Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/55

 object of science. Thus in transferring the moral from the "this side"—the sensual world—to the "other side"—the supersensual world—Kant did not advance the scientific knowledge of it, but has instead closed all ways to it. This obstacle must be got rid of before everything else; we must rise above Kant if we are to bring the problem of the moral law nearer to its solution.

It is the ethic which forms the weakest side of the Kantian Philosophy. And yet it is just through the ethic that its greatest success was achieved, because it met very powerful needs of the time.

French Materialism had been a philosophy of the battle against the traditional methods of thought, and consequently against the institutions which ruled them. An irreconcilable hatred against Christianity made it the watchword not only of the fight against the Church, but of that against all the social and political forces which were bound up with it.

Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" equally drives Christianity from out of the Temple; but the discovery of the origin of the moral law, which is brought about by the "Critique of the Practical Reason," opens for it again the door with all due respect. Thus through Kant, Philosophy became, instead of a weapon of the fight against the existing methods of thought and institutions, a means of reconciling the antagonisms.

But the way of development being that of struggle, the reconciliation of antagonisms implies the arrest of development. Thus the Kantian Philosophy became a conservative factor.

Naturally, Theology was the greatest gainer by this. It served to emancipate the traditional belief from the quandary into which it had been forced by the development of science, in rendering the reconciliation of science and religion possible.

"No other science," says Zeller, "experienced the influence of the Kantian Philosophy in a higher degree