Abstract
IN the notice of Dr. Federn's recent book “The Materialist Conception of History” published in NATURE of November 9, the reviewer, while deploring the interest of “the non-historical younger part of our people” in historical materialism, sums up his own attitude, and that of “generations of better historians than Marx”, in the statement that “mind and not matter rules the world”. If this is meant to imply that mind or the human will can act as an independent agent, then it is in striking contrast to the attitude expressed by Prof. Einstein in his article on “Science and Religion” in the same issue of NATURE. In discussing the “regularities obtaining within the realm of living things”, which presumably includes human history, Prof. Einstein says, “For him a man imbued with the ordered regularity of all events neither the rule of human nor the rule of Divine Will exists as an independent cause of natural events.”
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Selected Correspondence (Martin Lawrence), p. 475.
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POWELL, C. Historical Materialism. Nature 147, 119 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/147119a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/147119a0
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