p Knowledge is active, purposive reflection of the objective world and its laws in man’s mind. The source of knowledge is the outside world around man. It acts on man and arouses in him corresponding sensations, ideas and concepts. Man sees forests, fields and mountains, feels the heat and sees the light of the sun, hears the singing of birds, smells the scent of flowers. If these objects existing outside of man’s consciousness did not act on him, he would not have the least idea about them. It should be noted that man not only perceives objects and phenomena of the world, but actively, practically, acts upon them. We shall examine how he does this in more detail further on in the book.

p The Marxist theory of knowledge is based on recognition of the objective world, its objects and phenomena as the sole source of human knowledge.

p Idealists do not consider objective reality the source of our knowledge. In idealist philosophy the object of knowledge is either consciousness, sensation of the individual 152 man (subject) or some kind of a mystic consciousness which is supposed to exist independent of man (take “absolute idea”, “universal spirit”, etc.).

p A serious blow at idealism was struck by pre-Marxist materialists who regarded knowledge as a reflection of external objects in man’s mind. But their ideas on the process of knowledge were also limited. Being metaphysicians they were unable to apply dialectics to the process of knowledge. They regarded reflection as a passive imprint of a thing on man’s brain, comparing the latter with wax upon which things leave their imprint. Pre-Marxist materialists took no account of the activity, the life of man engaged in cognition. Moreover, their chief limitation lay in their failure to evaluate the role of practice in knowledge.

p Marx and Engels went beyond the limits set by preceding philosophies in understanding the cognitive process and created a qualitatively new, dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge.

p The fundamental distinction of the Marxist theory of knowledge is that it bases the process of cognition on practice, the material, production activities of people. It is in the course of this activity that man comes to know objects and phenomena. In Marxist philosophy practice is both the point of departure, the basis of the process of knowledge, and the criterion of truth, of correctness of knowledge. “The standpoint of life, of practice, should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge. And it inevitably leads to materialism,”  [152•*  Lenin wrote.

p It is in practice, in the material productive activity of people that knowledge manifests its activity, its purposeful nature. Man actively influences the world in the course of practice not all by himself, but together with other people, with society as a whole. And this means that if the object of knowledge, its source, is the material world, then the subject of knowledge and its carrier is the human society. Recognition of the social nature of knowledge is a key distinctive feature of the Marxist theory of knowledge.

p The founders of Marxism discovered the dialectics of knowledge. From the point of view of dialectical 153 materialism knowledge is an endless process of approximation of thought to the cognised object, the movement of thought from ignorance to knowledge, from incomplete, inexact knowledge to more complete and more exact. -Replacing obsolete theories with new ones, rendering old theories more exact, knowledge marches onward, revealing ever new sides of reality.

Inasmuch as practice serves as the basis of knowledge, let us examine it and the role it plays in the cognitive process.