Thursday, January 07, 2010

Complex ideas

Before reading Tristram Hunt’s biography I had not known that Friedrich Engels was such a polymath, a keen reader with an impressively fluent ability in several languages.

Like all non-specialists he sometimes failed to appreciate the finer points of the subjects he embraced with such enthusiasm; as a good Materialist he dismissed “those parts of theoretical science which went beyond a reflection of natural phenomena.”

For example:

When one has once become accustomed to ascribe to the square root of minus 1 or to the fourth dimension some kind of reality outside of our own heads, it is not a matter of much importance if one goes a step further & also accepts the spirit world of the mediums

Discuss!