Chairman: Today I called you here to study Sakata’s article. Sakata says that elementary particles are not indivisible, and that electrons are divisible. By saying this, he is taking a stand based on dialectical materialism.

The world is infinite. The world is boundless both in time and in space. Beyond the solar system there are countless fixed stars, which together form the Milky Way. Beyond the Milky Way, there are countless other galaxies. Seen from the large-scale perspective, the universe is infinite. Seen from the small-scale perspective, the universe is also infinite. Not only are atoms divisible, but atomic nuclei are divisible as well, and they can be divided ad infinitum. Zhuangzi said: “Take a foot-long stick and cut it in half every day; it will never be exhausted in ten thousand generations.” This is correct. Therefore, our understanding of the world is also inexhaustible. Otherwise, physics as a science would cease to develop. If our understanding were finite and we had already grasped everything, what need would there be for people like us?

Chairman: Human understanding of things always requires many repetitions and must go through a process of accumulation. A large amount of perceptual material must be amassed before the leap from perceptual knowledge to rational knowledge can occur. The principle of the leap from practice to the perceptual, and from the perceptual to the rational, was not clearly explained by Marx and Engels. Lenin also did not explain it clearly. Lenin’s *Materialism and Empirio-Criticism* only clearly explained materialism but did not fully clarify epistemology. Ai Siqi was right when he spoke on this point recently at the Higher Party School. This principle was also not clearly explained by China’s ancients. Laozi and Zhuangzi did not explain it clearly. Mozi discussed some issues of epistemology but also did not explain them clearly. Zhang Zai, Li Zhuowu, Wang Chuanshan, and Tan Sitong all failed to explain it clearly. What is philosophy? Philosophy is epistemology — nothing else. The first part of the first of the Ten Articles in the “Double Ten Articles” was written by me. I talked about matter transforming into spirit and spirit transforming into matter. I also talked about philosophy — don’t lecture too long at one time; an hour at most is enough. If you go on too long, the more you talk, the more confused things get. I also said that philosophy must be liberated from the classroom and the study. My words struck a sore spot for some people, and they came out with the idea of “two combining into one” to oppose me.

Chairman: We still do not clearly understand many things. Understanding always keeps developing. With powerful telescopes, we can see far more stars. Speaking of the solar system and the Earth, Kant’s nebular hypothesis — that the Earth and the Sun were both formed by the condensation of extremely hot gas — has not been overturned even to this day. Our Earth is probably still in its youth, and it has been gradually growing larger. Every day quite a few things fall onto the Earth, such as meteorites, sunlight, and so on. The Sun is probably already in its middle age, and it is not as hot now. If the sunlight on the ground were so intense, say a hundred degrees Celsius, how could people endure it? The surface temperature of the Sun is five to six thousand degrees, and above the Sun’s surface there is a layer with a temperature of one to two thousand degrees. If we say we do not fully understand the Sun, then we also do not fully understand the vast region between the Sun and the Earth. Now that we have artificial satellites, our knowledge of this area is gradually growing. Climatic changes on Earth are also unclear and require study. As for the issue of glaciers, scientists are still debating. Li Siguang maintains that there is a glacial period roughly every million years. When that happens, great changes in the biological world will occur again. The ancient dinosaurs could not endure the cold of the glacial period and became extinct. Humans emerged between the last two glacial periods. When the next glacial period comes, it will pose a problem for humans: people must prepare to cope with the arrival of the next ice age.

×××: What the Chairman just said about telescopes brings a question to my mind: can we generalize telescopes, artificial satellites, and the like under the concept of “tools of cognition”?

Chairman: The concept of “tools of cognition” you mentioned has some truth to it. Tools of cognition must include things like hoes, machines, and so on. Human understanding originates from practice. When we use hoes, machines, and other tools to transform the world, our understanding deepens. Tools are extensions of human organs. A hoe is an extension of the arm; a telescope is an extension of the eye; the body and the five senses can all be extended. Franklin said that man is a tool-making animal. The Chinese say that man is the most intelligent among all creatures. Among animals, there are also primates, but monkeys do not know how to make sticks to knock down fruit. In the animal brain, there are no concepts.

×××: Usually in philosophy books, the individual is taken as the subject of cognition. But in real life, the subject of cognition is not one individual after another; it is often a collective. Our Party, for example, is a subject of cognition. Is this view correct?

Chairman: A class is precisely a subject of cognition. At first, the working class was a class-in-itself; at that time it had no understanding of capitalism. Later, it developed from a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself. At that point it gained an understanding of capitalism. This is the development of cognition with a class as the subject.

Chairman: Water on Earth was not there from the very beginning. In the earliest times, the Earth’s temperature was so high that water could not exist; at that temperature water would have exploded into hydrogen and oxygen. Two days ago there was an article in *Guangming Daily* saying it takes several million years for hydrogen and oxygen to combine to form water. Fu Ying says it takes tens of millions of years. I wonder if the author of that article discussed it with Fu Ying? Once water appeared, living things emerged from water. Humans evolved from fish. There is a stage in the development of the human fetus that resembles a fish.

Chairman: All particular, specific things have their birth, development, and death. Everyone must die, because each person is brought into being. Humans must die. Zhang San is human — Zhang San must die. They cannot meet Confucius from two thousand years ago, because he had to die. Humans were brought into being, therefore humanity will also perish. The Earth was brought into being, and the Earth will also perish. But when we speak of the extinction of humanity and the Earth, it is not the same as the Christian idea of doomsday. When we say humanity will perish and the Earth will perish, it means that something more advanced than humanity will replace humanity — a higher stage in the process of the development of things. I say that Marxism also has its birth, development, and death. This may sound strange. But since Marxism says that everything that comes into being has its extinction, could it be that this statement does not apply to Marxism itself? To say it will never perish is metaphysics. Of course, the extinction of Marxism means that something higher than Marxism will replace it.

Chairman: Things are in motion. As for the Earth revolving around the Sun — rotation making a day, revolution making a year — in Copernicus’s time, only three people in Europe believed it: Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. In China, not a single person did. However, in the Song dynasty there was a man named Xin Qiji, who wrote a poem saying that when the moon sinks below us, it shines on another place.* In the Jin dynasty, Zhang Hua (styled Maoxian) wrote in one of his poems: “The great ritual revolves, the sky turns, the Earth travels.” This poem is collected in *The Source of Ancient Poems*.

Chairman: Everything is both conserved and not conserved. The universe conserves, yet later the Chinese scientists in America, Li Zhengdao and Yang Zhenning, said it does not conserve. Is it the same with conservation of mass and conservation of energy? There is nothing absolutely unchanging in the world. Change, no change; then change again, and no change again — this constitutes the universe. Conservation and non-conservation — that is both balance and imbalance. There are also situations where balance is completely shattered. A generator is a very good example illustrating the transformation of motion. When coal burns, what is the form of motion?

×××: It is the energy released when the outer electrons of the atoms in the compound change their orbital motion.

Chairman: That form is transformed into the motion of the expansion of steam in volume.

×××: That is the molecular motion producing kinetic energy.

Chairman: Then it rotates the rotor of the generator — that is mechanical motion — and finally electricity is produced in the copper and aluminum wires.

Everything in the world is changing; physics is also changing; Newtonian mechanics is also changing. In the world, there was a time when Newtonian mechanics did not exist, then Newtonian mechanics came into being; later, it went from Newtonian mechanics to relativity. This in itself is dialectics.

Things often turn up in unexpected places. Sun Yat-sen studied medicine, and later went into politics. Guo Moruo originally studied medicine too, and later became a historian. Lu Xun also studied medicine, and later became a great literary figure. I got into politics gradually myself. I studied the Confucian classics for six years, attended school for seven years, then served as a primary school teacher and later as a middle school teacher. At that time I had no idea what Marxism was. I had never even heard the names Marx and Engels. I only knew Napoleon and Washington. My involvement in military affairs was even more like that. I served as head of the propaganda department in the political department of the National Revolutionary Army. At the Peasant Movement Training Institute, I also spoke about the importance of fighting, but I never thought I would personally get involved in military affairs and go to war. Later, I led people into battle and went up to Jinggangshan. On Jinggangshan, we first won a small victory, and then suffered two major defeats in a row. So we summed up our experience. We summed up a sixteen-character experience for guerrilla warfare: “Enemy advances, we retreat; enemy camps, we harass; enemy tires, we attack; enemy retreats, we pursue.” Thanks are due to Chairman Jiang for giving us lessons; and thanks are also due to some people inside the Party, who said I had not a bit of Marxism and that they were one-hundred-percent Bolsheviks. Yet those one-hundred-percent Bolsheviks caused the Party in the White Areas to lose one hundred percent, and the Soviet Area to lose ninety percent.

Chairman: People like us do not produce grain or machinery; what we produce are lines and policies. Lines and policies do not come out of thin air. For instance, the “Four Clean-ups” and “Five-Antis” were not invented by us; they were told to us by the common people. The emergence of these policies owes thanks also to a counterrevolutionary from Guangdong. He wrote letters to ×× and ××, demanding that I hand over political power and the army.

Scientists must form an alliance with the masses and maintain close ties with young workers and old workers. Our brains are processing factories. Factory equipment must be renewed; our brains must also be renewed. The various cells in our bodies are constantly being renewed. The cells on the skin of our bodies are no longer the same as those we had when we were born; who knows how many times they have been replaced in between.

Chinese intellectuals come in several types. Engineers and technical personnel accept socialism relatively better. Those in the natural sciences come next. Those in the humanities and social sciences are the worst. Take Feng Ding at your place — I think he is a revisionist. What he writes in his books is Khrushchev’s stuff.

Chairman: When Cao Xueqin wrote *Dream of the Red Chamber*, he still wanted to mend the sky — to mend the sky of the feudal system. But what *Dream of the Red Chamber* describes is the decline of a feudal family. You could say that a contradiction emerged between Cao Xueqin’s world view and his literary creation. Cao Xueqin’s family declined during the Yongzheng reign. Kangxi had many sons; one of them was Yongzheng. Yongzheng ran a secret service to oppress his rivals, taking the other two sons of Kangxi — I believe the ninth and tenth sons — and renaming one “Pig” and the other “Dog.”

Chairman: Dissection is very important. Just like the cook Ding cutting up an ox. When Engels discussed medicine, he also attached great importance to anatomy. Medicine is built on the foundation of anatomy.

The question of the origin of cells should be studied. A cell has a nucleus, cytoplasm, and a cell membrane. A cell has structure. Before cells, there must have been non-cells. What exactly existed before cells? How exactly did non-cells become cells? A Soviet female scientist studied this question with no results.

×××: After our country reported on the reattachment of severed hands at the international surgical conference in Rome, the Americans said they could not grasp the real state of Chinese science and technology and felt a little afraid of us.

Chairman: A little fear is a good thing; if they were not afraid, that would be bad. We are somewhat afraid of America because America is our enemy. That America is somewhat afraid of us shows that we are America’s enemy, and an enemy with strength. In science and technology, we should pay attention to maintaining secrecy. We must not let them figure out our real situation.

*“Magnolia Flower” — drinking wine at Mid-Autumn Festival when dawn approaches. A guest says that in poems by past poets there are odes awaiting the moon but none bidding it farewell. Using the “heavenly questions” style, I compose this:

Pitiable, this evening’s moon —
Whither is it going, so far, so far?
Is there another human realm,
Where, on the other side, just now they see its glowing eastern edge?

Or is it beyond the heavens, in the boundless void,
That a great wind sweeps the Mid-Autumn night away?
The flying mirror — with no root, who ties it?
Chang’e unmarried — who keeps her there?