“It was juvenile of me to imagine that humanity as a whole, especially by splitting itself into two halves, could turn a whole period of history into a scientific experiment.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Scientific Experiment? Read More »
“Dialectic Materialism, examined at its point of origin, turns out to be the rather naïve, cloudy, unsuccessful and half-minded attempt of a matter-of-fact mind to escape from German metaphysics.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, The Seed of the Marxian Philosophy
“The most persistent and most threatening enemy of the scientific attitude is the disposition of men to think what they want to think, and of men and institutions to bend the results even of experimental investigation, and pervert its authority, to the support of their purposes and states of passion.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is
“The ability to rest in doubt, to withhold belief where belief is not warranted by methodological investigation–yet more, to suspend judgement while such investigation is in progress–is indispensable to expert common sense and it is the part most difficult for amateurs to learn.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is
“He (the scientist) is an implacable enemy of the occult. He really wants to know; the magician wants not to know.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is
“Science regards all valid knowledge as derived ultimately from experience, derived by the methods of observation, experiment, and rational calculation, and subject to the practical test of action.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is
“If Marx had understood the art of practical thinking, Das Kapital might have been as great a book as the Hegelian Marxists think it is.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, Religion in “Das Kapital”
Practical Thinking Read More »
“The dialectic philosophy, as we have seen, was a bold maneuver in the defense of animism against science. Science has always occupied itself with changes, and animism has survived for the most part as an assertion of the Changeless which lies behind and beyond them.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, The “Dialectic Method”
“The German state patronized modern capitalism, perverting it to the support of feudal political institutions; and the German philosophers patronized modern science, perverting it to the support of animistic superstition.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, The Theory of History
Institutions and Superstitions Read More »
“Marx and Engels were defending against scientific materialism–against that attitude which constitutes at least the simple common-sense starting point of science–a materialistic religion.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, The Belief in Dialectic Materialism
Materialistic Religion Read More »
