ABSTRACT
Trotsky in the past has never given himself heartily to these sterile exercises. He has, for one thing, been less the victim of Teutonic influences than the “vast majority of the Russian intelligentsia” who, as Plekhanov remarked, “in so far as they have any interest in philosophy trail along after German teachers.” In the process of being banished from one country to another Trotsky has acquired a very cosmopolitan culture. Only in recent times, when Stalin’s tyranny has made the plan-of-action embodied in the Marxian religion seem so obviously impractical, has Trotsky felt obliged to fall back upon the religion itself to defend the plan. If Trotsky knew something about Aristotle’s philosophy, he would not perhaps be quite so glib about his logic. He says later on that the Aristotelian logic was "founded in the period when the idea of evolution itself did not exist".
