SCIENCE

AND
RELIGION

BY MARCEL CACHIN
Editor of I’Humanite
Member of the French National
Assembly

INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK

 Translated from the French

1946
INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS
PRINTED IN U.S.A.
 Religions have always been opposed to the bold flights of phi-
losophers and men of science.
According to ancient legend, Prometheus was chained to a rock
in the Caucasus Mountains by the gods of Mount Olympus because
he sought to enlighten human minds. This myth is linked with the
biblical tale of man driven out of the Garden of Eden for having
tasted of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
Religious persecutions have occurred in every age.
Democritus, the Greek philosopher, was driven out of Abdera,
and Heraclitus banished from Ephesus. The Catholic Church im-
prisoned Galileo, tortured Campanella, and burned at the stake
Giordano Bruno in Rome and Vanini in Toulouse. At the time of the
Inquisition, it made five million human beings mount the execu-
tioner’s scaffold or rot in its dungeons.
The Geneva Protestants burned at the stake Michael Servetus, a
doctor and unorthodox theologian.
The Jewish rabbis excommunicated Spinoza, author of the ad-
mirable Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in which he commented on
the Bible as a freethinker, and forced his banishment from Amster-
dam.
Descartes, architect of modern thought, left France in order to
be free. For twenty years he took refuge in the republic of Holland,
in order to escape persecution from the Church. He no longer
wished to live in the “blind man’s cave.”
In recent years, Darwin and followers of Darwinism were con-
demned in court by Protestant Fundamentalists in the United States.
In a passionate speech delivered on January 15, 1850, before
the Legislative Assembly, Victor Hugo interpellated the religious
sectarians and flung the following challenge at them:
Whom are you against? I will tell you.
You are against human reason!
Why? Because it brings the daylight!
It may be said that every forward step of science causes religion
to retreat. It may even be asserted that science denies God and reli-
gion.
When Napoleon received Laplace and congratulated him on his
work on celestial mechanics, he asked the scientist why he had not
spoken of God in his book. The great mathematician replied to the
Emperor: “Sire, I have never had need of that hypothesis!”

3
 All scientists could adopt as their own this famous remark by
Laplace.
Between religion and science, one must choose.
Their conflict is in evidence throughout the history of human
thought. At the very beginning of history, men divide into two
groups: those who have confidence in the human mind, and that
alone, to explain the world; and, in the other camp, mystics and re-
ligious-minded people who resort to extra-human explanations, to
sentimental acts of faith.
The first, when they remain consistent, are materialists and
atheists. The second are, in a variety of forms, advocates of ideal-
ism.
The first Greeks who tried to unravel the mystery of things
spoke a materialist language. That is the meaning of the many dif-
ferent attempts to interpret nature which developed at the beginning
of Greek thought. They were more mythical and legendary than
really philosophical. Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, and the
Orphics were the principal creators of those poetic myths which
explained the origin of things in terms of the elements.
To Thales, water is the first principle from which everything
arises by successive transformations. From the cloud in the sky be-
neficent rain falls, mingling with the vast body of nature and nour-
ishing all its seeds. In a marriage union, the sky takes possession of
the fertile earth, and begets grain and herds of animals. To Anaxim-
enes, the first principle is the air – the ether, the wind, a vague im-
manent force agitated by primitive chaos, indistinct matter from
which everything proceeds by separation. To the Orphics, the world
was born of Love, the most beautiful of the immortals, Love, a force
of nature subduing the hearts of men and gods. To still others, like
Empedocles, everything was born of struggle, of war, mother and
queen of everything that exists.
At a later period, attempts to think abstractly were substituted
for these brilliant creations of the Greek imagination. There arose
philosophers who looked to rational values in order to explain the
universe. Leucippus and Democritus were among these first Greek
philosophers, and like the myth- makers they declared themselves
definitely materialists.
They conceived the world as a composite of very small material
molecules which they called atoms. By alternately coming together
and separating, these atoms determine the formation and destruction

4
of all things: of all bodies first of all; and also of the mind (or soul),
which is made of the loosest, the most mobile and most subtle at-
oms.
Death is the separation of atoms. The gods too are composed of
atoms just like mortals. They do not bother with the world, which is
governed by strict determinism.
On the basis of this materialist conception, Epicurus, the great
disciple of Democritus, taught three centuries before Jesus a moral
code which was widely received in the pre- Christian world of the
Greeks and Latins.
The aim of this morality was to assure man his happiness on
earth. And Epicurus chose the physics of Democritus because it
gave a solid basis to his moral code. For what are the fundamental
obstacles to man’s happiness? The fear of the gods and the fear of
death. But the soul is mortal since it is composed of elements that
separate. Hence death is not to be feared since it is nothing, and af-
ter it there is nothing. As for the gods, themselves mortal, they nev-
er participated in the creation of the world, which is eternal. They
are not at all concerned with the affairs of the universe, of which
they know nothing. Why fear them then, since to us they are as if
they did not exist?
Freed of the fears of death and the even worse terrors of reli-
gion, man can live happily by cultivating his reason.
Morality counsels him to enjoy fully, but with moderation, the
material, goods of this world. And the wise man’s happiness is
completed by friendship which links him with other men freed like
himself from vain religious fears.
Epicurus’ morality long attracted many of the human elite in
Greece and Rome; the memory of the garden in which the philoso-
pher taught his disciples was evoked by Anatole France, “a tranquil
atheist,” in one of his books. And all lovers of literature still admire
the magnificent poem of the Latin poet Lucretius, De Rerum Natu-
ra, which exalts the system of Epicurus whom Lucretius considered
the greatest benefactor of humanity.
In another direction, twentieth century physicists, following
those of the nineteenth century, have borrowed from Democritus the
thesis that matter is not infinitely divisible.
The English scientist Dalton assured the atomic theory of a sci-
entific foundation. The atomic hypothesis, adopted by modern sci-

5
ence, is the one which best accounts for the inner structure of bod-
ies.
What a tribute to the brilliant foresight of the Greek founders of
materialism!

Completely opposed to these conceptions of Democritus and

Epicurus, the great Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristo-
tle, developed theories of spiritualism and idealism in the fifth and
fourth centuries B.C. For more than a thousand years these theories
were destined to eclipse the materialism of the first Greek thinkers.
For Democritus and the disciples of his school the soul, like the
body, was composed of material atoms and all thought derived from
sensations, i.e., from impressions that the soul receives from objects
through the senses. Plato on the other hand preached extreme ideal-
ism.
Spirit is absolutely distinct from the body. Over against sensa-
tions and illusory sensory perceptions, there exist general ideas,
eternal types of transient things. These ideas have a real existence
outside the material world. Reason coming from the gods, and not
the body, is alone capable of making us know these ideas, which are
the laws of thought, the models on which things are copied.
So the good, the beautiful, the true, and morality are not ideas
coming from us, from our individual experience by way of the sens-
es and experience. They are eternal realities. Bodies pass, they re-
main. They have nothing in common with matter. Matter is, to Pla-
to, a blemish, an embarrassment, a waste. Ideas do not come from
the body – the body is a chain and the sensory world is to the sour a
prison, a place of punishment. We must absolutely separate spirit
from the body, which draws us to the earth and keeps us there with
soles of lead. The soul feels itself in exile in the world of the senses.
It seeks to fuse with the absolute, with the pure idea which is out of
the world. It wishes to flee the prison of senses, the prison of the
body. One and immortal, it strives to get away from the focus of
evil – the material world – in order to unite with the supreme idea
which is God, eternal creator of ideas and personification of the
good.
Thus idealism in its Platonist form was opposed to the material-
ism of the Epicureans. To idealists our ideas do not come from sen-
sations. They are anterior to matter which is only a state of decay.
To materialists sensation (modification of the body) precedes

6
thought which is linked with it and comes from it. It is not possible
to conceive of a thought without a sensation and without a material
brain which elaborates it.
The idealist conceptions of Plato and those, less absolute, of
Aristotle won out even in the ancient world over the conceptions of
Democritus and Epicurus. Plato’s genius in dialectics, his rich imag-
ination, and his language sweet as Attic honey contributed to the
success of his philosophy. But it was particularly when Christianity
began to develop and after it had adopted certain theories from Pla-
tonist idealism that materialism, in its primitive form, had to yield
for many long centuries.
Christianity, born of the Judaism of the Prophets and the teach-
ings of Jesus, was, above all, a moral code giving men rules of con-
duct. But it lacked a philosophy. The doctrines of Jesus were ad-
dressed, by his own admission, to the most downtrodden of crea-
tures. They had not sought to probe the origin of men’s ideas as had
subtle Greek thought. So when Christianity spread throughout
Greece and the Near East in the first centuries of our era, the Greek
fathers of the Church, anxious to give Christianity a philosophy,
borrowed from Plato his explanation of the origin of ideas.
They adapted Plato’s method and his entire system to the de-
mands of Christian propaganda. From Greek philosophy they re-
tained such conceptions as that of the Trinity. They developed in a
Christian sense Plato’s theses on matter as a principle of evil and
the body as a chain and prison for the soul. So it was that the ideal-
ism born of the fusion of pagan philosophy and the messianic dream
of a tribe in Syria conquered the world, after Emperor Constantine
installed Catholicism in the purple robes of rule.
During the closing era of the ancient world and all during the
Middle Ages, the domination of the Catholic Church, now all-
powerful, assured idealism of an unchallenged superiority. So it was
until the Renaissance in the sixteenth century. But from that mo-
ment on, the ideas of materialism were championed by a number of
vigorous minds, several of whom paid for their boldness with their
lives. Since that time, materialist ideas have gone forward to the
degree that the natural sciences have developed. They substitute
their increasingly rational explanations for the mystical conceptions
of Platonism and the childish legends of the Book of Genesis on the
origin of the world. A struggle, often a merciless struggle, has been
waged between the men of free thought and the intransigent devo-

7
tees of religion. This struggle is still going on, although the Catholic
religion today accepts some scientific truths which but recently it
considered blasphemous, and sanctions some discoveries which in
ages past it condemned as mortal sins.
This is not the place to recall the high points in this long secular
fight. Let us simply point out that the Montaignes, the Rabelais, the
Molieres, the Gassendis, and the Saint-Evremonds refused to follow
the religious doctrinaires. The seventeenth century knew numerous
“libertines” who provoked violent attacks from Bossuet; and La
Bruyere devoted a whole chapter in his Characters to denounce
them. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Fontenelle and
Bayle continued in France this tradition of free thought. And after
them came the Encyclopedists who boldly took a stand for frank
and logical materialism.
Their names are well known: La Mettrie, Helvetius, d’Holbach.
Diderot is the most brilliant and courageous representative of this
group.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, materialism spread far
and wide with the development and application of scientific discover-
ies. And little by little even the accusations leveled against it in the
course of history by idealism and the various religions have weak-
ened.
For a long time, to be a materialist and declare oneself an athe-
ist was considered degrading, vulgar, often criminal. But times have
changed indeed. Many broad people’s movements, numerous honest
and disinterested scientists now advocate doctrines once held scan-
dalous or offensive to personal dignity.
What is the position of materialism in our times?
How does it justify its refusal to support religious idealism and
every conceivable form of idealism? Is materialism in a position to
supply satisfactory answers to the many questions of morals, ori-
gins, and faith which arise in the consciousness of the most highly
developed modern men?
Here we would like to give some of the reasons for materialism
in our times, and to defend its claim to guide men’s minds.

As we have seen, all idealists and religious people believe that

spirit is absolutely distinct from the body, that it has nothing materi-
al. One of them has defined matter as “something stupid and devoid
of thought.” Consciousness is of an entirely different essence. But

8
then their difficulty, their stumbling block, is to explain the relation-
ship of thought to the body.
How can thought, which cannot go outside itself, acquire
knowledge of the body and of material objects which are outside it,
which are of quite a different nature from thought?
Plato did not hesitate to assert that the soul lived another life
before its life on earth. In this previous existence, it was able to con-
template ideas. Knowledge is thus memory of another world. It is a
reminiscence.
Bishop Berkeley and the metaphysician Leibnitz explained that
God had once and for all determined all relations between soul and
body by a pre-established harmony. Malebranche, priest of the
Congregation of the Oratory, asserted that the soul and body com-
municated by a vision in God.
God intervenes, on the occasion of each of our acts of will, to
impress this movement or that on our body. Kant rejected such di-
vine intervention in his theory of knowledge. To him, before expe-
rience, our mind is formed of a complex of relations or categories,
like those of causality, space and time, which are in the mind’s
make-up and which it applies to the external world. But since this
mode of knowledge is only relative to the forms of our mind, we do
not know anything of the world in itself. It escapes us entirely; it is
unknowable to us.
Materialism rejects these constructions of the mind, these prod-
ucts of a subtle and fanciful imagination, these “crotchets” as they
were called by Frederick Engels who did not mince his words.
Materialism declares that the world is material. Contrary to ide-
alism to which matter is only illusion and appearance, it asserts that
matter exists/It has not been created by any god. Matter and its en-
ergy are eternal; they change, one into the other, Matter is a primary
fact, a reality that exists objectively outside our mind and con-
sciousness. The law of the conservation of energy was valid in na-
ture before there were men who discovered it.
In the words of the physicist Max Planck, even if the inhabit-
ants of the earth were pulverized to bits, the stars would still obey
the law of universal gravitation. It is not we who create the external
world. It forces itself upon us with the irresistible power of ele-
mental things.
Sensation is at the basis of all our knowledge. It is born of our
organism on the occasion of our experience with the external world.

9
It is produced in the brain. It is a reflection of matter. Thought
would not exist if it were not preceded and accompanied by certain
chemical modifications in our organism and in the brain. It cannot
be produced without expending chemical energy.
Thought does not proceed without work, without fatigue. Ac-
cording to the scientist Le Dantec, there is equivalence between
thought and work: No man has ever lived without eating, or thought
without eating. Thought is bound up with the brain. It is not an enti-
ty separated from our body mechanism. It forms part of the material
world from which it emerges.
Then what is matter? What are the modern scientists’ concep-
tions of matter? Do they think that it is inert, passive, stupid? Do
they see in matter the power of evil, of impurity, of darkness, a
blemish and a waste? Not at all! They reject such fantasies.
To modern science matter is everywhere active and in motion.
Contemporary scientists have adopted the theory which the old
Greek materialist, Democritus, launched with the foresight of geni-
us: namely, that the world is a composite of atoms. They have deep-
ened and clarified the notion of the atom. Today they tend to admit
that the atom is a solar system in miniature. Everything in nature
breaks up into a composite of atoms endowed with eternal motion.
Matter is active, even matter which seems the most inert. Atoms are
centers of force. They impress on the ether wavelike movements
which our senses translate into various sensations. This wavelike
motion is endlessly transformed, and there is no essential difference
between matter which extends thus and mind which knows the
world from the starting point of sensation. Thought which is derived
from these origins is a new quality of matter, one with its own ac-
tions and reactions. Nor is it any longer inert. It plays an immense
part in the life of men. And in its turn, it transforms nature – to
which it owes its origin.

This is the first basic difference between materialists and ideal-

ists. Here is a second:
Idealist and religious metaphysicians dispute the possibility of
the human mind arriving at a knowledge of the laws of the world.
They think that there exists an Unknowable which will always es-
cape the human mind thrown back on its own devices. Reason, they
say, is too frail, too weak to pierce the mystery of things. Man is
nothing but an earthworm, a slender reed. Nature is a book closed to

10
him with seven seals. Man must abdicate, prostrate himself before
God, before explanations given once and for all in the holy books.
But materialists and scientists are of quite a different mind.
Thanks to the increasing perfection of the instruments they have
created to broaden the scope of our senses, physicists, chemists,
biologists, and astronomers are formulating the laws of nature in
ever closer and more accurate terms. Already they have disclosed
many of the ancient mysteries. Each day their progress decreases
the so-called Unknowable which is only the unknown. Their confi-
dence in the constant progress of science, their certainty that the
human mind can arrive at objective knowledge of nature, is based
on two arguments.
First, they now know enough about the composition of the
bodies they study to be able to reconstruct them themselves. Nature
produces chemical substances in vegetable and animal organisms.
Today, chemists are able to produce the same synthetic substances
as nature. To accomplish this, they must know the substances
intimately and completely. Chemists have produced synthetic
rubber, oil, sugar, fats, and numerous other substitutes. The list
grows longer with each passing day. And electrolysis and catalysis
have achieved real miracles.
Then too, scientists have succeeded in formulating laws that are
universal in application. Their truth is verified and guaranteed by
the experience of everyone, by the practice of all human life. This
absence of contradiction endows them with an objectivity that is
obvious to all minds which have not been distorted by a distrust of
science and mystical prejudices. When Nicholas Copernicus assert-
ed, after having proved it, that the earth is not in the center of the
world; when Newton discovered the law of gravitation; when Huy-
ghens developed his hypothesis of the wavelike nature of light;
when Faraday laid the foundations of electrodynamics, they all be-
lieved that their conception of the universe conformed to reality! All
the subtleties and gymnastics of Pure Thought will no longer pre-
vent men from believing that a scientific law constantly verified in
life by practice is a valid law.

But the mystics do not give up so easily!

They maintain that if human knowledge, after so many centu-
ries of research, contradictions, and errors, has succeeded in setting
up some laws that are still questionable and always subject to cor-

11
rection, there are some problems of origins and ends which it will
never be able to answer.
Where does the world come from? How did it begin? What is
the end, the aim of life? Only religion, acts of faith, or élans of the
heart, it is said, can satisfy the demands of the mind and emotions in
these questions.
Everything is simple indeed if one believes in a God who has
created all things and is also an example of moral perfection. We
are told: God has made the world the best it could possibly be, de-
spite the evil which rages in it. He built it to serve man’s ends; and
man in turn should adore this perfect God. Similarly, justice will not
be satisfied unless our soul is immortal, if it can live a future life in
which the good will be rewarded and the wicked punished.
To these traditional “truths,” solidly established for more than a
thousand years, the waverings and uncertainties of science are coun-
terposed. If one disputes these postulates of the appeasement of the
human soul, we are told, the result is an irreparable void which sci-
ence cannot fill.
Science can answer these objections with confidence.
Of course, the old religious myths offer apparently clear and
simple explanations to the human mind. Once and for all to all be-
lievers in Judaism and Christianity, the Book of Genesis has formu-
lated the whole truth about our origins. Later on, the Church coun-
cils established (forever, so it seems) certain dogmas which tradi-
tion – and also some persecution – has succeeded in instilling in
religious souls. But who dares maintain today that he depends solely
on these accounts of the Bible and the councils?
For two thousand years there has been an enormous accumula-
tion of observations, experiences, and reasonings, permitting scien-
tists to propose rational solutions for the problems of the origin and
evolution of the universe. Their superiority over the naive and prim-
itive explanations of the ancient world is explicitly admitted by reli-
gion itself, which is forced with each passing day to abandon posi-
tions formerly held in order to adopt, willy-nilly, those conquered
by science.
When four hundred years ago the Polish astronomer, Nicholas
Copernicus, published his book, Revolutions of the Celestial Worlds,
he opened the doors to the modern world. Before him humanity had
for 1300 years adopted the system of Ptolemy, according to which the
round earth was in the center of the universe and the other celestial

12
bodies revolved around the earth. Copernicus disproved the theory of
Ptolemy, showing that the sun, not the earth, was in the center of the
universe and that the earth was only a planet like the others. What an
upheaval! The biblical conception of the creation of the world was
demolished. And the religions of Western Europe tried in vain to shut
the mouths of scientists who proceeded to draw conclusions – anti-
religious conclusions – from the discovery of Copernicus.
After Copernicus’ great contribution, there arose mathemati-
cians, astronomers, chemists, physicists, and biologists who helped
formulate the present scientific conception of the origin and evolu-
tion of die universe. Another giant step forward was taken when,
after the discovery of Copernicus, Newton wrote his Principia in
which he developed his theory of universal attraction which Laplace
considered the loftiest creation of the human mind. Then came the
famous hypotheses of Kant and Laplace himself. Although super-
seded by scientists who have come after them, they have made it
possible for us rationally to reconstruct the formation of our solar
universe.
Geologists have been able to reconstruct the history of our
planet. They have noted its four eras (primary, secondary, tertiary,
quaternary) with their essential characteristics. They have been able
to give an approximate date for the advent of each of these epochs.
They have been able to determine the era in which life appeared on
earth. They have been able to make important advances in explain-
ing the influences under which this decisive phenomenon occurred.
They have determined the forms in which the first plants and ani-
mals probably appeared. Darwin proved that all the forms of plant
and animal life have a common origin. His central thesis was that of
natural selection, which acts by accumulating slight successive vari-
ations, favorable to the individual’s struggle for existence. Some of
these variations are transmitted to subsequent generations. Thus the
development of plant and animal species is explained, not by inde-
pendent creation as in the holy books, but by heredity with gradual
modifications. Later biologists enriched our knowledge of the origin
of species, indicating its basis in genetic changes. Hence the evolu-
tion of the different species and the emergence of man are explained
without resorting to any mysticism.
In the nineteenth century, Darwin dealt scientifically with the
origin of living species. The American, Morgan, studied in the light

13
of science the beginnings and transformations of primitive human
societies.
He showed that at the outset in these social formations into
which human beings were grouped, the woman-mother played the
most important part. The first human tribes, the first gentes or fami-
lies, were organized around the life-giving mother and, in accord-
ance with laws, dominated by the role of the mother. A mass of his-
torical data indicates that the matriarchate was the first social group
among human beings. Morgan proved under what influences the
power of the father, of the male, replaced that of the mother and the
patriarchate supplanted the matriarchate. And as society evolved,
the matrimonial family replaced the patriarchate, the best examples
of which are to be found in Roman and Chinese society.
Morgan’s discoveries confirmed Marx’s and Engels’ concep-
tions. These explained with unrivaled clarity and dialectic power
how the class-state was born in primitive social groups. They
showed that from its very beginnings human history has been domi-
nated by economic necessities and by the class struggle which is
still going on over most of the earth. They showed how human soci-
eties went in turn from primitive communism to slavery, then to
feudalism, and then to capitalism. They proved that the transition
from one type of society to another results from a change in the
modes of production. And it is because in our twentieth century
production has become increasingly social and collective that com-
munism is being increasingly espoused by mankind.
Thus, communism is linked up with the entire scientific devel-
opment of humanity. It is the peak of human development.
So science by its own resources has been able to explain the or-
igins of the world and the reasons for the general evolution of men
and things. Without resorting to the hypothesis of a divinity, it can
answer all the questions that the theologies and idealisms pretended
to solve. It is therefore not accidental that honest scientists have
been led by logic and integrity of thought to profess atheism. The
biologist Le Dantec is one of those thinkers with an incorruptible
conscience determined to follow science as far as it leads those who
believe in it.
Educated in the school of Pasteur, he pursued his scientific
studies with enthusiasm and joy; and the search for scientific truth
filled his life. Moreover, he could no longer tolerate those who
sought to make of science “the servant of theology.”

14
 No, there is nothing above science, nothing but childish dog-
mas, contradicted by all the discoveries of man’s genius. In a book
on atheism (that is, in fact, its title), Le Dantec assailed the concept
of a God creator of the universe.
Religious believers hold that God is all-powerful, that he is en-
tirely free, but at the same time they cannot deny that nature is gov-
erned by fixed laws and determinism. Then contradicting them-
selves, they admit the existence of miracles. From the fact that the
physical world is ordered and harmonious, they infer the existence
of an intelligent being who has built it. For, they say, when one sees
a clock, one is forced to think of the clockmaker. A bad compari-
son! For the clock- maker did not create the various parts of the
clock; he only arranged them. And reason only ends in making God
an architect, a demiurge, not a creator. Besides, if one could admit
that God himself created the universe, that would only shift but not
dispel the difficulty. He himself, whence does he come and who
created him? One mystery has been substituted for another.
Furthermore, why admit that the world was created? The world
need not have had a beginning. Science shows that matter and ener-
gy are conserved and transformed without end. Will it be said that
order in the universe, the strict rules governing the motion of the
stars, the harmony among the various parts of the body, point to
final ends and a divine intelligence creating order?

But there is no finality: It is too easy to make fun of finalities in

the manner of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. There is adaptation of be-
ings to things. Man, like the other beings, is the result of a long evo-
lution. This evolution has been going on for millions of years; and
during this period, multiple combinations have characterized this
adaptation of beings to things. Some of these combinations have a
relative stability for a time.
Man has been able to formulate the laws governing world phe-
nomena which are bound together by universal determinism. But in
nature, where everything is motion and change, no immobile body
has ever been set in motion by the action of something immaterial.
In reality, the idea of divinity is solely subjective and anthro-
pomorphic. Man has endowed God with his own attributes. He has
created God in his own image. But on what has this presumptuous-
ness been based?

15
 Over one hundred fifty years ago, Immanuel Kant demolished
the four traditional arguments ostensibly proving the existence of
God. He demonstrated the absurdity of so-called rational theology.
Kant’s arguments are still valid today.
Marx, Engels, and their successors, Lenin and Stalin, showed
clearly how religious notions originated. Religions are products of
the human brain. They are only man’s projection, outside himself,
of his own consciousness. In primitive societies, in which man is
dominated and crushed by the forces of nature, he deifies these
forces, as was the case among the first pagans. These products of
his brain, projected thus outside himself, seem later on to be en-
dowed with a life of their own. Later, in societies divided into clas-
ses, the exploited class, unaware of the causes of its subjugation,
attributes it to an unknown force which it calls a God.
History teaches that religions are social phenomena changing
with changes in men’s living conditions. Polytheism, monotheism,
Catholicism, Protestantism – all correspond to various periods in the
evolution of history. It has been possible to ascertain the rules and
stages of these modifications in the various religions which men
have adopted.
In our time, the ruling classes are interested in maintaining reli-
gions in order to safeguard their privileges. The bourgeoisie in pow-
er makes use of them in order to blind the masses. They are an opi-
um for the sufferings of the oppressed. The bourgeoisie wants reli-
gion for the people. It tries to keep alive religious traditions, which
have always been conservative, retarding forces. But religions will
not be eternal safeguards of capitalism; already the latter has low-
ered them to the status of brakes on progress.
More and more modern scientists are adopting the conclusions
of dialectical materialism. Materialism emerges strengthened from
each of the new discoveries. It was born of science, of observation
of nature at the very outset of human knowledge. It was an expres-
sion of science at each stage of progress. It was therefore natural for
it to assume new aspects and to be modified as scientific methods
and discoveries were themselves modified. Materialism today is not
formulated in the same terms as in the time of Democritus, nor even
in the time of Descartes or Diderot. Its content has become much
richer since the prodigious development of science in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.

16
 In the eighteenth century, the natural sciences were still quite
undeveloped. The world appeared to be a machine governed by the
laws of mechanics. Buffon alone had just begun to formulate some
very new and profound ideas on evolution. That is why Diderot’s
materialism was mechanistic. That of our own times has become
dialectic. That means that the idea of evolution, of constant change,
of eternal becoming, has definitely supplanted static and rigid con-
cepts of things. Reality is not fixity but change. Everything is mo-
tion; everything is also development. Everything is action. “One
never bathes twice in the same river.” That is no longer a poetic
expression, as it was to the ancients; it is scientific truth, completely
verified and universal.
Thus dialectics teaches that at each instant in time and in each
point in space something is born, and evolves, something dissolves
and disappears. What appears stable has already begun to die; and
from its death life is born. It is an endless process of motion.
This process of eternal change in things obeys rules which are
not those of Aristotle’s logic. Since Aristotle, the principle of con-
tradiction has dominated the reasoning of philosophers: “A thing,”
they said, “cannot at the same time be and not be.” But it can! Being
contains its opposite within itself. It is itself and its opposite. The
contradiction it contains is resolved in the process of becoming.
Essentially, nature is appearance and disappearance. Everything
evolves. But to evolve means to disintegrate, to begin to disappear.
Life contains death within itself. It comes to birth after an intense
struggle with its opposite. What is prepares what will be, prepares
that which will make it disappear.
Take, for example, biology. It teaches us that every human or-
ganism is a structure of cells. The cell is the unit from which, by
multiplication and differentiation, all organisms are born and grow.
Thus, every human being has been at a given moment the size of a
cell a fraction of a millimeter small. Then he grew to become a
composite of billions of cells. Every cell is active, not inert; it is in
constant motion. It is the seat of the most powerful physico-
chemical actions. It is ceaselessly in the process of destruction and
rebuilding. Life is not what the idealists thought it was: an immate-
rial principle quickening matter. It is a process of antagonisms in
action.
If we inquire of the physicists and chemists, we get equally re-
vealing answers. They show us that physical bodies too are not inert

17
but constantly evolving; that they change, one into the other; and
that their qualities, diverse in appearance, are the result of previous
quantitative changes. This truth was established around 1850 as a
result of discoveries by the English physicist Joule and by five other
scientists who, without knowing each other, formulated at almost
the same time the law of the mechanical equivalent of heat. Heat is
nothing but motion; sounds, color, temperature, electricity, mag-
netism, they are all motion and lead back to motion. Upon analysis
we find that they are only vibrations, waves, oscillations, which are
born of each other and which, under certain conditions, change into
each other. A larger or smaller quantity or intensity of vibrations –
and we obtain a change of quality.
All chemistry also proves that qualitative changes in bodies are
reduced to quantitative changes – this is even indicated by the for-
mulas for each of the bodies.
Every change in nature is therefore due to certain modifications
of a quantity of motion. At one moment of progress, an object with
a new quality is created. Quantity has been transformed into quality.
Moreover, the ceaseless transformations in bodies do not occur in a
slow, gradual, and continuous manner but brusquely, explosively. It
is to the credit of the German physicist, Max Planck, that he but-
tressed this general truth with his famous quantum theory. He
showed that a source of light does not give out its vibrations in the
continuous fashion of a bell or tuning fork; it emits them by jolts or
jerks. A bulb throws out a flow of energy, then another, so quickly
and in such great quantities that one has the impression of a contin-
uous flow of light. Planck calls these bundles of energy quanta.
It is the general and profound rule in nature always to proceed
thus by leaps. Dialectical materialism has not failed to adopt that
rule.
It goes without saying that this tested method of dialectical ma-
terialism applies not only to the study of the physical sciences. So-
cieties are also in nature, and are part of it. They are born, live, and
evolve according to the laws revealed by the dialectic method.
Idealists believe that abstract ideas guide the world. According
to them, every people is born with a spirit of its own. This spirit of
the people, these so-called innate ideas, are the source of all its in-
stitutions and culture. Man bears within himself, before he under-
goes any experiences, concepts of morals, of the good and the just.

18
Here too idealism does not take into account life itself, the material
conditions of human and social activity.
Materialism, on the contrary, looks for the reasons for the evo-
lution and progress of societies, not in concepts of the imagination
but in the concrete history of humanity. History is its teacher, the
true science of society. It is the science of sciences; and it is not a
trifling “guessing” science, as the dealers in metaphysical abstrac-
tions contemptuously say.
History shows that social phenomena, like other phenomena,
are eternally changing; that they are constantly being transformed.
That which appears stable is destined to die under the influence of
contrary forces. The present is explained by the past, in which it
was already contained. One cannot understand it unless one knows
whence it comes.
In each human group, the mode of production of material goods
conditions social changes. Marx proved that with masterly force.
For one must first live and produce in order to live. But in order to
produce, one needs more or less rudimentary or more or less per-
fected instruments. The progress of instruments of production has a
determining influence on the march of historic events. It is also the
mode of their possession which fundamentally modifies relations
between human beings.
In the course of the history of human societies, what was the
history of the means of production? Who were the possessors of
these instruments of human labor? When one is able to reply con-
cretely to these questions, one understands the meaning of human
evolution and the laws of progress, the meaning of the social pro-
cess.
The invention of the watermill, the windmill, the rudder, the
plow with an iron plowshare, the bellows-forge, the collar resting
not on the neck but on the shoulders of the horse, gunpowder, the
steam engine, the spinning jenny, the locomotive, the dynamo, the
internal combustion engine, the automobile, the airplane, and the
radio exerted a decisive influence on the history of societies. Histo-
ry proves with a wealth of examples that men’s conceptions and the
forms of their societies have been modified as a result of this mate-
rial progress, and not as a result of certain abstract ideas or religious
and metaphysical systems. These systems of beliefs have been al-
tered at the same time as the material conditions of life created by
the new machines have altered.

19
 Men think differently when they work solely with their hands in
a small workshop and when they are together with thousands of
other workers in a large factory equipped with the latest and most
complicated machines which make labor a social act common to
many men. Productive forces are changeable: They were of one
type in the epoch of slavery, of another type in the epoch of feudal-
ism, and quite different in the period of trusts and highly concen-
trated capitalism. And history is not merely the action of conquerors
and kings, but, in the last analysis, of producers of goods which men
can use.
It is easy to note in the long history of societies “the application
of the rules of the dialectic method.” It is from the death of a regime
that is born the social force which refutes it and which it neverthe-
less bore within itself. Capitalism was born and developed within
feudal society. Then it did away with feudalism and the bourgeoisie
replaced the feudal nobility in power. In the same way, after a cen-
tury and a half of domination, capitalism has created the powerful
class of the proletariat, strengthened each day by the progress of
machines, by the concentration of capital, the multiplication of ex-
propriated members of the middle class, and the flight from the
countryside. This proletarian class will replace capitalism, which
carries within itself the germs of its death.
Finally, the history of human societies also teaches that the pas-
sage of one social form to another does not occur by slow and con-
tinuous transitions but as a result of struggles and revolutions. His-
tory is full of attempts at revolution which one day allow the new
organization to replace the declining one doomed to destruction
because of its inner contradictions.
What is the inner contradiction of capitalism? It is the follow-
ing: Under capitalism, the mode of production of material goods is
social, collective; while the ownership of the instruments of produc-
tion has remained private. Hence repeated and chronic crises, hence
world wars; and wars hasten the end of capitalism which bears war
within itself “as the cloud bears the storm.”
Since the time of the Greeks and Romans, through the Middle
Ages and the ensuing centuries, history is marked by these constant
class struggles and profound social shocks.
Here as elsewhere, nature acts by leaps, jerks, revolutions.
Before finishing this incomplete sketch, we must reply to the
unjustified reproaches leveled against materialism.

20
 Remember that for a long time materialists and atheists were
excommunicated by society and even treated as criminals. We have
seen that in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the eighteenth
century, they aroused indignation and had to forego, under penalty
of death, an open expression of their opinions. Even during the
French Revolution the disciples of Rousseau’s deism condemned
the atheists and sent them to the guillotine. Today logical material-
ists are freer to talk, write, and spread their ideas. But what accusa-
tions are made against the supposed consequences of their doc-
trines!
They are accused of reducing man to the level of a brute, of
denying morals, of denying spirit, of checking the élan of souls, of
destroying imagination and poetry. It is said that they undermine the
foundations of social order; that they give free rein to all passions
and the most evil instincts; that they take away from man his indi-
vidualism, his nobility, his grandeur; that they plunge humanity into
despair.
Materialism is called a “base and dull” idea and described as
“coarse,” “sordid,” and “barbarous.”
The time has come to put an end to these warped opinions, the
fruit of stubborn old prejudices of idealism and mysticism.
There is one category of materialists which it seems absurd to
accuse of immorality. These are the scientists. We have already
mentioned the example of the physiologist Le Dantec. We could
summon up the names of many scientists past and present whose
lives are models of the highest human virtues. How many heroes
and martyrs of science there are among them! Their lives offer the
finest testimonial of disinterestedness and spiritual nobility. How
many scientists we could quote who did not wish to profit by their
discoveries and get rich from them! How many have preferred the
intimate joy of their researches to the mad rush for profits which is
the general rule in the capitalist system!
On a higher level, it may be affirmed that the practice of sci-
ence teaches of itself the most rigorous honesty and absolute intel-
lectual integrity. It demands careful observation, respect for facts,
truthfulness, surrender of any accepted hypothesis once the facts
have contradicted it. Is not that an aspect of the highest morality?
On the other hand, there are very many materialists in the so-
cially disinherited classes, among workers and artisans who love
their craft to a fault, among revolutionary workers always ready to

21
sacrifice for the ideal they have espoused. Those who have come
close to these workers have always paid tribute to their courage,
their energy, their personal disinterestedness, as well as to their
thirst for knowledge and their constant efforts toward progress.
They furnish so many examples throughout history! Just think
of the sans-culottes of 1793, the republican workers of June 1848,
the Communards who knew how to die defiantly! Recall the fight-
ers in the recent war in Spain and the men of the International Bri-
gades who went to their defense! Remember all those who but re-
cently, in all the countries of Europe invaded by the Nazis, fought to
the death against the crimes of the Gestapo! And what shall we say
of the spirit of sublime sacrifice of the peoples of the Soviet Union
who suffered such a long and terrible blood-letting in order to safe-
guard the freedom of all the peoples of the world! No, all of these
had no need of a religion to live and die in honesty, duty, and honor.
They raised morality to its peak. Those capable of dying for a great
human cause in order to assure future progress cannot be compared
with the vulgar person who acts under the pressure of momentary
interests or in the fear of hell or some heavenly policeman.
We must also refute another accusation made against material-
ism. It is charged not only with lowering morality until it is de-
stroyed, but also with denying spirit by asserting that it is linked
with matter and subsidiary to it.
The materialist should not find it difficult to reply to the ideal-
ists and religious-minded on this point. For they are the ones who
limit spirit, they diminish it by trampling on human reason and de-
claring it incapable of meeting the demands of knowledge. Reli-
gions keep on telling men that only a divine revelation will allow
them to clear up the essential problems posed to their conscious-
ness. All idealists down to Bergson have never stopped criticizing
reason and science. They humiliate reason and science, scorn them,
fight against them in favor of mysticism and instinct. Materialists,
on the other hand, have confidence in the progress of science, prod-
uct of oft-decried reason. We are therefore justified in asserting that
it is idealism, not materialism, that injures spirit. Materialism rec-
ognizes that science and reason are the only sources of human
knowledge and that there are no problems which they will not some
day be able to solve!
The objection is raised that human science, limited by its very
nature, is incapable of giving man certain consolations and certain

22
hopes for the other world, which sentiment requires. In this connec-
tion, the words of the great Pasteur himself are quoted:
“I want to raise myself above the doctrines of material-
ism. I do not want to die like a bacillus. Immortality of the
soul is a consolation, a risk to be run.”
No doubt certain scientists, including even some of the greatest,
are free to show how inconsistent and illogical they are. They may
declare themselves mystics in their extra-scientific life, while all the
consequences of their science lead them to materialism. But then
they obey influences in their social environment, prejudices in their
circle, vulgar bourgeois desires for tranquility, and sometimes (this
is true of some scientists) demands of their own class interests.
As one well-known scientist said: “If I held truth in my hand, I
would see to it that I did not open it, so as not to disturb the existing
order!”
Then there are others who used to make no bones about their
disbelief in religion – until influenced by class interest, they adopted
militant Catholicism on the pretext of saving society. There are
quite a few thinkers of this ilk.
But there are also numerous scientists, logical and of genuine in-
tegrity, who guide their pure and worthy lives according to their sci-
entific convictions. These men seem to me higher guarantors of true
morality. They find in their intellectual courage, in the accomplish-
ment of their task as seekers, the “consolations” which others look for
in fables or myths that violate reason and science. How many of
them, in the sixteenth century for example, preferred to be burned
alive rather than renounce their ideas and accept prevailing false-
hoods.
All these men could quote the words of the ancient sage:
“The impious one is not he who turns away from the
gods of the crowd. It is he who clings to the idea which the
crowd has of its gods.”
Finally, certain slanderers now repeat: “Materialism and science
do not allow for imagination, beauty, or poetry.”
This accusation is just as futile as all the others!
Is there a poet, including even Homer, who opens vaster, more
attractive, and more inspiring perspectives to the imagination than
contemporary astronomers, physicists, chemists, and biologists? For

23
our weak and infirm senses they have substituted instruments whose
scope and accuracy are almost infinite. In so doing, they have re-
vealed to us mysteries and beauties of the invisible which even the
most gifted artists of the past did not suspect.
As our eye sees it, the universe is a black vault dotted with sev-
eral thousand brilliant points that shine by night. To the ancients,
the earth floated flat as a pancake on the waters of Okeanos. Above
it was a crystal sphere strewn with golden nails that were the stars.
That was their little universe as it appeared to their senses. Moreo-
ver, they believed that the world had been created by a caprice of
the gods in order to serve man’s needs. Animals, plants, everything
in the world had been taken out of the void solely for our use. Down
through the ages how many childish pages have been written about
this feeble theory of finalism!
But from Copernicus to our own day, astronomers have come
with their powerful telescopes, and they have done away with such
puny visions! The reality with which they have replaced ancient
fables is supremely inspiring to the imagination of poets and artists.
It evokes the infinitely great. The universe is no longer the tiny
planet, earth, with its ceiling beyond which trial balloons of the sci-
entists have already reached. The universe is an infinite space which
can only be measured in millions of light-years. It is a mass of in-
candescent stars, a hundred million suns held together by the power
of attraction. It is the nebulae formed of millions of stars, each one
of which is nothing but a tiny island in the infinite universe. Their
light travels at 186,000 miles a second and it takes hundreds and
hundreds of years for this light to reach the earth. And the radiations
of these suns have awakened life on our planet, a grain of dust sus-
pended in this abyss! This grandiose structure will one day find a
Lucretius. But who dares assert that it limits or cripples contempo-
rary imaginations?
The astronomers acquaint us with the infinitely great. Biologists
bring us in contact with the infinitely small. Armed with their elec-
tron microscopes, they prove to us the existence of living beings
tinier than the boldest flights of the imagination can conceive. Their
instruments, enlarging objects more than forty thousand times, ac-
quaint us with beings endowed with an intense life measuring only
six-millionths of a millimeter and possessing differentiated parts. In
the depths of such a microscopic world life was born. Perpetual
struggles between billions of these tiny animals led to the most

24
highly developed human beings, of geniuses creating the most strik-
ing masterpieces! Does this scientific view of things destroy all the
work of the imagination and clip the wings of all poetry? Does not
the theory of evolution inspire emotions? Some pages of Darwin are
worthy of the greatest poets.
Geologists furnish us with the proof that there is no hard and
fast boundary between the living and the non-living, between min-
erals, animals, and plants.
Rocks are in part the result of the constructive power of animals
and plants, many of them of delicate and subtle structure, who have
been working at them for hundreds of millions of years. Sponges
and corals have built enormous constructions in the tropical seas.
Certain of these rock-building animals, such as the radiolaria which
form colorfully striped jaspers, are very beautiful microscopic jew-
els. No artist has ever sculptured more splendid forms.
Then come the physicists and chemists who take us through
marvelous adventures. They too confirm for us that matter is eve-
rywhere active, however passive and motionless certain of its forms
may seem. Since Dalton, the atomic theory has been unanimously
accepted by all scientists: Matter is not infinitely divisible. But what
is the make-up of the atom?
Before Crookes and the Curies, it was thought that the atom
was a fixed, rigid, indestructible ball. After them, and especially
after Rutherford, it is acknowledged that the atom comes close to
being a solar system in miniature. Myriads of tiny grains electrified
with negative charges, the electrons, are the planets which turn as if
around the sun, around a nucleus with a positive electric charge.
Nuclear physics is born.
For centuries, the radium discovered by the Curies has been
ceaselessly giving off energy by radiation, without any outside
source. It is luminous in darkness. It gives out a heat that burns se-
verely. And – here is the miracle! – one gram of radium has the en-
ergy of three thousand tons of coal. One gram of radium gives forth
every second 36 billion atoms of helium traveling at over twelve
thousand miles a second. At present, physicists have succeeded in
splitting atoms, thanks to bombardment by millions of volts of elec-
tricity. They hope to tap the prodigious reserves of energy locked up
within the atom. Thus, one atom is a mine of wealth so abundant
that one grows dizzy at the thought. If humanity succeeds in captur-
ing this wealth, it will have energy for nothing. We will be able to

25
close the coal mines and oil wells. What a dream! Courageous sci-
entists have undertaken to realize it. After the destructive atomic
bomb, let us hope that mankind will use the splitting of atoms for
more constructive human ends.
Already we have gone beyond the conceptions of the alchemists
who sought to transmute base metals. In 1934, Joliot-Curie disinte-
grated a nucleus of aluminum and changed it into phosphorus. Cen-
turies ago, he might have been burned at the stake. Today he is
made a member of the Academy of Sciences!
What poet will sing the epic story of radioactivity?
Who will glorify the genius of Faraday who discovered induc-
tion; or Hertz who achieved the synthesis of light and showed his
immediate successors the road which led to one of the most marvel-
ous inventions of our time, the radio?
Reality as revealed by the twentieth century physicist is a thou-
sand times more suggestive than all the systems and constructions
of the most fertile imagination.
The scientists of our day have a bolder imagination than those
ancients who were thought to be inspired by the gods of Olympus.
And think what it will be in the future! Hundreds of years hence
Prometheus unchained will have infinitely enriched the treasure-
house of human knowledge!
No! It is wrong to assert that poetry disappears as science gains
the upper hand over the myths and legends of religions.
Materialism is the philosophy of the Communists who believe
in science and its application. Science alone can explain the world;
it answers all the needs of the heart as well as of the mind. Every
day it clarifies men’s minds more completely. No one can set a limit
to its progress.
A number of religions still vie with each other to guide the hu-
man race. There are said to be 530,000,000 Christians (Catholics,
Protestants, Orthodox); 500,000,000 Buddhists; 230,000,000 Mos-
lems; 210,000,000 Hindus; 10,000,000 Jews; 100,000,000 pagans.
Therein, according to Onésime Reclus, lies the strength (more ap-
parent than real) of the various religions.
Communism does not choose among them. We know that their
role was and still is immense. Communism teaches neither scorn
nor hate for these ancient forms of men’s thought before science. It
recommends that we study their origins and history in order to un-
derstand them. It will then be found that our present is bound up

26
with the past, that many old ideas have survived in men’s minds,
and also that, despite appearances, there is a continuity of one cul-
ture to another.
Communism bases itself on man: real, concrete, living, think-
ing, suffering man. Man and his destiny – that is the sole aim of the
efforts of communism. There are some two billion human beings
scattered over the earth. The historic role of communism is to guar-
antee to each and every one of them freedom, joy, and the complete
development of his physical and moral well-being. This is for all
men whatever they may be, wherever they come from. “If the city is
not open to all,” said Michelet, “I shall not enter it!” We want to
wipe the tears from every face. Science gives man the means to do
that.
To usher in a social order in which this final goal will be at-
tained is humanity’s higher moral law. It is the “categorical impera-
tive” of our era. For after seventy centuries of religious discipline,
including twenty centuries of Christian teaching, man is still a wolf
to his fellow man! Nothing can conceal such a demonstration of
impotence. Where religions have failed, science comes forward to
achieve a human civilization worthy of the name.
Our philosophical doctrines are rooted in French traditions. We
are the sons of the Encyclopedists. We remain faithful to their mate-
rialist conceptions, to their desire for man’s material and moral pro-
gress. But since the appearance of the Encyclopedia around 1760,
almost two hundred years have elapsed. Three outstanding facts
dominate these two centuries:
Physical and natural sciences have made great advances.
The applications of science have changed the face of the world.
The history and evolution of human societies have been studied
scientifically.
The guides of modern man have appeared on the scene under
the influence of these three important events. They pursue the same
aims as the Encyclopedists but with new means adapted to the fur-
ther development of knowledge and techniques.
These leaders of men are: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin.
They devoted themselves to a thorough-going study of modern
capitalist economy. They have marked out its origins, disclosed and
laid bare its inner mechanism. They have followed it in its growth,
in its successes and magnificent achievements. They have also re-
vealed the causes of the periodic crises which shake capitalism.

27
They have perceived the contradictions which condemn it to die as
the societies which preceded capitalism have died.
Marx and his successors have thus created the science of social-
ism based on the strict observation of contemporary reality. They
have clearly shown by reasoning and accumulated facts that every-
thing impels the present system toward socialist and communist
solutions.
Already the appeal of these innovators has been listened to by
millions. Their realistic words have echoed in the farthest corners of
the earth. The oppressed and disinherited have rallied around them in
increasing numbers; so have all modern men of good will and clear
intelligence. Each day facts confirm the correctness of their teachings.
Without bothering about the slanders and attacks leveled
against them by those who are interested in perpetuating the past,
ever greater and more militant masses of human beings recognize
the truths of materialism and communism.
Having understood these truths, they fight with all their might
to bring about a new society solidly based on science. They fight
with enthusiasm to unite all human beings and all nations in a sys-
tem based on liberated labor and peace.
As for us, we have resolutely set out on the road traced by the
founders of communism. There is no turning back. The experience
of an entire lifetime confirms me in the belief that there is no other
way out for suffering humanity weighed down by the nameless af-
flictions of dying capitalism.
Communism is not only essential for the progress of human
civilization. It is also a demand of reason enlightened by modern
science.

28