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LIFE OF A BLACK PRISONER                         CHAPMAN

far as I was concerned, I would have to know something about every significant branch of human knowledge. So I began to study books like Science for the Citizen by Lancelot Hogben, outlines of science by authors like Sherwood Taylor and J. Arthur Thomson. In these books I learned something about all the major branches of natural science. Also I read the philosophers who supposedly based their positions on natural science, e.g., Herbert Spencer, John Fiske, and others of the evolutionist school; and the philosophers who claimed they were in tune with the discoveries of modern physics, e.g., Ernst Mach, Henri Poincare, Sir James Jeans, Alfred Korzybski (the semanticist), Moritz Schlick (the Vienna School), and others. Many times I got lost in this maze of science and philosophy, but I would always find my way again.
  At this point I want to say something which I think is very important. In studying science I became interested in the idealist and materialist arguments of western philosophy. It seemed to me that idealism was in league with superstition and prejudice in that it tried to reduce science to uncertainty and opinion by denying the existence of the material world or by putting mind over matter. But I couldn't be satisfied with my own opinion of idealism without any further inquiry so I undertook a more serious study of philosophy. I began with Frederick Paulsen's Introduction to Philosophy, after that I read several standard histories of philosophy. Now I settled down to the classics, reading with great interest Plato's Dialogues, works of Aristotle, Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, B. Spinoza's Ethics, Rene Descartes' Discourse on Method, Francis Bacon's Novum Organum, Berkeley's Dialogues, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind and Science of Logic. I considered Aristotle and Hegel the greatest speculative thinkers of all time but was sorely disappointed because neither was a materialist.
  Philosophy made me even more sensitive to human problems because it probed the very nature of human existence. And yet there was a contradiction: Philosophy, which supposedly stood above the natural sciences, justified rather than addressed itself to the problems of human slavery. So in my quest for freedom and humanity, I learned from philosophy that human bondage (greed, egoism, catch-as-catch-can competition, racism, etc.) is not an objective social fact but a state of mind-subjective evaluation. According to idealist philosophy, my own suffering in prison had nothing to do with my objective surroundings, to be sure I learned that my objective surroundings were merely events in my mind and that I had absolutely no way of

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