e of contradiction. To think in a consistently materialist way is to think in a dialectical way and to think in a consistently dialectical way is to think in a materialist way. These ways are the laws of thought, because they are the ways of assembling information, keeping thought within the bounds of informativeness and excluding illusion and fantasy. Materialism is not "a theory" that requires experimental verification and could be falsified, any more than it is a "metaphysical theory" which is somehow established a priori; nor are the laws of dialectics laws that require experimental verification and could be falsified; for any verifiable theory is materialist and dialectical.
The "mystification which dialectics suffers in Hegel's hands" was due to the way he separated dialectics from materialism, and tried to base formulation of laws of dialectics on idealist theory. The way Marx began to put this right was by getting rid of "preconceived idealist fancy". Hegel started with a preconceived and absurd idealist theory, to the effect that Thought or The Idea exists timelessly and independently of anyone's thinking, and that the world is created to be as Thought thinks it. Then (supposing himself to have what Ryle and others would now call "privileged access" to The Idea) he tried to write down in a book the sequence of Categories (in this context capital letters are used as a mark of respect for timelessness) in accordance with which the world is created. The result, naturally enough, was "mystification". Marx, on the other hand, did not start with any "preconceived idealist fancy". He started from "real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination . . . the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live". He started to work out how these real individuals must think and assemble their information in order to inform their practice. That is what he meant by turning dialectics "right side up again".
To work out the laws of thought is to work out the principles in accordance with which we must think in order to inform our practice. It is not, therefore, an a priori inquiry of the sort Kant imagined, but it starts, as Marx and Engels said, from "real premises" which are "verified in a purely empirical way".
At the same time, it is by no means the same as stating the laws in accordance with which subjective processes of thought proceed, as contrasted with the laws (studied by empirical sciences) in accordance with which objective processes proceed. Indeed, such a misunderstanding is an absurd onefor thought‑processes are just as "objective" as any other processes, and to find out how they proceed requires, as for any other processes, examining the evidences of their occurrence. The generalised principles of materialism and dialectics no more provide information, additional to that obtainable by empirical means, about thought‑processes and how they proceed than they do about any other processes and how they proceed. And they apply equally to both. They are not statements of information but principles of its assembly. But as such they do serve to correct erroneous views (those that take the form of illusion and fantasy), and consequently to specify the category‑formation of truthful views.
It is in this sense (and a very important sense it is) that the working out of the principles of materialism and dialectics may be said, in Ryle's words, to inform us about the "nature of things", and of their reflection in human thought; or, as Engels put it (Ludwig Feuerbach, 4), materialist dialectics becomes "the science of the general laws of motion both of the external world and of human thought". How things are and move (the forms of interconnection, the transformations of quantity into quality, the contradictions), and how this movement is to be reflected in our thought, is the discovery of materialist dialectics.
Principles of materialist dialectics, then, are expressible in less negative and "frivolous" terms than Ryle supposed, when he observed that the conclusion that "the 