such other means of proof which are, as it were,
the instruments of their production and their elaboration. Even ideas
involve a basis of social conditions; they have their technique; thought
also is a form of work. To rob the one and the other, ideas and thought,
of the conditions and environment of their birth and their development,
is to disfigure their nature and their meaning."[12]

This socialist materialism does not refuse the inspiration of ideals.
"By granting that society is dominated by material interests," Dietzgen
explains, "we do not deny the power of the ideals of the heart, mind,
science, and art. For we have no more to deal with the absolute
antithesis between idealism and materialism, but with their higher
synthesis which has been found in the knowledge that the ideal depends
on the material, that divine justice and liberty depend on the
production and distribution of earthly goods."[13]

Religions, schools of ethics, philosophy, metaphysics, art, political
and juridical institutions are all to be explained in the last analysis
by the economic and telluric environments, present and past. This
ruthless materialism crushes belief in God, in the Soul, in immortality.
It leaves no room for any shred of dualism in thought. It is true that
the German Social Democracy included in the famous Erfurt Programme
(adopted in 1891--the first clearly Marxian socialist platform ever
promulgated) a demand for a "Declaration that religion is a private
matter. Abolition of all expenditure from public funds upon
ecclesiastical and religious objects. Ecclesiastical and religious
bodies are to be regarded as private associations, which order their
affairs independently." It will be seen that this is nothing more than a
demand that the State withdraw its sanction of religion as France has
recently done in the Clemenceau law. But Ferri does nothing but draw the
necessary conclusions from socialist premises when he writes: "God, as
Laplace has said, is an hypothesis of which exact science has no need;
he is, according to Herzen, at the most an X, which represents not the
_unknowable_--as Spencer and Dubois Raymond contend--but all that which
humanity does not yet know. Therefore, it is a variable X which
decreases in direct ratio to the progress of the discoveries of science.

"It is for this reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio to
each other; the one diminishes and grows weaker in the same proportion
that