Page 304 - SELECTED WORKS OF MAO TSE-TUNG Volume I.indd

298 MAO TSE-TUNG

As social practice continues, things that give rise to man’s sense
perceptions and impressions in the course of his practice are repeated
many times; then a sudden change (leap) takes place in the brain
in the process of cognition, and concepts are formed. Concepts are
no longer the phenomena, the separate aspects and the external re-
lations of things; they grasp the essence, the totality and the internal
relations of things. Between concepts and sense perceptions there is
not only a quantitative but also a qualitative difference. Proceed-
ing further, by means of judgement and inference one is able to
draw logical conclusions. The expression in San Kuo Yen Yi, 3
“knit the brows and a stratagem comes to mind”, or in everyday
language, “let me think it over”, refers to man’s use of concepts in
the brain to form judgements and inferences. This is the second
stage of cognition. When the members of the observation group have
collected various data and, what is more, have “thought them over”,
they are able to arrive at the judgement that “the Communist Party’s
policy of the National United Front Against Japan is thorough,
sincere and genuine”. Having made this judgement, they can, if they
too are genuine about uniting to save the nation, go a step further
and draw the following conclusion, “The National United Front
Against Japan can succeed.” This stage of conception, judgement and
inference is the more important stage in the entire process of knowing
a thing; it is the stage of rational knowledge. The real task of knowing
is, through perception, to arrive at thought, to arrive step by step
at the comprehension of the internal contradictions of objective things,
of their laws and of the internal relations between one process and
another, that is, to arrive at logical knowledge. To repeat, logical
knowledge differs from perceptual knowledge in that perceptual knowl-
edge pertains to the separate aspects, the phenomena and the external
relations of things, whereas logical knowledge takes a big stride for-
ward to reach the totality, the essence and the internal relations of
things and discloses the inner contradictions in the surrounding world.
Therefore, logical knowledge is capable of grasping the development
of the surrounding world in its totality, in the internal relations of
all its aspects.
This dialectical-materialist theory of the process of development
of knowledge, basing itself on practice and proceeding from the
shallower to the deeper, was never worked out by anybody before
the rise of Marxism. Marxist materialism solved this problem correctly
for the first time, pointing out both materialistically and dialectically