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p The qualitative leap from sensory reflection to conceptual thought must have contained a whole number of intermediate transitions both before the first glimmer of thought and after it. Each of the links in their successive chain could have been separated from one another by tens and hundreds of thousands of years during the historical evolution of hominids; nevertheless there was a causal link between them stemming from the development of mediated (indirect) sense activity, and receiving its explanation from practice.

p Along with the development of primitive man’s labour activity with tools, and the complication of thought operations, all aspects of direct sensory reflection were qualitatively altered.

p The instinct of self-preservation, as an expression of the living organism’s striving for maximum negative entropy in its direct interaction with the environment, had been realised through the organism’s own activity. Now, however, with the transition to a mediated interaction, it was realised in addition through the action of a mediator-tool. Man’s ancestors’ increasingly harder struggle for existence caused a transition from sporadic to regular use of instruments.

p Self-preservation of the living organism now appeared as its preservation by means of external instruments, which called for preservation of the latter. Man’s ancestors passed to guarding objects of external adaptation, which they used as mediators. As regular use of instruments was transformed into a vital necessity, the loss of a tool, whatever 104 the cause (physical wear, loss, etc.), would evoke a striving to recover the old one, or get another like it, which, in turn, would have led to a search for tools among objects in the surrounding set-up, or to making one from external objects by their own efforts.

p Should we not also assume that man’s ancestors passed (after daily practical use, for example, of stones had become a fait accompli) to breaking natural stones they picked up by throwing them onto the floor or against the wall of a cave, in order to obtain a stone suitable for use as a tool? This last suggestion is the more justified since it was more probable that striking one stone by another held in the hand might have caused less painful negative sensations than throwing it.

p Against that interpretation of the transitional stage to the making of tools by means of tools, it can be objected that the moment so important for the moulding of man was in that case due to pure chance, while our task is to demonstrate the determined character of the transition as one stemming of necessity from existing circumstances. It can readily be noted that this argument has no basis. Of course, when a chimpanzee throws a heavy stone at an enemy, the fact that it is a stone and not another object that is to hand at the appropriate moment may be a matter of chance, but a chimpanzee’s attempts to use external objects of adaptation as a weapon are not so fortuitous, since they are caused by a need to fight to preserve its life. The transition to use and hoarding of tools to maintain life occurs of the same necessity. Once man’s ancestors had already mastered the operation of aimed throwing at a certain stage as a regular condition of successful achievement of vital results (e.g. the hitting of an enemy or prey) and had got a reflection in their heads of the need to have a suitable object ’to hand’, e.g. a stone, in order to achieve that result, the transition to making suitable stones by breaking others on a hard stone wall would hardly have happened by pure chance.

p The chance here is that some of man’s ancestors might not have thrown a stone at the object of the hunt but at a stone wall and unexpectedly obtained other stones, suiting for hunting. But the forming of a capacity to throw and (the main point) the need to have a suitable stone as an integral requisite of successful actions in the struggle for existence, were not accidental. Without such prerequisites, arising of necessity, the results of striking one stone by 105 another leading, by virtue of objective causes, to the splitting (chipping) of even one of them would not have been fixed in the brain of man’s ancestors as a vitally necessary result. Many modern discoveries are also regarded as pure chance when the most important circumstance is abstracted from them, namely that they were prepared by the whole course of the preceding development of man’s practical and cognitive activity and could resolve problems meriting scientific or practical interest.

p Reflection in the heads of man’s ancestors of the special role of external mediators in their struggle for existence led to their beginning gradually to pass directly to the fashioning of these mediators, while the end result of life activity (satisfaction of biological needs) ’persists in the head’ as the expected result of future actions by means of a prepared tool. That would have created an important precondition for practical activity becoming purposeful labour activity, when the end result was already in the head as the goal even before its performance, and the tool or weapon functioned as the means for achieving that goal.

p There has been a lively discussion of the category ‘goal’ in the Soviet philosophical literature.^^1^^ Following traditions formed in the past, materialists took the view thatonecould only speak of a goal in relation to man’s cognitive activity. That point of view was opposed to teleological idealism, which started from the assumption that not only man but all nature contained a given goal. In present-day materialist science a tendency has developed, however, to objectify the category ‘goal’, extending it to explanation of all processes of self-regulation, including the realm of preconscious life and of the automatic control systems created by man. The goal is denned as ’the forming at the level of the nervous system of models of all the attributes and properties of a future useful result in connection with which, and for the sake of which, processes of afferent synthesis have been evolved’,^^2^^ as ’a model of the needed future coded in the brain’ (N. A. Bernstein)^^3^^ as ’the concentrated expression of the needs of a system during its self-regulation’,⁴ and so on.

p It must be stressed that this tendency toward an extended interpretation of ‘goal’ is not shared by all materialist philosophers. The matter remains an open question, and a satisfactory solution calls for further research. But we have to note that, if we understand by goal the anticipation 106 of a future result proper to a material, self-regulating system, then attempts to objectify the concept can hardly be interpreted as a concession to idealist teleology. In the organism’s direct interaction with the environment a cyclically repeated link in the chain of its actions already leads to its ‘foreseeing’ the occurrence of the end result, as it were, when it has fixed the initial result, by-passing the intermediate links of the chain. But such a linking of the results of its actions differs qualitatively from the linking of the result of man’s effect on a tool with the results of the tool’s effect on the object of labour. In the first case the means of attaining the end result is simply the organism’s own actions. In the second case it is not only the organism’s actions but also the ‘action’ of the mediator employed by it. In that case, too, the prevision of the future end result is therefore also qualitatively different.

p This distinction is so essential that we would be quite justified in taking it into account, as well, on the plane of terminology. Because the term ‘goal’ has traditionally meant, in materialist philosophy, not just any prevision of a future result, but only conscious prevision, it should be left its former meaning, in our view, and an appropriate term found to designate ’anticipations of the future result’ in other specific senses. It is important that the still existing terminological vagueness should not lead to confusion of concepts.

p The complication of the activity of man’s ancestors in the use of objects and forces of nature caused by vital necessity led to a complicating and differentiation of the reflecting operations whose initial form was the scheme ’if R_a, then R_b (through mediator A/)’. So, for example, the throwing of a stone against the wall of a cave leading to the obtaining of sharp stones that could be used as new weapons in hunting, gave rise to the possibility of further development and complication of the structure of this scheme, without breach of its inherent wholeness and integrity. We might depict this newly arising possibility of mental reflection by a given chain of actions and operations as follows:

p If S-+M, then A/^^1^^ (through mediator A/->TV),

p where A/^^1^^ signified the new tool obtained as a result.

p The ‘fabrication’ of tools by such means, we would note, could have played a role only as a transitional stage to the 107 production of tools by means of tools. The act of a tool’s interaction with an object of labour (Af-vTV), leading to the obtaining of a new tool (A/^^1^^) takes place here as the instantaneous act of striking, i.e. as an instant that might not yet be perceived as a process taking time. The external object TV (object of labour) would also not be quite distinctly incorporated as a mediator in relation to tool A/, remaining in many respects simply the object onto which the action of tool M was directed. But this transitional stage, as soon as it was fully realised, opened the road to new transitions in complicating the operations to make tools. When the fact that the interaction M -> N led to obtaining another vitally necessary mediator M^^1^^ had become reflected in the psyche of man’s ancestors, it became possible to pass to working the external mediator by means of another external object, initially the use of an object of labour as a support-object and later as a means of mutual working of one external mediator by another.

p At the same time reflection of the relation

p ’If S-»Af, then A/^^1^^ (through mediator M -> TV)’

p would have been developed further; ’if S -*- A/, then A/¹ (through mediator M <=t TV)’, ’if S -> Af, then A/^^2^^ (through mediator M+±M^l); and so on. A representation would consequently have arisen of the birth of a new tool as the result of the interaction of two external mediators, i.e. of the ‘self-generation’ of tools by one another. The original scheme ’if R_a, then R_b (through mediator A/)’, would then have been filled with a new content. An important step toward the production of tools by means of others would thus have gone hand in hand with gradual development of psychic reflection toward the rise of logical thought.

p Since the mediator role of a tool was now performed not just by some external object taken separately, but through the mutual working of two or more external objects, the mediating representation would become one of a process taking place between external objects.

p The rise of primitive man’s notions that the process of the effect of external objects on one another, brought into being by his own actions, could lead to results useful to him, viz., the birth of a new mediator, would have been, in turn, a step toward his mastering not only of objects but also of forces of nature, and of objective processes like combustion taking place in it. Primitive man’s 108 mastering of fire would have been impossible if he had not already learned to use an object of the environment as mediator between himself and the environment and if the fact that it was possible to obtain useful results during the contact interaction of objects of the environment had not been reflected in his consciousness. Once these conditions already existed, the savage could use any stick he picked up for contact-interaction with a tree (burning, for example, after being struck by lightning) to carry fire on the end of the stick, without risk of being burned (i.e. suffering the negative emotion of a burn).

p The transition to primitive man’s use of fire objectively meant that he could put to his use energy resources of the environment that went beyond the possibilities of his own physical energy. The ‘increment’ to his own efforts from the use of a sharp object as a hunting weapon, while palpable, was objectively a fact of the transformation of the force exerted on it by the savage himself, and did not bring about any increase, in essence, in his forces. But the use of combustion as a mediator gave a real addition to man’s own forces, an increment without quotation marks.

p With the practical mastering of fire as a new mediator between man and his environment there arose a possibility of new mental operations in the form of the already known logical scheme: ’if cold, then warm (through a burning tree)’; ’if dark, then light (through a burning tree)’, and so on. The burning tree was thus endowed, in primitive man’s head, with the property of an inner activity and a capacity to produce light, heat, etc. With regular use of fire by keeping it going, he could have noted that dry sticks ignited faster and gave a brighter blaze than damp rotten wood. Given that man had already endowed wooden objects with a capacity to ‘contain’ fire, and had learned to subject external objects to mutual treatment so as to obtain useful results, there opened up the possibility for a new discovery most important in the history of primitive society; namely, to get fire by the friction of dry sticks on one another.

p The transition to production of ever newer external mediators by means of external mediators meant a practical extension of man’s power over the forces of nature opposing him, and led at the same time to a further development of human reason proper, which displayed not only its power but also its ‘ingenuity’, which, in Hegel’s definition quoted above, consisted in reason’s forcing external objects to 109 influence one another according to their own nature so as to achieve a set goal or aim without, at the same time, interfering directly in the process. And because the role of mediator M in the general interaction S -> M ->- N now no longer involved just one external object or force but two or more, acting on one another, we can depict the multiplicity of elements entering the structure of such a complex mediator (for example, a lathe and all its parts) as follows: M : (m_l, rn₂, . . ., tn_n). It is important, moreover, to add that, however complex and multi-stage the system M is in the total interaction S  > M -> N, it is not thought that directly serves as the factor creating and putting it into operation, but man’s practical, labour activity. That is true as concerns both the savage’s campfire and a modern atomic power station with all the multiplicity and complexity of interaction of its component mechanisms and processes.

p The role of mediator M can be performed not only by objects of inanimate nature but also of animate nature. Once ancient man already knew that external objects had a hidden inner force that could be set into action to achieve his aims, the transition from hunting and gathering to keeping animals and working land, dictated by material needs, also gets its explanation in an aspect of the development of cognitive activity. It had to be supposed that the seed of an edible plant also concealed an internal force that could be set in motion and called to life by certain physical efforts of man. Use of its capacity to sprout falls within the context of our three-member scheme: ’if the grain (seed) of a plant is put into the ground then (since it contains some hidden force engendering a new plant in it), a plant appears again that yields seed’. The same can be said of the breeding of animals for food, or to use them as beasts of burden or as another intermediary force.

p The introduction of newer and newer mediators between man and his environment meant a step by step extension of the sphere of natural forces that he had subordinated to himself, forcing them to operate in his interests. Many of the ancients’ guesses about the possible use of these forces could be called major discoveries of the primeval epoch, in spite of their seeming simplicity from the modern standpoint; and their practical use led to substantial results in the evolution of society. The radical shifts in the sphere of the economy, for example, caused by the 110 domestication of plants and animals were a critical epoch in the development of primitive society that has come to be called the neolithic revolution.^^6^^

p As man passed to practical application of more arid more complicated systems M, he penetrated more and more deeply into the secrets of the ’black box’, passed from understanding and practical use of separate results of the operation of objective laws to understanding and application of the laws themselves. It is beyond the scope of our book to go into the details of the transitions that followed one from the other during man’s ever widening mastery of natural forces, and development of the mechanism of the logical reflection of objective reality. But it will already be clear from what we have said that this development quite naturally led in time to the origin of notions of the ‘self-action’ of objects and forces of nature as a‘self-action’that could be performed without human involvement, ideas, for example, that the sun has an inherent inner capacity to generate light and heat.

p The rise of such ideas was a new stage in the evolution of man’s thinking capacity. While the notion of the ’ selfaction’ of external mediators had previously not yet been separated from notions of the subject’s own actions that caused it, it now became possible to make this differentiation in the aspect of thinking. That meant, at the same time, however, the rise of a possibility, on the one hand, of passing from ‘manual’ thinking to abstract thought and the performance of mental operations as a special faculty of the subject’s that is relatively independent of the performance of physical actions to alter external objects and, on the other hand, also of reflecting events taking place in the environment as ones brought about by the operation of objective causes existing in nature independently of man. The original logical scheme ’if R_a, then R_b (through mediator M)’, was developed further and given a new content that did not depend on the people’s individual peculiarities, since it reflected an objective link between events in the external world no matter what naive, metaphoric form it was given.

p From the heights of modern knowledge one can speak ironically about the primitive character of the Greeks’ notions that associated the sun with the image of a mythical charioteer. Helios, who drove in the sky daily at dawn from the east coast of the sea in a chariot drawn by four fire- 111 breathing horses, and in the evening sank down again in the west into the cool sea waves so as to cool the horses and himself, heated by their wild daytime exertions. We, of course, now know that such a notion of the sun is a myth that does not correspond to reality, but we sometimes forget that it contains a ’rational kernel’ of objective truth quite inaccessible to the perception of animals. This kernel is that a capacity to generate light and heat, and apparently to move relative to a given spot on the earth’s surface, was ascribed to the sun. And this capacity inherent in the sun, belonging to it, and included within it, was considered the cause of the illumination and heating of earthly objects, and of the succession of day and night.

p Today’s scientific ideas about the thermonuclear reactions taking place within the sun as the source of thermal, luminous, and other radiation were formulated quite recently. It is quite possible that the latest ideas of our day about the processes taking place in the sun will seem quite primitive to our remote offspring. Views are already being expressed that the level of knowledge now attained about the patterns of nuclear processes does not enable us to answer questions about the character of the processes within the sun; it is not ruled out, in particular, that these processes are linked with the existence of a ’black hole’ in the sun.

p There is an immense difference, of course, between notions of the sun like the image of Helios and as an astronomical object with a ’black hole’. Nevertheless, it can be said that there is something substantial in common between them, since they are essentially ideas of Homo sapiens, and not of animals that do not possess reason. The essentially common is that both notions reflect an objective property of the sun, its inherent ‘capacity’ to generate light and heat.

p Kant (following Hobbes and Hume) noted a difference in principle between statements (judgments) of the type of ’when the sun illuminates a stone, the stone becomes warm’ and ’the sun heats the stone’, which was that the first statement (’a judgment of perception’) contained no knowledge of causality, while the second (’a judgment of experience’) included a grasped causal link. According to Kant, this difference stemmed from the fact that the first statement lacked an a priori basis, while the second was an a priori synthesis of sense data.

p If we discard the idealist premiss about the human mind’s a priori capacity to introduce order into nature, including 112 causal relations (a premiss whose erroneous character has, we think, been quite clearly demonstrated above), Kant’s idea about the qualitative difference between such judgments is correct. Statements of the first type contain a reflection of the superficial sequence of events accessible to direct sense perception according to the relationship S i£ N. Psychic reflection of this sequence (the series r_lt r₂, . . . r_n) takes place even at the level of unconditioned and conditioned reflexes (e.g. in experiments with dogs: when a lamp shines food will appear).

p It is another matter that animals cannot objectify this sequence in the form of a statement of judgments of perceptions. They simply do not yet feel, and cannot, a need for external (linguistic) objectivising of the reflection of this sequence because, for them, the source uniting the links of the chain of successive events into a whole of sorts is (asalready^mentioned) the inner activity of the living organism as an entity and the projection of perception of events onto the integral background of an instinctive sense of self-preservation.^^6^^ At the sensory level of anticipatory reflection animals are capable of ‘anticipating’ the coming of warmth after sunrise but cannot attribute an active capacity to cause light and warmth to the sun, i.e. to relate to it as the mediator-producer that contains the cause of the conversion of darkness into light and of cold into warmth.

p With the genesis of representations of a capacity in external objects (included in a logical scheme already formed in man’s head) for ‘self-activity’ without any human involvement, for example, notions of the sun’s ‘life-giving’ capacity to produce light and heat, the logical scheme ’if /?„, then .ff_b (through mediator M)’ gets a further development and a new content without losing its original wholeness. To the extent that man abstracts, in his mental operations, from acts of bringing external mediators into action through the application of his own physical efforts, the place of the first member in the logical scheme has been taken by mental reflection] of^ the state of the external object before it was affected by the ‘self-acting’ mediator M, and the place of the second member by reflection of its state as altered by the effect of the mediator.

p The possibility of such a replacement is implicit in the scheme ’if R_a, then R_b (through mediator Af)’, because the final result of the interaction S ->• M -»- N was perceived as vitally important to man precisely because the effect of 113 a tool on part of the environment was to alter it, translating its state from one unsatisfactory for supporting human life to a satisfactory one (for example, a heavy stone thrown ‘transforms’ a dangerous live enemy into a dead, and therefore not dangerous thing). This possibility was also realised of logical necessity in the operation of the mechanism of the gradual development of practical and cognitive activity (described above). The logical scheme began to be used in that way for mental reflection of the link between phenomena taking place in the environment without any involvement of human physical efforts in the results.

p That moment was of fundamental importance for moulding arid developing conceptual thought, because it then became possible to reflect objective material processes in consciousness as ones that existed outside man and his consciousness, and independent of consciousness (or intuition). The first kernels of absolute objective truth appeared in the subjective logical scheme, i.e. an invariant content that did not depend either on an individual person or humankind as a whole. The subjective logical scheme began to coincide with the ’objective logic’ of nature, and in that sense became ‘identical’ with it to the extent that the objective patterns of the material world found adequate, reliable reflection in it. This logical scheme can be depicted symbolically in the following much simplified form:

p ’If A, then B (through mediator M)\

p in which A and B designate various states of the environment independent of the subject, which are linked together into some whole unity by the action of a mediator-producer M, also independent of the subject.

p To continue our example of the sun, we might say that since primitive man attributed an internal, life-giving capacity to it to generate light and heat, a change in the state of the environment caused by its effect would have got reflected in ideas (within the logical scheme introduced above) in the following mental operation: ’if it is dark and cold, then (due to the sun’s capacity to produce light and heat), it will become light and warm when the sun shines’.^^7^^

p It will readily be concluded that this scheme might (in the course of man’s cognitive capacity) have been filled with a more concrete content of mental reflection of the relation between phenomena occurring in the environment: 114 for example, ’if stones are cold, then (through the sun, capable of heating stones it shines on) those that the sun shines on will become warm’. By removing the brackets enclosing the description of the mediating representation, we can write the scheme as follows: ’if the sun is capable of heating stones it shines on, and it shines on stones, the stones will be heated’.

p In a mental operation of that type, it may be noted, there is already the possibility of its being developed into an inference containing a conclusion from two premises: for example, (1) the sun heats stones it shines on; (2) this stone is illuminated by the sun; (3) consequently, it is heated. The generalising of such inferences leads to a syllogism in which both the premisses and the conclusion (deduction) are ideal formations reflecting the objective link between phenomena in the form of a naturally arising and developing logical scheme that links separate components of the ideal formations (which can now be called individual concepts) into an integral formal-logical system of mental operations.

p With the rise of logical thought the sphere of the subject’s emotional experiences is transformed. While, with the organism’s direct interaction with the environment, the role of emotions consisted in self-regulation of the organism’s functions, now they are involved in addition in the fashioning, putting into motion, and regulating of the ‘self-activity’ of the external mediator (for example, the making of fire, the lighting and keeping burning of a campfire). Insofar as the organism’s self-experience is transferred to the ’ selfexperience’ of the mediator, it is alienated from the subject, and while it is perceived as vitally important, it is already an ‘experience’ of an external object foreign to the subject, because the mediator set in motion now operates by itself (for example, it is the campfire that burns and not man himself, though it was lit by him). The act of the genesis of thought through the creation of a mediating representation is therefore connected with the action of living imagination and is accompanied with an emotional experience. But, in passing through an emotionally experienced dawning, thought is liberated from emotions, and acquires a character independent of subjective experiences to the extent that it reflects a course of events alienated from the subject and external in relation to it, and mentally grasped as the result of the creation of a given mediating representation.

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p The difference between reason (mind) and understanding (a difference already noted by ancient philosophers, which has come down subsequently through many philosophical systems) comes out here. In short, understanding can be defined as a capacity, alienated from emotional experiences, to operate with concepts according to the rules of a formal logical system (the structure of the logical system and the content of the concepts having already been given by man’s preceding development of practical and cognitive activity). Rational thinking can provide new knowledge within the limits of the content of the system of knowledge built up, but it cannot give this system another content or lead to the creation of a new system of knowledge a need for which becomes particularly clear when facts are discovered that are incompatible with the old ones. Employing the terminology of the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn, we can say that rational thought operates basically within the paradigm of the period of ’normal science’. But insofar as ‘anomalies’ build up in an old system of knowledge through the influence of new interpretations or newly discovered facts, that are unresolvable within its context, the time comes for ’revolutionary transformations’ of this system. A leading role is once more played in that by creative imagination accompanied with an emotionally coloured striving to transform the unsatisfactory situation existing in science into a satisfactory one, and to connect the various contradictory facts mentally into an ordered whole at a new theoretical level. The activity of imagination leads to emotionally experienced guesses, ‘dawnings’, new concepts, hypotheses, conceptions, and paradigms—in short to the creation of new mediating representations as a link leading to change of the previous content of knowledge.

p Although the human emotions that accompany the development of understanding are genetically associated with animals’ emotional reactions, they are no longer those that animals experience when striving to satisfy their physiological needs. There is an intellectualisation of human feelings that we shall touch on again later. Here, however, we would note that the new mediating representation, having fulfilled its creative mission, is dissolved as it were in the new content of the knowledge generated by it and disappears in the whole entity of the formal logical structure filled with a new content.

p The real or imaginary links established between various 116 events by imagination can lead to a complicating of the logical scheme, but cannot break it up or alter its integral unity, or go beyond the rules of the mental operations stemming from it (otherwise there is the risk that imagination would be converted into a rambling, incoherent delirium).

p Understanding and imagination are two aspects of reason through which continuity and logical orderliness are guaranteed in the development of knowledge on the one hand, and a possibility is opened up, on the other, of creative development of knowledge and of establishing an interconnection between the various facts that do not fit into the previously created mental picture of the world, and of passing through practice to an ever deeper penetration of the mystery of the operation of objective laws.

p As we have already remarked, the first idea was still inarticulate, and only acquired the character of a differentiated whole over the course of thought’s further development. But when we examine the cognitive process from the standpoint of an already formed subject of knowledge, taken as the result of the whole preceding evolution of mankind, the process of understanding appears as a unity of induction and deduction, a mental ascent from the particular to the general, and the creation of a new ‘universal’ requiring the involvement of imagination, while a reverse transition takes place within the context of rational thought.

p The transition to labour activity with tools, and the rise of a faculty for logical thought evoked by it, led to a transformation of the instinctive sense of self-preservation and sphere of emotional experiences in other important respects as well. The transference of man’s own vital activity to external objects as his other opened the way for the subject’s being able to relate to himself mentally as another, to appreciate his vital activity from the standpoint of the other, to see his Ego from outside, as it were, and return the representation of himself ’carried outside’ back into his integral Ego. In other words the possibility of selfknowledge and of self-consciousness was discovered as the subject’s integral appreciation of himself and his place in life.

p The basis was thus laid for awareness of instincts, and man’s emancipation from blind obedience to instinctive, emotional stimuli; the subject developed conscious control over his actions, and a capacity to subordinate both 117 external circumstances and himself to the tasks of overcoming obstacles in the way of attaining a set goal—in short there began formation of that feature of the thinking subject that we call will.

p In this connection a rare case recalled by Grzimek presents interest, namely that of the raising of a female gorilla in a human family from infancy to the age of 36. In the view of a member of that family, the gorilla was incapable of self-control, and that was the biggest difference between her and humans, a difference much more substantial than inability to speak. Her sole attempt at self-control was expressed in her trying to stop intercourse with a friendly creature as soon as she felt that excitement and groundless anger were carrying her away.

p The transfer of subjective emotional experiences to external objects that accompanied the initial stage of the forming of consciousness (including objects of inanimate nature) led, so to say, to the subject’s relating himself to objects of his environment as to living, feeling creatures. That led to important consequences of a transformation of the whole sphere of his emotional attitude to reality and himself. Primitive man did not know what inner forces were hidden behind the external aspect of things, but he had no doubt of the ‘fact’ of their existence any more than he doubted that a stick he set on fire burned and had an incomprehensible capacity to turn darkness into light, cold into heat, and so on.

p Primitive man’s dependence on the action of the mysterious natural forces (and likewise of forces of his own relationships with other men), being discovered by his dawning consciousness, was reflected in it as an attribution of friendly or unfriendly intentions to those forces, which ostensibly influence his fate. The savage tried by his actions (including sacrifices, charms, etc.) to bring the good or evil intentions of these forces into line with his own, and strove to establish harmony with them. In spite of all their naivete, such views already contained the beginnings of the establishing of a sensual experience of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, etc., that is to say the beginnings of ethical, aesthetic, and other intellectualised feelings, albeit in still undifferentiated, syncretic forms. Primitive man can hardly be blamed that the universal dependence and mutual conditioning of phenomena of the material world opened out before him mainly in a still fantastic, distorted form. The important 118 point is that he discovered this link, while it remained inaccessible to animals.

p The transition to labour led as well to a qualitative transformation of the feeling of need. Positive and negative emotions now began to be linked not just with the satisfaction or non-satisfaction of certain direct physiological needs. It was already then, for example, when men began to understand the significance of tools in their lives, that the making of a tool began to give them an emotionally experienced satisfaction that dominated the negative emotions of the unconditioned-reflex pain irritation very probable when one external object was being worked by another (though the fact of the making of a tool is not an unconditionedreflex reinforcement).

p It is well known that man’s spiritual needs, and not just his material ones, developed with the evolution of society. Satisfaction of the latter, moreover (for food, clothing, housing, etc.), in spite of its difference from the satisfaction of animals’ physiological needs, occupies first place in the life of society, because it is incontestable that exchange of matter with the environment remains a necessary condition’for maintenance of the life of any organism, including the human one. But man produces objects of individual consumption by means of tools, so that the production of tools and productive consumption have become as necessary elements of human consumption as the production of objects entering individual consumption.

p A schematic representation of the periodically recurring cycle of satisfaction of man’s material needs can be represented as follows in very general form (employing the symbols we used earlier):

p M:

p N

p m

p There is hardly any point in making a detailed comparison of this scheme with the earlier ones of the chain of animals’ actions to satisfy their needs, since^the difference between them is obvious. Let us simply point out that ^m^^1^^ here signifies an aggregate tool newly created in the process of labour, r_n represents the objects of individual consumption created, and r_ki a newly satisfied need.

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p The difference of principle between this chain and operant conditioning consists in particular in the chain of intermediate results being here not one of the successful actions of the living organism itself but of the interconnected actions of external objects (parts of the mechanism of a machine; a successive chain of chemical reactions, or of technological processes, etc.). Men’s actions have a quite different character in the intermediate stages than the operant conditioning of animals’ actions; they consist in maintenance of the conditions of ‘self-activity’ of the aggregate tools, and in ensuring passage from one stage of the working of an object of labour to another, and so on.

p When we are examining the qualitative transformation of all aspects of direct sensory reflection caused by the transition to rational reflection of reality, we must pay special attention as well to the following very essential circumstances connected with the qualitative alteration of sensations, perceptions, and representations. The genesis of a mediating representation as one of an inner capacity for self-activity attributed to external objects meant the appearance of a new basis for identifying and differentiating sensually perceived external objects. The vital significance of objects of the environment began to be appreciated not just in connection with how far their shape, colour, odour, etc., signalled an impending, unconditioned, biological reinforcement. Man began to approach evaluation of the external form of objects from another angle, namely from what ‘capacities’ the inner forces latent in it possessed, what actions (vitally useful or dangerous) the object could produce when the capacities latent in it were set in motion. The information obtained about external objects from the sense organs now passed through the ‘prism’ of a mediating representation, as well as being projected onto the instinctive sense of selfpreservation.

p That meant that this representation became a criterion, as regards psychic reflection of reality, that formed the basis for an objective evaluation of the sense-perceived image of the external object as a mediator-object. The regularity of the appearance of an unconditioned reinforcement following the fixing of an externally observed object was ne longer the invariant that enabled the object to be sensually differentiated according to its shape, colour, etc., from other objects of the environment (similarly to the way aquarium fish distinguish a circle from a triangle, a yellow circle from 120 a black one, etc.). The basis of mental differentiation of an external object from a host of others became its regular capacity (reflected through the mediating representation) to perform precisely an action leading to identical results of its interaction with other external objects, and no others. The effectiveness with which this was done functioned here as the external object’s special inner determinacy, whose reflection in consciousness made it possible to create concepts of the qualitative determinacy of the external mediator-object as a determinacy included in itself and enabling it to be correlated with itself as an object identical with itself. The qualitative determinacy of the object functioned as an articulated whole. But behind this identity of its inner qualitative determinacy there was hidden a capacity for ‘self-action’ displayed in it as a process of interacting with other external objects that led to quite definite results.

p It is important once more to stress that the qualitative determinacy of an object functions as its identification with itself according to its capacity to perform certain actions rather than according to its outward appearance (shape, size, colour, etc.). It is not its external form that determines its quality; on the contrary, it is its qualitative determinacy (in the sense used above) that serves as the basis for the subsequent differentiation of objects according to their sensually perceived appearance. Although the qualitative determinacy of an external implement got its original mental reflection in the naive form of attribution of an inner capacity to it to perform certain actions, that subjective reflection already had an objective content, which consisted in the real (and not imaginary) aspects of the qualitative determinacy inherent in the mediator-object being displayed (and revealed) during its interaction with other external objects.

p The sensual image of the external mediator-object perceived by man just emerging from the animal kingdom, began to be qualitatively distinguished from animals’ direct sense perceptions of external objects. Man’s sense perceptions of an external object already contained an idea to the extent that they included a mediating representation of the external object’s internal capacity to perform certain actions. We shall call these perceptions and representations mentally visualised (or rationally sensed) images.

p The origin of the mentally visualised image-perception 121 meant that man began, even with the same structure of analysers, to perceive objects of the environment differently to his animal ancestors. His sense apparatus might have been inferior to that of the animal in its resolving power, but he noticed things in external objects that were inaccessible to the animal (recall, for instance, the comparison between the human eye and the eagle’s). Man ’saw through’ the external envelope of things to features hidden in them that were brought out by his practical use of them during the working of one external object by another in the course of labour operations.

p Such ‘seeing’ of the external world by man has nothing in common with rationalists’ claims that man has a capacity for direct perception of the truth by the ’eyes of reason’, by-passing the primary information obtained from the sense organs. At the same time, however, mentally visualised perception is no longer reducible to direct sense perception, since some one feature of the external object is perceived against the background of its functional purpose as a mediator, established by practice. And when any feature of an object (e.g. the size of a stone) proved useful for an implement’s performance of the function of a mediator, it was fixed in the memory, though there was no direct biological reinforcement associated with it.

p The mentally visualised image-perception fixed in memory, and mentally reproduced in the absence of the object of the perception over a given interval of time, functioned as a mentally visualised image-representation. Here again the profound difference between such a representation and a directly sensed one is revealed. The latter is inseparable from an emotionally felt recollection of the satisfaction or non-satisfaction of a need felt in the past, or an emotionally coloured expectation of the occurrence of an event previously experienced. The mentally visualised representation of an external object was freed from its shackling links with emotional experiences to the extent that it reflected the action of a given external object rather than the subject’s own action. The image of the external object could now be evoked in memory irrespective of whether the subject had felt any directly experienced need for it. Man could now operate mentally with images as ideal formations ‘transferred’ outside his organism, and think about events and things in relative independence of the time of their occurrence (for example, about a forthcoming labour operation to 122 obtain a foodstuff without experiencing a feeling of hunger and without performing the operation at that given moment).

p Initially a mentally visualised representation coincided with a mediating one and therefore contained the contradiction of the latter. On the one hand it was a mentally fixed, sensually perceived image as a ‘copy’ reproduced in memory with a certain resemblance to the external object of the thought. On the other hand it was a representation of an inner determinacy of an object that was itself hidden from direct observation as its inner essence, and was discovered mentally only through the results of man’s activity directly accessible to observation. From this second aspect a mentally visualised representation already contained a concept of an object and the concept coincided initially with a representation of its qualitative definiteness (determinacy) among a host of other objects although it could not at first be given a clearly defined conceptual form. In many respects the concept was still the prisoner of that aspect of a mentally visualised representation that functioned as a sense-perceived image. The concept was gradually differentiated into a relatively independent phenomenon of thought in the course of the further development of labour activity with tools.

p Constant practical use of a tool led to its revealing its various inherent attributes and properties during its interaction with other external objects differing from it. These attributes and properties began to be mentally differentiated from the initially undifferentiated unity of qualitative determinacy, as special parts of its preserved wholeness.

p Once primitive man established in practice, for instance, that a heavy stone that could be held in the hand and thrown with force at an enemy inflicted a mortal blow on it, the stone’s ‘capacity’ to inflict such a blow became a basic factor in appreciating the attributes and properties of stones (their weight, size, shape, etc.). All these properties were initially perceived together, in an undifferentiated way. But (in contrast to conditioned reflex perception) the direct source of the wholeness of this perception was no longer an instinctive feeling of self-preservation but the concept of the determinacy of stones, which was mentally fixed as their inherent capacity to inflict a mortal blow. Stones used during the hunt, or in beating off the attacks of enemies, were evaluated according to how far they successfully performed 123 the function of attaining that result. The effectiveness of the performance of a function also figured here as the qualitative determinacy of a stone, which contained the undifferentiated unity of its various properties and attributes in undeveloped form. Reflection of this determinacy in primitive man’s head was already creating the conditions for choice and preparation as weapons, of those stones that had proved in practice to be able to inflict a fatal blow more effectively.

p The constant use of stones as weapons to inflict blows led to the conclusion that a pointed stone plunged or thrust into a victim by its sharp, pointed end yielded the desired result with a greater degree of success than a round stone. That circumstance stimulated the making of sharp stone weapons, and also a striving to use them in such away that they affected the body of the object of the hunt or an attacking enemy with their points. The attribute of being pointed or tapered was thus mentally singled out from the qualitative, undifferentiated nature of this weapon, and independent significance was attributed to it in consciousness which became reflected in a new concept. Weapons with a pointed (conical) shape were thus differentiated in practice and mentally from other external objects as a special group according to the attribute of pointedness.

p The mental singling out of pointed shape and its reflection in a special concept were an act of abstraction and ideal identification of weapons according to this common attribute of theirs, with relative abstraction from other properties and attributes that constituted the weapon’s undifferentiated, qualitative determinacy. The external shape of the object was thus mentally singled out from its material elements. Once this form got relative independence in consciousness, the concept of it was more or less immaterial to reflection of its material substratum in consciousness. The role of a sharp weapon could be performed by a stone, stick, split bone, etc., of the appropriate shape; it was only important that they successfully ‘coped’ with the function of inflicting a mortal blow on an enemy or an object of the hunt. It thus became possible to identify various objects mentally by their outward shape.

p Although the concept of conical shape was singled out as an independent one in the initial period of its formation, it still] had an undifferentiated character as regards its volume. It was the concept of the object’s pointed shape ’in 124 general’, in contrast to the shape of objects that did not have the attribute of pointedness, an attribute that indicated its usefulness in practical use. Primitive man differentiated sharp stones from all others, still without distinguishing at what angle of the cone this shape ’was sharpened’. The angle might be blunt, straight, more or less sharp; these features of the pointed form were still perceived together. Only in the course of further practical use of pointed implements, and in accordance with the results of using them, did man begin to distinguish the sharper form of the weapon from a less sharp one, and endeavour to make tools of an appropriate shape more suitable to his purposes. That opened up a possibility of mentally distinguishing the quantitative determinacy of the shape of an object, as yet still in a very general, unconcretised way (for example, ’this object is more pointed than that’). In the same way concepts of other attributes and properties of external objects (size, hardness, weight, etc.) arose, stemming from the practice of using and making implements.

p It is not difficult to trace how a host of other attributes and properties were singled out in like fashion from the original undifferentiated wholeness of the reflection of an object in consciousness. The objects of the environment included in man’s practical activity were subjected to reciprocal processing that revealed their ever expanding wealth and variety to his mental gaze, and brought about an ever greater concretisation of knowledge of external objects. On the other hand, however, development of a capacity for mental differentiation of objects’ separate attributes and properties meant confirmation of the growing role of abstract thought. The faculty of abstracting made it possible to discover deep causal relations between objectively existing objects, and to disclose laws of the development of the material world hidden from direct sense observation. It is not always noticed that the basis of many modern discoveries had already been laid at the dawn of human society. That is true not only of the fact that there would have been no modern civilisation without the birth of the first cellule of logical thought from the union of primitive man and tools, and without the development of that cellule during the complication of human activity, but it is also true in the narrower sense that there is a link between certain naive notions of savages and modern ideas of fundamental science, in spite 125 of the seemingly impassable gap between them in depth of penetration into the essence of phenomena.

p In the early stage of man’s development, in fact, he could already mentally distinguish certain attributes of objects from their isolated bearer, which created a possibility of a generalised grouping of objects according to some attribute they had in common, and of establishing the identity, on that basis, of objects that differed from one another. And insofar, for example, as the property of weight was isolated in consciousness from a single object and became recognised as an inner property common to various objects, the possibility arose of a quantitative comparison of quite dissimilar, qualitatively different objects. That possibility was realised later in a lump of clay being comparable in weight, for example, to a piece of iron, and so on. The subsequent development of abstract reflection of the property of weight, associated with progress in practical and cognitive activity, played its role centuries and centuries later in discovery of the fundamental law of universal gravitation, which led in turn to the construction of modern theories of gravitation.

The genesis of logical thought also qualitatively altered the aspect of direct sense perception that in animals is called orientation reactions. Animals, as we know, react to unfamiliar external signals (the appearance of an object not previously encountered in their field of vision; an unusual sound, etc.), becoming on the alert and trying to determine whether or not this new signal is associated with danger to them or whether, on the contrary, it is a signal of the presence of an object that will satisfy some biological need. And if the newly discovered object, on further ’ investigation’ by the means available to the animal, limited by the structure of its analysers, and by the specific features of the structure of its bodily organs as regards opportunities to affect the object, etc., proves to be quite neutral as regards its significance for its life, the animal will simply cease to notice it.

p K

p Once man, however, discovered that there was a hidden force behind the outward appearance of things, he was not satisfied with external examination of an object by direct observation. He tried to elucidate whether it could be adapted to use as a mediator of sorts, and endeavoured through the action of other objects on it to ‘penetrate’ into the object that interested him in order to learn what force exactly was 126 latent in it. Man separates the object into parts (analyses it) in practice, and later by mental operations, arid puts it together from its parts (synthesis), and also joins it with other objects. In contrast to animals’ elementary analytical-synthetic activity (the breaking of nuts, birds’ building of nests, etc.), man’s investigatory activity has no bounds, just as the world around him has no finite bounds, because on passing from a phenomenon to its essence, from essence of the first degree to essence of the second, and so on, he discovers more and more deeply hidden patterns of objective reality calling for explanation, and in the end finds this explanation, and thereby again discovers the incompleteness of knowledge of the eternal, infinite material world. He thus comes endlessly closer to understanding of absolute truth, confirming in practice the objectivity of knowledge contained in relative truths.

p The transition to labour led to a transformation, as well, of the sense of self-movement (kinaesthesia). Whereas this sense (sometimes called muscular) had previously been limited to the movements of the animal’s organs including movement of its organs of vision, external motion of its body towards vitally useful objects (or away from dangerous objects), grasping motions, etc., now the sense of selfmovement was transferred to the self-movement of external objects; at first to the ‘self-movement’ of external mediators actuated by man and later to other objects.

p We shall not dwell on the consequences of the transition to labour (widely discussed in the Soviet literature), i.e. the transition to erect posture, freeing of the hands to perform various operations (which ultimately led to transformation of the clumsy, awkward movements of the anterior extremities of anthropoid apes when handling external implements to the organ of the human body, so perfected in its universal plasticity as the hand of a virtuoso violinist or a painter). Here we would draw attention to the fact that kinaesthetic sensations are often given a special role in the psychological literature that consists in their uniting various sensations in the integral image of an object, while forming part of all sorts of perceptions. In other words, they are a subjective source, from that standpoint, of the wholeness of the image. In our view this thesis needs refinement.

p Kinaesthesia is one aspect of the living organism’s reflective activity directed to maintaining its integrity in its 127 direct relationship with the environment. To the extent to which kinaesthetic sensations characterise this direction of the organism’s activity, and the vital process of its selfmovement, they can be regarded as the subjective source of the wholeness of sense images, if one remembers that the source of their own wholeness goes back in turn to the instinctive sense of self-preservation. But, as follows from the foregoing exposition, this proposition cannot be extended to man’s kinaesthetic sensations without substantial reservations.

p The objective basis of the integral wholeness of the subjective sense image of an external object is ultimately the definite wholeness of the object itself, independent of sensations. That statement, confirmed by practice, raises no doubts or discussion in dialectical materialist epistemology. But we are concerned here rather with the subjective source of man’s faculty of forming integral sense images; the answer to what is the nature of this source raises many difficulties.

p Many researchers have shown, for example, that the human eye is a ‘feeler’ (as I. M. Sechenov put it), which is in constant motion during perception of an object, successively ‘feeling’ its separate parts and the object as a whole. But one can hardly conclude from this that the subjective source of the wholeness of the image is man’s kinaesthetic sensations of the movement of the eye muscles translated to the brain together with the visual sensations and ’tied up’ in it through the muscular sense into an integral image of the object. (Earlier we spoke of the failure of the associationist school’s attempts to reduce the wholeness of the image to an aggregate of separate sensations.) The source of man’s subjective capacity to form whole images by specifically human means apparently cannot be discovered without returning to the period of his origin. The special nature of human sense perception has its genetic roots in the time when the faculty to create mediating representations was taking shape.

p If, however, we consider man as the ‘formed’ result of all preceding social and historical development, then, in our view, we must consider the direct, subjective source of the wholeness of the sense image to be the mentally visualised image of the object built up as a result of his previous activity. This result contains not only his individual experience acquired during his lifetime but also that 128 accumulated by his contemporaries, and preceding generations, and passed on to him and incorporated in his individual experience. The subjective source of the wholeness of the mentally visualised images of an object is thus a concept of it whose content is also the product of man’s socio-historical evolution in the same way as we explained in regard to mentally visualised images. The concept, in turn, comes genetically from mental reflection (predetermined by labour) of the object’s qualitative determinacy as an object identical with itself, but existing independently of any subjective sensations. The developed concept of an external object is ramified into a host of mentally visualised images which associate the idea of it with actual contemplation of it. Allowing for that, we might say that the wholeness of the direct sense image of an object observed by man is given by mentally visualised images of it built up phylogenetically and ontogenetically, rather than by kinaesthetic sensations. It is not by chance that the eye, when examining an object, ’rests only on certain elements of the objects of vision, and very little on others, and quite ignores certain others’.⁸ The human eye, in its scanning movements, often runs over those parts of an object’s contours that are most important for singling it out from a number of others from the angle of the level of knowledge of it that the subject has accumulated at the moment of perception.

p Strotton’s experiments with optical lenses provide good confirmation of the dependence of human visual perception on the specific features of our socio-historical experience. The specific nature of human experience in its most abstract definition is, as we have seen, that man, unlike animals, transfers his sense perceptions to an external object as to ’his other’ and passes (through that intermediate stage) to understanding of the external world as an objective reality existing outside him and independently of him. Insofar as that circumstance has already been reinforced in his practical relation with the external world, and correspondingly in his consciousness, he has acquired the capacity to actively overcome the contradictoriness of the situations that create illusions in the perception of objects of the external world.

p Such experiments are evidence of the truth of the tenet of dialectical materialism that man recognises the external world as independent of his direct subjective perception of objective reality, and it is not objective reality that is 129 adapted to the ’aggregate of sensations’ but rather the latter to the former. In that way the possibility of his correct orientation in the external world is realised to the extent that an adequate reflection of the objective order of things in consciousness, independent of either direct sense perception or consciousness, is concealed in the sense data. These experiments also confirm that man’s sensory reflection of objective reality cannot be reduced to direct sensory reflection. Animals that relate directly to the external world, and therefore cannot ‘carry’ their sensory reflection outside themselves as reflection of a reality independent of them display a complete incapacity to adapt to perception of the world through lenses that invert the image. They sink into an exhausted, depressed, rejected state accompanied with indifference to the situation around them.

p The wealth of very fine nuances of the sense image of objects directly perceived by man, with preservation of the integrity of the image, consequently depends on how far mentally perceived images of them have been developed during previous activity, and on the level of the individual’s practical and theoretical mastery of the objects. There are many examples of that in any sphere of human activity. Show a man who is unfamiliar with the fundamentals of nuclear physics a photograph made in a Wilson cloud chamber and he will see nothing except white lines cutting across the dark background of the paper. But for the nuclear physicist the photograph opens up a whole picture of the interaction of ‘captured’ elementary particles to his mental gaze. He can name each particle and becomes ecstatic when he discovers traces in the photograph of a new, hitherto unknown visitor from the microworld.

p One can imagine a situation (during a mental experiment) when a man (with all the knowledge that he has acquired) encounters an object about which he has no information. First of all (if he is sufficiently curious), he will try to establish the identity of the object he has newly discovered with ones he already knows something about. If, however, the new object has no signs of similarity with the mentally visualised images of objects preserved in his memory, he will not, nevertheless, unlike an animal, take as the starting point of his evaluation whether it is edible or, on the contrary, whether it is capable of ‘eating’ him himself.

p In normal conditions a man encountering an object quite unknown to him for the first time would reflect it in the 130 form of a judgment (since he already possesses the faculty of conceptual thought): ’this is something’. In other words, he would create a mediating representation of it containing a unity of his sense perception of it and the concept of it as ‘something’. In that concept its determinacy would be reflected mentally in undifferentiated form to the extent that it was dissimilar to any known object. On the other hand, as soon as it became accessible to direct sense perception precisely as a really existing object, it could no longer be nothing for him (’not anything’). In appropriate conditions of the continuation of practical and cognitive relations with it, the mental process of differentiation of its separate attributes and properties that we have already considered would have taken place, and it would have been identified and differentiated from other objects in accordance with them, and so on.

p Critical examination of the thesis about the determining role of kinaesthetic sensations as the central link connecting the aggregate of separate, isolated sensations into a single, integral bunch, convinces us that it cannot be extended unreservedly to man since it is a matter precisely of the qualitative feature of man’s perception of the external world in contrast to that of non-reasoning living creatures. Given this reservation, the thesis of the synthesising character of kinaesthetic sensations not only does not contradict our initial premisses but rather follows from them. If it is true that the initial source of the wholeness of the sense image, on the ‘subjective’ side, is in the final analysis the wholeness of the living organism itself as a self-regulating system, then this source must go back genetically to the period of the origin of the first living cell as a result of the gradual evolution of inanimate nature. The striving for self-preservation built into the living cell, and for self-development through the assimilation of vitally necessary resources from the external medium, was realised in the course of the active functioning of the living cell itself. The cell’s inner capacity for ‘self-action’ could also have been the initial moment providing the beginning of the subsequent development of the muscular sense. In that case kinaesthesia must actually have functioned as integrating factor in relation to other sensations. But then we would have to make a number of substantial reservations connected with the fact that kinaesthesia did not unite separate, isolated sensations into a wholeness during the evolution of the living cell, but on 131 the contrary branched out in a bundle of increasingly diverse sensations.

p As for man, this property of kinaesthesia may be applied to him to the extent that he is regarded biologically as a species of animal. Since matters stand so, experiments on people (carried out according to the methods of experiments on animals) should have led to discovery of a flowing together of an observable number of isolated sensations in a common stream of kinaesthesia. But if we set ourselves the aim of seeking not the common root of the genesis of animals and man but of examining the qualitative features that single man out precisely as man from the world of animals, then the unsatisfactory nature of the approach to kinaesthetic sensations as the direct source of the tying together of various sensations in the integral image of an object becomes clear. At the level of human conceptual thought the kinaesthesia of the body is supplemented by the ‘kinaesthesia’ of thought. The thesis of the integrating role of kinaesthetic sensations, without its subsequent dialectical materialist deepening, may be employed by spokesmen of Kantian and other subjective idealist conceptions, associated largely with an uncritical transference of the dyad ‘subject-object’ to man’s cognitive activity.

p At the same time living awareness of reality, and its reflection in sensations, including kinaesthetic ones, were and are the sole source of our knowledge about objective reality. Sense perception of new facts disclosed during the development of practical and cognitive activity is the initial element in the deepening or breaking of previously acquired knowledge, when the newly discovered facts will not fit into the context of the old system of knowledge.

p In conclusion it remains to examine certain aspects of the qualitative change in anticipatory reflection as a whole, associated with the transition to logical thinking.

p We said earlier that the organism already exercises a kind of control over the fatal ’miner’s fuse’ reaction in the chain of results r₁, r%, . . . r_n at the level of conditioned reflexes (in contrast to unconditioned reflex activity). And if the rise of r_l switches on the whole chain of subsequent results automatically leading, through a number of mediating links of the chain (r₂, r₃, . . .), to a certain result r_n that is, for example, dangerous to the organism’s life, the organism that has fixed the occurrence of r_l will have an advance presentiment of the future result r_n and, in order 132 to avoid the danger, will stop operation of the switched-on chain, trying to turn the direction of its activity into another channel. When the initial result is associated in the organism’s psyche with the end result, this anticipation of events, bypassing all the intermediate links so as to introduce corrections into its activity, can be called sensory intuition. And it is this anticipation that constitutes the difference between sensory intuition and instinct (with its uncontrollable automatism).

p Since the individual links of the chain of actions are not tied together directly other than through the activity of the organism itself, its establishment by sensory intuition of a link between the results of separate actions, skipping the intermediate links, has only a subjective and probable character. The organism perceives the objective recurrence of external events in its direct interaction with its environment only as the recurrence of its own experiences. In that case, the objective source of the link between events, independent of the animate system, is beyond the system’s capacity to reflect it, and the connection between the events is therefore not objectified as something distinct from the results of its own activity, and there is no external object uniting them.

p The position is greatly altered, however, with the transition from direct to mediated interaction with the environment, and the genesis afterward of logical thought. The sequence of external events is now united in the subject’s psyche through the interaction of the external objects themselves. The ’miner’s fuse’ reaction, which was previously not differentiated from the instinctive sense of self- preservation, and was fixed through emotional experiences and sensory intuition, goes outside the organism, as it were, with the genesis of consciousness, and is reflected in consciousness as the inevitability of the development of a certain sequence of events (e.g the onset of cold winter weather after the autumn), independent of it, and separate from its body. Man thus acquired the faculty of averting the dangerous effects of the foreseeable results of objective events not through adaptive changes of his organism (e.g. the accumulation of glycerine in cells, or the growth of a thicker coat, or hibernation, etc.), but by bringing other external objects and processes into action (e.g. use of the skins of killed animals as clothing, the lighting of a campfire, etc.).

p The stochastic character of anticipatory reflection also 133 underwent qualitative changes with the transition to logical thought. When the intermediate link was created and set going, its action was equally conclusive for man irrespective of how often it became an object of observation— once or a thousand times. The recurrence of the results of observations was now related to reinforcement of the process of the mediator’s self-movement in man’s memory, but the objective process of its self-movement had no relation to the frequency with which the recurrence of the observations was confirmed. When man lights a fire, for instance, the chain reaction of combustion will continue in the appropriate conditions while there is material that will burn, irrespective of whether man watches the fire (or how often) or completely ignores it. Or take another example: the operation of the objective law whereby a sharp object can pierce the body of a victim more easily than a blunt one does not depend on how many times the hunter throws his spear.

p The recurrence of subjective observations is now no longer men’s direct source of the order of events, but rather their objective pattern, associated with the use of a mediator, becomes the source of the recurrence of observations. In contrast to direct sensory observations the link reflected in consciousness now not only has a subjective, stochastic or probability character but also an objective, necessary one. The choice of direction of man’s activity in regard to the environment (in contrast to an animal’s) correspondingly also becomes more determined. The probability character of the direction of an animal’s behaviour in response to a situation in its environment is evidence of its complete dependence on external conditions that it is powerless to alter. Man, however, has become freer to the extent that he is conscious of necessity and knows how to put objective laws to his use.

p With the genesis of logical thought all aspects of direct sense reflection (instinctive sense of self-preservation, sense of need, sphere of emotional experiences, perception and apperception, kinaesthetic sensations, etc.) thus underwent a qualitative change. When treating direct sense reflection as the natural, historical precondition of conceptual thought, we might call it preconscious reflection. The genesis of consciousness, transforming preconscious reflection, does not mean the latter’s complete elimination and its metaphysical negation. What takes place is a dialectical negation leading to preservation of direct sensory reflection in rational 134 reflection in a ‘sublated’ form. With the development of consciousness, the preconscious is preserved, as the subconscious to the extent that it is not within the sphere of consciousness at the moment.

p The subconscious continues to be involved in regulation of man’s behaviour, finding a manifestation of sorts in the field of conscious activity. The area of the interconnection of the conscious and subconscious is one of complex problems that have been the subject-matter of many special studies. Here, however, we must draw attention to the very general proposition about their relation that follows from our exposition. If we admit that the integrity of direct sensory reflection in animals is due, on the ‘subjective’ side, to the wholeness of the living organism itself as a biological system, then the instinct of self-preservation, i.e. organisms’ striving to preserve their integrity (as we have already said), underlies the kind of situation that determines their behaviour. With the genesis of consciousness the character of the situation must also have been altered, but it obviously could not disappear. The research of D. N. Uznadze and his disciples demonstrates that the set up plays an important role in regulating man’s behaviour. We might say that the character of the situation is altered to the extent that consciousness is realised instinct.

p That is manifested in the animal striving to preserve life being replaced in Homo sapiens by quests for the sense of life, and the creation of lofty ideals for which people are prepared to sacrifice their own lives. The ideal created by man, like ideal reflection in general, may reflect reality more or less adequately or in distorted form, and may either correspond to the objective requirements of social progress or contradict them. The truly human ideal, worthy of a rational being, is the one that corresponds to the objective patterns of the evolution of nature and society.

p With discovery of the objective laws of social development by the founders of scientific communism, ideals worthy of man cannot be created without the moulding of a Marxist-Leninist outlook on the world. Starting from that broadly known tenet of historical materialism, we would note that, as soon as any ideal created by man becomes his inner conviction, it begins to play the role of a subjective situation underlying the general direction of his behaviour. To the extent that the conviction has become a really inseparable, integral inner characteristic of the subject, an 135 essential quality of his own ‘Ego’ (relatively independent of the ways it was formed, which may be various), it becomes a guiding factor of behaviour that does not require fixing in consciousness as ’his other’. The conviction functions as an ’inner Ego’ returning to the sphere of the transformed preconscious, i.e. to the sphere of the subconscious.

p When we speak of the direct source of the integrity of man’s perceptions of the external world, which consists in the level of knowledge of the world that he has attained, we specially single out that aspect of rational reflection which distinguishes him qualitatively from the animal, as a specific feature of a thinking being only. But man is not an inanimate reasoning mechanism. He is a living creature, an integral biological organism, and as such bears in himself air the results of the preceding stages of his natural evolution, including the preconscious, animal state in ’sublated* form. The wholeness of his outlook, therefore, moulded on a foundation different in principle and quite foreign to animals, is nevertheless indirectly linked in a complicated way with the wholeness of his biological organisation, transformed as a result of the transition to labour. We can therefore say that the link between the phenomena of the unconscious, preconscious, conscious, and subconscious will receive its further scientific explanation in an integral theory built on the basis of dialectical materialism.

p Notes to Chapter 5

p  ^^1^^ See P. K. Anokhin. The Philosophical Sense of the Problem of Intellect. Voprosy filosofii, 1973, 6: 93;

p B. S. Ukraintsev. Samoupravlyaemye sistemy I prichinnost (Self-Regulative Systems and Causality), Mysl, Moscow, 1972, pp. 122-154.

p  ^^2^^ P. K. Anokhin. Art. cit., p. 96.

p  ^^3^^ Cited from B. S. Ukraintsev. Op. cit., p. 147.

p  ^^4^^ B. S. Ukraintsev. Op. cit., p. 175.

p  ^^5^^ V. D. Glovatsky and A.V. Nikitin (Ed.). Vozniknoveniye i razvitie zemledeliya (The Origin and Development of Agriculture). Nauk’a, Moscow, 1967; G. N. Lisitsyna. Through the Eyes of Ancient Artists. Priroda, 1968; 11; 74-76;

p G. N. Lisitsyna. Cultured Plants in the Middle East and the South of Asia in VIII-V millennia B. C. Sovetskaya arkheologiya, 1970, 3: 53-66.

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p  ^^6^^If the debatable question of animals’ psychic capacity to possess representations in the form of interconnected reproductive images were ever resolved in their favour that would not, in any way, mean recognition of a capacity in them for cognitive thought. Man is capable of operating mentally with representations as ‘copies’ of events that happened outside his organism. In an animal, however, the psychic link of reproductive images could only be expressed in changes in its emotional mood engendered by ‘recollections’ of past events (on condition, of course, that the interaction between it and its environment is really made according to the scheme S++N).

p  ^^7^^ In this connection we must draw attention to Lukasevich’s comment that Aristotle originally formulated the syllogism not as a conclusion but as an implication, in which the antecedent is a conjunction of premisses and the consequent a conclusion. Lukasevich also notes that in contrast to traditional logic Aristotle put the predicate first and the subject second. See Ya. Lukasevich. Ar^;stotelevskaya sillogistika s tochki zreniya sovremennoi jormaVnoi logiki (Aristotelean Syllogistics from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic), Nauka, Moscow, 1959; N. I. Kondakov. Vvedenie v logiku (Introduction to Logic), Nauka, Moscow, 1967, p. 329.

 ^^8^^ A. L. Yarbus. RoV dvizheniya glaz v protsesse zreniya (The Role of Eye Movements in the Process of Seeing), Nauka, Moscow, 1965, p. 125.