Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/133

 break through the hard economic necessity of their own strength, and can change it. Undoubtedly there is a reciprocal action between the economic basis and its spiritual superstructure—morality, religion, art, etc. We do not speak here of the intellectual influence of inventions, that belongs to the technical conditions in which the spirit plays a part ultimately by the side of the tool; technic is the conscious discovery and application of tools by thinking men.

Like the other ideological factors morality can also advance the economic and social development. Just in this lies its social importance. Since certain social rules arise from certain social needs, they will render the social co-operation so much the more easy the better they are adapted to the society which makes them.

Morality thus reacts on the social life. But that only holds good so long as it is dependent upon the latter, as it meets the social needs from which it sprang.

As soon as morality begins to lead a life independent of society, as soon as it is no longer controlled by the latter, the reaction takes on another character. The further it is now developed the more is that development purely logical and formal. As soon as it is cut off from the influence of the outer world it can create no more new conceptions but only arrange those already attained, so that the contradictions disappear from them. Getting rid of the contradictions, winning a unitary conception, solving all problems which arise from the contradictions, that is the work of the thinking spirit. With that it can, however, only secure the intellectual superstructure already set up, not rise superior to itself. Only the appearance of new contradictions, new problems, can affect a new development. The human spirit does not, however, create contradictions from its own inner being; they are produced in it only by the impress of the surrounding world on it.