Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/125

 the weapons of war, or with the weapons of the intellect, to hirelings. Besides that, however, the ruling classes are often internally deeply divided through the struggles between themselves for the social surplus, and over the means of production. One of the strongest causes of that kind of division we have learned in the battle of competition.

All these factors, which work against the social instincts, find no, or little, soil in the exploited classes. The smaller this soil, the less property that the struggling classes have, the more they are forced back on their own strength, the stronger do their members feel their solidarity against the ruling classes, and the stronger do their own social feelings towards their own class grow.

We have seen that the economic development introduces into the moral factors transmitted from the animal world an element of pronounced mutability, in that it gives a varying degree of force to the social instincts and virtues at different times, and also at the same time in different classes; that it, however, in addition, widens, and then again narrows down the scope within which the social impulses have effect; on the one side expanding its influence from the tiny tribe till it embraces the entire humanity, on the other side limiting it to a certain class within the society.

But the same economic development creates in addition a special moral factor, which did not exist at all in the animal world, and is the most changeable of all, since not only its strength, but also its contents are subject to far-reaching change. These are the tenets of morality.

In the animal world we find only strong moral feelings, but no distinct moral precepts which are addressed to the individual. That assumes that a language has been formed, which can describe not only impressions but also things, or at least actions; a language for whose existence in the animal world all