p Some view philosophy as the “science o^f sciences" that should incorporate all other sciences and allot each one of them its place and the principles underlying its scope and development. This view was widespread in pre-Marxian philosophy. 28 Some bourgeois philosophers, however, continued to support this view even after the emergence of dialectical materialism.

p Positivists hold the opposite opinion. They maintain that special sciences have no need of philosophy. Moreover, they argue that philosophy should be abolished, since it only harms and hampers scientific cognition; nothing in reality corresponds to its principles; it studies nothing and cannot study anything; it does not and cannot possibly have a scientific method of cognition.

p This is true, to a certain extent, of idealist philosophy, which substitutes the construction of various principles on the basis of pure thought for the study of objective reality. Dialectical materialism is a totally different matter, for it has its own subject-matter for study and its own method of cognition.

p As distinct from special sciences, which study the specific laws characteristic of a certain field of reality, dialectical materialism studies general laws coverincTalT fields of HIP objective worlH and all laws, however rln Tint manifest themselves independently of or alongside specific laws-they do so through the latter. So in order to discover a philosophical law, one has to refer to special sciences, to analyse their specific laws and single out that which recurs in all fields of real life, and is thus universal. By this token philosophy is inseparable from the special sciences and the scientific data obtained by them; it draws on such data and can develop successfully only through generalising scientific information.

p Special sciences, in their turn, are inseparable from philosophy and the results of its studies. Indeed, philosophy studies the general laws of reality and the regularities governing the relationship between matter and consciousness and on this basis develops a theory of knowledge and logic, i.e. laws and forms of thinking, and together with all this a general method of cognition. Special sciences, on the other hand, cannot exist and develop without using logical forms and laws of thinking. Neither can they do without a general method of cognition. They are unable to evolve all this by themselves, insofar as they do not study the general laws of reality governing the thinking process and underlying the logical laws and principles of the dialectical method of cognition.

Dialectical materialism and special sciences, though they have their own fields of study, are closely interconnected, interdependent, and cannot develop one without the other.