ABSTRACT
Sense-perception and the great intellectual systems of man were equally the result of social–in particular industrial–relations. The handmill resulted in feudal society, the stream-mill in industrial and capitalist society, in both cases with the corresponding spiritual and intellectual super-structure. In other words, philosophy, religion, art, culture, on Marx's theory, lost their traditional social and human justification, and became instead epiphenomena reflecting their material causes. Even for Karl Marx and Lenin, however, the ideological propagandist implications of the word matter were more evident than the philosophical implications. The upheavals Marx sought in political life Soren Kierkegaard sought in the Christian life. He threw the old, the outworn, the fake overboard and called on Christians to evolve a new life-style. Marx and Friedrich Engels, with their ideals of a human paradise, therefore found a fertile soil in old and new empiricism, and not only in French materialism.
