Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/51

 is subordinate to its own personality as far as it belongs to the world of intelligence." Thus it is not then to be wondered if man, as belonging to both worlds, is obliged to look on his own being, with regard to its second and highest qualification, not otherwise than with respect, and to conceive the greatest respect for the laws of the same.

And with that we could congratulate ourselves on having got back to the early Christian argument for the equality of man, which is based on the fact that we are all children of God.

Meanwhile, reject, as we must, the assumption of the two worlds to which, according to Plato and Kant, man belongs, it is nevertheless true that man lives at the same time in two worlds, and that the moral law inhabits one of them, which is not the world of experience. But all the same, even this world is no supersensuous one.

The two worlds in which man lives are the Past and the Future. The Present forms the boundary of the two. His whole experience lies in the past, all experience being as such necessarily of the past, and all the connecting links which past experience shows him lie with inevitable necessity before, or rather, behind him. In these there is nothing more left to alter; he can do nothing more in regard to them than recognise their necessity. Thus is the world of experience the world of knowing, and the world of necessity.

It is otherwise with the Future. Of this I cannot have the smallest experience. Apparently free, it lies before me as the world which I do not explore as one knowing it, but in which I have to assert myself as an active agent. Certainly I can extend the experience of the past into the future; certainly I can conclude that these will be even so necessarily determined as those; but even if I can only recognise the world on the assumption of necessity, yet I shall only be able to act in it on the assumption of a certain freedom. Even if a compulsion is exercised over my actions, there still