42 SOCIAL SCIENTIST that pre-Marxist philosophers and scientists could not solve the problem of the attainability of objective truth in a concrete historical way, for they failed to comprehend the influence of human practice on human thought, logic and scientific method. They either metaphysically separated the subject from the object or united them by way of simple conjunction. For Marxism; however, it -is not sufficient to state merely that "there are both the subjective and the objective both thinking and reality external to it, that philosophical investigation embraces both the one and the other, being divided into ontology and epistemology which includes logic and, of late, also philosophical anthropology". Truth is considered as subjective because it is a form of human activity and it is objective because the content of knowledge is a reflection of the objective reality, the existence of which does not depend either on the individual or mankind as a whole. II It can be generally remarked that philosophers prior to the founders of Marxism could not solve the problem of the attainment of objective truth in the subjective forms of cognition, for they approached the problem in the most abstract possible way and could not find the real basis on which the subject coincides most fully with the object, that is, in the dynamic historical context of man's concrete living. Locke, for example, recognized the existence of an objective world, yet the nature of the objects constituting such a world could not be known. Scientific enquiry, for Locke, was restricted only to the sphere of appearances; he denied that it could penetrate into the essence of things. He took upon himself the task of examining the limitations of understanding. The results of his investigation led him to the conclusion "that the object of our knowledge is limited to the subjective world of our own ideas". Yet it must be said that he proclaimed, at least to some degree, confidence in the power and the ability of the human mind to explore and to know reality. But afterwards empiricism started doubting everything and arrived at the completely negative conclusion that knowledge of anything, strictly speaking, is impossible and declared that knowledge, in essence, is non-knowledge. This theoretical position of agnosticism denies man's ability to know the world, to know it truly and to transform it on the basis of such knowledge. Thus Hume, for example, defended faith and force of habit rather than knowledge as the basis of practical action. Kant did not ignore the active role of the rational faculty in the generation of knowledge and the necessary part its forms played in ordering the raw materials of sense- experience and produced a detailed analysis of the cognitive process, its separate elements — the