Scanned from Four Essays on Philosophy. 1968 Foreign Languages Press Edition. Please report errors to mim@mim.org.
Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are
they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it
alone; they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production,
the class struggle and scientific experiment. It is man's social being that
determines his thinking. Once the correct ideas characteristic of the advanced
class are grasped by the masses, these ideas turn into a material force
which changes society and changes the world. In their social practice, men
engage n various kinds of struggle and gain rich experience, both from their
successes and from their failures. Countless phenomena of the objective
external world are reflected in a man's brain through his five sense organs-the
organs of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. At first, knowledge is
perceptual. The leap to conceptual knowledge, i.e., to ideas occurs when
sufficient perceptual knowledge is accumulated. This is one process in cognition.
It is the first stage in the whole process of cognition, the stage leading
from objective matter to subjective consciousness, from existence to ideas.
Whether or not one's consciousness or ideas (including theories, policies,
plans or measures) do correctly reflect the laws of the objective external
world is not yet proved at this stage, in which it is not yet possible to
ascertain whether they are correct or not. Then comes the second stage in
the process of cognition, the stage leading from consciousness back to matter,
from ideas back to existence, in which the knowledge gained in the first
stage is applied in social practice to ascertain whether the theories, policies,
plans or measures meet with the anticipated success. Generally speaking,
those that succeed are correct and those that fail are incorrect, and this
is especially true of man's struggle with nature. In social struggle, the
forces representing the advanced class sometimes suffer defeat not because
their ideas are incorrect but because, in the balance of forces engaged
in struggle, they are not as powerful for the time being as the forces of
reaction, they are therefore temporarily defeated, but they are bound to
triumph sooner or later. Man's knowledge makes another leap through the
test of practice. This leap is more important than the previous one. For
it is this leap alone that can prove the correctness or incorrectness of
the first leap, i.e., of the ideas, theories, policies, plans or
measures formulated in the course of reflecting the objective external world.
There is no other way of testing truth. Furthermore, the one and only purpose
of the proletariat in knowing the world is to change it. Often, a correct
idea can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process leading
from matter to consciousness and then back to matter, that is, leading from
practice to knowledge and then back to practice. Such is thc Marx ist theory
of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge. Among our
comrades there are many who do not yet understand this theory of knowledge.
When asked the source of their ideas, opinions, policies, methods, plans
and conclusions, eloquent speeches and long articles, they consider the
question strange and cannot answer it. Nor do they comprehend that matter
can be transformed into consciousness and consciousness into matter, although
such leaps are phenomena of everyday life. It is therefore necessary to
educate our comrades in the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge,
so that they can orientate their thinking correctly, become good at investigation
and study and at summing up experience, overcome difficulties, commit fewer
mistakes, do their work better, and struggle hard so as to build China into
a great and powerful socialist country and help the broad masses of the
oppressed and exploited through out the world in fulfilment of our great
internationalist duty.
This passage is from the "Draft Decision of the Central Committee
of the Chinese Communist Party on Certain Problems in Our Present Rural
Work", which was drawn up under the direction of Comrade Mao Tse-tung.
The passage was written by Comrade Mao Tse-tung.