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Scanned from Four Essays on Philosophy. 1968 Foreign Languages Press Edition. Please report errors to mim@mim.org.
Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they
innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they
come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class
struggle and scientific experiment. It is man's social being that determines his
thinking. Once the correct ideas characteristic of the advanced class are
grasped by the masses, these ideas turn into a material force which changes
society and changes the world. In their social practice, men engage n various
kinds of struggle and gain rich experience, both from their successes and from
their failures. Countless phenomena of the objective external world are
reflected in a man's brain through his five sense organs-the organs of sight,
hearing, smell, taste and touch. At first, knowledge is perceptual. The leap to
conceptual knowledge, i.e., to ideas occurs when sufficient perceptual knowledge
is accumulated. This is one process in cognition. It is the first stage in the
whole process of cognition, the stage leading from objective matter to
subjective consciousness, from existence to ideas. Whether or not one's
consciousness or ideas (including theories, policies, plans or measures) do
correctly reflect the laws of the objective external world is not yet proved at
this stage, in which it is not yet possible to ascertain whether they are
correct or not. Then comes the second stage in the process of cognition, the
stage leading from consciousness back to matter, from ideas back to existence,
in which the knowledge gained in the first stage is applied in social practice
to ascertain whether the theories, policies, plans or measures meet with the
anticipated success. Generally speaking, those that succeed are correct and
those that fail are incorrect, and this is especially true of man's struggle
with nature. In social struggle, the forces representing the advanced class
sometimes suffer defeat not because their ideas are incorrect but because, in
the balance of forces engaged in struggle, they are not as powerful for the time
being as the forces of reaction, they are therefore temporarily defeated, but
they are bound to triumph sooner or later. Man's knowledge makes another leap
through the test of practice. This leap is more important than the previous one.
For it is this leap alone that can prove the correctness or incorrectness of the
first leap, i.e., of the ideas, theories, policies, plans or measures
formulated in the course of reflecting the objective external world. There is no
other way of testing truth. Furthermore, the one and only purpose of the
proletariat in knowing the world is to change it. Often, a correct idea can be
arrived at only after many repetitions of the process leading from matter to
consciousness and then back to matter, that is, leading from practice to
knowledge and then back to practice. Such is thc Marx ist theory of knowledge,
the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge. Among our comrades there are
many who do not yet understand this theory of knowledge. When asked the source
of their ideas, opinions, policies, methods, plans and conclusions, eloquent
speeches and long articles, they consider the question strange and cannot answer
it. Nor do they comprehend that matter can be transformed into consciousness and
consciousness into matter, although such leaps are phenomena of everyday life.
It is therefore necessary to educate our comrades in the dialectical materialist
theory of knowledge, so that they can orientate their thinking correctly, become
good at investigation and study and at summing up experience, overcome
difficulties, commit fewer mistakes, do their work better, and struggle hard so
as to build China into a great and powerful socialist country and help the broad
masses of the oppressed and exploited through out the world in fulfilment of our
great internationalist duty.
This passage is from the "Draft Decision
of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on Certain Problems in
Our Present Rural Work", which was drawn up under the direction of Comrade Mao
Tse-tung. The passage was written by Comrade Mao Tse-tung.
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