Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/59



like Plato, had divided mankind into two sides: into natural and supernatural, animal and angelic. But the strong desire to bring the entire world, including our intellectual functions, under a unitary conception and to exclude all factors beside the natural from it; or, in other words, the Materialist method of thought was too deeply grounded in the circumstances for Kant to be able to paralyse it for any length of time. And the splendid progress made by the material sciences, which began just at the very time of Kant's death to make a spurt forwards, brought a series of new discoveries, which more and more filled up the gap between men and the rest of nature, which among other things revealed the fact that the apparently angelic in man was also to be seen in the animal world, and thus was of animal nature.

All the same, the Materialist Ethics of the nineteenth century, so far as it was dominated by the conceptions of natural science, as much in the bold and outspoken form which it took in Germany as in the more retiring and modest English and, even now, French version, did not get beyond that which the eighteenth century had taught. Feuerbach founded morality on the desire for happiness; while Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, took, on the other hand, from the English the distinction between the moral or altruistic feelings and the egoistical feelings, both of which are equally rooted in human nature.

The first great and decided advance over this position was made by Darwin, who proved, in his book on the "Descent of Man," that the altruistic feelings formed no peculiarity of man, that they are also to be found in the animal world, and that there, as here, they spring