Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/88

 was obliged to close its eyes to all idea of a further social evolution, and repudiate every philosophy of evolution, which did not simply investigate the development of the past to understand this, and also in order to understand the tendencies of the new society of the future, and to hammer out weapons for the struggle of the present, which is destined to bring about this form of society of the future.

Although this period of intellectual reaction after the great Revolution had been overcome, and the bourgeoisie, which had regained self-respect and power, had made an end to all artistic and philosophic romanticism in order to proclaim Materialism, they could not, all the same, get as far as the historic Materialism. Deeply founded as this was in the circumstances of the time, it was no less in the nature of the circumstances that this (the latest form of materialism) could only be a philosophy of the proletariat; that it should be repudiated by science so far as this came under the influence of the bourgeoisie, repudiated to such an extent that even the Socialist author of "The History of Materialism," Albert Lange, only mentions Karl Marx in that work as an economist, and not as a philosopher.

The idea of evolution, generally accepted for the material sciences, even fruitful for certain special branches of mental science, has remained a dead letter for the scientific point of view, as interpreted by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie could not even get farther than Hegel in their philosophy. They fell back into a Materialism which stands considerably below that of the eighteenth century, because it is purely natural philosophy and has no theory of society to show. And when this narrow Materialism no longer suited them they turned to the old Kantianism, purified from the defects which had been superseded by science in the meantime, but not emancipated from its Ethic, which was now the bulwark which was to be brought against the Materialist theory of Social Evolution.

In the economic sciences the bourgeoisie hovered between an historic conception, which certainly acknowledges an evolution of society but denies necessary