Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/79

 things appear disproportionately big or near, while others are overlooked. How blind and deaf the instinct for reproduction can render many animals at times is ell known. The social instincts which do not show themselves as a rule so acutely and intensively, generally obscure much less the intellectual faculties; they can, however, influence them very considerably on occasion. Think, for instance, of the influence of faithfulness and discipline upon sheep, who follow their leading sheep blindly wherever it may go.

The moral law in us can lead our intellect astray just as any other impulse, being itself neither a producer nor a product of wisdom. What is apparently the most devoted and divine in us is essentially the same as that which we look on as the commonest and most devilish. The moral law is of the same nature as the instinct for reproduction. Nothing is more ridiculous than when the former is put on a pedestal and the latter is turned away from with loathing and contempt. But no less false is it to infer that man can, and ought, to give way to his impulses without check. That is only so far true as it is impossible to condemn any one of these as such. But that by no means implies that they cannot come to cross purposes. It is simply impossible that anyone should follow all his instincts without restraint, because they restrain one another. Which, however, at a given moment wins, and what consequences this victory may bring to the individual and his society with it, neither the ethic of pleasure nor those of a moral law standing outside of space and time afford us any help to divine.

If, however, the moral law were recognised as a social instinct which, like all the instincts, is called out in us by the struggle for life, then the supersensuous world has lost a strong support in human thought. The simple gods of Polytheism were already dethroned by natural philosophy. If, nevertheless, a new philosophy could arise which not only revealed the belief in God and a supersensuous world, but put it more firmly in a higher form, as was done in ancient times by Plato and on the eve of the French