Page 266 - For Men of Understanding

ed to a second person's brain, that person would also feel full after Engels fin-
ished the cake. If the nerves of materialist Johnson, who felt pain in his foot
after delivering a sound kick to a stone, were connected to a second individ-
ual, that person too would feel himself kick the same stone and feel the same
pain.
So, which cake or stone is the real one? Again, materialist philosophy falls
short of giving a consistent answer. The correct, consistent answer is that
Engels and the second person have both eaten the cake and are satiated in their
minds; both Johnson and the second person have fully experienced kicking the
stone-again, in their minds.
In our previous example, let's make an exchange: Connecting the nerves of
the man hit by the bus to Politzer's brain, and the nerves of Politzer, sitting in
his house, to brain of that accident victim. In this case, Politzer will think that
a bus has hit him, but the man actually hit by the bus will never feel the impact
and think that he is sitting in Politzer's house. The very same logic can be
applied to the examples involving the cake and the stone.
All this reveals how dogmatic materialism actually is. Its philosophy is
founded on the assumption that nothing exists except matter. The fact is, how-
ever, that no one can ever experience any direct contact with matter and thus
be justified in claiming that everything consists of it. The universe we contact
is the universe that we perceive in our minds. The famous British philosopher
David Hume expressed his thoughts on this point:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always
stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or
shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time
without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the percep-
tion. 12
We can never step outside these perceptions and encounter matter as it
"really" is, so it is wholly nonsensical to construct any philosophy regarding
matter as an absolute entity we can experience directly. As a theory, material-
ism is totally unfounded, right from the outset.

The Formation of Perceptions in the Brain Is Not Philosophy,
But Scientific Fact

Materialists claim that what we have stated here is a philosophical view. But
the plain scientific fact is, we cannot interact with the "external" material world,
but only with a world in our brain. This is not a matter of philosophy. All med-
ical schools teach in detail how images and feelings form in the brain. Facts
proven by twentieth-century science, and by physics in particular, clearly show

264 For Men of Understanding