Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/83

 American literature and science. What specially distinguished America from Europe was, however, the close contact of the capitalist civilisation of the white man with Indian barbarism. That was the object which especially attracted literature and science. Soon after the German Romanticism there arose the American-Indian novel, and soon after the rise of the historical school of law, the revival of the old fancy tales and the world of legends, and the comparative philological research in Germany, and the scientific theory of the social and linguistic conditions of the Indians in America.

At an earlier period, however, the settlement of the English in India had afforded the possibility, nay the necessity of a study of the languages, the customs, and the laws of these territories. As far as Germany there had penetrated, at the commencement of the nineteenth century, the knowledge of Sanskrit, which laid the foundation for the comparative study of languages, which in its turn afforded the most valuable insight into the life of the Indo-Germanic peoples in primitive times.

All this rendered it possible to treat the accounts given by civilised observers of primitive peoples, as well as the discoveries of weapons and tools of vanished races, differently from formerly, when they had been simply looked on as curiosities. They now became material by which to extend the partly-revealed chain of human development still further into the past, and to close up many of the gaps.

In this entire historical work there was lacking, however, the object which had, up to then, ruled the entire writing of history—the great man theory. In the written sources, from which formerly the knowledge of human history was exclusively culled, only the extraordinary had been related, because it was that only which seemed noteworthy to the chronicler of the events of his time. To describe everyday occurrences, that which everybody knew, was by no means his task. The extraordinary man, the extraordinary event, such as wars and revolutions, only seemed worth relating. Thus it was that for the traditional historians, who never got beyond writing up from the sources handed