Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/348

322 is wholly bad; but he must either recognise it inasmuch as he makes no attempt to improve it, or else he must attempt to improve it and must thereby recognise it—and either course will conflict with the letter of the Marxist doctrine.

But theory, too, confutes Marxism. It is an old story that the materialism of Marx and Engels is untenable; the entire doctrine of historical or economic materialism is simply unscientific as a form of psychological and metaphysical materialism; and the whole conception of the "superstructure" is obscure and devoid of meaning.

The positivism of Marx and Engels, no less than their materialism, is epistemologically untenable and incapable of being carried out in practice.

With positivism, there falls likewise historism in its extreme form, the attempt to base socialism as communism in a purely objective manner and by a law of evolution. If Marx and Engels conceive the notion of science and conceive their scientific socialism in this sense of positivist historism, it is because they start from the entirely false assumption that for the masses, for society, for humanity (this concept is not accurately defined by Marx and Engels) and its history, the individual consciousness is a negligible quantity. The theory is in conformity with the teaching of Comte and with his contempt for psychology, but it is fundamentally erroneous. When Marx says, It is not the consciousness of human beings which determines their existence, but conversely it is their social existence which determines their consciousness, this is to say nothing at all, and is moreover to beg the question (by the use of "existence" and "social existence" as convertible terms). There is simply no such thing as a mass consciousness or a class consciousness; when Engels sacrifices the "beggarly individual" to the mass, and eliminates the individual consciousness as a negligible quantity, he is altogether wrong-headed. Everything which Engels and the Marxists adduce for the elucidation of their conception of ideology as a reflex, an indication, sign, and so on, lacks clearness, and is erroneous, precisely for the reason that the individual consciousness is not falsified in the sense in which Engels declared it to be falsified when he explained individual motive aa appearance, imagination, and illusion.

Postkantian philosophy has made so thorough a study of psychology and sociology, and above all of the philosophy of