sity and at the
Academy in a formal and solemn fashion the science of free inquiry with
Lamark! This science, which the bourgeois epoch has, through its
inherent conditions, stimulated and made to grow like a giant, is the
only heritage of past centuries which communism accepts and adopts
without reserve.

It would not be useful to stop here for the discussion of the so-called
antithesis between science and philosophy. If we accept those fashions
of philosophizing which are confounded with mysticism and theology,
philosophy never means a science or doctrine separate from its
appropriate and particular things, but it is simply a degree, a form, a
stage of thought with relation to the things which enter into the domain
of experience. Philosophy is, then, either a generic anticipation of the
problems which science has still to elaborate specifically, or a summary
and a conceptual elaboration of the results at which the sciences have
already arrived. As for those who, that they may not appear behind the
times, talk now of scientific philosophy, if we do not wish to stop over
the humorous element that there is in that expression, it will suffice
to say that they are simply fools.

I said some pages back, in my statement of formulas, that the economic
structure determines in the second place the direction, and in great
part and indirectly, the objects of imagination and of thought in the
production of art, of religion and of science. To express this
otherwise, or to go further, would be to put one's self voluntarily on
the road toward the absurd.

Before all else, in this formula, we are opposing the fantastic opinion,
that art, religion and science are subjective developments and
historical developments of a pretended artistic, religious or scientific
spirit, which would go on manifesting itself successively through its
own rhythm of evolution, favored or retarded on this side or that by
material conditions. By this formula, it is desired to assert, moreover,
the necessary connection, through which every fact of art and of
religion is the exponent, sentimental, fantastic and thus derived, of
definite social conditions. If I say _in the second place_, it is to
distinguish these products from the facts of legal-political order which
are a true and proper projection of economic conditions. And if I say
_in great part and indirectly the objects_ of these activities, it is to
indicate two things: that in artistic or religiou