REVIEW 81 not because it gives a distorted reflection of reality, but because it reflects, assesses the given historical reality and the whole socio-historical process from definite social positions, and not merely the personal, subjective positions of the researcher" and, further; the concept of scientific ideology "presupposes cognition of one's own historical, class content, origin, significance and relationship to other ideologies, classes and epochs55 (pp 35-36). Ilyenkov's and Sheptulin's essays provide a very stimulating discussion of the concept of the ideal and categories of material dialectics. According to Ilyenkov the category of "ideality" becomes a specifically meaningful definition of a certain category of phenomena, establishing the form of the process of reflection of objective reality in mental activity, which is social and human in its origin and essence, in the social-human consciousness, and ceases to be an unnecessary synonym for activity in general" (p 79). Through a study of the history of the development of philosophical thought, it is asserted that Marxism does regard categories as ideal images reflecting the corresponding aspects and connections of material things as was maintained in varying degrees by earlier philosophers like Aristotle, Locke and the French materialists. But Marxism maintains further that these categories are a "product of the subject's creative activity in the course of which he separates the general from the individual, reduces it to intrinsic necessary properties and connections, and presents them in pure form" (p 119) and, therefore, the content of categories must coincide and does coincide to some degree not with the phenomenon but with essence. Since cognition takes place through these ideal forms or categories, at a low level of human comprehension itself it is plausible to treat them as a world of ideas standing apart and over the material world. And when the problem of formation of ideas is treated as an individual's mental activity, unmediated by labour and constantly developing social forms, coupled with the fact that individual's mental activity depends on the system of culture established before him, one is led to conclude, like Plato (or for that matter idealism in general) that the "world of ideas" is given and therefore fixed supernatural "objective reality" standing in opposition to every individual and dictating the activity of the individual. This kind of approach to the study of idealism does not dismiss it as an aberration or a conspiracy. As a result, the main problem of philosophy is not to distinguish and countcrpose everything that is in the "consciousness of the individual" to everything that is outside this individual