p The materialist view of the world is rooted in the distant past. It began to emerge in Egypt and Babylonia at the end of the 3rd and the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C. It was at that time that the idea was recorded that water was the prime source of the world, giving birth to all things and living creatures.

p Only in the 1st millennium B.C., however, did materialism become a more or less integral system of views. This was particularly true of India and China. In India, for instance, the philosophical trend Lokayata (literally, the views of those who recognise only this world-loka) gained currency as a fully developed materialist system of world views. The school was founded by Brihaspati.

p Adherents of Lokayata harshly critisised the religious beliefs that were then popular in India and were contained in the Vedas (scriptures of Hinduism). They resolutely opposed all forms of magic and superstition and exposed as false the priests’ dogmas about the immortality of the soul, 34 which allegedly remained alive in the other world after death. According to their doctrine, there was not nor could there possibly be any other life, except in this world, so man’s soul died together with his body.

p At about the same time a materialist view of the world took shape in China. A school opposing religion and asserting that the world was eternal and consisted of fire, water, wood, soil and metal, was widespread in China between the 9th and the 7th centuries B.C. All things, the first Chinese materialists maintained, were various combinations of the above five elements.

p The materialist world outlook was developed in the philosophical system of Taoism that emerged in the 6th century B.C. and was ascribed to Lao-tze. His followers considered that the world was eternal and in a constant state of motion and change. Taoists maintained that motion was directed and governed by Tao-the path taken by natural events (tao means path, law).

p The materialist systems that emerged in India and China in the 1st millennium B.C. at first fought against religious beliefs and later against idealism-the theoretical basis of religion. These systems developed and matured in the course of this contention.

p From the 6th century B.C. onwards, philosophy began to develop spectacularly in ancient Greece. There too, the materialist view of the world was the outcome oFthe struggle again reflected the interests of the progressive strata of the slave-owning class. Materialist philosophy in 35 ancient Greece was founded by the so-called Milesian (Ionic) School: Thales (c. 624-c. 547 B.C.), Anaximander (c. 610-c. 546 B.C.), and Anaximenes (c. 585-c. 525 B.C.).

p Thales considered water the basic element of all things. Everything originated from water and everything eventually turned into water.

p Anaximander thought that the primary source of all things was the “apeuron” (the unlimited, boundless), and inchoate mass, separated out to make the physical world by rotary motion and educing the opposites, such as “moist” and “dry”, “cold” and “warm”. Things and entire worlds that had emerged and lasted for a certain time, disintegrated for the same reasons (motion and education of opposites), disappeared and then turned into the “boundless” again. Thus, Anaximander held, the world was in a constant state of motion, rotation, which caused some things and phenomena to emerge from the “boundless” and others to disappear back into it. Holding a materialist view, Anaximander clearly attempted to present the world dialectically, in motion, attended, to a certain extent, by the process of divarication of the whole (the “boundless”) into opposites (eduction of opposite things and phenomena).

p Anaximenes held a similar view of the origin of sensuous things. He taught that air was the basic universal substance and that the motion of air caused some things to emerge and others to disappear. Air, being in a constant state of motion, either rarefied or condensed, thus turning from one substance into another. When air rarefied, for 36 example, it turned into fire, whereas when it condensed it became wind. Further condensation turned air into clouds, and still further into soil and eventually rock. All other things, God included, emerged from the above states of matter.

p The first Greek materialists who expressed and defended the interests of the progressive groups of slave-owners were initially confronted by religious dogmas concerning the origin and essence of the surrounding world, and then with idealist philosophy developed by reactionary aristocratic groups of slave-owners.

p Pythagoreanism, founded by the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras (c. 580-c. 500 B.C.), was the first form of idealism in ancient Greece. The Pythagoreans believed that number was the essence of all things and that all relations could be expressed numerically. The whole world depended on numbers and was, they maintained, but a harmony of numbers.

p The Pythagoreans developed their philosophy and assailed the materialist views of the Milesian School. Materialism, however, was rapidly gaining popularity.

p An appreciable contribution to the development of the materialist world outlook was made by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 530-c. 470 B.C.). He held that fire was the underlying substance, the first principle of the world, and that it caused things to emerge and disappear. Heraclitus believed that everything came from fire and eventually turned into fire. Fire, he said, was like 37 gold, which could be exchanged for everything, just like everything could be exchanged for gold. Heraclitus maintained that the world was not created by anybody, but existed eternally and irrespective of any supernatural forces. The world, he wrote, was one whole created by neither God nor man. It was and would always be a living fire bound to blaze up and die away.

p Heraclitus reiterated the idea of the continuous motion and change of the surrounding world, of contradiction as a source of that motion, of the possibility of one opposite transforming into another. He thus formulated a number of dialectical principles which to some extent reflected reality, though they were not based on scientific data. Heraclitus affirmed: “Upon those who step into the same river different and ever different waters flow down" (because when we step into water the second time it will certainly change); “There is one and the same in us-alive and dead, awake and sleeping, young and old. Indeed, this, when changed, is that, and conversely, that, when changed, is this”; “What is cold turns warm, while what is warm turns cold; what is moist dries up, while what is dry gets moist.”

p The further progress of materialism in Greek philosophy is associated with the works of Democritus (5th century B.C.) who advanced an atomic theory of matter. According to this theory, the world was made up of an infinite number of atoms and of the vacuum in which they moved. Moving in the vacuum, atoms met and formed various bodies. All that existed was made up of atoms. 38 Even man’s soul was nothing more than a combination of particular atoms. Democritus turned his ideas of the soul against the Pythagoreans, who maintained that the soul was immortal. Democritus believed that the soul died together with the body. The body’s death signified the disintegration of the atoms making it up, which meant that the atoms making up the soul disintegrated as well.

p The atomic theory was later developed by the Greek philosopher Epicurus (4th-3rd century B.C.) and the Roman philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (1st century B. C.).

p The Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C.), who expressed the interests of the reactionary slave-owning aristocracy, came out against the atomic theory of Democritus and the materialist views shared by other philosophers, Heraclitus in particular.

p Platonism is based on the division of all that exists into the real world, consisting of general ideas (“ideal essences”), and the unreal world, made up of assorted sensuous things, being just a reflection or a shadow of the real world (the world of ideas). To illustrate the correlation between the world of sensuous things (the unreal world) and the world of ideas (the real world), Plato gives the following example. Imagine a man chained to a pole in a dark cave, his back always to the entrance from where the sunlight comes, so that he cannot see what is going on outside the cave. When people pass the cave entrance their shadows and the shadows of things they carry would appear on the wall facing the entrance. The 39 man would see these shadows and take them for real, though they are but imperfect imprints of the real world. Sensuous things, the world of the senses, are similar imprints or, to be more precise, shadows of the world of ideas. According to Plato, we are just like that prisoner in the cavewe take this world of things as real, though it is nothing but a shadow of the real world, the world of ideas concealed from us.

p Plato believes that the world of ideas is integral thanks to the Idea of the Good, and is eternal, whereas separate things and phenomena are transient and temporary. They emerge from the amorphous and vague being (matter) as a result of combining with a certain idea, but as soon as the idea abandons the thing it has created, the latter ceases to exist. It follows then that real things and phenomena are created by ideas, which ultimately take their beginning in God.

p Plato’s theory of ideas was severely criticised by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), whose teaching is the pinnacle of ancient Greek philosophy. Aristotle summed up and further developed all the philosophical systems advanced by his predecessors. His works encompass all aspects of reality-nature, human society and knowledge. Assailing Plato’s philosophy, particularly his belief that ideas were primary to sensuous things and that they existed independently, Aristotle proved that no general ideas existed outside and independently of things. All that is real manifests itself through separate things. As for general ideas, they emerge in man’s consciousness in the process of cognition as he is 40 confronted with repetition and becomes aware of it.

p Aristotle vacillated between materialism and idealism.

p He held that all things originated from primordial matter characterised by vagueness and a lack of form, i.e., in fact it was just the possibility of existence. This possibility turned into a real sensuous thing only when matter combined with a form (Aristotle’s term), which gave it definiteness. Although Aristotle’s world view was basically materialist, it also had idealistic overtones. First, he divorced primordial matter from motion, presenting the former as a vague and amorphous mass. Motion was introduced into it from outside, by form. Second, the active element that caused changes in matter and its transformation from an uncertain into a certain state, and then from one state into another-i.e. form-originated, in the final analysis, from God as the prime mover. All this reveals the inconsistency of Artistotle’s teaching. There are metaphysical and idealist elements in his views, alongside elements of dialectics and materialism.

The crisis of slave-owning society caused a decline in ancient Greek philosophy after Aristotle. A trend emerged towards transition from materialism to idealism and mysticism. The revival and propagation of idealist views was especially manifest during the fall of the Roman Empire, when idealism became linked to religion, particularly to emerging Christianity, which became the dominant ideology in the period of European feudalism.