Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from God and the State
We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong to it, -that this matter has nothing in common with the tile matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false theorizing, is indeed a stupi i, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving birth to the small est pl oduct, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the opposite of this supreme Being, matter, their matter, stripped by them of all that constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness. They have taken away from matter intelligence, life, all its determining qualities, active relations or forces, motion itself, without which matter would not even have weight, leaving it nothing but impenetrability and absolute immobility in space; they have attributed all these natural forces, properties, and manifesta tions' to the imaginary being created by their abstract fancy; then, interchanging rates, they have called this product of their imagination, this phantom, this God who is nothing, supreme Being, and, as a necessary consequence, have declared that the real Being, matter, the world, is nothing. After which they gravely tell us that this matter is incapable of producing anything, not even of setting itself in motion, and consequently must have been created by their God.
Who are right, the idealists or the materialists? The question once clearly stated, hesitation becomes impossible. Undoubtedly the idealists are wrong and the materialists right. Yes, facts are before ideas; yes, the ideal, as Proudhon said, is but a ?ower, whose root lies in the material conditions of existence. Yes, the whole history of humanity, intellectual and moral, political and social, is but a re?ection of its economic history.
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