Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/23

 I by that means stir up public opinion for ever against me, if I put my existence at stake or even bring on myself the penalty of death, there can be no talk of even the more remote pleasure or happiness which could transform the discomfort or pain of the moment into its opposite.

But what could the critics bring forward to explain this phenomenon? In reality, nothing—even, if according to their own view, a great deal. Since they were unable to explain the moral law by natural means it became to them the surest and most unanswerable proof that man lived not only a natural life, but also outside of nature, that in him supernatural and extra-natural forces work, that his spirit is something supernatural. Thus arose from this view the Ethic of Philosophic Idealism and Monotheism, the new belief in God.

This belief in God was quite different to the old Polytheism; it differed from the latter not only in the number of the gods, and it did not arise from the fact that many were reduced to one. Polytheism was an attempt to explain the processes of nature. Its gods were personifications of the forces of nature; they were thus not over nature, and not outside of nature, but in her, and formed a part of her. Natural philosophy superseded them in the degree in which it discovered other than personal causation in the processes of nature, and developed the idea of the necessary connection of cause and effect. The gods might here and there maintain a traditional existence for a time even in the philosophy, but only as a kind of superman who no longer played any active part. Even for Epicurus, despite his materialism, the gods were not dead but they were changed into passive spectators.

Even the non-materialist ethical school of philosophy, such as was most completely represented by Plato (427–347 ), and whose mystical side was far more clearly developed by the Neo-Platonists, especially by Plotinus (204–270 ), even this school did not find the gods necessary to explain nature, and they dealt with the latter no differently to the materialists. Their