Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/98

 nature. On the other hand, human society forms for the human individual a nature which is a quite peculiar world and apart from the rest; a world which apparently interferes with its being much more than nature, with which latter it imagines itself the better able to cope the more the division of labour increases.

And the latter is practically just as unlimited as the possible progress of technique itself; it finds its limits only in the limits to the expansion of the human race.

If we said above that the animal society is an organism of a peculiar kind, different from the plant and animal, so we now find that human society forms a peculiar organism, not only differing again from the plant and animal individual, but is essentially different from that composed of animals.

Before all there come two distinguishing features into account. We have seen that the animal organism itself possesses all the organs which it requires for its own existence, while the human individual under the advanced division of labour cannot live by itself without society. The Robinson Crusoes who without any means produce everything for themselves are only to be found in children’s story books and the so-called scientific works of bourgeois economists, who believe that the best way to discover the laws of society is to completely ignore them. Man is in his whole nature dependent, on society; it rules him; only through the peculiar nature of this is he to be understood.

The peculiar nature of society is, however, in a continual state of change, because human society, in distinction to the animal one, is always subject to development in consequence of the technical advance. Animal society develops itself, probably, only in the same degree as the animal species which forms it. Far faster does the process of development proceed in human society. But at the same time nothing can be more erroneous than to conceive it as the same as the development of the individual, and distinguish the stages of youth, of maturity, of decay and death in it. So long as the sources of force hold out over which the earth has command, therefore so long as the foundation