Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/84

 down to them with more or less criticism, the big man was the motive power in history—in the Feudal period the king, the military commander, the religious founder, and the priest. In the eighteenth century there were very many men branded by the bourgeois intellectuals as the authors of all the evil in the world, and the philosophers, on the other hand, as legislators and teachers, as the only real instruments of progress. But all progress appeared to be only external, a simple change of clothes. That period in which the sources of historical writing began to flow more abundantly, the time of the victory of the Greeks over the Persian invasion, was the culminating period of the social development. From that time on society in the lands round the Mediterranean began to decay; it went down and down till the Barbarian Immigration. Only slowly have the peoples of Europe since then developed themselves again to a higher level socially, and even in the eighteenth century they had not risen far above the level of classical antiquity, so that in many points of politics, of philosophy, and especially of art, the latter could rank as a pattern.

History, as a whole, appeared simply as a rise and fall, a repetition of the same circle, and just as the simple individual can set himself continually higher aims than he arrives at, because as a rule he fails, so did this circle appear as a horrible tragi-comedy in which all that was most elevated and strongest was doomed to play wretched parts.

Quite otherwise was it with primitive history. That, with its individual departments, history of law, comparative philology, ethnology, found in the material which these worked up, not the extraordinary and the individual, but the everyday and common-place described. But for this very reason primitive history can trace with certainty a line of continuous development. And the more the material increases the more it is possible to compare like with like, the more it is discovered that this development is no chance, but according to law. The material which is at our disposal is, on the one side, facts of the technical arrangements of life, on the