f
Nihilism. In a word, it teaches the material origin of Ideas. In the
last analysis, every idea can be traced back to the economic and
telluric environments. In the words of Joseph Dietzgen, "philosophy
revealed to them (Marx and Engels) the basic principle that, in the last
resort, the world is not governed by Ideas, but, on the contrary, the
Ideas by the material world." This doctrine involves a new epistemology,
the distinguishing mark of which is its denial of the immaculate
conception of thought. The human mind, according to Marx and Dietzgen,
can only bring forth thought after it has been impregnated by the
objects of sense perception.[10]

Here we have a thorough-going system of materialist monism. "Ours is
the organic conception of history," says Labriola. "The totality of the
unity of social life is the subject matter present to our minds. It is
economics itself which dissolves in the course of one process, to
reappear in as many morphological stages, in each of which it serves as
a substructure for all the rest. Finally, it is not our method to extend
the so-called economic factor isolated in an abstract fashion over all
the rest, as our adversaries imagine, but it is, before everything else,
to form an historic conception of economics, and to explain the other
changes by means of its changes."[11]

In another place he says: "Ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing
comes to us in a dream.... The change in ideas, even to the creation of
new methods of conception, has reflected little by little the experience
of a new life. This, in the revolutions of the last two centuries, was
little by little despoiled of the mythical, religious and mystical
envelopes in proportion as it acquired the practical and precise
consciousness of its immediate and direct conditions. Human thought,
also, which sums up this life and theorizes upon it, has little by
little been plundered of its theological and metaphysical hypotheses to
take refuge finally in this prosaic assertion: in the interpretation of
history we must limit ourselves to the objective co-ordination of the
determining conditions and of the determined effects." He reiterates:
"Ideas do not fall from heaven; and, what is more, like the other
products of human activity, they are formed in given circumstances, in
the precise fulness of time, through the action of definite needs,
thanks to the repeated attempts at their satisfaction, and by the
discovery of such and