Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/94

 employment of stones and sticks, and brought him nearer to the discovery of the first tools and weapons.

Whatever development we accept, the first or the second—and both could have taken place independent of each other at different points—from both of them we see clearly the close connection which exists between new means of production, new methods of life and new needs. Each of these factors necessarily produces the other; each becomes necessarily the cause of changes, which in their turn hide fresh changes in their bosom. Thus every discovery produces inevitable changes, which give rise to other discoveries, and therewith bring new needs and methods of life, which again call forth new discoveries, and so on—a chain of endless development which becomes so much more rapid and more complicated the farther it proceeds and the more the possibility and facility of new discoveries advance.

Let us consider the consequences which the rise of hunting, as a source of food for man, and his emergence from the primitive forest was bound to draw with it.

Besides the meat man took, in place of the tree fruits, roots and fruits of the grasses, corn and maize into his bill of fare. In the primitive forest a cultivation of plants is impossible, and to clear the primitive forest is beyond the power of primitive man. The latter, however, could not even have evolved this idea. He lived from tree fruits; to plant fruit trees which would first bear fruit after many years assumes that already a high degree of culture and settlement has been attained. On the other hand, the planting of grasses in meadows and steppes is much easier than in the primitive forest, and can be brought about with much simpler tools. The thought of planting grasses, which often bear fruits after only a few weeks, is, moreover, easier to conceive than that of planting trees. Cause and effect are so nearly connected in this case that their dependence is easier to see, and even the unsettled primitive man might expect to exist during the period