62 SOCIAL SCIENTIST intrusion of idealist concepts surfaces the thought of materialist thinkers; there is no pure materialist thought in the period under discussion on which idealist, religious ideas have been super-imposed almost as a conspiracy. Chattopadhyaya identifies the subjective interpretation of texts by the latter-day physicians as the "serious internal cause" for the decadence and eventual collapse of Indian medicine. Such an approach does not analyse the social forces and the material basis on which arose an edifice of scientific knowledge with all its contradictory aspects and stagnation because of which it collapsed. The demand to understand the achievements of ancient science in relation to the contemporary social development is not to deny its achievements but, as the only correct scientific approach, to guard against exaggerations which acquire an ahistorical character. Engels, referring to the return to the point of view of Greek philosophy in modern Western thought, had observed that it was "only with the essential difference that what for the Greek was a brilliant intution, is in our case the result of strictly scientific research in accordance with experience, and hence also it emerges in a much more definite and clear form. It is true that the empirical proof of this motion is not wholly free from gaps, but these are insignificant in comparison with what has already been firmly established.'51 The materialist interpretation of history does not consist in injecting modern materialism in ancient times but in understanding the social and material conditions for exaggerated generalisations. The materialist attitude to the history of thought was formulated by Engels as follows: "For it is by no means a matter of simply throwing overboard the entire thought content of those two thousand years, but of criticism of it, of extracting the results...that had been won within a form that was false and idealistic but which was inevitable for its time and for the course of evolution itself. ...?'2 It is far from our intention to suggest that Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya is not aware of these formulations but it has to be noted that he has in his textual analysis made a very mechanical distinction between the "results" and the "form" in which they were won. The history of science can only be understood as a function of the total life of society. In antiquity, given the low level of productive forces, science had not and could not have become an entrenched system. It was at one level brilliant conjectures, filling the gaps in imagination, to use Engel's phrase, and at another, the repository of centuries of empirical data and knowledge remarkably organised. At no stage was it free from metaphysical, spiritual and religious elements. It was, unlike what we understand by modern science, neither critically aware of its own propositions nor in a position to cross over to the theoretical stage (where theoretical generalisations could be made on