Here we have a thorough-going system of materialist monism. "Ours is the organic conception of history," says Labriola. "The totality of the unity of social life is the subject matter present to our minds. It is economics itself which dissolves in the course of one process, to reappear in as many morphological stages, in each of which it serves as a substructure for all the rest. Finally, it is not our method to extend the so-called economic factor isolated in an abstract fashion over all the rest, as our adversaries imagine, but it is, before everything else, to form an historic conception of economics, and to explain the other changes by means of its changes."[1]
In another place he says: "Ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing comes to us in a dream. . . . The change in ideas, even to the creation of new methods of conception, has reflected little by little the experience of a new life. This, in the revolutions of the last two centuries, was little by little despoiled of the mythical, religious and mystical envelopes in proportion as it acquired the practical and precise consciousness of its immediate and direct
- ↑ "Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History." Antonio Labriola, Chicago, 1904. Pages 85, 86.
