Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/87

 the requisite scientific conditions had been to hand. And on the other hand, even Engels and Marx, despite their genius, and despite the preparatory work which the new sciences had achieved, would not have been able, even in the time of the forties in the nineteenth century, to discover it, if they had not stood on the standpoint «of the proletariat, and were thus Socialists. That also was absolutely necessary to the discovery of this Conception of History. In this sense it is a proletarian philosophy, and the opposing views are bourgeois philosophies.

The rise of the idea of evolution took place during a period of reaction, when no immediate further development of society was in question. The conception, consequently, only served for the explanation of the previous development, and thereby only in a certain sense—that of a justification; nay, at times, more a glorification of the past. Just as through Romanticism and the historical school of jurisprudence there goes through the entire study of early times, even through Sanskrit study—I may point to the example of Schopenhauer's Buddhism—in the first decades of the last century, a reactionary trait. So was it with that philosophy which made the evolutionary idea of that period the centre of its system—the Hegelian. Even that was only intended to be a panegyric on the previous development, which had now found its close in the monarchy by the will of God. As reactionary philosophy, this philosophy of the development was bound to be an idealist philosohpy, since the present, the reality, was in too great a contradiction with its reactionary tendencies.

As soon as reality—that is, the capitalist society—had got so far as to be able to make itself felt in face of these tendencies, the idealist conception of evolution became impossible. It was superseded by a more or less open Materialism. But only from the proletariat point of view was it possible to translate the social development into a Materialistic one—in other words, to recognise in the present an evolution of society proceeding according to natural laws. The bourgeoisie