Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/82

 old. To come to an agreement with the latter became merely a requirement of political sagacity on the part of the bourgeoisie. With that, however, their opinion on the past was bound also to grow milder.

On the other hand the Revolution had brought a great disillusionment to the Idealogues themselves. Great as were its achievements for the bourgeoisie, they are not yet up to the expectations of an harmonious empire of "morality," general well-being, and happiness, such as had been looked for from the overthrow of the old. No one dared to build hopes on the new; the more unsatisfactory the present, so much the more terrifying were the reminiscences of the most recent past which the present had brought to a head, so much the more bright did the farther past appear. That produced, as is well known, Romanticism in art. But it produced also similar movements in the mental sciences. Men began to study the past, not in order to condemn it, but to understand it; not to show up its absurdity, but to understand its reasonableness.

But the Revolution had done its work too thoroughly for men to dream of re-establishing what had been set aside. Had the past been rational, so it was necessary to show that it had become irrational. The socially necessary and reasonable ceased with that to appear as an unchangeable conception. Thus arose the view of a social evolution.

That applied first to the knowledge of German history. In Germany the above-described process was most markedly to be seen; there the revolutionary method of thought had not penetrated so deeply, had never struck such deep roots as in France; there the work of the Revolution had not been so complete, the forces and opinions of the past had been shaken in a less degree, and finally had appeared on the scene more as a disturbing than an emancipating element.

But to the study of the German past there associated itself the investigation of similar periods. In America the young community of the United States was already so far advanced that a separate class of the intellectuals had been able to develop a real