Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/80

 by Kant, the cause lay in the fact that the problem of the moral law, to whose explanation neither its deduction from pleasure nor from the moral sense sufficed—while it yet offered the only "natural" causal explanation which seemed possible. Darwinism was the first to make an end to the division of man, which this rendered necessary, into a natural and animal being on the one hand and a supernatural and heavenly one on the other.

But with that the entire ethical problem was not yet solved. Were it attempted to explain moral impulse, duty, and conscience as well as the ground type of the virtues from the social impulse, yet this breaks down when it is a question of explaining the moral ideal. Of that there is not the least sign in the animal world; only man can set himself ideals and follow them. Whence come these? Are they prescribed to the human race from the beginning of time as an irrevocable demand of nature, or an eternal reason—as commands which man does not produce, but which confront man as a ruling force and show him the aims to which he has ever more and more to strive after? That was, in the main, the view of all thinkers of the eighteenth century, Atheists as well as Theists, Materialists and Idealists. This view took, even in the mouth of the boldest Materialism, the tendency to assume a supernatural providence, which indeed had nothing more to do in nature, but still hovers over human society. The evolution idea which recognised the descent of man from the animal world made this trend of idealism absurd in a Materialist mouth.

All the same, before Darwin founded his epoch-making work, that theory had arisen which revealed the secret of the moral ideal. This was the theory of Marx and Engels.