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Chapter 15

concept. A child who first calls things by their names is making genuine discoveries.

I do not see that this is a cow, for this cannot be seen. I see something big, black,

moving, lowing, etc., and understand that this is a cow. And this act is an act of

classification, of assigning a singular phenomenon to the class of similar phenom-

ena, of systematizing the experience, etc. Thus, language itself contains the basis

and possibilities for the scientific knowledge of a fact. The word is the germ of

science and in this sense we can say that in the beginning of science was the word.

Who has seen, who has perceived such empirical facts as the heat itself in

steam-generation? It cannot be perceived in a single real process, but we can infer

this fact with confidence and to infer means to operate with concepts.

In Engels we find a good example of the presence of abstractions and the

participation of thought in every scientific fact. Ants have other eyes than we have.

They see chemical beams that are invisible to us. [10] This is a fact. How was it

established? How can we know that “ants see things that are invisible to us”? Natu-

rally, this is based on the perceptions of our eye, but in addition to that we have

not only the other senses but the activity of our thinking as well. Thus, establishing

a scientific fact is already a matter of thinking, that is, of concepts.

To be sure, we will never know how these chemical beams look to the ants. Who

deplores this is beyond help [Engels, 1925/1978, p. 507]. [11]

This is the best example of the non-coincidence of the real and the scientific

fact. Here this non-coincidence is presented in an especially vivid way, but it exists

to a certain degree in each fact. We never saw these chemical beams and did not

perceive the sensations of ants, i.e., that ants see certain chemical beams is not a

real fact of immediate experience for us, but for the collective experience of man-

kind it is a scientific fact. But what to say, then, about the fact that the earth turns

around the sun? For here in the thinking of man the real fact, in order to become

a scientific fact, had to turn into its opposite, although the earth’s rotation around

the sun was established by observations of the sun’s rotations around the earth.

By now we are equipped with all we need to solve this problem and we can

go straight for the goal. If at the root of every scientific concept lies a fact and,

vice versa, at the basis of every scientific fact lies a concept, then from this it in-

evitably follows that the difference between general and empirical sciences as re-

gards the object of investigation is purely quantitative and not fundamental. It is

a difference of degree and not a difference of the nature of the phenomenon. The

general sciences do not deal with real objects, but with abstractions. They do not

study plants and animals, but life. Theft subject matter is scientific concepts. But

life as well is part of reality and these concepts have their prototypes in reality.

The special sciences have the actual facts of reality as their subject matter, they

do not study life as such, but actual classes and groups of plants and animals. But

both the plant and the animal, and even the birch tree and the tiger, and even this

birch tree and this tiger are already concepts. And scientific facts as well, even the

most primitive ones, are already concepts. Fact and concept form the subject matter

of all disciplines, but to a different degree, in different proportion. Consequently,

general physics does not cease being a physical discipline and does not become

part of logic because it deals with the most abstract physical concepts. Ultimately,

even these serve to know some part of reality.

But perhaps the nature of the objects of the general and the special disciplines

is really the same, maybe they differ only in the proportion of concept and fact,

and the fundamental difference which allows us to count the one as logic and the

other as physics lies in the direction, the goal, the point of view of both investiga-

tions, so to speak, in the different role played by the same elements in both cases?