MATERIALISM AND THE MYSTERIES 33 uniform manner, no expedition will ever face a hindrance and it will go round and round in a gravitationally curved space. While all these show that the material universe is not an open book, they do not confirm the mysteries of the mystics and idealist philosophers. On the contrary they do confirm the concepts of dialectical materialism. Not only are the idealists disproved, but the views of mechanical materialists stand negated. Accepting that human knowledge has its internal dialectics of growth, it would be wrong to consider it as an autonomous phenomenon. It is inseparably linked with the growth of the historical practice of man as a social being. It is man, the highest product of material evolution on this planet, \\fho creates this knowledge. Human existence has its social dialectics. So, in order to understand why philosophy has taken the path it has, we must look back and trace the determinant class factors. The emergence on the historical scene of the working class, it will be seen, has basically helped the crystallization of the materialist philosophy. Materialist philosophy could not have advanced but for the emergence of the industrial and scientific revolutions. Marx and Engels were fully alive to the philosophical consequences of science in their days and so was Lenin. They defended dialectical materialism against the corrupt influence of both the idealists and the mechanical materialists. Each time there was an advance in science, both sought to interpret it in a manner that buttressed their respective positions. One of the consequences was the emergence of logical positivism which denied that real knowledge was possible. To avoid confusion Lenin went ahead and defined matter as a philosophical category. This he had to do because the discovery of electrons, protons and so on showed the discrete character of the atoms which led some philosophers to argue that matter had disappeared. Elementary particle physics is adding more challenging ideas today to the concept of matter. But the concept of matter cannot be replaced by any other. Dialectical Materialism Apart from the revolution in the natural sciences and technological applications of natural laws which showed the great possibility of transforming nature, the emergence of the proletariat as a new class in history paved the way for the fruition of all earlier progressive materialist tendencies into dialectical materialism. Marx's study of the concrete social contradictions led to his rejection of Hegel's idealist errors, and Engels's study of the condition of the working class in England revealed to him the determinative role of material being in the life of society. The proletariat is the child of the scientific-industrial revolution. The fundamentally new role the proletariat has to play in history, unlike all the earlier classes that played a progressive role in the various stages of history, is that it docs not wish to substitute one form of exploitation for another. Its liberation would mean the end of all exploitation of man by