GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THEORY OF COMMUNISM 665
being, develop and behave, and it is a description of the
in which we come to learn the truth about them.
way
For Hegel, the two processes, the development of things
and the discovery of truth, were aspects of the same
reality; but whereas he gave logical priority to the second,
Marx emphasized the priority of the first.
The dialectical process involves a continual series 0F
ups and downs. One tendency by its very success generates
its opposite, so that at the very moment of its apparent
triumph its opposite begins to gain upon it. To take one
of Marx's own examples: the nineteenth century saw
the development of an increasingly triumphant and increasingly
extreme Individualism. But Individualism
throughout the whole period of its advance was generating
Collectivism, which first entered the field as a formidable
rival at the very moment of Individualism's apparent
triumph. Since in coming to fruition any tendency or
movement prepares the way for its opposite, the right
understanding of the tendencies operating in society at
any given moment depends upon a knowledge of the
processes which have brought that society into being.
But the movement from one tendency to the other is
not simply that of a see-saw. The later tendency is truer
than the earlier because it takes it into account and
includes it Thus the conflict of opposing tendencies both
in thought and in events is no less fruitful than necessary,
since it leads to a development in the direction of truth
and reality. There is, however, no finality about the
process, which is endless.
Man's Materialism. Hegel held that the driving
force of the dialectical process was the ideas themselves.
Marx denied this; for him, ideas which were not the
ideas of any mind were meaningless. Moreover, he held
a materialist doctrine according to which minds are
themselves in an important sense the reflections of the
environment in which they operate. The events which
take place in a mind are, therefore, in the last resort,