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Most materialists, despite wanting to eliminate all spiritual entities, ended up describing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark it out as specifically idealist. They have situated dead matter at the summit of a conventional hierarchy of diverse types of facts, without realising that in this way they have submitted to an obsession with an ideal form of matter, with a form which approaches closer than any other to that which matter should be. Dead matter, the pure idea, and God, all in fact answer a question in the same way – perfectly, and as flatly as a docile student in a classroom – a question that can perhaps only be posed by idealist philosophers, the question of the essence of things, in other words of exactly the idea by means of which things become intelligible. The classical materialists did not really even substitute causation for the must be (the quare for the quamobrem, that is to say, determinism for destiny, the past for the future...). Due to the functional role they unconsciously attributed to the idea of science, their need for external authority in fact placed the must be on all appearance. If the principle of things they defined constitutes precisely the stable element that permitted science to acquire an apparently unshakeable position, a veritable divine eternity, this choice cannot be attributed to chance. Most materialists have simply substituted the conformity of dead matter to the idea of science for the religious relations earlier established between the divinity and his creatures, the one being the idea of the others.
Materialism can be seen as a senile idealism to the extent that it is not immediately founded upon psychological or social facts and not upon abstractions, such as artificially isolated phenomena. Thus it is from Freud, among others – rather from long dead physicists whose ideas today are remote from their causation – that a representation of matter must be taken. It matters little that the fear of psychological complication (a fear that bears a unique witness to intellectual debility) cause timid souls to see this attitude as an obscure detour or as a return to spiritual values. The time has come, when employing the word materialism, to assign to it the meaning of a direct interpretation, excluding all idealism, of raw phenomena, and not of a system founded on the fragmentary elements of an ideological analysis elaborated under the sign of religious relations.