Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/52

 remains to me the choice whether I shall yield to it or not; there remains even as a last resort the possibility of withdrawing myself by a voluntary death. Action implies continual choice between various possibilities, and be it only that of doing or not doing, it means accepting or rejecting, defending or opposing. Choice, however, assumes, in advance, the possibility of choice, just as much as the distinction between the acceptable and inacceptable, the good and the bad. The moral judgment, which is an absurdity in the world of the past—the world of experience, in which there is nothing to choose, where iron necessity reigns—is unavoidable in the world of the unknown future—of freedom.

And not only the feeling of freedom is assumed by action, but also certain aims. Does there rule in the world of the past the sequence of cause and effect (causality), so in that of action, of the future, rules the thought of aim (teleology). For action the feeling of freedom is an indispensable psychological necessity, which is not to be got rid of by any degree of knowledge. Even the sternest Fatalism, the deepest conviction that man is a necessary product of his circumstances, cannot make us cease to love and hate, to defend and attack.

But all that is no monopoly of man, but holds also of the animals. Even these have freedom of the will, in the sense that man has, namely, as a subjective, inevitable feeling of freedom, which springs from ignorance of the future, and the necessity of exercising a direct influence on it.

And just in the same way they have command of a certain insight into the connection of cause and effect. Finally the conception of an end is not quite strange to them. In respect of insight into the past, and the necessity of nature on the one hand, and on the other in respect of the power of foreseeing the future, and the setting up of aims for their action the lowest specimens of humanity are distinguished far less from the animals than from civilised men.