Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/142

 everybody demands but nobody practises—something which is beyond our strength, which is only given to supernatural powers to carry out. Here we see in the revolutionary classes a different kind of antagonism arise between moral theory and practice, the antagonism between the moral ideal and the reality created by the social revolution.

Here, again, morality appears as something which everybody strives for but nobody attains—as, in fact, the unattainable for earthly beings. No wonder then the moralists think that morality has a supernatural origin, and that our animal being which clings to the earth is responsible for the fact that we can only gaze wistfully at its picture from afar without being able to arrive at it.

From this heavenly height morality is drawn down to earth by historical materialism. We make acquaintance with its animal origin, and see how its changes in human society are conditioned by the changes which this has gone through, driven on by the development of the technic. And the moral ideal is revealed in its purely negative character as opposed to the existing moral order, and its importance is recognised as the motive power of the class and as a means to collect and inspire the forces of the revolutionary classes. At the same time, however, the moral ideal will be deprived of its power to direct their policy. Not from our moral ideal, but from distinct material conditions does the policy depend which the social development takes. These material conditions have already at earlier periods, to a certain extent, determined the moral will, the social aims of the uprising classes, but for the most part unconsciously. Or if a conscious directing social knowledge was already to hand, as in the eighteenth century, it worked, all the same, unsystematically, and not consistently, at the formation of the social aims.

It was the materialist conception of history which first completely deposed the moral ideal as the directing factor of the social evolution, and which taught us to deduce our social aims solely from the knowledge of the