Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/24

 idea of God did not spring out of the need to explain the natural world around us but the ethical and spiritual nature of man. For that they required to assume a spiritual being standing outside of and over nature, thus outside of time and space, a spiritual being which formed the quintessence of all morality, and who ruled the material nature just as the aristocrats ruled the crowd who worked with their hands. And just as the former conceived themselves as noble and the latter appeared to them common and vulgar, so did nature become mean and bad, the spirit, on the other hand, elevated and good. Man was unlucky enough to belong to both worlds: those of matter and spirit. Thus he is half animal and half angel, and oscillates between good and evil. But just as God rules nature, has the moral in man the force to overcome the natural, the desires of the flesh, and to triumph over them. Complete happiness is, nevertheless, impossible for man so long as he dwells in this vale of tears, where he is condemned to bear the burden of his flesh. Only then, when he is free from this and his spirit has returned to its original source, to God, can he enjoy unlimited happiness.

Thus it will be seen that God plays a very different rôle to what He does in the original Polytheism. This one god is no personification of an appearance of the outer nature, but the assumption for itself of an independent existence on the part of the spiritual (or intellectual) nature of man. Just as this is a unity, so can the Godhead be no multiplicity. And its most complete philosophic form, the one god, has no other function than of accounting for the moral law. To interfere in the course of this world in the manner of the ancient gods is not his business, but, at least, for philosophers the assumption of binding force in the natural law of cause and effect suffices.

Certainly the more this view became popular and grew into the religion of the people, the more did the highest, the all-embracing and all-ruling spirit take on again personal characteristics; the more did he take part in human affairs, and the more did the old gods