Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/143

 material foundations. And at the same time it has shown how we can ensure that the new reality resulting from the Revolution shall come up to the ideal, how illusions and disappointments are to be avoided. Whether they can be really avoided depends upon the degree of the insight acquired into the laws of development, and of the movement of the social organism, its forces and organs.

With that the moral ideal will not be deprived of its influence on society; this influence will simply be reduced to its proper dimensions. Like the social and the moral instinct the moral ideal is not an aim, but a force or a weapon in the social struggle for life. The moral ideal is a special weapon for the peculiar circumstances of the class war.

Even the Social-Democracy, as the organisation of the proletariat in its class war, cannot do without the moral ideal, the moral indignation against exploitation and class rule. But this ideal has nothing to find in scientific Socialism, which is the scientific examination of the laws of the development and movement of the social organism, for the purpose of knowing the necessary tendencies and aims of the proletarian class war.

Certainly in Socialism the student is always a fighter as well, and no man can artificially cut himself in two parts, of which the one has nothing to do with the other. Thus even with Marx in his scientific research there occasionally breaks through the influence of a moral ideal. But he always endeavours, and rightly, to banish it where he can. Because the moral ideal becomes a source of error in science, when it takes on itself to point out to it its aims. Science has only to do with the recognition of the necessary. It can certainly arrive at prescribing a "shall," but this dare only come up as a consequence of the insight into the necessary. It must decline to discover a "shall" which is not to be recognised as a necessity founded in the world of phenomena. The Ethic must always be only an object of science; this has to study the moral instincts as well as the moral ideals, and explain them; it cannot take advice from them as to the results at