p In the material world causality has a general, universal character. No phenomena exist or can exist without cause, for everything has its cause. “There is no smoke without fire,” as the old saying goes. Causality is objective, it has not been introduced into reality by man’s reason or by some supernatural force. Causality is inherent in reality and is discovered by man in the process of cognition and practical activity.

p The dialectical-materialist understanding of causality diametrically differs from the religious interpretation of the world, according to which God is the cause of everything existing: God supposedly created the world order and he refashions it, and divine will is the prime cause of everything existing. Religion also preaches the ideological theory of the world, which regards the development of the world as the realisation of some kind of supernatural, preordained aims. From the standpoint of teleology, Engels wrote, cats were created to eat mice, mice, to be eaten by cats, and all of nature, to prove the wisdom of God.

p There are, however, neither miracles nor preordained aims. Everything develops on the basis of natural causes, objective laws. It goes without saying that nature cannot and does not set itself any aims. In society the situation is different, because people act consciously, set themselves definite aims, and work to achieve them. These aims, however, are not preordained by the Almighty, but are determined by objective causes, by the entire course of historical development. Communism, mankind’s great goal towards which the Soviet people are now working, is such an aim based on a thorough analysis of objective causality and the patterns of social development.

p The doctrine that the natural cause of things is subordinated to objective causality, governed by laws, is called determinism. Determinism is the opposite of indeterminism, an idealistic doctrine denying objective causality, necessity, laws. Indeterminism, Lenin observed, is an idealist approach 139 to causality; it looks for the order, the causes of development of phenomena, not in the outside objective world, but in consciousness, in reason.

p Dialectical materialism is opposed not only to indeterminism, but also to mechanistic determinism, which reduces the whole diversity of causes to outward, mechanical influences. Such determinism prevailed in natural science in the 17th and 18th centuries when mechanics was the most developed of all the natural sciences.

p Mechanistic determinism may be applied in studying the movement of macro-bodies, in technical calculations of machines, bridges and other installations. But attempts to explain numerous biological processes, mental activity and social life from the point of view of mechanistic determinism are erroneous.

p Mechanistic determinism also proved inapplicable to quantum mechanics, a new field of physics. The micro-particles studied by quantum mechanics qualitatively differ from the macro-bodies studied by classical mechanics. Whereas the co-ordinate (position in space) and speed of a macro-body can be determined exactly and simultaneously by the laws of classical mechanics, this cannot be done with an elementary particle. In the micro-world where the laws of classical mechanics are invalid, the laws of quantum mechanics operate. They make it possible to determine either the co-ordinate or the speed of the particle in each given moment of time, not with absolute accuracy, but only approximately, with a certain degree of probability.

p When the opponents of materialism realised that mechanistic determinism cannot be applied to micro-objects they proclaimed the “collapse” of determinism in general and the triumph of indeterminism. They declared that causality in micro-processes is created by man himself in the course of observation and measuring operations. In reality, however, modern physics in no way refuted the dialecticalmaterialist principle of causality; on the contrary, it furnished additional proof of it. At the same time it showed that determinism appears in different ways in various spheres of reality.

p Dialectical materialism is also opposed to the metaphysical separation of cause and effect. Proceeding from the achievements of science and practice, dialectical materialism 140 asserts that cause and effect are inseparably connected, that there is no effect without cause and vice versa. The connection between cause and effect is of an internal, law-governed character. This is the kind of connection in which effect stems from cause, is a result of its action. Engendered by cause, effect does not remain indifferent to its cause and exerts a reverse action upon it. Thus, economic relations between people in the process of production are the cause, the source of political, philosophical and other ideas, but these ideas, in turn, influence the development of economic relations.

The interconnection of cause and effect also means that one and the same phenomenon can be the cause in one connection and the effect in another. The combustion of coal in boilers at electric power plants is the cause of the conversion of water into steam. Steam, being the effect of coal combustion, is itself the cause of motion of the generator’s rotor. Its rotation generates electricity, which is the source, the cause of motion of numerous machines and mechanisms giving people heat, light, etc. This train of argument could be taken further. What is characteristic of causality is this endless chain of reciprocal connections, the universal interaction of objects and phenomena of the world where each link is simultaneously both a cause and an effect.