Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/25

 smuggle themselves in. They came in as intermediators between God and man, as saints and angels. But even in this form the contempt for nature held good, as well as the view that the spiritual, and especially the ethical nature of man, was of supernatural origin and afforded an infallible proof of the existence of a supernatural world.

Between the two extremes, Plato and Epicurus, there were many intermediary positions possible. Among these the most important was the Stoic philosophy, founded by Zeno (341–270 ). Just like the Platonic philosophy, it attached those who sought to derive the moral law from the pleasure or egoism of the individual; it recognised in him a higher power standing over the individual which can drive man to action, and which brings him pain and grief, nay, even to death. But different to Plato, it saw in the moral law nothing supernatural, only a product of nature. Virtue arises from the knowledge of nature; happiness is arrived at when man acts in accordance with nature, that is, in accordance with the universe, or universal reason. To know nature and act in accordance with her reasonably, which is the same as virtuously, and voluntarily to submit to her necessity, disregarding individual pleasure and pain, that is the way to happiness which we will go. The study of nature is, however, only a means to the study of virtue. And nature itself is explained from a moral point of view. The practical result of the Stoic Ethics is not the pursuit of happiness but the contempt for pleasure and the good things of the world. But this contempt for the world was finally to serve the same end: that which appeared to Zeno as well as Epicurus as the highest, viz., a state of repose for the individual soul. Both systems of philosophy arose out of the need for rest.

The intermediary position of the Stoic Ethics between the Platonic and the Epicurean corresponded to the view of the universe which Stoicism drew up. The explanation of nature is by no means without importance to them, but nature appeared to them as a greater view of monotheistic materialism, which assumes a