FICTION CHRONICLE
their selections, while on a high level for a popular magazine, have been
confined, for the present at least, to reminiscences of childhood. The
New Yorker's
psyche is very puzzling; it allows a graceful, admirable
pace to children, but insists that the adult be killed off in a few, short,
violent sentences.
Elizabeth Hardwick
ON THE PHILOSOPHICAL BATTLEFRONT
SCIENCE AND IDEALISM.
By
Mourice Cornforth. New York: lnternotionol
Publishers. $3.00.
Whether or not Lenin succeeded in his
Materialism and Em–
pirio-Criticism
in demolishing the philosophy of Ernst Mach, is of smaller
moment for subsequent intellectual history than is the fact that Lenin's
views have been taken by orthodox Communists as authoritative on
all questions dealing
with
epistemology and the interpretation of science.
Lenin pronounced Mach to be an idealist, a solipsist, and a sophistical
defender of a reactionary ideology. Faithful followers of Lenin have
in consequence, and without an independent examination of the actual
evidence, condemned as false and socially dangerous all tendencies in
contemporary philosophy which derive some of their inspiration from
Mach or from the British empiricistic tradition.
However, Lenin wrote before Cambridge analytic philosophy, log–
ical positivism, and pragmatism were born or acquired their present
influence; the polemic contained
in
his book is therefore no longer
directly relevant to the contemporary state of philosophy in the West.
The book under review, written by an Englishman who received his
philosophic training at Cambridge University, is an obvious attempt
to bring Lenin's critique of
positivism
up to date, and to evaluate current
antimetaphysical empirical philosophies from a "materialist" standpoint.
In the first of the two parts of his volume Cornforth repeats Lenin's per–
formance, and again "refutes" traditional British empiricism and the
phenomenalism of Kant and of Mach. In the second part, the larger
of the two, he addresses himself to the views of G. E. Moore, Bertrand
Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf Carnap; he claims to show
in
it
that these modern descendants of Berkeley and Hume have pro–
duced only a barren antiscientific scholasticism, a philosophy which
seeks to reconcile science and religion, a system of ideas which by dis–
torting the significance of science and scientific methods is an obstacle
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