p The way for the emergence of Marxist philosophy was also paved by the entire progress of natural science and philosophical thought. The development of natural science was unusually rapid in the 19th century. It ceased to be a science which merely accumulated facts and studied individual objects and phenomena, and turned into a theoretical science concerned with explaining these facts and establishing the connections between them. Metaphysics in natural science gave way to dialectical ideas of the unity and historical development of the world.

p The first breach in the metaphysical view of nature was made by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) whose cosmogonic hypothesis proved that the Earth and the Solar system were not eternal, but came into being as a result of the long evolution of matter. Then geology, a science that deals with the history of the Earth’s crust, came into being and physics, chemistry, biology and other sciences began to develop at a very rapid pace.

p Three great discoveries of natural science played a particularly important role in shaping and substantiating 27 dialectical materialist views on nature, namely, the discovery of the law of the conservation and transformation of energy, the theory of the cellular structure of living organisms and Darwin’s theory of evolution.

p The law of the conservation and transformation of energy discovered by the great Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov, the German scientist Julius Robert von Mayer and the English physicist James Prescott Joule convincingly demonstrates the material unity of the world, and the eternity and indestructibility of matter and motion. It also shows the great qualitative diversity of matter and motion and their variability and ability to pass from one form to another.

p The theory of the cellular structure of the living tissue evolved by the Russian botanist Pavel Goryaninov, the Czech biologist Jan Purkyne and the German scientists Matthias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann showed that a material element, the cell, was the basis of any more or less complex organism. By demonstrating the cell’s ability to change they laid the groundwork for a correct understanding of the development of organisms.

p With his theory of evolution the great English natural scientist Charles Darwin, as Lenin noted, overturned the view that the species of plants and animals were accidental, unconnected with anything, god-created and immutable. He scientifically proved that the complex, higher organisms had been formed from the simple, lower ones through the action of the laws of natural selection inherent in nature itself. Darwin also showed that man was a product of nature, a result of the prolonged evolution of living matter. This confirmed the basic idea of dialectics, namely the idea of development, of the transition from the lower to the higher, from the simple to the complex.

p Alongside the achievements of natural science, the successes of philosophical thought in that period also played an enormous role in shaping a Marxist world outlook. As they evolved dialectical and historical materialism, Marx and Engels exhaustively studied the history of philosophy and used the best that philosophical thought acquired over the many centuries of its development. The direct theoretical source of Marxist philosophy was the 19th-century German classical philosophy, above all the philosophy of Hegel and Feuerbach.

p Marx and Engels did not arrive at positions of dialectical materialism at once. In their youth they were attracted by the idealistic philosophy of Georg Hegel (1770-1831) which was widespread in Germany in their days. Hegel was an objective idealist. He believed that the world was created by the supra-human, objectively existing consciousness—-Absolute Idea and World Spirit. Though the point of departure of his philosophical system was erroneous, he made a serious contribution to the development of philosophical thought by elaborating a harmonious system of idealistic dialectics as a totality of logical laws and categories.

p Hegel evolved the basic laws of dialectics governing the development of ideas and thoughts. He showed that the development of ideas did not follow a closed circuit, but rose from lower to higher forms, that quantitative changes turned into qualitative ones in this process and that contradictions were the source of development. He characterised the basic concepts (categories) of dialectics and disclosed their interconnection and ability to turn into each other. It was dialectics that Marx and Engels borrowed from Hegel’s philosophy and which they interpreted from materialist positions and used to develop dialectical and historical materialism.

p The materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) powerfully influenced the formation of Marx’s and Engels’s world outlook. Feuerbach who was a great materialist of his time rejected idealism and religion and emphasised that philosophy should not be confined to thought alone and that it had to study nature and man. Nature, he maintained, existed outside of man, it was the first, primary and underived being. As regards man, he was a part of nature, a product of its long evolution. Consciousness, in Feuerbach’s opinion, did not precede nature, but merely reflected and cognised it. Matter, nature is cognisable and man can understand it by means of all his sensory organs.

p The materialistic ideas in Feuerbach’s philosophy helped Marx and Engels to discard Hegel’s idealism and evolve dialectical and historical materialism. But as they used Feuerbach’s philosophy the founders of Marxism discerned its narrow limits and idealistic interpreting of social life; they were not satisfied with its contemplative nature and isolation from life and the people’s struggle for liberation. They 29 were firmly convinced that major philosophical and social problems had to be solved in the course of the revolutionary, political struggle and not in the solitude of studies.

p Participation in the social and political struggle on the side of the working people and profound study of natural science, philosophy and history convinced Marx and Engels that idealism was insolvent and they resolutely moved from revolutionary democracy to the positions of scientific communism, of the proletariat. In the sphere of philosophy this meant that they created a qualitatively new philosophydialectical and historical materialism.

p In evolving their philosophy Marx and Engels drew on Hegel’s dialectics and Feuerbach’s materialism which they critically revised, purged of all sorts of unscientific features and enriched with the vast experience of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and the latest scientific achievements.

By creating dialectical and historical materialism, Marx and Engels consummated a great revolution in philosophy.