincaré
does not develop these deductions consistently, nor is he
essentially interested in the philosophical aspect of the
question. It is dealt with in detail by the French writer on
philosophical problems, Abel Rey, in his book The Physical Theory of the Modern Physicists (La Théorie physique chez les physiciens contemporains, Paris, F. Alcan, 1907). True,
the author himself is a positivist, i.e., a muddlehead and a semi-Machian, but in this case this is even a certain
advantage, for he can not be suspected of a desire to “slander” our Machians’ idol. Rey cannot be trusted when it comes to giving an exact philosophical
definition of concepts and of materialism in particular, for
Rey too is a professor, and as such is imbued with an utter
contempt for the materialists (and distinguishes himself by
utter ignorance of the epistemology of materialism). It goes
without saying that a Marx or an Engels is absolutely non-existent for such “men of science.” But Rey
summarises carefully and in general conscientiously the
extremely abundant literature on the subject, not only French,
but English and German as well (Ostwald and Mach in particular),
so that we shall have frequent recourse to his work.

The attention of philosophers in general, says the author, and
also of those who, for one reason or another, wish to criticise
science generally, has now been particularly attracted towards
physics. “In discussing the limits and value of physical
knowledge, it is in effect the legitimacy of positive science,
the possibility of knowing the object, that is criticised”
(pp. i-ii). From the “crisis in modern physics” people hasten to draw sceptical conclusions (p. 14). Now, what
is this crisis? During the first two-thirds of the nineteenth
century the physicists agreed among themselves on everything
essential. They believed in a purely mechanical explanation of
nature: they assumed that physics is nothing but a more
complicated mechanics, namely, a molecular mechanics. They
differed only as to the methods used in reducing physics to
mechanics and as to the details of the mechanism. . . . At
present the spectacle presented by the physico-chemical sciences
seems completely changed. Extreme disagreement has replaced
general unanimity, and no longer does it concern details, but
leading and fundamental ideas. While it would be an exaggeration
to say that each scientist has his own peculiar tendencies, it
must nevertheless be noted that science, and especially physics,
has, like art, its numerous schools, the conclusions of which
often differ from, and sometimes are directly opposed and
hostile to each other. . . .

“ From this one may judge the significance and scope of
what has been called the crisis in modern physics.

“ Down to the middle of the nineteenth century, traditional
physics had assumed that it was sufficient merely to extend
physics in order to arrive at a metaphysics of matter. This physics ascribed to its theories an ontological value. And its
theories were all mechanistic. The traditional mechanism [Rey employs
this word in the specific sense of a system of ideas which reduces physics to mechanics] thus
claimed, over and above the results of experience, a real knowledge of the material universe. This was not a
hypothetical account of experience; it was a dogma. . .”
(p. 16).

We must here interrupt the worthy “positivist.” It is clear that he is describing the materialist philosophy of
traditional physics but does not want to call the devil
(materialism) by name. Materialism to a Humean must appear to be
metaphysics, dogma, a transgression of the bounds of experience,
and so forth. Knowing nothing of materialism, the Humean Rey has
no conception whatever of dialectics, of the difference between
dialectical materialism and metaphysical materialism, in
Engels’ meaning of the term. Hence, the relation between
absolute and relative truth, for example, is absolutely unclear
to Rey.

“. . . The criticism of traditional mechanism made during
the whole of the second half of the nineteenth century weakened
the premise of the ontological reality of mechanism. On the
basis of these criticisms a philosophical conception of physics
was founded which became almost traditional in 7philosophy at
the end of the nineteenth century. Science was nothing but a
symbolic formula, a method of notation (repérage, the creation of signs, marks, symbols), and since the methods of
notation varied according to the schools, the conclusion was
soon reached that only that was denoted which had been previously designed ( faonné ) by man for notation
(or symbolisation). Science became a work of art for dilettantes, a work of art for utilitarians: views which could
with legitimacy be generally interpreted as the negation of the
possibility of science. A science which is a pure artifice for
acting upon nature, a mere utilitarian technique, has no right
to call itself science, without perverting the meaning of
words. To say that science can be nothing but such an artificial
means of action is to disavow science in the proper meaning of
the term.

“ The collapse of traditional mechanism, or, more precisely, the criticism to which it was subjected, led to the
proposition that science itself had also collapsed. From the impossibility of adhering purely and simply to traditional
mechanism it was inferred that science was impossible” (pp. 16-17).

And the author asks: “Is the present crisis in physics a
temporary and external incident in the evolution of science, or
is science itself making an abrupt right-about-face and
definitely abandoning the path it has hitherto pursued?. . .”

“ If the [physical and chemical] sciences, which in history
have been essentially emancipators, collapse in this crisis,
which reduces them to the status of mere, technically useful
recipes but deprives them of all significance from the stand
point of knowledge of nature, the result must needs be a
complete revolution both in the art of logic and the history of
ideas. Physics then loses all educational value; the spirit of
positive science it represents becomes false and dangerous.” Science can offer only practical recipes but
no real knowledge. “Knowledge of the real must be sought
and given by other means. . . . One must take another road, one
must return to subjective intuition, to a mystical sense of
reality, in a word, to the mysterious, all that of which one
thought it had been deprived” (p. 19).

As a positivist, the author considers such a view wrong and the
crisis in physics only temporary. We shall presently see how Rey
purifies Mach, Poincaré and Co. of these conclusions. At
present we shall confine ourselves to noting the fact of the
“crisis” and its significance. From the last words of Rey quoted by us it is quite clear what reactionary elements
have taken advantage of and aggravated this crisis. Rey
explicitly states in the preface to his work that “the fideist and anti-intellectualist movement of the last years of
the nineteenth century” is seeking “to base itself on the general spirit of modern physics” (p. ii). In
France, those who put faith above reason are called fideists
(from the Latin fides, faith). Anti-intellectualism is a doctrine that denies the rights or claims of reason. Hence, in
its philosophical aspect, the essence of the “crisis in
modern physics” is 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 theories only as symbols, signs, and marks
for practice, i.e., it denies the existence of an objective reality independent of our mind and reflected by
it. If Rey had used correct philosophical terminology, he would
have said: the materialist theory of knowledge, instinctively
accepted by the earlier physics, has been replaced by an
idealist and agnostic theory of knowledge, which, against the
wishes of the idealists and agnostics, has been taken advantage
of by fideism.

But Rey does not present this replacement, which constitutes the
crisis, as though all the modern physicists stand opposed to all
the old physicists. No. He shows that in their epistemological
trends the modern physicists are divided into three schools: the
energeticist or conceptualist school; the mechanistic or
neo-mechanistic school, to which the vast majority of physicists
still adhere; and in between the two, the critical school. To
the first belong Mach and Duhem; to the third, Henri
Poincaré to the second, Kirchhoff, Helmholtz, Thomson (Lord
Kelvin), Maxwell—among the older physicists—and
Larmor and Lorentz among the modern physicists. What the essence
of the two basic trends is (for the third is not independent, but intermediate) may be judged from the following
words of Rey’s:

“ Traditional mechanism constructed a system of the material world.” Its doctrine of the structure of matter
was based on “elements qualitatively homogenous and identical"; and elements were to be regarded as
“immutable, impenetrable,” etc. Physics “constructed a real edifice out of real
materials and real cement. The physicist possessed material elements, the causes and modes of
their action, and the real laws of their action” (pp. 33-38). “The change in this view consists in the
rejection of the ontological significance of the theories and in
an exaggerated emphasis on the phenomenological significance of
physics.” The conceptualist view operates with “pure abstractions . . . and seeks a purely abstract theory which will
as far as possible eliminate the hypothesis of matter. . . . The
notion of energy thus becomes the substructure of the new
physics. This is why conceptualist physics may most often be
called energeticist physics,” although this designation does not fit, for example, such a representative of
conceptualist physics as Mach (p. 46).

Rey’s identification of energetics with Machism is not altogether correct, of course; nor is his assurance that the neo-mechanistic school as well is approaching a phenomenalist
view of physics (p. 48), despite the profundity of its disagreement with the conceptualists. Rey’s
“new” terminology does not clarify, but rather obscures matters; but we could not avoid it if we were to give
the reader an idea of how a “positivist” regards the crisis in physics. Essentially, the opposition of the
“new” school to the old views fully coincides, as the reader may have convinced himself, with Kleinpeter’s
criticism of Helmholtz quoted above. In his presentation of the
views of the various physicists Rey reflects the indefiniteness
and vacillation of their philosophical views. The essence of the crisis in modern physics consists in the
breakdown of the old laws and basic principles, in the rejection
of an objective reality existing outside the mind, that is, in
the replacement of materialism by idealism and agnosticism. “Matter has disappeared"—one may thus
express the fundamental and characteristic difficulty in
relation to many of the particular questions, which has created
this crisis. Let us pause to discuss this difficulty.

---
Notes:
[1]
X-rays, Becquerel rays, radium—discoveries which, laid the basis for the development of atomic physics.

X-rays (Rontgen rays) are extremely short-wave electromagnetic
radiation ’which can pass through media impenetrable by visible light. They were discovered by the German physicist Wilhelm
Konrad R6ntgen in December 1895 who described their main
properties; later the nature of this radiation was discovered.

In 1896 the French physicist Antoine-Henri Becquerel, while
studying the action of various fluorescent substances on photo
graphic film, discovered that uranium salts affect such film in
the dark even without previous exposure to light. By further
experiments he showed that this action was due to a new form of
radiation distinct from X-rays.

Investigating this new form of radiation, Pierre and Marie Curie
established that it was due to a hitherto unknown property of
matter, which they called radioactivity. As a result of their
experiments two new radioactive elements were discovered:
polonium and radium (1898). Later it was found that Becquerel’s
rays consist of three components (alpha-, beta- and gamma-rays).

[2]
This discovery was made by lames Clerk Maxwell. By generalising
Michael Faraday’s experimental results in the study of electromagnetic phenomena he created the theory of the
electromagnetic field, from which it followed that changes of
the electromagnetic field are propagated with the speed of
light. On the basis of his researches, Maxwell in 1805 concluded
that light consists of electromagnetic vibrations. In 1886-89
his theory was confirmed experimentally by Heinrich Hertz, who
proved the existence of electromagnetic waves.

[3]
The study of radioactivity revealed the existence of a special kind
of radiation: alpha-, beta- and gamma-rays. In 1903, Ernest
Rutherford and Frederick Soddy suggested that radioactivity was
the spontaneous transformation of one chemical element into
another. This was speedily confirmed by William Ramsay and
Frederick Soddy, who discovered that helium was one of the
products of radioactive disintegration of radon (1903). Shortly
afterwards it was discovered that helium was formed by the
disintegration of radium and other radioactiye elements showing
alpha-radioactivity. This formation of helium was an important
argument in favour of the theory of radioactive transformations,
and could only be explained by supposing that alpha-rays are the
nuclei of helium atoms. This was confirmed in 1909 by the
experiments of T. Rutherford and T. Royds.

[4]
Lenin uses the concept of the ether, which was still generally
accepted in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century. The idea of the ether as a special material medium
filling all space and acting as the carrier of light, gravitational forces, etc., was put forward in the seventeenth
century. Later, the notion of different forms of the ether,
independent of one another (electromagnetic, magnetic, etc.) was
introduced to explain various phenomena. Owing to the success of
the wave theory of light, the concept of the luminiferous ether
(Christian Huygens, Austin Frosnel and others) was especially
developed; subsequently the hypothesis of a single ether
arose. As science developed, however, the concept of the ether
came into contradiction with new facts. The untenability of the
hypothesis of the ether as a universal mechanical medium was
proved by the theory of relativity; the rational elements
contained in the hypothesis of the ether were reflected in the
quantum field theory (tile vacuum concept).

[5]
Lenin repeatedly pointed out the limited nature of Plekhanov’s
criticism of Machism. In 1905, in connection with his preface to
the second Russian edition of Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbaeh and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Lenin wrote: “How
petty are his sallies and ’pinpricks against the Machists! For
me this is the more to be regretted since Plekhanov’s criticism
of Mach seems to me essentially correct" (Lenin Miscellany XXVI, p. 21). In 1907-08, in the works Fundamental Problems of Marxism, Materialismus militais and others,
Plekhnnov criticised Machism and its adherents in Russia
(Bogdanov, Lunacharsky and others) and pointed out the fallacy
of their attempts to combine Marxism with the subjective-idealist philosophy of Mach and Avenarius. In so
doing, Plekhanov “was less concerned with refuting Mach than
with dealing a factional blow at Bolshevism” (see p. 355 of this
volume).

Plekhanov’s opposition to Machism played a positive part in
defending Marxist philosophy from the attacks of the revisionists, but he did not give a deep theoretical analysis of
empirio-criticism, and did not reveal the direct dependence of
Machism on the crisis in natural science, confining himself to a
criticism of the idealist epistemological views of some of its
adherents.

[6]
See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow,
1958, p. 375. 94.

[7]
See F. Engels, Anti-Duhring, Moscow, 1959, p. 86.

[8]
The description of the concept of mass given by Henri
Poincaré and quoted by Lenin was in accord with the level
of development of physics at that time. The development of the
electronic theory that followed the discovery of the electron
made it possible to explain the nature of the mass of the
electron. Joseph John Thom son advanced the hypothesis that the
actual mass of the electron is determined by the energy of the
electromagnetic field (i.e., the inertia of the electron is due
to the inertia of the field). The concept of the electromagnetic
mass of the electron was introduced, and this mass was found to
depend on the velocity of motion of the electron. The mechanical
mass of the electron, however, like that of any other particle,
was regarded as unchanging. The existence of the mechanical mass
should have been revealed by experiments on the dependence of
the electromagnetic mass of the electron on its velocity. However, these experiments, performed by Walter
Kaufmann in 1901-02, unexpectedly showed that the electron
behaved as if all its mass was of an electromagnetic nature. Hence the conclusion was drawn that, in the case of the
electron, mechanical mass, which was formerly regarded as an
inalienable property of matter, has disappeared. This circumstance gave rise to various kinds of philosophical
speculations and statements about the "disappearance of matter’,
the fallacy of which was demonstrated by Lenin. The further
development of physics (relativity theory) showed that mechanical mass also depends on velocity of motion and that the
mass of the electron cannot be reduced wholly to electromagnetic
mass.