Page 268 - For Men of Understanding

one to read Lenin's century-old book Materialism
and Empirio-Criticism, Pekunlu only repeated
Lenin's counsel to "not think over this issue, or you
will lose track of materialism and be carried away by
religion." In an article for the aforementioned peri-
odical, Pekunlu quoted the following lines from
Lenin:
Once you deny the objective reality [that is] given us
in sensation, you have already lost every weapon
against fideism [reliance on faith alone], for you have
slipped into agnosticism or subjectivism-and that is
Turkish materialist writer
Rennan Pekunlu says all that fideism requires. A single claw ensnared, and
that "the theory of
the bird is lost. And our Machists [an adherent of
evolution is not so
important, the real Machism, a modern positivist philosophy], have all
threat is this subject",
become ensnared in idealism, that is, in a diluted,
because he is aware that
this subject nullifies subtle fideism; They became ensnared from the
matter, the only concept
moment they took "sensation" not as an image of the
in which he has faith.
external world, but as a special "element." It is
nobody's sensation, nobody's mind, nobody's spirit, nobody's will. 13
These words explicitly demonstrate the fact that Lenin found alarming and
wanted to expunge, both from his own mind and the minds of his "comrades."
It disturbs contemporary materialists too, in a similar way. But Pekunlu and
other materialists suffer a yet greater distress because they know that this cer-
tain fact is now being advanced in a way that's far more explicit convincing
than a hundred years ago. For the first time, this subject is being explained in
a truly irrefutable way.
Still, nevertheless, a great number of materialist scientists take a superficial
stand against the fact that no one can reach matter in and of itself. The subject
covered in this chapter is one of the most important and most exciting that a
person can ever run across. It's fairly unlikely that these scientists would have
faced such a crucial subject before, but the reactions and the stance they
employ in their speeches and articles still hint at how shallow and superficial
their comprehension really is.
Some materialists' reactions show that their blind adherence to materialism
has somehow impaired their logic, making them far removed from compre-
hending the subject. For instance, Alaeddin Senel-like Rennan Pekunlu, an aca-
demician and a writer for Bilim ve Utopya-said, "Forget the collapse of
Darwinism, the real threatening subject is this one," and made demands imply-
ing " prove what you tell," sensing that his own philosophy has no basis. More

266 For Men of Understanding