Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/75

 On the other hand, reproduction and care for the progeny already render longer or shorter relations of a more intimate kind necessary between different individuals of the same species; and just as these relations have formed the starting point for the formation of societies, so could the corresponding impulses well give the point of departure for the development of the social impulses.

These impulses themselves can vary according to the varying conditions of the various species, but a row of impulses form the requisite conditions for the success of any kind of society. In the first place, naturally, altruism—self-sacrifice for the whole. Then bravery in the defence of the common interests; fidelity to the community; submission to the will of society, thus obedience and discipline; truthfulness to society, whose security is endangered, or whose energies are wasted, when they are misled in any way by false signals. Finally ambition, the sensibility to the praise and blame of society. These are all social impulses which we find expressed already among animal societies, many of them in a high degree.

These social impulses are, nevertheless, nothing less than the highest virtues; they sum up the entire moral code. At the most they lack the love for justice, that is the impulse towards equality. For its development there certainly is no place in the animal societies, because they only know natural and individual inequality, and not those called forth by social relations, the social inequalities. The lofty moral law that the comrade ought never to be merely a means to an end—which the Kantians look on as the most wonderful achievement of Kant's genius, as the moral programme of the modern era, and as essential to the entire future history of the world—is in the animal world a common-place. The development of human society first created a state of affairs in which the companion became a simple tool of others.

What appeared to Kant as the creation of a higher world of spirits is a product of the animal world. How closely the social impulses have grown up with