Modern dialectical materialism

Modern dialectical materialism

(essay)

Introduction

We are living in a period of profound historical change. After a period of 40 years of unprecedented economic growth, the market economy is reaching its limits. At the dawn of capitalism, despite its barbarous crimes, it revolutionized the productive forces, thus laying the basis for a new system of society. The First World War and the Russian Revolution signalled a decisive change in the historical role of capitalism. From a means of developing the productive forces, it became transformed into a gigantic fetter upon economic and social development. The period of upswing in the West in the period of 1948-73 seemed to promise a new dawn. Even so, the benefits were limited to a handful of developed capitalist countries. For two-thirds of humanity living in the Third World, the picture was one of mass unemployment, poverty, wars and exploitation on an unprecedented scale. This period of capitalism ended with the so-called "oil crisis" of 1973-4. Since then, they have not managed to get back to the kind of growth and levels of employment they had achieved in the post-war period.

A social system in a state of irreversible decline expresses itself in cultural decay. This is reflected in a hundred different ways. A general mood of anxiety and pessimism as regards the future spreads, especially among the intelligentsia. Those who yesterday talked confidently about the inevitability of human progress and evolution, now see only darkness and uncertainty. The 20th century is staggering to a close, having witnessed two terrible world wars, economic collapse and the nightmare of fascism in the period between the wars. These were already a stern warning that the progressive phase of capitalism was past.

The crisis of capitalism pervades all levels of life. It is not merely an economic phenomenon. It is reflected in speculation and corruption, drug abuse, violence, all-pervasive egotism and indifference to the suffering of others, the breakdown of the bourgeois family, the crisis of bourgeois morality, culture and philosophy. How could it be otherwise? One of the symptoms of a social system in crisis is that the ruling class increasingly feels itself to be a fetter on the development of society.

Marx pointed out that the ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class. In its heyday, the bourgeoisie not only played a progressive role in pushing back the frontiers of civilisation, but was well aware of the fact. Now the strategists of capital are seized with pessimism. They are the representatives of an historically doomed system, but cannot reconcile themselves to the fact. This central contradiction is the decisive factor which sets its imprint upon the mode of thinking of the bourgeoisie today. Lenin once said that a man on the edge of a cliff does not reason.

Lag in Consciousness

Contrary to the prejudice of philosophical idealism, human consciousness in general is extraordinarily conservative, and always tends to lag far behind the development of society, technology and the productive forces. Habit, routine, and tradition, to use a phrase of Marx, weigh like an Alp on the minds of men and women, who, in "normal" historical periods cling stubbornly to the well-trodden paths, from an instinct of self-preservation, the roots of which lie in the remote past of the species. Only in exceptional periods of history, when the social and moral order begin to crack under the strain of intolerable pressures do the mass of people start to question the world into which they have been born, and to doubt the beliefs and prejudices of a lifetime.

Such a period was the epoch of the birth of capitalism, heralded by the great cultural re-awakening and spiritual regeneration of Europe after its lengthy winter sleep under feudalism. In the period of its historical ascent, the bourgeoisie played a most progressive role, not only in developing the productive forces, and thereby mightily expanding humanity's power over nature, but also in extending the frontiers of science, knowledge and culture. Luther, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Duhrer, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo and a host of other pathfinders of civilisation shine like a galaxy illuminating the broad highroad of human cultural and scientific advance opened by the Reformation and Renaissance. However, such revolutionary periods do not come into being easily or automatically. The price of progress is struggle--the struggle of the new against the old, the living against the dead, the future against the past.

The rise of the bourgeoisie in Italy, Holland, England and later in France was accompanied by an extraordinary flourishing of culture, art and science. One would have to look back to ancient Athens to find a precedent for this. Particularly in those countries where the bourgeois revolution triumphed in the 17th and 18th centuries, the development of the forces of production and technology was accompanied by a parallel development of science and thought, which drastically undermined the ideological domination of the Church.

In France, the classical country of the bourgeois revolution in its political expression, the bourgeoisie in 1789-93 carried out its revolution under the banner of Reason. Long before it toppled the formidable walls of the Bastille, it was necessary to overthrow the invisible but no less formidable walls of religious superstition in the minds of men and women. In its revolutionary youth the French bourgeoisie was rationalist and atheist. Only after installing themselves in power did the men of property, finding themselves confronted by a new revolutionary class, jettison the ideological baggage of their youth.

Not long ago France celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of its great revolution. It was curious to note how even the memory of a revolution two centuries ago fills the establishment with unease. The attitude of the French ruling class to their own revolution vividly recalled that of an old libertine who tries to gain a ticket to respectability--and perhaps admittance to heaven--by renouncing the sins of his youth which he is no longer in a position to repeat. Like all established privileged classes, the capitalist class seeks to justify its existence, not only to society at large, but to itself. In its search for ideological points of support, which would tend to justify the status quo and sanctify existing social relations, they rapidly rediscovered the enchantments of Mother Church, particularly after the mortal terror they experienced at the time of the Paris Commune. The church of Sacre Coeur is a concrete expression of the bourgeois' fear of revolution translated into the language of architectural philistinism.

Marx (1818-83) and Engels (1820-95) explained that the fundamental driving force of all human progress is the development of the productive forces--industry, agriculture, science and technique. This is a truly great theoretical generalisation without which it is impossible to understand the movement of human history in general. However, it does not mean, as dishonest or ignorant detractors of Marxism have attempted to show, that Marx "reduces everything to economics." Dialectical and historical materialism takes full account of phenomena such as religion, art, science, morality, law, politics, tradition, national characteristics and all the other manifold manifestations of human consciousness. But not only that. It shows their real content and how they relate to the actual development of society, which in the last analysis clearly depends upon its capacity to reproduce and expand the material conditions for its existence. On this subject, Engels wrote the following:

"According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence, if someone twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that position into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure--political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by victorious classes after a successful battle, etc., judicial forms, and the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles, and in many cases predominate in determining their form." (1)

The affirmation of historical materialism that, in general, human consciousness tends to lag behind the development of the productive forces seems paradoxical to some. Yet it is graphically expressed in all kinds of ways in the United States where the achievements of science have reached their highest level. The constant advance of technology is the prior condition for bringing about the real emancipation of men and women, through the establishment of a rational socioeconomic system, in which human beings exercise conscious control over their lives and environment. Here, however, the contrast between the rapid development of science and technology and the extraordinary lag in human thinking presents itself in its most glaring form.

In the USA nine persons out of ten believe in the existence of a supreme being, and seven out of ten in a life after death. When the first American astronaut who succeeded in circumnavigating the world in a spacecraft was asked to broadcast a message to the inhabitants of the earth, he made a significant choice. Out of the whole of world literature, he chose the first sentence of the book of Genesis: "In the beginning, God created heaven and the earth." This man, sitting in his space ship, a product of the most advanced technology ever seen, had his mind full to the brim with superstitions and phantoms handed down with little change from the primeval past.

Seventy years ago, in the notorious "monkey trial" of 1925, a teacher called John Scopes was found guilty of teaching the theory of evolution, in contravention of the laws of the state of Tennessee. The trial actually upheld the state's anti-evolution laws, which were not abolished until 1968, when the US Supreme Court ruled that the teaching of creation theories was a violation of the constitutional ban on the teaching of religion in state schools. Since then, the creationists changed their tactics, trying to turn creationism into a "science." In this, they have the support, not only of a wide layer of public opinion, but of not a few scientists, who are prepared to place their services at the disposal of religion in its most crude and obscurantist form.

In 1981 American scientists, making use of Kepler's laws of planetary motion, launched a spacecraft that made a spectacular rendezvous with Saturn. In the same year an American judge had to declare unconstitutional a law passed in the state of Arkansas which imposed on schools the obligation to treat so-called "creation-science" on equal terms with the theory of evolution. Among other things, the creationists demanded the recognition of Noah's flood as a primary geological agent. In the course of the trial, witnesses for the defence expressed fervent belief in Satan and the possibility that life was brought to earth in meteorites, the variety of species being explained by a kind of meteoric shuttle-service! At the trial, Mr. N. K. Wickremasinge of the University of Wales was quoted as saying that insects might be more intelligent than humans, although "they're not letting on…because things are going so well for them." (2)

The religious fundamentalist lobby in the USA has mass support, access to unlimited funds, and the backing of congressmen. Evangelical crooks make fortunes out of radio stations with a following of millions. The fact that in the last decade of the 20th century there are a large number of educated men and women--including scientists--in the most technologically advanced country the world has ever known who are prepared to fight for the idea that the book of Genesis is literally true, that the universe was created in six days about 6,000 years ago, is, in itself, a most remarkable example of the workings of the dialectic.

"Reason Becomes Unreason"

The period when the capitalist class stood for a rational world outlook has become a dim memory. In the epoch of the senile decay of capitalism, the earlier processes have been thrown into reverse. In the words of Hegel, "Reason becomes Unreason." It is true that, in the industrialised countries, "official" religion is dying on its feet. The churches are empty and increasingly in crisis. Instead, we see a veritable "Egyptian plague" of peculiar religious sects, accompanied by the flourishing of mysticism and all kinds of superstition. The frightful epidemic of religious fundamentalism--Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu--is a graphic manifestation of the impasse of society. As the new century beckons, we observe the most horrific throwbacks to the Dark Ages.

This phenomenon is not confined to Iran, India and Algeria. In the United States we saw the "Waco massacre," and after that, in Switzerland, the collective suicide of another group of religious fanatics. In other Western countries, we see the uncontrolled spread of religious sects, superstition, astrology and all kinds of irrational tendencies. In France, there are about 36,000 Catholic priests, and over 40,000 professional astrologers who declared their earnings to the taxman. Until recently, Japan appeared to be an exception to the rule. William Rees-Mogg, former editor of the London Times, and arch-Conservative, in his recent book The Great Reckoning, How the World Will Change in the Depression of the 1990s states that: "The revival of religion is something that is happening throughout the world in varying degrees. Japan may be an exception, perhaps because social order has as yet shown no signs of breaking down there…" (3) Rees-Mogg spoke too soon. A couple of years after these lines were written, the horrific gas attack on the Tokyo underground drew the world's attention to the existence of sizable groups of religious fanatics even in Japan, where the economic crisis has put an end to the long period of full employment and social stability. All these phenomena bear a striking resemblance to what occurred in the period of the decline of the Roman Empire. Let no one object that such things are confined to the fringes of society. Ronald and Nancy Reagan regularly consulted astrologers about all their actions, big and small. Here are a couple of extracts from Donald Regan's book, For the Record:

"Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favourable alignment for the enterprise. Nancy Reagan seemed to have absolute faith in the clairvoyant powers of this woman, who had predicted that `something' bad was going to happen to the president shortly before he was wounded in an assassination attempt in 1981.

"Although I had never met this seer--Mrs. Reagan passed along her prognostications to me after conferring with her on the telephone--she had become such a factor in my work, and in the highest affairs of the state at one point I kept a colour-coded calendar on my desk (numerals highlighted in green ink for `good' days, red for `bad' days, yellow for `iffy' days) as an aid to remember when it was propitious to move the president of the United States from one place to another, or schedule him to speak in public, or commence negotiations with a foreign power.

"Before I came to the White House, Mike Deaver had been the man who integrated the horoscopes of Mrs. Reagan's into the presidential schedule…It is a measure of his discretion and loyalty that few in the White House knew that Mrs. Reagan was even part of the problem [waiting for schedules]--much less that an astrologer in San Francisco was approving the details of the presidential schedule. Deaver told me that Mrs. Reagan's dependence on the occult went back at least as far as her husband's governorship, when she had relied on the advice of the famous Jeane Dixon. Subsequently, she had lost confidence in Dixon's powers. But the First Lady seemed to have absolute faith in the clairvoyant talents of the woman in San Francisco. Apparently, Deaver had ceased to think there was anything remarkable about this long-established floating seance…To him it was simply one of the little problems in the life of a servant of the great. `At least,' he said, `this astrologer is not as kooky as the last one.'"

Astrology was used in the planning of the summit between Reagan and Gorbachev, according to the family soothsayer, but things didn't go smoothly between the two first ladies because Raisa's birth date was unknown! The movement in the direction of a "free market economy" in Russia has since bestowed the blessings of capitalist civilisation on that unfortunate country--mass unemployment, social disintegration, prostitution, the mafia, an unprecedented crime wave, drugs and religion. It has recently emerged that Yeltsin himself consults astrologers. In this respect also, the nascent capitalist class in Russia has shown itself to be an apt pupil of its Western role models.

The prevailing sense of disorientation and pessimism finds its reflection in all sorts of ways, not only directly in politics. This all-pervasive irrationality is not an accident. It is the psychological reflection of a world where the destiny of humanity is controlled by terrifying and seemingly invisible forces. Just look at the sudden panic on the stock exchange, with "respectable" men and women scurrying around like ants when their nest is broken open. These periodic spasms causing a herd-like panic are a graphic illustration of capitalist anarchy. And this is what determines the lives of millions of people. We live in the midst of a society in decline. The evidence of decay is present on all sides. Conservative reactionaries bemoan the breakdown of the family and the epidemic of drugs, crime, mindless violence, and the rest. Their only answer is to step up state repression--more police, more prisons, harsher punishments, even genetic investigation of alleged "criminal types." What they cannot or will not see is that these phenomena are the symptoms of the blind alley of the social system which they represent.

These are the defenders of "market forces," the same irrational forces that presently condemn millions of people to unemployment. They are the prophets of "supply-side" economics, which John Galbraith shrewdly defined as the theory that the poor have too much money, and the rich too little. The prevailing "morality" is that of the market place, that is, the morality of the jungle. The wealth of society is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, despite all the demagogic nonsense about a "property-owning democracy" and "small is beautiful." We are supposed to live in a democracy. Yet a handful of big banks, monopolies, and stock exchange speculators (generally the same people) decide the fate of millions. This tiny minority possesses powerful means of manipulating public opinion. They have a monopoly of the means of communication, the press, radio and television. Then there is the spiritual police--the church, which for generations has taught people to look for salvation in another world.

Science and the Crisis of Society

Do We Need Philosophy?

Before we start, you may be tempted to ask, "Well, what of it?" Is it really necessary for us to bother about complicated questions of science and philosophy? To such a question, two replies are possible. If what is meant is: do we need to know about such things in order to go about our daily life, then the answer is evidently no. But if we wish to gain a rational understanding of the world in which we live, and the fundamental processes at work in nature, society and our own way of thinking, then matters appear in quite a different light.

Strangely enough, everyone has a "philosophy." A philosophy is a way of looking at the world. We all believe we know how to distinguish right from wrong, good from bad. These are, however, very complicated issues which have occupied the attention of the greatest minds in history. When confronted with the terrible fact of the existence of events like the fratricidal war in the former Yugoslavia, the re-emergence of mass unemployment, the slaughter in Rwanda, many people will confess that they do not comprehend such things, and will frequently resort to vague references to "human nature." But what is this mysterious human nature which is seen as the source of all our ills and is alleged to be eternally unchangeable? This is a profoundly philosophical question, to which not many would venture a reply, unless they were of a religious cast of mind, in which case they would say that God, in His wisdom, made us like that. Why anyone should worship a Being that played such tricks on His creations is another matter.

Those who stubbornly maintain that they have no philosophy are mistaken. Nature abhors a vacuum. People who lack a coherently worked-out philosophical standpoint will inevitably reflect the ideas and prejudices of the society and the milieu in which they live. That means, in the given context, that their heads will be full of the ideas they imbibe from the newspapers, television, pulpit and schoolroom, which faithfully reflect the interests and morality of existing society.

Most people usually succeed in muddling through life, until some great upheaval compels them to re-consider the kind of ideas and values they grew up with. The crisis of society forces them to question many things they took for granted. At such times, ideas which seemed remote suddenly become strikingly relevant. Anyone who wishes to understand life, not as a meaningless series of accidents or an unthinking routine, must occupy themselves with philosophy, that is, with thought at a higher level than the immediate problems of everyday existence. Only by this means do we raise ourselves to a height where we begin to fulfil our potential as conscious human beings, willing and able to take control of our own destinies.

It is generally understood that anything worthwhile in life requires some effort. The study of philosophy, by its very nature, involves certain difficulties, because it deals with matters far removed from the world of ordinary experience. Even the terminology used presents difficulties because words are used in a way that does not necessarily correspond to the common usage. But the same is true for any specialized subject, from psychoanalysis to engineering.

The second obstacle is more serious. In the last century, when Marx and Engels first published their writings on dialectical materialism, they could assume that many of their readers had at least a working knowledge of classical philosophy, including Hegel. Nowadays it is not possible to make such an assumption. Philosophy no longer occupies the place it had before, since the role of speculation about the nature of the universe and life has long since been occupied by the sciences. The possession of powerful radio telescopes and spacecraft renders guesses about the nature and extent of our solar system unnecessary. Even the mysteries of the human soul are being gradually laid bare by the progress of neurobiology and psychology.

The situation is far less satisfactory in the realm of the social sciences, mainly because the desire for accurate knowledge often decreases to the degree that science impinges on the powerful material interests which govern the lives of people. The great advances made by Marx and Engels in the sphere of social and historical analysis and economics fall outside the scope of the present work. Suffice it to point out that, despite the sustained and frequently malicious attacks to which they were subjected from the beginning, the theories of Marxism in the social sphere have been the decisive factor in the development of modern social sciences. As for their vitality, this is testified to by the fact that the attacks not only continue, but tend to increase in intensity as time goes by.

In past ages, the development of science, which has always been closely linked to that of the productive forces, had not reached a sufficiently high level to permit men and women to understand the world in which they lived. In the absence of scientific knowledge, or the material means of obtaining it, they were compelled to rely upon the one instrument they possessed that could help them to make sense of the world, and thus gain power over it--the human mind. The struggle to understand the world was closely identified with humankind's struggle to tear itself away from a merely animal level of existence, to gain mastery over the blind forces of nature, and to become free in the real, not legalistic, sense of the word. This struggle is a red thread running through the whole of human history.

Role of Religion

"Man is quite insane. He wouldn't know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen." (Montaigne.)

"All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the force of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them." (Marx)

Animals have no religion, and in the past it was said that this constituted the main difference between humans and "brutes." But that is just another way of saying that only humans possess consciousness in the full sense of the word. In recent years, there has been a reaction against the idea of Man as a special and unique Creation. This is undoubtedly correct, in the sense that humans developed from animals, and, in many important respects, remain animals. Not only do we share many of the bodily functions with other animals, but the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees is less than two percent. That is a crushing answer to the nonsense of the Creationists.

Recent research with bonobo chimpanzees has proven beyond doubt that the primates closest to humans are capable of a level of mental activity similar in some respects to that of a human child. That is striking proof of the kinship between humans and the highest primates, but here the analogy begins to break down. Despite all the efforts of experimenters, captive bonobos have not been able to speak or fashion a stone tool remotely similar to the simplest implements created by early hominids. The two percent genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees marks the qualitative leap from the animal to the human. This was accomplished, not by a Creator, but by the development of the brain through manual labour.

The skill to make even the simplest stone tools involves a very high level of mental ability and abstract thought. The ability to select the right sort of stone and reject others; the choice of the correct angle to strike a blow, and the use of precisely the right amount of force--these are highly complicated intellectual actions. They imply a degree of planning and foresight not found in even the most advanced primates. However, the use and manufacture of stone tools was not the result of conscious planning, but was something forced upon man's remote ancestors by necessity. It was not consciousness that created humanity, but the necessary conditions of human existence which led to an enlarged brain, speech and culture, including religion.

The need to understand the world was closely linked to the need to survive. Those early hominids who discovered the use of stone scrapers in butchering dead animals with thick hides obtained a considerable advantage over those who were denied access to this rich supply of fats and proteins. Those who perfected their stone implements and worked out where to find the best materials stood a better chance of survival than those who did not. With the development of technique came the expansion of the mind, and the need to explain the phenomena of nature which governed their lives. Over millions of years, through trial and error, our ancestors began to establish certain relations between things. They began to make abstractions, that is, to generalize from experience and practice.

For centuries, the central question of philosophy has been the relation of thinking to being. Most people live their lives quite happily without even considering this problem. They think and act, talk and work, with not the slightest difficulty. Moreover, it would not occur to them to regard as incompatible the two most basic human activities, which are in practice inseparably linked. Even the most elementary action, if we exclude simple biologically determined reactions, demands some thought. To a degree, this is true not only of humans but also of animals, such as a cat lying in wait for a mouse. In man, however, the kind of thought and planning has a qualitatively higher character than any of the mental activities of even the most advanced of the apes.

This fact is inseparably linked to the capacity for abstract thought, which enables humans to go far beyond the immediate situation given to us by our senses. We can envisage situations, not just in the past (animals also have memory, as a dog which cowers at the sight of a stick) but also the future. We can anticipate complex situations, plan and thereby determine the outcome, and to some extent determine our own destinies. Although we do not normally think about it, this represents a colossal conquest which sets humankind apart from the rest of nature. "What is distinctive of human reasoning," says Professor Gordon Childe, "is that it can go immensely farther from the actual present situation than any other animal's reasoning ever seems to get it." (6) From this capacity springs all the manifold creations of civilization, culture, art, music, literature, science, philosophy, religion. We also take for granted that all this does not drop from the skies, but is the product of millions of years of development.

The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras (500-428 B.C.), in a brilliant deduction, said that man's mental development depended upon the freeing of the hands. In his important article, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, Engels showed the exact way in which this transition was achieved. He proved that the upright stance, freeing of the hands for labour, the form of the hands, with the opposition of the thumb to the fingers, which allowed for clutching, were the physiological preconditions for tool making, which, in turn, was the main stimulus to the development of the brain. Speech itself, which is inseparable from thought, arose out of the demands of social production, the need to realize complicated functions by means of co-operation. These theories of Engels have been strikingly confirmed by the most recent discoveries of paleontology, which show that hominid apes appeared in Africa far earlier than previously thought, and that they had brains no bigger than those of a modern chimpanzee. That is to say, the development of the brain came after the production of tools, and as a result of it. Thus, it is not true that "In the beginning was the Word," but as the German poet Goethe proclaimed--"In the beginning was the Deed."

The ability to engage in abstract thought is inseparable from language. The celebrated prehistory Gordon Childe observes: "Reasoning, and all that we call thinking, including the chimpanzee's, must involve mental operations with what psychologists call images. A visual image, a mental picture of, say, a banana, is always liable to be a picture of a particular banana in a particular setting. A word on the contrary is, as explained, more general and abstract, having eliminated just those accidental features that give individuality to any real banana. Mental images of words (pictures of the sound or of the muscular movements entailed in uttering it) form very convenient counters for thinking with. Thinking with their aid necessarily possesses just that quality of abstractness and generality that animal thinking seems to lack. Men can think, as well as talk, about the class of objects called `bananas'; the chimpanzee never gets further than `that banana in that tube.' In this way the social instrument termed language has contributed to what is grandiloquently described as `man's emancipation from bondage to the concrete." (7)

Early humans, after a long period of time, formed the general idea of, say, a plant or an animal. This arose out of the concrete observation of many particular plants and animals. But when we arrive at the general concept "plant," we no longer see before us this or that flower or bush, but that which is common to all of them. We grasp the essence of a plant, its innermost being. Compared with this, the peculiar features of individual plants seem secondary and unstable. What is permanent and universal is contained in the general conception. We can never actually see a plant as such, as opposed to particular flowers and bushes. It is an abstraction of the mind. Yet it is a deeper and truer expression of what is essential to the plant's nature when stripped of all secondary features.

However, the abstractions of early humans were far from having a scientific character. They were tentative explorations, like the impressions of a child--guesses and hypotheses, sometimes incorrect, but always bold and imaginative. To our remote ancestors, the sun was a great being that sometimes warmed them, and sometimes burnt them. The earth was a sleeping giant. Fire was a fierce animal that bit them when they touched it. Early humans experienced thunder and lightning. This must have frightened them, as it still frightens animals and people today. But, unlike animals, humans looked for a general explanation of the phenomenon. Given the lack of any scientific knowledge, the explanation was invariably a supernatural one--some god, hitting an anvil with his hammer. To our eyes, such explanations seem merely amusing, like the naive explanations of children. Nevertheless, at this period they were extremely important hypotheses--an attempt to find a rational cause for the phenomenon, in which men distinguished between the immediate experience, and saw something entirely separate from it.