Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/144

 which it is to arrive. Science stands above Ethics, its results are just as little moral or immoral as necessity is moral or immoral.

All the same, even in the winning and making known of scientific knowledge, morality is not got rid of. New scientific knowledge implies often the upsetting of traditional and deeply-rooted conceptions which had grown to a fixed habit. In societies which include class antagonisms, new scientific knowledge, especially that of social conditions, implies, for the most part however, damage to the interests of particular classes. To discover and propagate scientific knowledge which is incompatible with the interests of the ruling classes, is to declare war on these. It assumes not simply a high degree of intelligence, but also ability and willingness to fight, as well as independence from the ruling classes, and, before all, a strong moral feeling, strong social instincts, a ruthless striving for knowledge, and to spread the truth with a warm desire to help the oppressed, uprising classes.

But even this last desire is likely to mislead if it does not play a simple negative part, as repudiation of the validity of the ideas of the ruling classes, and as a spur to overcoming the obstacles which the opposing class interests bring against the social development, but aspires to rise above that, and to take the direction, laying down certain aims which have to be attained through social study.

Even though the conscious aim of the class war in scientific Socialism has been transformed from a moral into an economic aim, it loses none of its greatness. Since that which appeared to all social renovators hitherto as a moral ideal, which could not be attained by them; for that the economic conditions are at length given, that ideal we can now recognise for the first time in the history of the world as a necessary result of the economic development, viz., the abolition of class, not the abolition of all professional distinctions, not the abolition of division of labour, but certainly the abolition of all social distinctions and antagonisms which arise from private property in the means of