Science

Science is…

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Science is: “patience in investigation and clarity in calculation; singleness of purpose; the power to suspend judgement, to remain, if need be, for a lifetime in doubt; the gift of abstraction, of thinking about things definitely but without too much intrusion of their sensuous qualities; the skill to hold in suspense one’s own tastes and passions, a skill which demands discipline of the most rigorous kind. Without these traits, science as a thing distinct from common sense, from magic, pseudo-science, charlatanism, poetry, religion, religious philosophy, and tendentious belief in general, could hardly have come into being.”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, Is it Science? Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is

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Superscientific

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Marxism “is superscientific, metaphysical–religious in the truest sense of the term. It is a scheme for reading the ideal purpose of the communists and their plan for achieving it into the objective facts, so that their account of changing the world and their plans for changing it become one and the same thing.”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, What Dialectic Meant to Marx and Lenin

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The World Robot

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“Far from abandoning ‘all philosophy’ for science, Marx did not even abandon Hegel’s philosophy. He merely replaced Hegel’s World Spirit with a World Robot who performs to a different purpose, and without demanding social attentions, all the work which the World Spirit was employed to perform.”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, What Dialectic Meant to Marx and Lenin

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Romantic Philosophy

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“For my part, I think there is no intellectual question of more importance to the future of American culture than the question whether we are going to conduct our social efforts in the name of science, or are going to swallow down this romantic German philosophy.”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, The Word “Dialectic”.

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The Marxist Mind

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“In the mind of the Marxist, dialectic is the ‘leader of all knowledge’ and ‘holds the primacy and rule of all philosophy,’ and of science ,too. It is the supreme ‘organon’, the ultimate and perfect instrument of understanding, an inherently revolutionary superscience to which all genuinely progressive minds must learn to conform.”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, Is it Science?, Part III, The Religious Heritage

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Oversoulful People

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“These oversoulful people have not wanted to deny science or deprive themselves of its benefits, but neither have they wanted to commit themselves to its methods of acquiring knowledge and above all to the limitations of knowledge which those methods imply. They have used the faculty of ideation not only in order to change real things in an ideal direction, but also in order to make themselves comfortable among things-as-they-are by thinking up ideal ways of conceiving them.”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, Is it Science? Part III The Religious Heritage, Chapter 2 Hegel’s Contribution

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