Page 766 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

Throughout his life, Lenin told his followers that matter was absolute real-
ity. Actually, he gave his most impassioned speeches to impressions of
people formed in his brain and the followers from whom he took his
strength were also impressions in his brain.

In the 8th volume of the Larousse Encyclopedia, mate-
rialist philosophy is defined as follows:

Materialism is a doctrine which does not accept the existence
of any other substance than matter. It is the opposite of ideal-
ism which says that the essence and substance of reality is

created by spirit.
As we can see in this brief definition, materialist phi-

losophy regards matter as the only absolute existent and
believes that, apart from matter, no thought or thing ex-
ists. Materialist philosophy does not accept the existence
of spirit but regards human consciousness as a product of

the activities of the brain. (We considered the invalidity of
this materialist claim in the section entitled, "One of the Most
Important Dilemmas of Materialism: Human Consciousness").
One of the most important implications of what is explained

throughout this book is the fact that materialist philosophy is completely
invalid. This is due to the fact that it is now very clear today that what we call mat-
ter is an impression in our mind; it is impossible for us to demonstrate that these impressions have any ma-
terial referent outside our mind. This is because it is impossible for us to come out of our minds and come

into contact with a material source of things. If we accept this fact summarized in two sentences, neither
matter nor materialism remains. Even if we think that our perceptions have a material counterpart outside
our minds, seeing that we can never attain to this counterpart, it is clearly unnecessary and pointless to con-
struct a philosophy on matter whose very existence is doubtful and to base a view of life on it.

The basic reason why those who espouse materialist philosophy are disturbed by this important secret
underlying matter and refuse to accept it even though it is very evident, is that they understand that it will
mean the end of their philosophy. Throughout history every materialist has been disturbed by the descrip-
tion of the nature of matter, even by the other materialists' reading books telling about this fact, and they

have expressed their misgivings. For example, one of the leaders of the bloody Russian Revolution,
Vladimir I. Lenin, in his book written almost a century ago called Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, warned
his followers of this fact:

Once you deny objective reality, given us in sensation, you have already lost every weapon against fideism, for

you have slipped into agnosticism or subjectivism-and that is all that fideism requires. A single claw ensnared,
and the bird is lost. And our Machists have all become ensnared in idealism, that is, in a diluted, subtle fideism;
they became ensnared from the moment they took "sensation" not as an image of the external world but as a spe-
cial "element". It is nobody's sensation, nobody's mind, nobody's spirit, nobody's will. 38

These sentences show how uncomfortable this fact made materialists; Lenin was very afraid of it and
wanted to erase it from his own mind and from the minds of his comrades. But materialists today are in a

much greater state of discomfort than Lenin was because the invalidity of materialism has, in the last 100
years, become more clearly and strongly established. Considered in the past to be a philosophical specula-
tion or a matter of opinion, the unreality of matter has now been proven for the first time in history in an ir-
refutable and scientifically based manner. The science writer Lincoln Barnett says that even hinting at this

possibility makes materialist scientists anxious and fearful:

Along with philosophers' reduction of all objective reality to a shadow-world of perceptions, scientists have be-
come aware of the alarming limitations of man's senses. 39

764 Atlas of Creation Vol. 3