Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/43

 this very examination became for him an incitement to surmount this barrier and to discover an unknowable world, of which he actually knew that it was of quite another nature than the world of appearances, that it was completely timeless and spaceless, and therefore causeless as well.

But why this break-neck leap over the boundaries of knowledge which cut away all firm ground beneath his feet? The position could not be a logical one, since through this leap he landed on contradictions which nullified his own assumptions. It was an historical reason which awakened in him the need for the assumption of a supersensuous world—a need which he must satisfy at any price.

If, in the eighteenth century, France was a hundred years behind England, just so much was Germany behind France. If the English bourgeoisie no longer needed Materialism, since without it, and on religious grounds, they had got rid of the feudalistic State and its Church, the German bourgeoisie did not yet feel strong enough to take up openly the fight against the State and its Church. They, therefore, withdrew in fear from Materialism. This came in the eighteenth century to Germany, just as to Russia: not as the philosophy of the fight but of pleasure, in a form suitable to the needs of the "enlightened" despotism. It grew within the princely courts, side by side with the narrowest orthodoxy. In the bourgeoisie there remained, however, even in its boldest and most independent pioneers, as a rule, a relic of Christian belief hanging to them, from which they could not emancipate themselves.

All this made the English philosophy appeal specially to German philosophers. In fact, its influence on Kant was very great. I cannot remember ever to have found in his writings any mention of a French Materialist of the eighteenth century. On the other hand, he quoted with preference Englishmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Lock, Hume, Berkeley, and Priestley.