Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/30

 middle system between the two. The optimism and joy of life in the rising bourgeoisie—at least in their progressive elements, especially among their intellectuals—felt itself strong enough to come forth openly and to throw aside all the hypocritical masks which the ruling Christianity had hitherto enforced. And miserable though frequently the present might be, the rising bourgeoisie felt that the best part of reality, the future, belonged to them, and they felt themselves capable of changing this Vale of Tears into a Paradise, in which each could follow his inclinations. In reality, and in the natural impulses of man, their thinkers saw the source of all good and not of all evil. This new school of thought found a thankful public, not only among the more progressive elements in the bourgeoisie, but also in the Court nobility, who at that period had acquired such a power that even they thought that they could dispense with all Christian hypocrisy in their life of pleasure, all the more as they were divided by a deep chasm from the life of the people. They looked on citizens and peasants as beings of a lower order to whom their philosophy was incomprehensible, so that they could freely and undisturbedly develop it without fear of shaking their own means of rule—the Christian Religion and Ethics.

The conditions of the new life and Ethics developed most vigorously in France. There they came most clearly and courageously to expression. Just as in the case of the ancient Epicureanism so in the new enlightenment philosophy of Lamettrie (1709–1751), Holbach (1723–1789), Helvetius (1715–1771), the ethic of egoism, of utility or pleasure stood in the closest connection with a Materialist view of the universe. The world, as experience presents it to us, appeared the only one which could be taken into account by us.

The causes of this new Epicureanism had great similarity with the ancient one, as well as the results at which both arrived. Nevertheless they differed in one very essential point. The old Epicureanism had not arisen as the disturber of the traditional religious views, it had understood how to accommodate itself to them.