Thanks to modern science—the child of the machine process—the universality of the law of cause and effect is now assumed on all hands. In Labriola's strong words, "Nothing happens by chance." The Marxist believes this in all its fulness. To him systems of religion, codes of ethics and schools of art are, in the last analysis, just as much products of material causes as are boots or sausages. There are some intellectual Socialists whose mode of life has shielded them from the discipline of the Machine Process—the inexorable inculcator of causation—who attempt to place religion and ethics and other ideological phenomena in a separate category not to be accounted for by the materialistic conception of history. These may turn to Marx and weary their auditors by their iteration of "Lord! Lord!" but verily they know not the mind of the Master.
With Marx matter always comes first, thought second. The dialectic materialism of the Socialist is an all-inclusive philosophy, accounting for all phenomena—as fully for those called spiritual as for the most grossly material.
The man who narrows this dialectic materialism down to economic determinism and then defines the latter as meaning that the
