Page 14 - Communism in Ambush

COMMUNISM IN AMBUSH
12

the "Goddess of Reason." In the course of the French Revolution, many
priests and nuns were killed; churches and monasteries were plundered
and destroyed.
At the same time, the philosophy of materialism reawakened and
began to spread throughout Europe. Certain ancient Greek philosophers
had first proposed this philosophy, which believes that only matter ex-
ists, that living things—indeed, human consciousness itself—are only
"matter in motion." In the 18th century, two important names in the
French Revolution, Denis Diderot and his close friend Baron d'Holbach,
adopted this philosophy and imposed it on the people. In his book called
Système de la Nature (The System of Nature) published in 1770, Baron
d'Holbach used a few so-called "scientific" suppositions to propose that
only matter and energy existed. A fanatical atheist, D'Holbach was op-
posed to the concept of morality advocating that human beings should
take all the pleasure they can and do everything they can to get it.
In the 18th century, a few thinkers adopted materialism, but it be-
came much more widespread in the 19th, overflowing the borders of
France to take root in other
European countries. At the begin-
ning of the 20th century, two impor-
tant Materialist thinkers appeared in
Germany: Ludwig Büchner and Karl
Vogt. Vogt tried to explain human
rationality in terms of a simile: "the
brain secretes thought just as the
liver secretes bile." Not even the
Materialists of his time accepted that
nonsensical analogy.
Despite the proffering of such id-
iotic proposals, materialism was
adopted by anti-religious forces,

Communism's roots stretch back to the
French Revolution, when hostility to reli-
gion was embodied by the "goddess of
reason." She later appeared on Communist
posters, like the one on the left.