¹ In the article on “Marxist Philosophy” by Neil Mclnnes, Volume 5, page 174.

² Analysis, Volume 5, No. 5 (August, 1938), pages 65–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in Philosophy and Analysis, edited by Macdonald, Margaret (Oxford, 1954, pages 278–286).Google Scholar

³ Analysis (op. cit.), page 68. (Philosophy and Analysis, edited by M. Macdonald (op. cit.), page 281).

⁴ Wolniewicz, Bogustaw, in his article “Lenin i Filozofia Subiektywnego Idealizmu” in studia filozoficzne, Volume 63 (1970), No. 2, pages 151–170Google Scholar, advances an interpretation like this for much of what Lenin says in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism but, contrary to the present contention, he thinks there are also passages in the book supporting a representationalist interpretation. He also takes for granted without argument, as indeed G.A. Paul does in attacking Lenin, the logical positivist Verification Principle, according to which nothing logically contingent is either true or false unless its truth or falsity would necessarily make a difference in what experiences we were to have. As the Vienna Circle were well aware, this Principle is incompatible with realism, inasmuch as the realist cannot deny the conceivability self-consistently – however ridiculously improbably – of the same sequence of experiences as we are in fact undergoing, though without those material objects causing them which we normally suppose (no matter how justifiably) to be existent in objective reality. The point is that numerical difference necessitates logical independence. Cf. George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, 18.

⁵ On page 71 Lenin quotes with approval Norman Kemp Smith's criticism of Avenarius for using the term “experience” sometimes to mean experiencing and sometimes to mean the experienced. This implies the view (in opposition to Avenarius and representationalists alike) that the experienced (that which is directly perceived or otherwise an immediate object of consciousness) need not always be something psychical (such as experiencing). Norman Kemp Smith's fellow Scot, the eighteenth-century “common sense” philosopher, Thomas Reid, was perhaps the first direct realist to emphasize the distinction between perceivings and the perceived, as against Locke and Berkeley's conflation of them under the name of “idea”.

⁶ This is more or less the version of direct realism expounded by D.M. Armstrong in Chapters 7–10 of his book, Perception and the Physical World (London, 1961, pages 80–135)Google Scholar, and Chapters 10–12 of his A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London, 1968, pages 208–290)Google Scholar. On page 227 of the latter book, Armstrong expressly withdraws – for reasons which are, perhaps, not very good – his earlier characterization of the position taken as a form of “direct realism”.

⁷ Here Lenin is using “matter” in the ontological sense of the word (= the spatiotemporal). In this sense, materialism denies the existence-or-occurrence of anything nonmaterial. In the epistemological sense, on the other hand, “… the sole ‘property’ of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind” (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, pages 260–261); and, in that sense of the word, of course, to call the mind or its operations “material” is nothing but a simple and uninteresting contradiction (“a muddle”, as Lenin calls it on page 245 of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism). See the present author's discussion in “On the Dialectical Unity of the Marxist Concept of Matter”, Horizons, The Marxist Quarterly, No. 28, Winter 1969, pages 72–84.Google Scholar

⁸ This last case, however, is different in principle from all the others. For, when we describe the non-existent oasis a traveller has seen, what we are really characterizing is his experience, that is, we are saying something about him of a psychological nature. When we describe Cupid's bow (e.g. as wooden, and hence material) we are really stating a fact about a certain historical myth. When we say anything mentioning the “canals”, or river-system, of the planet Mars, we are really speaking of a certain scientific theory, one which indeed has been definitely disproved only recently. But, when we talk about the various extinct dinosaurs that once populated the earth, we are not, strictly speaking, describing – even though we are ourselves voicing – human thought or theories on that subject.

⁹ As between (2) and (3), which account of hallucination is the correct one? Either, the difference between the two of them being only verbal. In one way of speaking, (as in (3)), hallucinating does not count as really being seeing. In another way of speaking, (as in (2)), it is sufficient for something to have been seen (whether existent or not) that somebody has had a sensory-type experience as if veridically seeing it. Compare the use of the word “(to) report”. In one way of speaking it is not necessary to be real to “be reported”. An account which reports non-existent things simply is false. But, in another way of speaking, such an account does not really report things, but really only purports to be reporting. Similarly, in one way of speaking, it is perfectly possible to have seen things which never existed; whereas, in another way of speaking, the experient has only “seemed to see” the things in question. The whole persuasiveness of the Argument From Illusion rests upon the confusion of these two ways of speaking. With the first one in mind, we feel unable to deny that the victim of a hallucination really has seen something. However, in the second way of speaking, nothing can have been seen without having existed. And so, as the mirage-oasis that the traveller saw did not exist spatiotemporally – materially – we seem to find ourselves forced to the conclusion that it must have existed somehow immaterially.

¹⁰ For fuller discussion of these cases, see the two books by D.M. Armstrong (op. cit.). Armstrong, of course, is not committed to the particular details of the presentation in this paragraph and the preceding two. The same thing goes, a fortiori, for the exposition below in the fourth last paragraph of the present article.

¹¹ A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by Selby-Bigge, L.A. (Oxford, 1888), pages 96, 130, 199, 629.Google Scholar

¹² E.g., Acton, H.B., The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophical Creed (London, 1955), page 36Google Scholar; this even though Acton himselfjoins in characterizing Lenin as representationalist (ibid., pages 39–40).

¹³ However, even in English, a propositional use of the word “image” is not actually impossible. The sixth meaning of the word given by the Oxford English Dictionary is: “A representation of something to the mind by speech or writing; a vivid or graphic description”.

¹⁴ Op. cit., pages 68–69 (pages 281–282 of the Macdonald book).

¹⁵ Such a denial amounts (doubtless usually unintentionally) to the adoption of a position of subjective idealism since, in order to deny even the possibility of all sensuous experience being hallucinatory, the theorist must construe “hallucinatory” sensuous experiences meaning deviant, abnormal sensuous experiences, rather than as meaning, sensuous experiences which are not caused (at least not in the right way) by objects in external reality corresponding to them.

¹⁶ Including G.A. Paul, op. cit., pages 72–73 (pages 285–286 of the Macdonald book).