Glossary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   M   —

MACH, Ernst   (1838-1916)
Austrian physicist and philosopher. Mach was one of the founders of “empirio-criticism”, a form of positivism or idealist empiricism. Mach viewed reality as a “complex of sensations”, which is a prominent form of subjective idealism. Lenin strongly criticizes Mach’s views, and subjective idealism in general, in his important philosophical work, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908).
        One of Mach’s idealist notions was that a great many entities we talk about in science, such as molecules and atoms, do not actually have any real existence, but are merely “theoretical constructs” which we have found to be useful in conceptualizing how the world works despite their non-existence! In the case of atoms and molecules, it was only in his old age, shortly before his death, and long after the further absolute confirmation of the existence of molecules and atoms by many experiments, and with Einstein’s theoretical explanation of Brownian motion which depended on the actual existence of atoms and molecules, did Mach finally, yet still reluctantly, admit that atoms probably really did exist.

MACROECONOMICS
A term used (mostly in bourgeois economics) to refer to the study of the whole economy, or large areas of the economy, as opposed to microeconomics.

MALTHUS, Thomas Robert   (1766-1834)
English cleric and economist. He was an ideologist of the landed aristocracy which had become merged with the bourgeoisie and an apologist for capitalism. His famous (and erroneous) theory that the population would always expand to the point that the masses would always be driven down to the bare subsistence level was put forward to explain away the qualitatively increased misery that the development of capitalism was causing in Britain. In his economic writings he tended to plagiarize others, especially Sismondi.

“MARKET SOCIALISM”
An attempt to combine “socialism” with capitalism, and in particular with the capitalist commodity market (including the market for labor-power). From the revolutionary Marxist (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) perspective this makes no sense whatsoever, because we define socialism as the transitional stage between capitalism and communism. But various types of revisionist thinkers view “socialism” as merely a modification of capitalism, and sometimes even such a slight modification that some of them consider a lightly “regulated” capitalist welfare state (such as in Scandinavia) to be “socialism”!
        Clearly nothing like European social democracy can be in any way viewed as genuine socialism, either economically or politically. But couldn’t we imagine a society where there are really no capitalists, but still separate, decentralized state-run enterprises that use a market to sell commodities to each other, and sell mass-consumption commodities to the people? Couldn’t there still be a labor market as well, with these enterprises hiring workers, and even continuing to extract surplus value from them—but then turning all of this surplus value over to the state for the expansion of production and for public purposes (education, health care, retirement benefits, and so forth), with no “profits” going to any rich owners of the enterprises (because there are none)?
        One important thing to seriously ponder in a thought experiment of this kind is just how stable such a system would be. In fact it would be extremely unstable, and would inevitably degenerate back into traditional capitalism. There would still be foremen, supervisors, layers of management of plants and enterprises, influential people running the government and the dominent political parties, and so forth. And these people would soon develop (if they didn’t already have) special interests of their own, both as individuals, and collectively as a new social class. In other words class society would soon reassert itself, and we would soon be back in the horrible capitalist world where we live today.
        “But couldn’t we keep such tendencies under control?” someone might ask. “Couldn’t we perhaps use the methods developed in Mao’s China to have managers also engage in productive labor, to rotate streams of ordinary workers into management and government positions for limited periods of time, etc. Couldn’t we even engage in struggle against those who get too uppity and start to gather too many private privileges and too much individual power, and so forth?” The answer is that this sort of thing might work for a while, and will have to be made to work during the relatively short socialist transition period to communism. But if society is organized in such a way that these measures are permanently necessary, then an eventual breakdown and return to capitalism is inevitable. The entire underlying material basis for capitalism must be destroyed, and destroyed down to its lowest roots, if capitalism is itself to be destroyed once and for all.
        And here is where it is necessary to come to understand the nature of bourgeois “right”, and how it grows out of the commodity form itself. If you have commodities, if you have commodity exchange, if you have the extraction of surplus value (even if for a time it is somehow arranged that it is put to public uses), then eventually you will have a complete system of capitalism again, because capitalism grows out of those seeds.
        What we revolutionary Marxists are trying to do is to transform society so that classes no longer exist, so that class struggle no longer needs to exist, and so that not even any “struggle” to prevent the development of classes again is necessary any more! There is a way to do this, but it requires uprooting capitalism completely, and on a world scale, down even to the existence of commodity markets and the commodity form. And this is why we are also determined opponents of any “market socialism” schemes.
        The main motivation for favoring “market socialism” comes from those who can only conceive of socialism in the form it took in the Soviet Union, and view that failure as something that is inevitable in a “command economy”. Thus they are straining their brains to think of another way to make socialism work. Well, there is another way, a way that was outlined by Marx, Lenin and Mao. And that way is not the state capitalism of the revisionist Soviet Union nor is it “market socialism”. Those who champion that last scheme have just not investigated the problem deeply enough to understand the inherent flaws in their proposals.
        For those seeking to look into the question of “market socialism” further, I suggest first seriously studying the great work by Marx, “The Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1875) which is available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm.

MARX, Karl   (1818-1883)
The primary founder, along with Frederick Engels, of the science of society and social revolution which is now customarily known as Marxism.
[More to be added...]

“As to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to demonstrate: 1) that the existence of classes is merely linked to particular historical phases in the development of production, 2) that class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.” —Marx, Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence (Moscow: 1975), p. 64; in a slightly different translation in MECW 39:62.

“These two great discoveries, the materialist conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out all its details and relations.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878), MECW 25:27.

MARXISM
1. [As used by Marxists-Leninists-Maoists:] The science of society and social revolution, as originally established by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and elaborated and extended by many others, especially V. I. Lenin and Mao Zedong. Short-hand for Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
2. [As used by non-Marxists:] The ideas of Karl Marx (and sometimes Engels), as interpreted and distorted by bourgeois professors and other ideologists.

MARXIST-LENINIST CLASS INTEREST THEORY OF ETHICS
See: CLASS INTEREST THEORY OF ETHICS.

“The mass line is the primary method of revolutionary leadership of the masses, which is employed by the most conscious and best organized section of the masses, the proletarian party. It is a reiterative method, applied over and over again, which step by step advances the interests of the masses, and in particular their central interest within bourgeois society, namely, advancing towards proletarian revolution. Each iteration may be viewed as a three step process: 1) gathering the diverse ideas of the masses; 2) processing or concentrating these ideas from the perspective of revolutionary Marxism, in light of the long-term, ultimate interests of the masses (which the masses themselves may sometimes only dimly perceive), and in light of a scientific analysis of the objective situation; and 3) returning these concentrated ideas to the masses in the form of a political line which will actually advance the mass struggle toward revolution. Because the mass line starts with the diverse ideas of the masses, and returns the concentrated ideas to the masses, it is also known as the method of ‘from the masses, to the masses’. Though implicit in Marxism from the beginning, the mass line was raised to the level of conscious theory primarily by Mao Zedong.” —Scott H., The Mass Line and the American Revolutionary Movement, Chapter 43.

See also: MASS PERSPECTIVE below.

“A mass perspective is a point of view regarding the masses which recognizes: 1) That the masses are the makers of history, and that revolution can only be made by the masses themselves; 2) That the masses must come to see through their own experience and struggle that revolution is necessary; and 3) That the proletarian party must join up with the masses in their existing struggles, bring revolutionary consciousness into these struggles, and lead them in a way which brings the masses ever closer to revolution. A mass perspective is based on the fundamental Marxist notion that a revolution must be made by a revolutionary people, that a revolutionary people must develop from a non-revolutionary people, and that the people change from the one to the other through their own revolutionizing practice.
         “The relation between the mass line and a mass perspective is simply that only those with a mass perspective will see much need or use for the mass line. It is possible to have some notion of the mass line technique, and yet fail to give it any real attention because of a weak mass perspective. On the other hand, it is also possible to have a mass perspective and still be more or less ignorant of the great Marxist theory of the mass line.
         “The mass line and a mass perspective are nevertheless best viewed as intimately related, as integrated aspects of the Marxist approach toward the masses and revolution. I have found the most felicitous phrase for both aspects together is ‘the mass line and its associated mass perspective’.” —Scott H., The Mass Line and the American Revolutionary Movement, Chapter 43.

See also: SECTARIAN

MASSES
[To be added...]
        See also: PEOPLE, The

MATERIALISM AND EMPIRIO-CRITICISM
This is a great philosophical work by Lenin which defends and develops scientific materialism. It was written in 1908 and first published in May 1909. Its purpose was to combat various Kantian, religious and other idealist doctrines which were becoming popular among a certain strata of the Russian revolutionary movement, including among some of the Bolsheviks.
        In the late 19^th century, physics entered into a period of crisis with the discovery of radioactivity and other anomalies, and the advent of the earliest quantum-related speculations. Thus some of the materialist assumptions, that most physicists had explicitly or tacitly assumed, came into question, especially by scientists and philosophers who had been strongly influenced by Kant or early forms of positivism. These idealist theories spread beyond physics and philosophy, and led to a resurgence of subjective idealism among intellectuals. It was the intrusion of this trend into the revolutionary movement itself that alarmed Lenin, and moved him to write this book.
        Since at the beginning of the 21^st century Kantianism and various other forms of philosophical idealism are once again quite rampant, even among some philosophers who claim to be Marxists or influenced by Marxism, and since these people are misleading many young revolutionaries in the universities, it is all the more important to once again promote the serious study of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

MATHEMATICAL LOGIC
“Logically” this should mean the mathematical development of any form of logic. In practice, in bourgeois society, it usually just means the mathematical development of the various kinds of deductive logic. It is almost always propounded in axiomatic form, that is, along the same lines as geometry usually is, with axioms, postulates, theorems, proofs, and so forth. As with most of modern mathematics, it can soon become highly abstruse to the point where only specialists can easily understand the more complex arguments and proofs.

MAXIM
See: MORAL MAXIM

MEANS OF PRODUCTION
The totality of the material elements of economic production, including the factories, mines, machinery, tools, raw materials, means of transport, etc. (Human labor, the work force, is not included in this category; the means of production together with the people necessary to utilize them are collectively known as the productive forces.)

MECHANICAL MATERIALISM
A crude and simplistic form of materialism which views all nature as being constructed on basic mechanical principles such as those which govern old-fashioned clocks. This is the most common sort of naive materialism.

METAPHYSICS
1. [In Marxist usage:] Views which are opposed to dialectics, such as views which deny the unity and connections which exist among things in the world, or which deny the struggle of opposites that exist within things, or which take a static view of the world or parts of it and deny the possibility of any development.
2. [In non-Marxist usage:] The branch of philosophy, or philosophical views, which are concerned with the ultimate nature of reality, which sorts of things truly exist, which things depend on the existence of other things, etc. The primary sphere here is also called ontology.
        See also: Philosophical doggerel about metaphysics.

“To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He things in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses.... For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other.
         “At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound common sense. Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and and even necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the pariticular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluable contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring, MECW 25:22-23.

MICHURIN, Ivan Vladimirovich   (1855-1935)
Russian horticulturalist whose theory of cross-breeding was based on the idea that acquired characteristics of plants and animals could be inherited. Unfortunately, this erroneous theory was adopted by Trofim Lysenko and became for a long while the official doctrine of the Soviet Union during the years of Stalin and Khrushchev. This led to considerable damage to Soviet genetic research and Soviet agriculture.

MICROECONOMICS
A term used (mostly in bourgeoic economics) to refer to studies or descriptions of small and semi-isolated parts of the economy, such as how individual firms or households typically function from an economic perspective. Compare with macroeconomics which studies the overall operation of the economy.

“MIDDLE CLASS”
[In common bourgeois usage:] A vague sort of class category, or occasionally more precisely defined on the basis of arbitrary family income ranges, such as “families which have an income of more than $20,000 per year and less than $500,000 per year”. As this example shows, the “middle class” in current establishment parlance includes the greatest part of the American population.
        While bourgeois writers prefer not to talk about social classes at all, they are sometimes forced to do so. But when they do, they do not use Marxist class terms which are defined on the basis of definite relationships of groups of people to the means of production. Instead, vaguely or arbitrarily defined “classes” such as the middle class are referred to. The bourgeois term the “middle class” is the rough equivalent to the Marxist term the petty bourgeoisie, though the bourgeois term also includes much of what we would call the working class or proletariat.
        [More to be added... ]

MILL, James   (1773-1836)
British economist and philosophers, who vularized the political economy of Ricardo. James Mill was a close friend of Jeremy Bentham and the father of John Stuart Mill.

MILL, John Stuart   (1806-1873)
British economist and positivist philosopher. Following in the footsteps of his father, James Mill (see above), and his godfather Jeremy Bentham, he became the most famous proponent of utilitarianism, in the hedonistic form that Bentham gave to it.
        Also following in the footsteps of Bentham and his father, he became the most prominent vulgarizer of classical political economy in the 19^th century. He advocated conciliation between the interests of the bourgeoisie and the interests of the working class, and thought that the contradictions of capitalism could be overcome by reforming the methods of distribution into some vague bourgeois version of “socialism”.

MIND
A set of ways of looking at the brain at work. In other words, a set of aspects, characteristics or functions of the brains of advanced animals (especially humans of course). Thus thinking is a high-level characterization of one sort of operation that a brain carries out, while a thought is a high-level characterization of the results of that brain process in a specific situation. Awareness, concern, boredom, worrying, happiness and all the countless other such mental states, are abstract characterizations of the physical states of the brain (which, if they could be described in purely neurophysiological terms would be incomprehensibly complex compilations of the states of neural networks and of millions or billions of individual neuronal states). The mind is not “identical to” the brain; it is rather the collection of all the high-level abstract views which we must necessarily have about how our brain is functioning.
        See also: FUNCTIONALISM and philosophical doggerel about mind and matter.

MIND-BODY PROBLEM
The most basic question of philosophy: what is the nature of the relationship between mind and body (or between mind and brain, or mind and matter). The two big schools of thought are materialism (that matter is primary and mind is a characteristic or function of certain highly complex organizations of matter such as brains) and idealism (that mind or “spirit” is primary and that matter—if it really exists at all—is somehow a creation or outgrowth of mind). Dualism, the view that mind and matter are completely independent, is often considered a third option, though to materialists it just seems to be a variety of idealism since it denies that mind is a function or characteristic of certain complicated organizations of matter (brains).

MONAD
[In the philosophy of Leibniz]: The supposed “ultimate” units of reality which give rise to matter and mind. Thus an entity postulated to underly a dualistic conception of the world. The notion is clearly incoherent. God is supposed to be the “supreme monad”, whatever that means.

MONETARISM
A complex of various theories in bourgeois economics, championed by reactionary economists such as Milton Friedman. Two prominent specific monetarist theories are:
1. The theory that inflation is basically caused by the undue expansion of the money supply. (Marxist political economy pretty much agrees with this!)
2. The theory that capitalist economic crises (recessions and depressions) are caused by mismanagement of the money supply. (This is utter bourgeois stupidity!)

MONISM
The view that everything in the world is derived from, or can be explained by, the existence of just one fundamental type of thing. There are various kinds of naive monism (“all is made of water”), but the more modern view of monism is just that it is a denial of dualism. Dialectical materialism is a type of monism because it holds that although mind exists, it exists as a set of characteristics or functional aspects of the brain (i.e., of highly organized matter in motion). That is, matter is primary, and mind depends on matter, is an “outgrowth” or “development” or set of aspects or characteristics of certain complex forms of matter (brains, or their equivalent).

MONOPOLY
[To be added... ]
        See also: OLIGOPOLY.

MONOPOLY CAPITAL (1966 Book)
This is an influential book written by Paul M. Sweezy and Paul Baran, and published in 1966. There are widely differing opinions as to just how correct and important this book is. John Bellamy Foster, who is now the editor of the magazine Sweezy co-founded, Monthly Review, talks about the book in rather glowing terms:

“The appearance in 1966 of Monopoly Capital by Baran and Sweezy (published two years after Baran’s death) represented a turning point in Marxian economics. Although described by the authors themselves as a mere ‘essay-sketch’, it rapidly gained widespread recognition as the most important attempt thus far to bring Marx’s Capital up to date, as well as providing a formidable critique of prevailing Keynesian orthodoxy.
         “Where Sweezy himself was concerned, Monopoly Capital reflected dissatisfaction with the analysis of accumulation and crisis advanced in The Theory of Capitalist Development [his book from 1942]. His earlier study had been written when mainstream economics was undergoing rapid change due to the Keynesian ‘revolution’ and the rise of imperfect competition theory. Thus, he had provided a detailed elaboration of both Marx’s theory of realization crisis (or demand-side constraints in the accumulation process), and of work by Marx and later Marxian theorists on the concentration and centralization of capital. As with mainstream theory, however, these two aspects of Sweezy’s analysis remained separate; and hence he failed to develop an adequate explanation of the concrete factors conditioning investment demand in an economic regime dominated by the modern large enterprise. It was essentially this critique of Sweezy’s early efforts that was provided by Josef Steindl in Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism (1952: 243-6), who went to show how a more unified theory could ‘be organically developed out of the underconsumptionist approach to Marx’ based on Michal Kalecki’s model of capitalist dynamics, which had connected the pehenomenon of realization crisis to the increasing ‘degree of monopoly’ in the economy as a whole.
         “In fact, it was out of this argument, as outlined by Steindl, that the underlying framework for Baran and Sweezy’s own contribution in Monopoly Capital was derived. Thus, they suggested that Marx’s fundamental ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ associated with accumulation in the era of free competition, had been replaced, in the more restrictive competitive environment of monopoly capitalism, by a law of the tendency of the surplus to rise (defining surplus as the gap, at any given level of production, between output and socially necessary costs of production). Under these circumstances, the critical economic problem was one of surplus absorption. Capitalist consumption tended to account for a decreasing share of capitalist demand as income grew, while investment was hindered by the fact that it took the form of new productive capacity, which could not be expanded for long periods of time independently of final, wage-based demand. Despite the fact that there was always the possibility of new ‘epoch-maing innovations’ emerging that would help absorb the potential economic surplus, all such innovations—resembling the steam engine, the railroad and the automobile in their overall effect—were few and far between. Hence Baran and Sweezy concluded that the system had a powerful tendency toward stagnation, largely countered thus far through the promotion of economic waste by means of ‘the sales effort’ (including its penetration into the production process) and military expenditures, and through the expansion of the financial sector. All such ‘countervailing influences’ were, however, of a self-limiting character and could be expected to lead to a doubling-over of contradictions in the not too distant future.” —John Bellamy Foster, “Paul Malor Sweezy”, in John Eatwell, et al., eds., The New Palgrave: Marxian Economics (1990), p. 352-3.

However, to my eyes much of this seems to be unnecessary and even downright wrong. Yes, there is a more fully coherent “underconsumptionist” approach (or overproductionist approach, I would prefer to say) than Sweezy put forward in his 1942 book, and it comes straight out of Marx himself. The problem, it seems to me, is that not only in 1942, but also in this 1966 book Monopoly Capital there is an unnecessary and incorrect adulteration of Marx with Keynesian conceptions. Thus contrary to Foster’s comment that this book provides “a formidable critique of prevailing Keynesian orthodoxy”, I would say the book has still not sufficiently broken with Keynesianism!
        The basic problem with capitalism is that it does not pay the workers enough to buy back all that they produce for the capitalists. The capitalists themselves can for a long while spend a large part of the surplus value they extract from the workers in building new factories and buying more machinery. And for a fairly long while they can still sell the output from these new and old factories by granting credit to the workers and by having the government borrow money from the rich (or else simply print up money) to buy weapons, military supplies, and other commodities. In other words, the continual and ever-faster expansion of debt can keep the system working for quite a while. But eventually this massive credit bubble must pop, and then—according to Marx—the only thing that can clear the ground for a new expansion is the destruction of all the old excess capital, including that massive overhang of excess factories and machinery that was artificially built up during the long credit boom. This is really pretty much all there is to it, and no Keynesian conceptions at all are necessary to further explicate the situation.
        It is true that Sweezy and Baran were right to point out mechanisms such as wastefulness, innovation, and so forth, as ways which to a degree help keep the system going for a while. But these are quite secondary to the main thing, the expansion of the consumer and government credit bubbles. That is the place to focus one’s attention! And when this giant credit bubble pops it is totally inadequate to say that there will then be stagnation; actually there will then be long-term and intractable economic depression!
        So while there are indeed some things of interest in the book Monopoly Capital, and some valid points, overall it still seems to me to be a Keynesian-influenced down-playing of how central and how serious the economic contradictions really are within the capitalist system. —S.H.

MONTHLY REVIEW
An important Marxist magazine in the United States, established by Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman in 1949. After Huberman died, Harry Magdoff became a co-editor with Sweezy, and now that Sweezy and Magdoff have both died, it is edited by John Bellamy Foster. [More to be added... ]

MONTHLY REVIEW SCHOOL
This is not a formal school, but a loose collection of political economists centered around the Monthly Review magazine (see above). Many or most of these economists also are influenced by Keynes to one degree or another.

MOORE, G. E. [George Edward]   (1873-1958)
English idealist philosopher. In ethics he was an intuitionist who believed the word ‘good’ is indefinable.
        See also: Philosophical doggerel about Moore.

MORAL HAZARD (In bourgeois economics)
A variety of related views, such as:
        1) The problem that having insurance can cause people to behave in more risky ways. (This is bad from the perspective of the bourgeoisie not because it increases the risk of harm to people, but because it increases the chances that they will collect insurance, thus leading to rising insurance premiums.)
        2) Government bailouts of failing companies (even if there was no previous promise that this would occur), which amounts to a form of insurance payment anyway, and tends to increase the chances that companies will act imprudently (stupidly!) again in the future. This should lead bourgeois economists to oppose government bailouts, but most of them find some special excuse to make an exception when the matter comes up in any major way—such as at the present time with the trillions of dollars being given to banks that recklessly invested in “securities” based on highly risky sub-prime mortgages.

MORAL MAXIM
A general rule about what is right or wrong, such as “Lying is wrong.” According to Kantian ethics, such moral maxims are absolutes, and must always be followed regardless of the circumstances or the specific consequences. But more rational people understand that there are times when lying is not wrong (and even occasions when it is morally wrong not to lie!). Therefore, more rational people treat virtually all moral maxims not as absolutes, but rather more like “rules of thumb” which are generally valid, but not invariably so. On this conception, moral maxims must be evaluated in the particular situation, and by ascertaining if they agree or conflict with more general moral principles, and especially the most central moral principle: something is good and right only if it answers to (or satisfies) the interests (or meets the needs) of the people.
        See also: CLASS INTEREST THEORY OF ETHICS

MORALITY
1. Conformity to the standards of right conduct.
2. The norms, standards, principles or rules of right conduct themselves.
3. Ethics, although most philosophers (Marxist and non-Marxist alike) try to keep the concepts of ethics and morality separate, with ethics being the theory behind any system of morality.

MORTGAGE
[To be added... ]
        See also: SUB-PRIME MORTGAGE.

MYSTICISM
Any religious philosophy which accepts the possibility of mystical experiences, divine intuitions, and “direct experiences of God”. Most mystics believe they can achieve an experience of some deep reality through the temporary union of their “soul” with God, and hold that “true reality” can only be known in this way. Materialists dismiss all this as the fantastical misinterpretation of confused internal mental states which miseducated people are prone to.

Glossary Home Page and Letter Index

MASSLINE.ORG Home Page