III. A Propos of the Historical Development of Consciousness

Man’s consciousness is not something immutable. Some of its features in any concrete historical circumstances are progressive, with prospects of development, others are survivals doomed to extinction, which means that consciousness, the psyche, needs to be regarded in its change and development, in its essential dependence on men’s way of life which is determined by actual social relations and by the place a person occupies in them. It is thus necessary to approach the evolution of man’s psyche as a process of qualitative changes, for if the social conditions themselves of men’s being also develop by way of qualitative changes rather than simply through quantitative ones, it is clear that their psyche and consciousness also change qualitatively in the course of socio-historical development.