Karl Kautsky (1854-1938)

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Ethics and the Materialist Conception Of History (1906)

Preface

Like so many other Marxist publications the present one owes its origin to a special occasion, it arose out of a controversy. The polemic in which I was involved last Autumn with the editors of Vorwärts brought me to touch on the question of their “ethical tendencies”. What I said, however, on this point was so often misunderstood by one side, and on the other brought me so many requests to give a more thorough and systematic exposition of my ideas on Ethics, that I felt constrained to attempt at least to give a short sketch of the development of Ethics on the basis of the materialist conception of history. I take as my starting point, consequently, that materialist philosophy which was founded on one side by Marx and Engels, on the other, though in the same spirit, by Joseph Dietzgen. For the results at which I have arrived I alone am responsible.

My original intention only got so far as to write an article for the Neue Zeit on the subject. But never had I so miscalculated over the plan of a work as this time; and not only in respect of its scope. I had begun the work in October, because I thought there were now going to be a few months of quiet for the party, which might be devoted to theoretical work. The Jena Congress had run so harmoniously that I did not expect to see a conflict in our own party so soon. On the other hand it looked at the beginning of October as if there had come in the Russian revolution a pause for gathering together and organizing the revolutionary forces.

As is well known, however, everything turned out quite differently. An unimportant personal question was the occasion of a sharp discussion, which indeed did not for a moment disturb the party, but all the same cost the party officials and especially those in Berlin, a considerable amount of time, worry and energy. What, however, certainly demanded even more time and energy was the Russian revolution, which unexpectedly in the course of that very October received a powerful impetus and regained its previous height. That glorious movement naturally absorbed even out of Russia all the interest of revolutionary thinking people. It was a magnificent time, but it was not the most suitable moment to write a book on ethics. However, the subject had captivated me and I could not free myself, and so I concluded my work despite the many distractions and interruptions, which the Berlin storm in a teacup, and the hurricane in the Russian ocean brought with them. It is to be hoped that the little work does not bear too obviously on its face the marks of its stormy birth. When, however, I had brought it to a conclusion another question arose. Far beyond the limits of an article had it grown, and yet was hardly fitted for a book. It contents itself with giving a general idea of my thought, and gives very few references to facts and arguments to prove or illustrate what has been brought forward.

I asked myself whether I ought not to reconstruct and enlarge my work by the addition of such arguments and facts. If, however, that had to be done it would mean delaying the publication of the book for an indefinite period; because to carry out this work would require two years quiet undisturbed labor. We are, however, coming to a time when for every Social Democrat quiet and undisturbed work will be impossible, where our work will be continual fighting. Neither did I desire that the publication should be put off for too long a time in face of the influence which has been won in our ranks by the ethics of Kant, and I consequently hold it necessary to show the relations which exist between the materialist conception of history and Ethics.

Consequently I have resolved to allow the little book to appear. However, to show that with this not all is said which I might have said on Ethics, and that I hold myself in reserve to deal with the subject more fully in a period of greater calm, I call the present work simply an attempt – an Essay. Certainly when these quieter times will come is not to be seen at present, as I have already remarked. At this very time the myrmidons of the Czar are zealously at work to rival the deeds of the Alvas and Tillys during the religious struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – not in military achievements, but in brutal destruction. The west European champions of culture and order greet that with enthusiasm as the restoration of legal conditions. But just as little as the hirelings of the Hapsburgs succeeded, despite temporary successes, in conquering North Germany and Holland for Catholicism will the Cossacks of the Romanoffs succeed in restoring the rule of absolutism. This has sufficient strength remaining to lay its country waste, not to rule it. In any case the Russian Revolution is not by a long way at an end – it cannot close so long as the peasants are not appeased. The longer it lasts, so much the greater will be the disturbances in the rank of the west European proletariat, so much the nearer financial catastrophes, so much the more probable that even in west Europe there should set in a period of sharp class struggles.

That is no time which calls for the theoretical labors of revolutionary writers. But this drawback for our theoretical labors, which will probably be felt in the next few years, we need not lament. The materialist conception of history is not only important because it allows us to explain history better than has been done up to now, but also because it enables us to make history better than has been hitherto done. And the latter is more important than the former. From the progress of the practice our theoretical knowledge grows and in the progress of the practice our theoretical progress is proved. No world-conception has been in so high a degree a philosophy of deeds as the dialectical materialism. Not only upon research but upon deeds do we rely to show the superiority of our philosophy.


Even the book before us has not to serve for contemplative knowledge, but for the fight, a fight in which we have to develop the highest ethical strength as well as the greatest clearness of knowledge if we are to win.

Karl Kautsky
Berlin-Friedenau, January 1906

Chapter I
Ancient and Christian Ethics

In the history of Philosophy the question of Ethics comes to the fore soon after the Persian wars. The repulsion of the gigantic Persian despotism had had a similar effect on the tiny Hellenic people to that of the defeat of the Russian despotism on the Japanese. At one blow they became a world-power, ruling the sea which surrounded them and with that commanding its trade. And if now over Japan the great industry is going to break with a weight of which they have only as yet experienced the commencement, so, after the Persian wars, Greece, and Athens in particular, became the headquarters of the world commerce of that time, commercial capitalism embraced the entire people and dissolved all the traditional relations and conceptions which had hitherto ruled the individual and regulated his dealings. The individual found himself suddenly transplanted into a new society – and indeed the more so the higher he stood socially – in which he lost all the traditional supports, in which he found himself left wholly to himself. And yet despite all this seeming anarchy, everyone felt not only a need for distinct rules of conduct, but he found more or less clearly that in his own inner being there worked a regulator of his action which allowed him to decide between good and bad, to aim for the good and to avoid the bad. This regulator revealed itself as a highly mysterious power. Granted that it controlled the actions of many men, that its decisions between good and bad were given without the least delay and asserted themselves with all decision – if any one asked what was the actual nature of this regulator and on what foundation it built its judgments, then were both the regulator which dwelt in the breast of every man, as well as the judgments which appeared so natural and self evident, revealed as phenomena which were harder to understand than any other phenomena in the world.

So we see then that since the Persian wars Ethics, or the investigation of this mysterious regulator of human action – the moral law – comes to the front in Greek Philosophy. Up to this time Greek Philosophy had been in the main natural philosophy. It made it its duty to investigate and explain the laws which hold in the world of nature. Now nature lost interest with the philosophers ever more and more. Man, or the ethical nature of humanity, became the central point of their investigations. Natural Philosophy ceased to make further progress, the natural sciences were divided from philosophy; all progress of the ancient philosophy came now from the study of the spiritual nature of man and his morality.

The Sophists already had begun to despise the knowledge of nature. Still farther went Socrates, who was of opinion that he could learn nothing from the trees, but certainly from the human beings in the town. Plato looked on Natural Philosophy as play.

With that, however, the method of philosophy changed. Natural Philosophy is of necessity bound to rely on the observation of nature. On the other hand how is the moral nature of man to be recognized with more certainty than through the observation of our own personality? The senses can be mistaken, other men can deceive us. But we ourselves do not lie to ourselves, when we wish to be truthful. Thus finally that alone was recognized as certain knowledge which man produced from himself.

But not alone the subject and the method, but also the object of philosophy was different. Natural Philosophy aimed at the examination of the necessary connection of cause and effect. Its point of view was that of causality. Ethics on the other hand dealt with the will and duty of man, with ends and aims which he strives for. Thus its point of view is that of a conscious aim, teleology.

Now these new conceptions do not always reveal themselves with equal sharpness in all the various schools of thought.

There are two methods of explaining the moral law within us.

One can look for its roots in the obvious motive forces of human action, and as such appeared the pursuit of happiness or pleasure. Under the production of wares, the production of private producers externally independent of each other, happiness and pleasure and the conditions necessary thereto are also a private affair. Consequently men come to look for the foundation of the moral law in the individual need for happiness or pleasure. That is good that makes for the individual’s pleasure, and increases his happiness. And evil is that which produces the contrary. How is it then possible that not everybody under all circumstances wishes only the good? That is explained by the fact that there are various kinds of pleasure and happiness. Evil arises when men choose a lower kind of pleasure or happiness in preference to a higher, or sacrifice a lasting pleasure to a momentary and fleeting one. Thus it arises from ignorance or short-sightedness. Accordingly Epicurus looked on the intellectual pleasures as higher than the physical because they last longer and give unalloyed satisfaction. He considers the pleasure of repose greater than the pleasure of action. Spiritual peace seems to him the greatest pleasure. In consequence all excess in pleasure is to be rejected; and every selfish action is bad, since respect, love and the help of my neighbors, as well as the prosperity and welfare of the community to which I belong are factors which are necessary to my own prosperity, which, however, I cannot attain if I only look out for myself without any scruples.

This view of Ethics had the advantage that it appeared quite natural and it was very easy to reconcile it with the needs of those who desired to content themselves with the knowledge which our senses give us of the knowable world as the real and to whom human existence appeared only a part of this world. On the other hands this view of ethics was bound to produce in its turn that materialist view of the world. Founding Ethics on the longing for the pleasure or happiness of the individual or on egoism and the materialist world concept conditioned and lent each other mutual support. The connection of both elements comes most completely to expression in Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) His materialist philosophy of nature is founded with a directly ethical aim.

The materialist view of nature is in his view alone in the position to free us from the fear which a foolish superstition awakes in us and to give us that peace of soul without which true happiness is impossible.

On the other hand, all those elements who were opposed to the materialism were obliged to reject his ethics, and vice versa; those who were not satisfied with this ethics were not satisfied with the materialism either. And this ethic of egoism, or the pursuit of the individual happiness, gave ample opportunity for attack. In the first place it did not explain how the moral law arose as a moral binding force, as a duty to do the right and not simply as advice, to prefer the more rational kind of pleasure to the less rational. And the speedy decisive moral judgment on good and bad is quite different from the balancing up between different kinds of pleasures or utilities. Also, finally, it is possible to feel a moral duty even in cases where the most generous interpretation can find no pleasure or utility from which the pursuit of this duty can be deduced. If I refuse to lie, although I by that means stir up public opinion forever against me, if I put my existence at stake, or even bring on myself the penalty of death, then there can he no talk of even the remotest pleasure or happiness which could transform the discomfort or pain of the moment into its opposite.

But what could the critics bring forward to explain this phenomenon? In fact nothing, even if according to their own view a great deal. Since they were unable to explain the moral law by natural means it became to them the surest and most unanswerable proof that man lived not only a natural life, but also outside of nature, that in him supernatural and non-natural forces work, that his spirit is something supernatural. Thus arose from this view the ethic of philosophic idealism and monotheism, the new belief in God.

This belief in God was quite different to the old polytheism; it differed from the latter not only in the number of the gods; it did not arise from the fact that these were reduced to one. Polytheism was an attempt to explain the process of Nature. Its gods were personifications of the forces of Nature; they were thus not over Nature, and not outside of Nature, but in her and formed a part of her. Natural Philosophy superseded them in the degree in which it discovered other than personal causation in the processes of nature, and developed the idea of law, of the necessary connection of cause and effect. The gods might here and there maintain a traditional existence for a time even in the philosophy, but only as a kind of superman who no longer played any active role. Even for Epicurus, despite his materialism, the gods were not dead, but they were changed into passive spectators.

Even the non-materialist ethical school of philosophy, such as was most completely represented by Plato (427-347 B.C.), and whose mythical side was far more clearly developed by the neoplatonists, especially by Plotinus (204-270 A.D.) – even this school did not find the gods necessary to explain nature, and dealt with them in no other way than did the materialists. Their idea of God did not spring out of the need to explain the natural world around us, but the ethical and spiritual nature of man. For that they required to assume a spiritual Being standing outside of and over nature, thus outside of time and space, a spiritual Being which formed the quintessence of all morality and who ruled the crowd who worked with their hands. And just as the former conceived themselves as noble, and the latter appeared to them common and vulgar, so did nature become mean and bad, the spirit on the other hand elevated and good. Man was unlucky enough to belong to both worlds, that of matter and of spirit. Thus he is half animal and half angel, and oscillates between good and evil. But just as God rules nature, has the moral in man the force to overcome the natural, the desires of the flesh and to triumph over them. More complete happiness is nevertheless impossible for man so long as he dwells in this vale of tears, where he is condemned to bear the burden of his own flesh. Only then when he is free from this and his spirit has returned to its original source – to God – can he enjoy unlimited happiness.

Thus it will be seen that God plays a very different role to what he does in the original Polytheism. This one God is no personification of an appearance of the outer nature, but the assumption for itself of an independent existence on the part of the spiritual (or intellectual) nature of man. Just as this is a unity so can the Godhead be no multiplicity. And its most complete philosophic form, the one God, has no other function than that of accounting for the moral law. To interfere in the course of the world in the manner of the ancient gods is not his business, here suffices, at least for philosophers, the assumption of the binding force in the natural law of cause and effect.

Certainly the more this view became popular and grew into the religion of the people, the more did a highest, all embracing and all ruling spirit take on again personal characteristics; the more did he take part in human affairs, and the more did the old gods smuggle themselves in. They came in as intermediators between God and man, as saints and angels. But even in this form the contempt for nature held good, as well as the view that the spiritual and especially the ethical nature of man was of supernatural origin and afforded an infallible proof of the existence of a supernatural world.

Between the two extremes Plato and Epicurus, there were many intermediary positions possible. Among these the most important was the Stoic Philosophy, founded by Zeno (B.C. 341-270). Just like the Platonic Philosophy it attacked those who sought to derive the moral law from the pleasure or egotism of the single passing individual; it recognized in him a higher power, standing over the individual, which can drive man to action, and which brings him pain and grief, nay even to death. But different to Plato they saw in the moral law nothing supernatural, only a product of nature. Virtue arises from the knowledge of nature; happiness is arrived at when man acts in accordance with nature, that is in accordance with the universe or the universal Reason. To know nature and act in accordance with her, reasonably, which is the same as virtuously, and voluntarily to submit to her necessity, disregarding individual pleasure and pain, that is the way to happiness which the wise go. The study of nature is, however, only a means to the study of virtue. And nature itself is explained by the stoics from a moral point of view. The practical result of the Stoic ethics is not the search for happiness, but the contempt of pleasure and the good things of the world. But this contempt of the world was finally to serve the same end, that which appeared to Zeno as well as Epicurus as the highest – viz., a state of repose for the individual soul. Both systems of ethics arose out of the need for rest.

This intermediary position of the Stoic ethics between the Platonic and the Epicurean corresponded to the view of the universe which Stoicism drew up. The explanation of nature is by no means without importance to them, but nature appeared to them as a peculiar kind of monotheistic materialism which assumes a divine original force from which even the human soul springs. But this original force, the original fire, is bodily, it exists in and not outside of nature, and the soul is not immortal, even if it survives the human body. Finally it will be consumed by the original fire.

Stoicism and Platonism finally became elements of Christianity and overcame in this form the materialist Epicureanism. This latter materialism could only prove satisfactory to a social class which was satisfied with things as they were, which found in them its pleasure and happiness, and had no need for another state of affairs.

It was necessarily rejected by classes to whom the world as it was seemed bad and full of pain – to the decaying class of the old aristocracy as well as to the exploited classes – for whom present and future in this world could only be equally hopeless when the material world, that is the world of experience, was the only one, and no reliance was to be placed in an almighty spirit who had it in his power to bring this world to destruction. Finally materialism was bound to be rejected by the whole society so soon as this had so far degenerated that even the ruling classes suffered under the state of affairs, so that even these came to the opinion that no good could come out of the existing world, but that this only brought forth evil. To despise the world with the Stoics, or look for a Redeemer from the other side with the Christians, that was the only alternative.

A new element came in Christianity with the invasions of the Barbarians, which substituted for the decadent society of the Roman Empire another in which the decrepit remains of the Roman system of production and their views of life combined with the youthful German society, the latter being organized on the basis of the mark, and a people of simple thought, content to enjoy life; these elements combined to produce a strange new formation.

On the one hand the Christian Church became the bond which held the new state together: here again the theory is apparently confirmed that the spirit is stronger than matter, since the intelligence of the Christian priesthood showed itself strong enough to tame the brute force of the German Barbarians. And this brute force, springing as it did from the material world, appeared to the representatives of Christianity, in addition, as the source of all evil, where it was not ruled by spirit and held in check; on the other hand they saw in the spirit the foundation of all that was good.

Thus the new social situation only contributed to strengthening the philosophic foundation of Christianity and its system of ethics. But on the other hand there came through this new situation the joy in life and a feeling of self confidence into society which had failed at the time of the rise of Christendom. Even to the Christian clergy – at least in the mass – the world no longer appeared a vale of tears and they acquired a capacity for enjoyment – a happy Epicureanism, certainly a coarser form and one which had nothing in common with the ancient philosophy. Nevertheless the Christian priesthood was obliged to hold to the Christian ethic, no longer as the expression of their own moral feeling, but as a means of maintaining their rule over the people. And everything forced them to recognize more and more the philosophic foundation of this system of ethics, namely the independence, nay the mastery of the spirit, over the real world. Thus the new social situation produced on the one hand a tendency to a materialist system of ethics, while on the other a series of reasons arose to strengthen the traditional Christian ethic. Thus arose the double morality, which became characteristic of Christianity, the formal recognition of a system of ethics which is only partially the expression of our moral feeling and will, and consequently of that which controls our action. In other words, moral hypocrisy became a standing social institution, which was never so widely spread as under Christianity.

Ethics and religion appeared now as inseparably bound together. Certainly the moral law was the logical creator of the new God; but in Christianity God appeared as the author of the moral law. Without a belief in God, without religion, no morality. Every ethical question became a theological one, and as the most original and simple form of social indignation is the moral, the feeling of moral indignation, the feeling of the immorality of the existing social institution – so did every social uprising commence in the form of a theological criticism, to which certainly came as an additional factor the circumstance that the Church was the foremost means of class rule and the Roman Priesthood the worst exploiters in the middle ages, so that all rebellion against any form of exploitation always affected the Church in the first place.

Even after the Renaissance at a time when philosophic thought had again arisen, questions of ethics remained for a long time questions of theology.

Chapter II
The Ethical Systems of The Period of the Enlightenment

After the Renaissance the study of nature again began to arouse interest, and with it also philosophy, which from then till well into the eighteenth century became principally natural philosophy, and as such raised our knowledge of the world to far above the level reached in the ancient world. They set out from the progress which the Arabs had made in natural science during the middle ages over the Creeks. The high-water mark of this development is certainly formed by the theory of Spinoza (1632-1677).

Ethics took a second place with these thinkers. It was subordinated to natural science, of which it formed a part. But it came again to the fore so soon as the rapid development of Capitalism in west Europe in the eighteenth century had created a similar situation to that which had been created by the economic awakening which followed on the Persian wars in Greece. Then began, to speak in modern language, a revaluing of all values, and therewith a zealous thinking out and investigation into the foundation and essence of all morality. With that went certainly an eager research into the nature of the new method of production. Simultaneously with the appearance of ethics there began a new science of which the ancients were ignorant, the special child of the capitalist system of production, whose explanation it serves: political economy.

In Ethics, however, we find three schools of thought side by side, which often run parallel to the three systems of the ancients, the Platonic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic: An anti-materialist – the traditional Christian – a materialist, and finally a middle system between the two. The optimism and joy of life in the rising Bourgeoisie, at least in their progressive elements, especially their intellectuals, felt itself strong enough to show itself openly and to throw aside all hypocritical masks, which the ruling Christianity had hitherto forced on them. And miserable as frequently the present might be, yet the uprising Bourgeoisie felt that the best part of reality, the future belonged to them, and they felt the ability in themselves to change the vale of tears into a Paradise, in which man could follow his inclinations. In reality and in the natural impulses of man their thinkers saw the germs of all good and not all evil. This new school of thought found a thankful public not only among the more progressive elements in the Bourgeoisie, but also in the court nobility, who at that period had acquired such an absolute power in the state that even they thought that they could dispense with all Christian hypocrisy in their life of pleasure, all the more as they were now divided by a deep chasm from the life of the people. They looked on citizens and peasants as being of a lower order to whom their philosophy was incomprehensible, so that they could freely and undisturbedly develop it without fear of shaking their own means of rule, the Christian religion, and Ethics.

The conditions of the new view of life and ethics developed most vigorously in France. There they came most clearly and courageously to expression. But as in the case of the ancient Epicureanism so in the enlightenment philosophy of Lametrie (1709-1751), Holbach (1723-1789), Helvetius (1715-1771), the ethic of egoism, of utility or pleasure, stood in close logical connection with a materialist view of the universe. The world as experience presents it to us appeared the only one which can be taken into account by us. The causes of this new Epicureanism had great similarity to the ancient, as well as the results at which both arrived. Nevertheless they were in one very essential point of a totally different character. The old Epicureanism did not arise as the disturber of the traditional religious views: it had understood how to accommodate itself to them. It was, however, not the theory of a revolutionary class, it did not preach war, but contemplative enjoyments. Far more was the Platonic idealism and theism the theory of the overthrow of the traditional religious views, a theory of the discontented classes.

Otherwise was it with the Philosophy of Enlightenment. Certainly even this had a conservative root, it regarded contemplative enjoyment as happiness, that is so far as it served the needs of the court nobility, which drew its living from the existing autocratic regime. But in the main it was the philosophy of the most intelligent and farthest developed as well as the most courageous elements in the Bourgeoisie. It gave them a revolutionary character. Standing from the very beginning in the most absolute opposition to the traditional religion and ethics they acquired more and more, the more the Bourgeoisie increased in strength and class consciousness, the conception of a fight – a conception which was quite strange to the old Epicureans – the fight against priests and tyrants; the fight for new ideals.

The nature and method of the moral views and the height of the moral passions are according to the French materialists determined by the conditions of human life, especially by the constitution of the state as well as by education. It is always self interest that determines men; it can, however, become a very social interest, if society is so organized that the individual interest coincides with the interest of the community, so that the passions of men serve the common welfare. True virtue consists in the care for the common weal, it can only flourish where the commonwealth at the same rime advances the interests of the individual, where he cannot damage the commonwealth without damaging himself.

It is incapacity to perceive the more durable interests of mankind, ignorance as to the best form of government, society and education which renders a state of affairs possible which of necessity brings the individual interest into conflict with that of the community. It only remains to make an end of this ignorance, to find a form of state, society and education corresponding to the demands of reason, in order to establish happiness and virtue on a firm and eternal foundation. Here we come on the revolutionary essence of the French materialism, which indicts the existing state as the cause of immorality. With that it raises itself above the level of Epicureanism, with that, however, it weakens the position of its own Ethics.

Because it is no mere question of inventing the best form of state and society; these have got to be fought for, the powers that be must be confronted and overthrown in order to establish an empire of virtue. That requires, however, great moral zeal, and where is that to come from if the existing society is so bad that it prevents altogether the growth of virtue or morality? Must not morality be already there in order that the higher society may arise? Is it not necessary that the moral should be alive in us before the moral order can become a fact? Whence, however, is a moral ideal to be derived from in a world of vice?

To that we obtain no satisfactory answer.

In very different fashion to the French did the Englishmen of the eighteenth century endeavor to explain the moral law. They showed themselves in general less bold and more inclined to compromise, in keeping with the history of England since the Reformation. Their insular position was especially favorable to their economic development during this period. They were driven thereby to make sea voyages which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thanks to the colonial system, formed the quickest road to a fortune. It kept England free from all the burdens and the ravages of wars on land, such as exhausted the European powers. Thus England acquired in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries more wealth than all the other nations of Europe and placed herself, so far as her economic position was concerned, at their head. But when new classes and new class antagonisms and with that new social problems, arise in a country at an earlier date than elsewhere, the new classes only attain a small degree of class consciousness, and still remain to a large degree imprisoned in the old methods of thought, so that the class antagonisms only appear in a very undeveloped form. Thus in such a land it does not at once come to a final and decisive struggle in the class war, it comes to no decisive overthrow of the old classes, who there continue to rule without any limit and in all the neighboring countries remain at the height of their power. The new classes are still incapable of taking on the governments because they do not realize their own position in society, are frightened by the novelty of their own endeavors, and themselves seek for support and points of contact in the traditional relations.

So that it seems to be a general law of social development, that countries which are pioneers in the economic development are tempted to put compromise in the place of radical solutions.

Thus France stood by the side of Italy in the Middle Ages at the head of the economic development of Europe. She came more and more into opposition with the Papacy – their government first rebelled against Rome. But just because she opened the way in this direction, she never succeeded in founding a national church, and only was able to force the Papacy to a compromise which has lasted, with unimportant interruptions, up to the present. On the other hand the most radical champions against the Papal might were two states which were economically the most backward, Scotland and Sweden.

Since the Reformation England, together with Scotland, has taken the place of France and Italy as the pioneer of economic development, and thus compromise has become for both England and Scotland the form of the solution of their class struggles. Just because in England, in the seventeenth century, capital acquired power more rapidly than elsewhere, because there earlier than in other countries, it came to a struggle with the feudal aristocracy, did this fight end with a compromise, and that explains the fact that the feudal system of landed property even today is stronger in England than in any other country of Europe – Austro-Hungary perhaps alone excepted. For the same reason, that of her rapid economic development, the class war between Proletariat and Bourgeoisie first blazed up in England of all countries in the world. It blazed up at a time when Proletariat and industrial capitalist had not yet got over the small bourgeois methods of thought, when many and even clear-sighted observers mixed up the two classes together as the industrial class; when the type of the proletariat, self-conscious and confident in the future of his own class, as well as that of the autocrat and unlimited ruler in the state – the industrial capitalist – had not yet developed. Thus the struggle of the two classes landed, after a short and showy flare-up in a compromise which made the rule of the Bourgeoisie for many years to come more unlimited than in any other land with the modern system of production.

Naturally can the effects of this law, just as that of any other, be disturbed by unfavorable by-currents, and advanced by favorable. But in any case it was so far efficacious that it is necessary to be on our guard against the popular interpretation of the historical materialism which holds that the land which takes the lead in the economic development invariably also brings the corresponding forms of the class war to the sharpest and most decisive expression.

Even materialism and atheism as well as ethics were subject in England to the spirit of compromise, which has ruled since the sixteenth century. The fight of the democratic and rising class against the governing power, independent of the Bourgeoisie and subject to the feudal aristocracy with their court nobility and their state church, commenced in England more than a century before France, at a time when only few had got over the Christian thought. If in France the fight against the state church became a fight between Christianity and atheistic materialism, in England it became only a struggle between special democratic Christian sects and the state-church-organized sect. And if in France in the period of the enlightenment, the majority of the intelligence and the classes that came under its influence thought as materialists and atheists, so did the English intelligence look for a compromise between materialism and Christianity. Certainly materialism found its first public form in England in the theory of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679); certainly were to be found in England thinkers on Ethical questions, whose courage surpassed that of the most courageous Frenchman, such as Mandeville (1670-1733) who declared morality to be a means of ruling, a discovery to keep the workers in subjection, and who looked on vice as the root of all social good. But such ideas had little influence on the thoughts of the many. A Christian profession remained the sign of respectability, and even if this were not felt, still to pretend to feel it became the duty of every man of learning, who did not wish to come into conflict with society.

Thus the Englishmen remained very sceptical of the materialistic ethics, which wished to found the moral law on self love, or on the pleasure and the ability of the individual. Certainly the intellectual circles of the rising Bourgeoisie sought even in England to explain the moral law as a natural phenomenon, but they saw that its compulsory might could not be explained from simple considerations of utility, and that the constructions were too artificial which were required to unite the commands of morality with the motives of utility – let alone to think of making out of the latter an energetic motive force of the former. Thus they distinguished very nicely between the sympathetic and the egoistic interests in man, recognized a moral sense which drives man to be active for the happiness of his fellows. After the Scotchman, Hutcheson (1694-1747), the most distinguished representative of this theory was Adam Smith, the economist (1723-1790). In his two principal works he investigated the two mainsprings of human action. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) he started out from sympathy as the most important bond of human society; his Wealth of Nations assumes the egoism, the material interest of the individual, to be the mainspring of human action. That book appeared in 1776, but the principles which it contained Adam Smith uttered orally in Glasgow as early as 1752 or 1753. His theory of egoism and his theory of sympathy were not mutually exclusive, but were complementary the one of the other.

If these Englishmen set egoism and moral sense over against each other, so was that, as compared to the materialists, an approach to Platonism and Christianity. Nevertheless their views were widely different from the latter. Since, while according to Christianity, man is bad by nature; and according to the Platonic theory our natural impulses are the source of evil in us, so for the English school of the eighteenth century, the moral sense was opposed certainly to egoism, but was just as much as the latter a natural impulse. Even the egoism appeared to them not as a bad, but as a fully justifiable impulse which was as necessary for the welfare of society as sympathy with others. The moral sense was a sense just as any other human sense, and in a certain degree their sixth sense.

Certainly with this assumption, just as in the case of the French materialists, the difficulty was only postponed and not solved. To the question, whence comes this peculiar sense in man, the Englishman had no answer. It was given by nature to man. That might suffice for those who traded in a creator of the universe, but it did not make this assumption superfluous.

The task for the further scientific development of ethics appeared in this state of the question clear. The French, as well as the English, school had achieved much for the psychological and historical explanation of the moral feelings and views. But neither the one nor the other could succeed in making quite clear that morality was an outcome of causes which lie in the realm of experience. The English school must be surpassed and the causes of the moral sense investigated. It was necessary to go beyond the French school and to lay bare the causes of the moral ideal.

But the development goes in no straight line. It moves in contradictions. The next step of philosophy in regard to ethics took the opposite direction. Instead of investigating the ethical nature of man in order to bring this more than ever under the general laws of nature, it came to quite other conclusions.

This step was achieved by German philosophy with Kant (1724-1804). Certain people like to cry now, “Back to Kant!” But those who mean by that the Kantian ethic, might just as well cry “Back to Plato!”

Chapter III
The Ethic of Kant

I. The Criticism of Knowledge

Kant took the same ground as the materialists. He recognized that the world outside of us is real and that the starting point of all knowledge is the experience of the senses. But the knowledge which we acquire from experience is partly composed of that which we acquire through the sense impressions and partly from that which our own intellectual powers supply from themselves; in other words, our knowledge of the world is conditioned not simply by the nature of the external world, but also by that of our organs of knowledge. For a knowledge of the world therefore the investigation of our own intellectual powers is equally as necessary as that of the external world. The investigation of the first is, however, the duty of philosophy – this is the science of science.

In this there is nothing contained that every materialist could not subscribe to, or that, perhaps with the exception of the last sentence had not also been previously said by materialists. But certainly only in the way in which certain sentences from the materialist conception of history had already been uttered before Marx, as conceptions which had not borne fruit. It was Kant who first made them the foundation of his entire theory. Through him did philosophy first become the science of science, whose duty it is not to teach a distinct philosophy, but how to philosophize, the process of knowing, methodical thinking, and that by way of a critique of knowledge.

But Kant went farther than this, and his great philosophical achievement, the investigation of the faculties of knowledge, became itself his philosophical stumbling block.

Since our sensual experience does not reveal to us the world as it is in itself, but only as it is for us, as it appears to us, thanks to the peculiar constitution of our faculties of knowledge, so the world as it is in itself must be different to that which appears to us. Consequently Kant distinguishes between the world of phenomena, of appearances, and the world of things in themselves, the “noumena”, or the intelligible world. Certainly this latter is for us unknowable, it lies outside of our experience, so that there is no need to deal with it; one might simply take it as a method of designating the fact that our knowledge of the world is always limited by the nature of our intellectual faculties, is always relative, that for us there can only be relative and no absolute truths, not a final and complete knowledge, but an endless process of knowing.

But Kant was not content with that. He felt an unquenchable longing to get a glimpse into that unknown and inexplorable world of things in themselves, in order to acquire at least a notion of it.

And indeed he got so far as to say quite distinct things about it. The way to this he saw in the critique of our powers of thought.

These latter by separating from experience that which comes from the senses must arrive at the point of describing the forms of knowledge and perception as they originally and a priori, previous to all experience, are contained in our “feelings”. In this manner he discovered the ideality of time and space. According to him these are not conceptions which are won from experience, but simply the forms of our conception of the world, which are embedded in our faculties of knowledge. Only under the form of conceptions in time and space can we recognize the world. But outside of our faculties of knowledge there is no space and no time. Thus Kant got so far as to say about the world of things in themselves, that completely unknowable world, something very distinct, namely, that it is timeless and spaceless.

Without doubt this logical development is one of the most daring achievements of the human mind. That does not say by any means that it is not open to criticism. On the contrary there is a great deal to be said against it, and in fact there are very very weighty objections which have been brought against it. The assumption of the ideality of space and time in the Kantian sense led to inextricable contradictions.

There can certainly be no doubt that our conceptions of time and space are conditioned by the constitution of our faculties of knowledge, but I should have thought that that would only necessarily amount to saying, that only those connections of events in the universe can be recognized which are of such a nature as to call forth in our intellectual faculties the concepts of space and time. The ideality of time and space would then imply just as the thing in itself, no more and no less than a limit to our powers of knowing.

Relations of a kind which cannot take the form of space or time concepts – even if such really exist, that we do not know – are for us inconceivable, just as much as the ultra-violet and ultra-red rays are imperceptible for our powers of vision.

But Kant did not mean the matter in this sense at all. Because space and time provide the forms in which alone my faculties of knowledge can recognize the world, he takes for granted that time and space are forms which are only to be found in my faculty of knowledge, and correspond to no sort of connection in the real world. In his Prolegomena to every future Metaphysic Kant compares in one place the concept of space with the concept of color. This comparison appears to us very apt, it by no means, however, proves what Kant wants to prove. If cinnabar appears red to me, that fact is certainly conditioned by the peculiarity of my visual organs. Out of that there is no color. What appears to me as color is called forth by waves of aether of a distinct length which affect my eye. Should any one wish to consider these waves in relation to the color as the thing in itself, which in reality they are not, then our power of vision would not be a power to see the things as they are, but power to see them as they are not; not a capacity of knowledge, but of illusion.

But it is quite another matter when we look not at one color alone, but take several colors together and distinguish them from one another. Each of them is called forth by distinct ether waves of different lengths. To the distinctions in the colors there correspond differences in the lengths of the ether waves. These distinctions do not lie in my organ of vision but have their ground in the external world. My organs of vision have only the function of making me conscious of this difference in a certain form, that of color. As a means to a recognition of this distinction it is a power of real knowledge and not of illusion. These distinctions are no mere appearances. That I see green, red and white, that has its ground in my organ of sight. But that the green is different to the red, that testifies to something that lies outside of me, to a real difference between the things.

Besides that the peculiarity of my organ has the effect that by its means I can only recognize the motions of the ether. No other communication from the outer world can reach me through that medium.

Just as with the power of vision in particular so is it with the organs of knowledge in general. They can only convey to me Space and Time conceptions, that is, they can only show me those relations of the things which can call forth Time and Space conceptions in my head. To impressions of another kind, if there are any, they cannot react. And my faculty of knowledge renders it possible for me to obtain these impressions in a particular way. So far are the categories of space and time founded in the construction of my faculty of knowledge.

But the relations and distinctions of the things themselves, which are shown to me by means of the individual space and time concepts, so that the different things appear to me as big and small, near and far, sooner or later, are real relations and distinctions of the external world, which are not conditioned through the nature of my faculty of knowledge.

Even if we therefore are not in a position to recognize a single thing by itself, if our faculty of knowledge is in respect to that a faculty of ignorance, we can yet recognize the real differences between things. These distinctions are no mere appearances, even if our conception of them is conveyed to us by means of appearances; they exist outside of us, and can be recognized by us, certainly only in certain forms.

Kant, on the other hand, was of the opinion that not simply are space and time forms of conception for us, but that even the temporal and spacial differences of phenomena spring solely from our heads, and indicate nothing real. If that were really so, then would all phenomena spring simply from our heads, since they all take the form of temporal and spacial differences. Thus we could know absolutely nothing about the world outside of us, not even that it existed. Should there exist a world outside of us, then, thanks to the ideality of space and time, our faculty of knowledge would be not an imperfect, one-sided mechanism, which communicated to us only a one-sided knowledge of the world, but a complete mechanism of its kind, and one which served to completely cut us off from all knowledge of the world. Certainly a mechanism to which the name “Faculty of Knowledge” is just about as suitable as the fist to the eye.

Kant could attack ever so energetically the “mystical” idealism of Berkeley, which he hoped to replace with his critical idealism. His criticism took a turn, which nullifies his own assumption that the world is real and only to be known through experience, and thus mysticism cast out from the one side finds on the other a wide triumphal doorway open, through which it can enter with a flourish of trumpets.

II. The Moral Law

Kant assumed as his starting point that the world is really external to us and does not simply exist in our heads, and that knowledge about it is only to be attained through experience. His philosophical achievement was to be the examination of the conditions of experience, of the boundaries of our knowledge. But just this very examination became for him an incitement to surmount this barrier, and to discover an unknowable world, of which he actually knew that it was of quite another nature than the world of appearances, that it was completely timeless and spaceless, and therefore causeless as well.

But why this break-neck leap over the boundaries of knowledge which caused him to lose all firm ground under the feet? The ground could not be a logical one, since through this leap he landed in contradictions which nullified his own assumptions. It was a historical ground which awaked in him the need for the assumption of a supersensuous world – a need which he must satisfy at all price.

If, in the eighteenth century, France was a hundred years behind England, just so much was Germany behind France. If the English bourgeoisie no longer needed the materialism, since without it, and on religious grounds, they had got rid of the feudalist state and its church, the German bourgeoisie did not yet feel strong enough to take up openly the fight against the state and its church. They therefore withdrew in fear from the materialism. This came in the eighteenth century to Germany, just as to Russia, not as the philosophy of conflict but of pleasure, in a form suitable to the needs of the “enlightened” despotism. It grew at the princely courts, side by side with the narrowest orthodoxy. In the bourgeoisie there remained, however, even in its boldest and most independent pioneers, as a rule, some relic of Christian belief, from which they could not emancipate themselves.

That was bound to make the English philosophy appeal to German philosophers. In fact they had also a very great influence on Kant. I cannot remember ever to have found in his writings any mention of a French materialist of the eighteenth century. On the other hand he quoted with preference Englishmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Locke, Hume, Berkeley and Priestley.

But between the German and English philosophy there was a great difference. The English philosophized at a time of great practical advance, of great practical struggles.

The practice captured their entire intellectual force; even their philosophy was entirely ruled by practical considerations. Their philosophers were greater in their achievements in economics, politics, natural science, than in philosophy.

The German thinkers found no practice which could prevent them from concentrating their entire mental power on the deepest and most abstract problems of science. They were therefore in this respect without their like outside of Germany. That was not founded on any race quality of the Germans, but on the circumstances of the time. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the deepest philosophic thinkers were to be found in Italy, France, Holland, England, and not in Germany. The quiet that came over German political life in the century following the Thirty Years War first gave Germany the lead in Philosophy, just as Marx’s Capital had its origin in the period of reaction following on 1848.

Kant, despite his sympathy for the English, could not find satisfaction in their philosophy. He was just as critical towards it as towards materialism.

In both cases Ethics was bound to strike him as the weakest point. It seemed to him quite impossible to bring the moral law into a necessary connection with nature; that is, with the world of phenomena. Its explanation required another world, a timeless and spaceless world of pure spirit, a world of freedom in contrast to the world of appearances (phenomena) which is ruled by the necessary chain of cause and effect. On the other hand his Christian feelings, the outcome of a pious education, were bound to awaken the need for the recognition of a world in which God and immortality were possible. [1] As Kant had to allow that God and immortality were completely superfluous in the world of our experience, he was obliged to look for a world “beyond” experience for them, and thus the spaceless and timeless world of things in themselves corresponded most completely to his needs.

Kant obtained the best proof for the existence of God and immortality in this world of the “beyond” from the moral laws. Thus we find with him, as with Plato, that the repudiation of the materialist explanation and the belief in a special world of spirits, or if it is preferred a world of spirit, lend each other mutual support and render it necessary.

How, however, did Kant manage to obtain farther insight into this spirit world? The critique of pure reason only allowed him to say of it, that it was timeless and spaceless. Now this spacelessness has to be filled up with a content. Even for that Kant has an idea.

The unknowable world of things in themselves becomes at least partly knowable directly one succeeds in getting hold of a thing in itself. And Kant finds this for us. It is the personality of man. I am for myself at once phenomenon and thing in itself. My pure reason is a thing in itself. As a part of the sensuous world I am subject to the chain of cause and effect, therefore to necessity; as a thing in itself I am free, that is, my actions are not determined by the causes of the world of the senses, but by the moral law dwelling within me, which springs from the pure reason and calls out to me not “Thou must,” but “Thou shalt.” This shall were an absurdity if there did not correspond to it, a can, if I were not free.

The moral freedom of man is certainly a complicated thing. It brings along with it certainly no less contradictions than the ideality of time and space. Since this freedom comes to expression in actions which belong to the world of phenomena, but as such fall into the chain of cause and effect, – they are necessary. The same actions are at the same time free and necessary. Besides this freedom arises in the timeless, intelligible world, while cause and effect always fall in a particular time. The same time-determined action has thus a time, as well as a cause in time.

But what is now the moral law, which from the world of things in themselves, the “world of the understanding, extends its working right into the world of appearances, the world of the “ senses,” and then subordinates itself? Since it springs from the world of the understanding its determining ground can only lie in he pure reason. It must be of a purely formal nature, because it must remain fully free from all relation to the world of the senses, which would at once involve a relation of cause and effect, a determining ground of the will which would at once annihilate its freedom. “ There is, however,” says Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason, “ besides the matter of the law, nothing further contained than the lawgiving form. Thus the law-giving form, so far as it is contained in the maxim, is the only thing that can constitute a determining ground of the free will.”

From that he draws the following Fundamental Law of the Pure Practical Reason.

“Act so that the maxim of thy action may be a principle of universal legislation.”

This principle is by no means startlingly new. It forms only the philosophic translation of the ancient precept, to do unto others as we would be done by. The only new thing is the declaration that this precept forms a revelation of an intelligible world; a revelation which with the greatest application of philosophic insight was to be discovered as a principle which applied not only for humanity, “but for all finite Beings who possess Reason and will, nay even including the Infinite Being as the highest intelligence.”

Unfortunately the proof for this law which applies even to the Supreme Intelligence shows a very serious flaw. It ought to be “independent of all conditions appertaining to the world of the senses,” but that is easier said than fulfilled. Just as little as it is possible with the air pump to create a completely airless space; just as it must always contain air, though it be in so refined degree, that it is no more to be recognized by us, in the same way we cannot possibly grasp a thought, which is independent of all conditions appertaining to the world of the senses. Even the moral law does not escape this fate.

The moral law already includes conditions which belong to the world of the senses. It is not a law of the “pure will” in itself, but a law of the control of my will when brought in contact with my fellow men. It assumes this; for me, however, these appearances are from the world of the senses.

And still more is assumed, however, by the conception of the moral law: “act so that the maxim of thy action may be a principle of universal legislation.” This assumes not only men outside of me, but also the wish that these fellow men should behave themselves in a particular manner. They are so to behave themselves as the moral law prescribes to me to act. Not only society but also a distinct form of social conditions is assumed as possible and desirable.

That in fact the need for such is concealed in the ground of his “practical reason” and determines his spaceless and timeless moral law, Kant himself betrays in his Critique of Practical Reason in a polemic against the deduction of the moral law from pleasure. [2]

“It is therefore surprising that intelligent men could have thought of calling the desire for happiness a universal practical law on the ground that the desire is universal and therefore also the maxim by which everyone makes this desire determine his will.

“For, whereas, in other cases a universal law of nature makes everything harmonious, here, on the contrary, if we attribute to the maxim the universality of law the extreme opposite of harmony will follow, the greatest opposition and the complete distraction of the maxim itself and its purpose. For, in that case, the will of all has not one and the same object, but everyone has his own (his private welfare), which may accidentally accord with the purposes of others which are equally selfish, but it is far from sufficiency for a law, because the occasional exceptions which one is permitted to make are endless and cannot be definitely embraced in a universal rule. In this manner there results a harmony like a married couple bent on going to ruin. ‘O, marvellous harmony, what he wishes, she wished also,’ or like what is said of the pledge of Francis I, to the Emperor Charles V.: ‘What my brother Charles wishes, that I wish also’ (viz. Milan).”

Thus pleasure is not to be a maxim which can serve as a principle of universal legislation, and that because it can call forth social disharmonies. The moral law has thus to create a harmonious society, and such must be possible, otherwise it would be absurd to wish to create it.

The Kantian moral law assumes thus, in the first place, a harmonious society as desirable and as possible. But it also assumes that the moral law is the means to create such a society, that this result can be achieved through a rule which the individual sets to himself. We see how thoroughly Kant was deceived, when he thought that his moral law was independent from all conditions appertaining to the world of sense, and that it formed thus a principle which would apply to all timeless and spaceless spirits, including God Almighty himself.

In reality Kant’s moral law is the result of very concrete social needs. Naturally, since it springs from the wish for a harmonious society, it is possible to deduce from it the ideal of a harmonious society and thus it has been possible to stamp Kant as a founder of Socialism. Cohen repeats this again also in his latest work Ethics of the Pure Will (Ethik des reinen Willens) 1905. In reality, however, Kant is far farther removed from Socialism than the French materialism of the eighteenth century. While according to these the Moral Law was determined by the condition of the state and society, so that the reform of morality rendered in the first place necessary the reform of the State and Society, and so the fight against immorality widened itself into a fight against the ruling powers; according to Kant the society which exists in time and space is determined by a moral law standing outside of time and space, which directs its commands to the individual not the society. Is the morality of the individual imperfect, one must not lay the blame for that on the State and Society, but in the fact that man is not entirely angel, but half animal and consequently always being drawn down by his animal nature, against which he can only fight through the raising and the purifying of his own inner man. The individual must improve himself if the Society is to be improved.

It is clear that Socialism takes peculiar forms if we look on Kant as its founder. This peculiarity will be in no way diminished when we observe the farther development of the moral law by him. From the moral law springs the consciousness of Personality, and the dignity of man, and the phrase: “Act so, that you, as well in your own person as in the person of every other, at all times look on man as end, and never simply as a means.”

“ In those words,” says Cohen (pp. 303-4) “is the deepest and most far-reaching sense of the categoric imperative brought to expression; they contain the moral programme of the new time and the entire future world history. The idea of the final (or end) advantage of Humanity becomes thereby transformed into the idea of Socialism, by which every man is defined as a final end, as an end in itself.”

The programme of the “entire future world history” is conceived in somewhat narrow fashion. The “timeless moral law, that man ought to be an end, and at no time simply a means, has itself only an “end” in a society in which men are used by other men simply as means to their ends. In a communist society, this possibility disappears and with that goes the necessity of the Kantian Programme for the “entire future world history.” What becomes then of this? We have then in the future either no Socialism, or no world history to expect.

The Kantian Moral Law was a protest against the very concrete feudal society with its personal relations of dependency. The would-be “socialist” principle which fixes the Personality and Worth of men is accordingly just as consistent with Liberalism or Anarchism as with Socialism, and contains, in no greater degree any new idea than the one already quoted, of the universal legislation. It amounts to the philosophical formula for the idea of “Freedom, Equality and Fraternity” already then developed by Rousseau, and which, moreover, was to be found in primitive Christianity. The only thing Kantian, even here, is simply the mere form in which this principle is proved.

The dignity of Personality is namely derived from the fact, that it is a part of a super-sensuous world, that as a moral being it stands outside nature and over nature. Personality is “Freedom and Independence from the mechanism of the entire nature,” so that “the person as belonging to the world of sense is subordinate to its own personality, so far as it belongs to the world of intelligence.” Thus it is not then to be wondered if man, as belonging to both worlds, is obliged to look on his own being with regard to its second and highest qualification, not otherwise than with respect and to conceive the greatest respect for the laws of the same. With that we would be happily arrived again at the primitive Christian argument for the equality of all men, which necessarily arises from the fact that we are all children of God.

III. Freedom and Necessity

Meanwhile, reject as we must the assumption of the two worlds to which, according to Plato and Kant, man belongs, it is nevertheless true that man lives at the same time in two worlds, and the moral law inhabits one of them, which is not the world of experience. But all the same even this world is no super-sensuous one. The two worlds, in which man lives, are the Past and the Future. The Present forms the boundary of the two. His whole experience lies in the past, all experience is past, and all the connecting links which past experience shows him lie with inevitable necessity before, or still more, behind him. In these there is nothing more left to alter, he can do nothing more in regard to them than recognize their necessity. Thus is the world of experience the world of knowing, and the world of necessity.

It is otherwise with the Future. Of it I have not the smallest experience. Apparently free it lies before me, as the world which I do not explore as one knowing it, but in which I have to assert myself as an active agent. Certainly I can extend the experience of the past into the future, certainly I can conclude that these will be even so necessarily determined as those, but even if I can only recognize the world on the assumption of necessity, yet I shall only be able to act in it on the assumption of a certain Freedom. Even if compulsion is exercised over my actions, there remains to me the choice, whether I shall yield to it, or not, there remains to me as last resort the possibility of withdrawing myself by a voluntary death. Action implies continual choice between various possibilities, and be it alone that of doing or not doing, it means accepting or rejecting, it means defending and opposing. Choice, however, assumes in advance the possibility of choice just as much as the distinction between the acceptable and the inacceptable, the good and the bad. The moral judgment, which is an absurdity in the world of the past, the world of experience, in which there is nothing to choose, where iron necessity rules, is unavoidable in the world of the unknown future – of freedom.

But not simply the feeling of freedom is assumed by action, but also certain aims. If in the world of the past, the sequence of cause and effect (causality) rules, so in the world of action, of the future; the thought of aim (Teleology). For action the feeling of freedom is an indispensable psychological necessity, which is not to be got rid of by any degree of knowledge. Even the sternest Fatalism, even the deepest conviction that man is a necessary product of his circumstances, cannot bring it about that we cease to love, and to hate, to defend and attack.

But all that is no monopoly of man but holds also of the animals. Even these have freedom of the will, in the sense that man has, namely as a subjective, inevitable feeling of freedom, which springs from ignorance of the future and the necessity of exercising a direct influence on it.

And just in the same way they have command of a certain insight into the connection of cause and effect. Finally the conception of an end is not quite strange to them. In respect of insight into the past and the necessity of nature on the one hand, and on the other in respect of the power of foreseeing the future, and the setting up of aims for their action the lowest specimens of humanity are distinguished far less from the animals than from civilized men.

The setting up of aims is not, however, anything which exists outside the sphere of necessity, of cause and effect. Even though I set up aims for myself only in the future, in the sphere of apparent freedom, yet the act of setting up aims itself, from the very moment when I set up the aim, belongs to the past, and can thus in its necessity be recognized as the result of distinct causes. That is not in any way altered by the fact that the attainment of the end is still in the future, in the sphere of uncertainty, thus in this sense in that of freedom. Let the attainment of the end be assumed as ever so far distant, the setting up of the aim itself lies in the past. In the sphere of freedom there lie only those aims which are not yet set up, of which we do not even know anything as yet.

The world of conscious aims is thus not the world of freedom in opposition to that of necessity. For each of the aims which we set ourselves, just as for each one of the means which we apply to its attainment, the causes are already given and are under certain circumstances recognizable as those which brought about the setting up of these aims and determined the way in which that was to be achieved.

It is impossible, however, to distinguish the realm of necessity and that of freedom simply as past and future; their distinction often coincides also with that of nature and society, or to be more exact, of society and that other nature from which the former displays only one particular and peculiar portion.

If we look at nature in the narrower sense, as apart from Society and then both in their relation to the future, we find at once a serious difference. The natural conditions change much slower than the Social. And the latter are at the period when men commence to philosophise, at the period of the production of wares, of a highly complicated nature, whereas there are in nature a large number of simple processes, whose subjection to law can be relatively easily perceived.

The consequence is, that despite our apparent freedom of action in the future, this action, nevertheless as far as nature is concerned comes to be looked on as determined at an early period. Dark as the future lies before me, I know of a certainty that summer will follow winter, that to-morrow the sun will rise, that to-morrow I shall have hunger and thirst, that in winter the need for warming myself will occur to me, and that my action will never be directed to escaping these natural necessities, but with the idea of satisfying them. Thus I recognize, despite all apparent freedom that in face of nature my action is necessarily conditioned. The constitution of nature external to us and of my own body produce necessities which force on me a certain willing and acting which being given according to experience can be reckoned with in advance.

It is quite otherwise with my conduct to my fellow men, my social actions. In this case the external and internal causes, which necessarily determine my action, are not so easy to recognize. Here I meet with no overpowering forces of nature, to which I am obliged to submit myself, but with factors on a level with myself, men like myself, who by nature have no more strength than I have. Over against these I feel myself to be free, but they also appear to me to be free in their relations to their fellow men. Towards them I feel love and hate, and on them and my relations to them I make moral judgments.

The world of freedom and of the moral law is thus certainly another than that of recognized necessity, but it is no timeless and spaceless and no super-sensual world, but a particular portion of the world of sense seen from a particular point of view. It is the world as seen in its approach to us, the world on which we have to work, which we have to rearrange, before all.

But what is to-day the future will be to-morrow past; thus what to-day is felt to be free action will be recognized to-morrow as necessary action. The moral law in us, which regulates this action, ceases, however, with that to appear as an uncaused cause, it falls into the sphere of experience and can be recognized as the necessary effect of a cause – and only as such cause are we at all able to recognize it, or can it become an object of Science. In that he transferred the moral from the “this side,” the sensual world, to the “other side,” the super-sensual world, Kant has not advanced the scientific knowledge of it, but has closed all access to it. This obstacle must be got rid of before everything else, we must rise above Kant if we are to bring the problem of the moral law nearer to its solution.

IV. The Philosophy of Reconciliation

The Ethic forms the weakest side of the Kantian Philosophy. And all the same it is just through the Ethic that it has won its greatest success, because it met very powerful needs of the time.

The French Materialism had been a philosophy of the fight against the traditional methods of thought, and consequently against the institutions which rested on them. An irreconcilable hatred against Christianity made it the watchword, not only of the fight against the church, but of that against all the social and political forces which were bound up with it.

Kant’s Critique of the Pure Reason equally drives Christianity from out of the Temple; but the discovery of the origin of the moral law, which is brought about by the Critique of the Practical Reason, opens for it again the door with all due respect. Thus through Kant, Philosophy became, instead of a weapon of the fight against the existing methods of thought and institutions, a means of reconciling the antagonisms.

But the way of development is that of struggle. The reconciliation of antagonisms implies the stoppage of development. Thus the Kantian Philosophy became a conservative factor.

The greatest advantage thereby was drawn by theology. It emancipated this from the quandary, into which the traditional belief had fallen through the development of science, in that it rendered it possible to reconcile science and religion.

“No other science,” says Zeller, “experienced the influence of the Kantian Philosophy in a higher degree than the Theology. Here Kant found the soil best prepared for his principles; with that, however, he brought to the traditional methods of thought a reform and an increase in depth, which it was badly in need of.” (Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie, 1873, p.519.)

Just after the outbreak of the French Revolution a specially strong need arose for a theology, which was in a position to hold its own against materialism, and to drive it out of the field among educated people. Zeller writes then further.

“Kant’s religious views corresponded exactly both to the moral and intellectual need of the time; it recommended itself to the enlightened by its reasonableness, its independence of the positive, its purely practical tendency; to the religious by its moral severity and its lofty conceptions of Christianity and its founder. German theology from now on took Kant as their authority.” His Moral Theology became after a few years the foundation on which Protestant theology in Germany almost without exception, even the Catholic to a very large extent, was built up. The Kantian Philosophy, exercised for that reason, that the majority of German theologians for close on fifty years took their start from it, a highly permanent and far-reaching influence on the general education.

Vorländer quotes in his History of Philosophy (Leipzig 1903) the word of a modern German Theologian, Ritschl, who declared:

“Thus the development of the method of knowledge by Kant implied at the same time a practical rebirth of Protestantism. (Vol. II, p. 476.)”

The great Revolution created the soil for the influence of Kant, which was strongest in the two decades after the Terror. Then this influence became paler and paler. The Bourgeoisie acquired after the thirties, even in Germany, strength and courage for more decided struggles against the existing forms of State and thought, and to an absolute recognition of the world of the senses as the only real one. Thus through the Hegelian dialectic there arose new forms of Materialism, and just in the most vigorous form in Germany, for the very reason that their Bourgeoisie was well behind that of France and England; because they had not conquered the existing state machine; because they had that still to upset, therefore they required a fighting philosophy and not one of reconciliation.

In the last decades, however, their desire to fight has greatly diminished. Even though they have not attained all that they wish, yet they have all which was necessary for their development. Further struggles on a large scale, energetic fights against the existing, must be of much less use to them than to their great enemy, the proletariat, that grew in a most menacing fashion and now for its part required a fighting philosophy. This was so much the more susceptible to the influence of materialism, the more the development of the world of the senses showed the absurdity of the existing order and the necessity of its victory.

The Bourgeoisie, on the other hand, became more and more susceptible to a philosophy of reconciliation, and thus Kantism was aroused to a fresh life. This resurrection was prepared in the reactionary period after 1848 by the then commencing influence of Schopenhauer.

But in the last decade the influence of Kant has found its way into Economics and Socialism. Since the laws of Bourgeois Society, which were discovered by the Classical Economists, showed themselves more clearly as laws which made the class war and the disappearance of the Capitalist order necessary, the Bourgeois Economists took refuge in the Kantian Moral Code, which being independent of Time and Space must be in a position to reconcile the class antagonisms and prevent the Revolutions which take place in Space and Time.

Side by side with the ethical school in Economics we got an ethical Socialism, when endeavors were made in our ranks to modify the class antagonisms, and to meet at least a section of the Bourgeoisie half way. This policy of Reconciliation also began with the cry: Back to Kant! And with a repudiation of materialism, since it denies the Freedom of the Will.

Despite the categoric imperative, which the Kantian Ethic cries to the individual, its historical and social tendency, from the very beginning on till today, has been that of toning down, of reconciling the antagonisms, not of overcoming them through struggle.

Footnotes

1. As a curiosity it may be mentioned here that it is possible to confront Bernstein’s witty remark “Kant against Cant” with the fact that Kant himself was Cant. “His ancestors came from Scotland … The father, a saddler by profession, maintained in his name the Scottish spelling Cant, the Philosopher first changed the letters to prevent the false pronunciation as Zant. [Kuno Fischer, History of Modern Philosophy, Vol.III., p.52, German Ed.] His family was very religious and this influence Kant never got over. Not less than Kant is the “cant” related to puritan piety. The word signifies first the puritan method of singing, then the puritan religious and finally the customary, thoughtless oft-repeated phraseology to which men submit themselves. Bernstein appealed, in his Assumptions of Socialism, for a Kant as an ally against the materialist “party-cant”.

2. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, Tr. by T.W. Abbott,. Lond. 1889, Sect.10, theorem II, pp.115-6.

Chapter III
The Ethic of Kant

I. The Criticism of Knowledge

Kant took the same ground as the materialists. He recognized that the world outside of us is real and that the starting point of all knowledge is the experience of the senses. But the knowledge which we acquire from experience is partly composed of that which we acquire through the sense impressions and partly from that which our own intellectual powers supply from themselves; in other words, our knowledge of the world is conditioned not simply by the nature of the external world, but also by that of our organs of knowledge. For a knowledge of the world therefore the investigation of our own intellectual powers is equally as necessary as that of the external world. The investigation of the first is, however, the duty of philosophy – this is the science of science.

In this there is nothing contained that every materialist could not subscribe to, or that, perhaps with the exception of the last sentence had not also been previously said by materialists. But certainly only in the way in which certain sentences from the materialist conception of history had already been uttered before Marx, as conceptions which had not borne fruit. It was Kant who first made them the foundation of his entire theory. Through him did philosophy first become the science of science, whose duty it is not to teach a distinct philosophy, but how to philosophize, the process of knowing, methodical thinking, and that by way of a critique of knowledge.

But Kant went farther than this, and his great philosophical achievement, the investigation of the faculties of knowledge, became itself his philosophical stumbling block.

Since our sensual experience does not reveal to us the world as it is in itself, but only as it is for us, as it appears to us, thanks to the peculiar constitution of our faculties of knowledge, so the world as it is in itself must be different to that which appears to us. Consequently Kant distinguishes between the world of phenomena, of appearances, and the world of things in themselves, the “noumena”, or the intelligible world. Certainly this latter is for us unknowable, it lies outside of our experience, so that there is no need to deal with it; one might simply take it as a method of designating the fact that our knowledge of the world is always limited by the nature of our intellectual faculties, is always relative, that for us there can only be relative and no absolute truths, not a final and complete knowledge, but an endless process of knowing.

But Kant was not content with that. He felt an unquenchable longing to get a glimpse into that unknown and inexplorable world of things in themselves, in order to acquire at least a notion of it.

And indeed he got so far as to say quite distinct things about it. The way to this he saw in the critique of our powers of thought.

These latter by separating from experience that which comes from the senses must arrive at the point of describing the forms of knowledge and perception as they originally and a priori, previous to all experience, are contained in our “feelings”. In this manner he discovered the ideality of time and space. According to him these are not conceptions which are won from experience, but simply the forms of our conception of the world, which are embedded in our faculties of knowledge. Only under the form of conceptions in time and space can we recognize the world. But outside of our faculties of knowledge there is no space and no time. Thus Kant got so far as to say about the world of things in themselves, that completely unknowable world, something very distinct, namely, that it is timeless and spaceless.

Without doubt this logical development is one of the most daring achievements of the human mind. That does not say by any means that it is not open to criticism. On the contrary there is a great deal to be said against it, and in fact there are very very weighty objections which have been brought against it. The assumption of the ideality of space and time in the Kantian sense led to inextricable contradictions.

There can certainly be no doubt that our conceptions of time and space are conditioned by the constitution of our faculties of knowledge, but I should have thought that that would only necessarily amount to saying, that only those connections of events in the universe can be recognized which are of such a nature as to call forth in our intellectual faculties the concepts of space and time. The ideality of time and space would then imply just as the thing in itself, no more and no less than a limit to our powers of knowing.

Relations of a kind which cannot take the form of space or time concepts – even if such really exist, that we do not know – are for us inconceivable, just as much as the ultra-violet and ultra-red rays are imperceptible for our powers of vision.

But Kant did not mean the matter in this sense at all. Because space and time provide the forms in which alone my faculties of knowledge can recognize the world, he takes for granted that time and space are forms which are only to be found in my faculty of knowledge, and correspond to no sort of connection in the real world. In his Prolegomena to every future Metaphysic Kant compares in one place the concept of space with the concept of color. This comparison appears to us very apt, it by no means, however, proves what Kant wants to prove. If cinnabar appears red to me, that fact is certainly conditioned by the peculiarity of my visual organs. Out of that there is no color. What appears to me as color is called forth by waves of aether of a distinct length which affect my eye. Should any one wish to consider these waves in relation to the color as the thing in itself, which in reality they are not, then our power of vision would not be a power to see the things as they are, but power to see them as they are not; not a capacity of knowledge, but of illusion.

But it is quite another matter when we look not at one color alone, but take several colors together and distinguish them from one another. Each of them is called forth by distinct ether waves of different lengths. To the distinctions in the colors there correspond differences in the lengths of the ether waves. These distinctions do not lie in my organ of vision but have their ground in the external world. My organs of vision have only the function of making me conscious of this difference in a certain form, that of color. As a means to a recognition of this distinction it is a power of real knowledge and not of illusion. These distinctions are no mere appearances. That I see green, red and white, that has its ground in my organ of sight. But that the green is different to the red, that testifies to something that lies outside of me, to a real difference between the things.

Besides that the peculiarity of my organ has the effect that by its means I can only recognize the motions of the ether. No other communication from the outer world can reach me through that medium.

Just as with the power of vision in particular so is it with the organs of knowledge in general. They can only convey to me Space and Time conceptions, that is, they can only show me those relations of the things which can call forth Time and Space conceptions in my head. To impressions of another kind, if there are any, they cannot react. And my faculty of knowledge renders it possible for me to obtain these impressions in a particular way. So far are the categories of space and time founded in the construction of my faculty of knowledge.

But the relations and distinctions of the things themselves, which are shown to me by means of the individual space and time concepts, so that the different things appear to me as big and small, near and far, sooner or later, are real relations and distinctions of the external world, which are not conditioned through the nature of my faculty of knowledge.

Even if we therefore are not in a position to recognize a single thing by itself, if our faculty of knowledge is in respect to that a faculty of ignorance, we can yet recognize the real differences between things. These distinctions are no mere appearances, even if our conception of them is conveyed to us by means of appearances; they exist outside of us, and can be recognized by us, certainly only in certain forms.

Kant, on the other hand, was of the opinion that not simply are space and time forms of conception for us, but that even the temporal and spacial differences of phenomena spring solely from our heads, and indicate nothing real. If that were really so, then would all phenomena spring simply from our heads, since they all take the form of temporal and spacial differences. Thus we could know absolutely nothing about the world outside of us, not even that it existed. Should there exist a world outside of us, then, thanks to the ideality of space and time, our faculty of knowledge would be not an imperfect, one-sided mechanism, which communicated to us only a one-sided knowledge of the world, but a complete mechanism of its kind, and one which served to completely cut us off from all knowledge of the world. Certainly a mechanism to which the name “Faculty of Knowledge” is just about as suitable as the fist to the eye.

Kant could attack ever so energetically the “mystical” idealism of Berkeley, which he hoped to replace with his critical idealism. His criticism took a turn, which nullifies his own assumption that the world is real and only to be known through experience, and thus mysticism cast out from the one side finds on the other a wide triumphal doorway open, through which it can enter with a flourish of trumpets.

II. The Moral Law

Kant assumed as his starting point that the world is really external to us and does not simply exist in our heads, and that knowledge about it is only to be attained through experience. His philosophical achievement was to be the examination of the conditions of experience, of the boundaries of our knowledge. But just this very examination became for him an incitement to surmount this barrier, and to discover an unknowable world, of which he actually knew that it was of quite another nature than the world of appearances, that it was completely timeless and spaceless, and therefore causeless as well.

But why this break-neck leap over the boundaries of knowledge which caused him to lose all firm ground under the feet? The ground could not be a logical one, since through this leap he landed in contradictions which nullified his own assumptions. It was a historical ground which awaked in him the need for the assumption of a supersensuous world – a need which he must satisfy at all price.

If, in the eighteenth century, France was a hundred years behind England, just so much was Germany behind France. If the English bourgeoisie no longer needed the materialism, since without it, and on religious grounds, they had got rid of the feudalist state and its church, the German bourgeoisie did not yet feel strong enough to take up openly the fight against the state and its church. They therefore withdrew in fear from the materialism. This came in the eighteenth century to Germany, just as to Russia, not as the philosophy of conflict but of pleasure, in a form suitable to the needs of the “enlightened” despotism. It grew at the princely courts, side by side with the narrowest orthodoxy. In the bourgeoisie there remained, however, even in its boldest and most independent pioneers, as a rule, some relic of Christian belief, from which they could not emancipate themselves.

That was bound to make the English philosophy appeal to German philosophers. In fact they had also a very great influence on Kant. I cannot remember ever to have found in his writings any mention of a French materialist of the eighteenth century. On the other hand he quoted with preference Englishmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Locke, Hume, Berkeley and Priestley.

But between the German and English philosophy there was a great difference. The English philosophized at a time of great practical advance, of great practical struggles.

The practice captured their entire intellectual force; even their philosophy was entirely ruled by practical considerations. Their philosophers were greater in their achievements in economics, politics, natural science, than in philosophy.

The German thinkers found no practice which could prevent them from concentrating their entire mental power on the deepest and most abstract problems of science. They were therefore in this respect without their like outside of Germany. That was not founded on any race quality of the Germans, but on the circumstances of the time. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the deepest philosophic thinkers were to be found in Italy, France, Holland, England, and not in Germany. The quiet that came over German political life in the century following the Thirty Years War first gave Germany the lead in Philosophy, just as Marx’s Capital had its origin in the period of reaction following on 1848.

Kant, despite his sympathy for the English, could not find satisfaction in their philosophy. He was just as critical towards it as towards materialism.

In both cases Ethics was bound to strike him as the weakest point. It seemed to him quite impossible to bring the moral law into a necessary connection with nature; that is, with the world of phenomena. Its explanation required another world, a timeless and spaceless world of pure spirit, a world of freedom in contrast to the world of appearances (phenomena) which is ruled by the necessary chain of cause and effect. On the other hand his Christian feelings, the outcome of a pious education, were bound to awaken the need for the recognition of a world in which God and immortality were possible. [1] As Kant had to allow that God and immortality were completely superfluous in the world of our experience, he was obliged to look for a world “beyond” experience for them, and thus the spaceless and timeless world of things in themselves corresponded most completely to his needs.

Kant obtained the best proof for the existence of God and immortality in this world of the “beyond” from the moral laws. Thus we find with him, as with Plato, that the repudiation of the materialist explanation and the belief in a special world of spirits, or if it is preferred a world of spirit, lend each other mutual support and render it necessary.

How, however, did Kant manage to obtain farther insight into this spirit world? The critique of pure reason only allowed him to say of it, that it was timeless and spaceless. Now this spacelessness has to be filled up with a content. Even for that Kant has an idea.

The unknowable world of things in themselves becomes at least partly knowable directly one succeeds in getting hold of a thing in itself. And Kant finds this for us. It is the personality of man. I am for myself at once phenomenon and thing in itself. My pure reason is a thing in itself. As a part of the sensuous world I am subject to the chain of cause and effect, therefore to necessity; as a thing in itself I am free, that is, my actions are not determined by the causes of the world of the senses, but by the moral law dwelling within me, which springs from the pure reason and calls out to me not “Thou must,” but “Thou shalt.” This shall were an absurdity if there did not correspond to it, a can, if I were not free.

The moral freedom of man is certainly a complicated thing. It brings along with it certainly no less contradictions than the ideality of time and space. Since this freedom comes to expression in actions which belong to the world of phenomena, but as such fall into the chain of cause and effect, – they are necessary. The same actions are at the same time free and necessary. Besides this freedom arises in the timeless, intelligible world, while cause and effect always fall in a particular time. The same time-determined action has thus a time, as well as a cause in time.

But what is now the moral law, which from the world of things in themselves, the “world of the understanding, extends its working right into the world of appearances, the world of the “ senses,” and then subordinates itself? Since it springs from the world of the understanding its determining ground can only lie in he pure reason. It must be of a purely formal nature, because it must remain fully free from all relation to the world of the senses, which would at once involve a relation of cause and effect, a determining ground of the will which would at once annihilate its freedom. “ There is, however,” says Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason, “ besides the matter of the law, nothing further contained than the lawgiving form. Thus the law-giving form, so far as it is contained in the maxim, is the only thing that can constitute a determining ground of the free will.”

From that he draws the following Fundamental Law of the Pure Practical Reason.

“Act so that the maxim of thy action may be a principle of universal legislation.”

This principle is by no means startlingly new. It forms only the philosophic translation of the ancient precept, to do unto others as we would be done by. The only new thing is the declaration that this precept forms a revelation of an intelligible world; a revelation which with the greatest application of philosophic insight was to be discovered as a principle which applied not only for humanity, “but for all finite Beings who possess Reason and will, nay even including the Infinite Being as the highest intelligence.”

Unfortunately the proof for this law which applies even to the Supreme Intelligence shows a very serious flaw. It ought to be “independent of all conditions appertaining to the world of the senses,” but that is easier said than fulfilled. Just as little as it is possible with the air pump to create a completely airless space; just as it must always contain air, though it be in so refined degree, that it is no more to be recognized by us, in the same way we cannot possibly grasp a thought, which is independent of all conditions appertaining to the world of the senses. Even the moral law does not escape this fate.

The moral law already includes conditions which belong to the world of the senses. It is not a law of the “pure will” in itself, but a law of the control of my will when brought in contact with my fellow men. It assumes this; for me, however, these appearances are from the world of the senses.

And still more is assumed, however, by the conception of the moral law: “act so that the maxim of thy action may be a principle of universal legislation.” This assumes not only men outside of me, but also the wish that these fellow men should behave themselves in a particular manner. They are so to behave themselves as the moral law prescribes to me to act. Not only society but also a distinct form of social conditions is assumed as possible and desirable.

That in fact the need for such is concealed in the ground of his “practical reason” and determines his spaceless and timeless moral law, Kant himself betrays in his Critique of Practical Reason in a polemic against the deduction of the moral law from pleasure. [2]

“It is therefore surprising that intelligent men could have thought of calling the desire for happiness a universal practical law on the ground that the desire is universal and therefore also the maxim by which everyone makes this desire determine his will.

“For, whereas, in other cases a universal law of nature makes everything harmonious, here, on the contrary, if we attribute to the maxim the universality of law the extreme opposite of harmony will follow, the greatest opposition and the complete distraction of the maxim itself and its purpose. For, in that case, the will of all has not one and the same object, but everyone has his own (his private welfare), which may accidentally accord with the purposes of others which are equally selfish, but it is far from sufficiency for a law, because the occasional exceptions which one is permitted to make are endless and cannot be definitely embraced in a universal rule. In this manner there results a harmony like a married couple bent on going to ruin. ‘O, marvellous harmony, what he wishes, she wished also,’ or like what is said of the pledge of Francis I, to the Emperor Charles V.: ‘What my brother Charles wishes, that I wish also’ (viz. Milan).”

Thus pleasure is not to be a maxim which can serve as a principle of universal legislation, and that because it can call forth social disharmonies. The moral law has thus to create a harmonious society, and such must be possible, otherwise it would be absurd to wish to create it.

The Kantian moral law assumes thus, in the first place, a harmonious society as desirable and as possible. But it also assumes that the moral law is the means to create such a society, that this result can be achieved through a rule which the individual sets to himself. We see how thoroughly Kant was deceived, when he thought that his moral law was independent from all conditions appertaining to the world of sense, and that it formed thus a principle which would apply to all timeless and spaceless spirits, including God Almighty himself.

In reality Kant’s moral law is the result of very concrete social needs. Naturally, since it springs from the wish for a harmonious society, it is possible to deduce from it the ideal of a harmonious society and thus it has been possible to stamp Kant as a founder of Socialism. Cohen repeats this again also in his latest work Ethics of the Pure Will (Ethik des reinen Willens) 1905. In reality, however, Kant is far farther removed from Socialism than the French materialism of the eighteenth century. While according to these the Moral Law was determined by the condition of the state and society, so that the reform of morality rendered in the first place necessary the reform of the State and Society, and so the fight against immorality widened itself into a fight against the ruling powers; according to Kant the society which exists in time and space is determined by a moral law standing outside of time and space, which directs its commands to the individual not the society. Is the morality of the individual imperfect, one must not lay the blame for that on the State and Society, but in the fact that man is not entirely angel, but half animal and consequently always being drawn down by his animal nature, against which he can only fight through the raising and the purifying of his own inner man. The individual must improve himself if the Society is to be improved.

It is clear that Socialism takes peculiar forms if we look on Kant as its founder. This peculiarity will be in no way diminished when we observe the farther development of the moral law by him. From the moral law springs the consciousness of Personality, and the dignity of man, and the phrase: “Act so, that you, as well in your own person as in the person of every other, at all times look on man as end, and never simply as a means.”

“ In those words,” says Cohen (pp. 303-4) “is the deepest and most far-reaching sense of the categoric imperative brought to expression; they contain the moral programme of the new time and the entire future world history. The idea of the final (or end) advantage of Humanity becomes thereby transformed into the idea of Socialism, by which every man is defined as a final end, as an end in itself.”

The programme of the “entire future world history” is conceived in somewhat narrow fashion. The “timeless moral law, that man ought to be an end, and at no time simply a means, has itself only an “end” in a society in which men are used by other men simply as means to their ends. In a communist society, this possibility disappears and with that goes the necessity of the Kantian Programme for the “entire future world history.” What becomes then of this? We have then in the future either no Socialism, or no world history to expect.

The Kantian Moral Law was a protest against the very concrete feudal society with its personal relations of dependency. The would-be “socialist” principle which fixes the Personality and Worth of men is accordingly just as consistent with Liberalism or Anarchism as with Socialism, and contains, in no greater degree any new idea than the one already quoted, of the universal legislation. It amounts to the philosophical formula for the idea of “Freedom, Equality and Fraternity” already then developed by Rousseau, and which, moreover, was to be found in primitive Christianity. The only thing Kantian, even here, is simply the mere form in which this principle is proved.

The dignity of Personality is namely derived from the fact, that it is a part of a super-sensuous world, that as a moral being it stands outside nature and over nature. Personality is “Freedom and Independence from the mechanism of the entire nature,” so that “the person as belonging to the world of sense is subordinate to its own personality, so far as it belongs to the world of intelligence.” Thus it is not then to be wondered if man, as belonging to both worlds, is obliged to look on his own being with regard to its second and highest qualification, not otherwise than with respect and to conceive the greatest respect for the laws of the same. With that we would be happily arrived again at the primitive Christian argument for the equality of all men, which necessarily arises from the fact that we are all children of God.

III. Freedom and Necessity

Meanwhile, reject as we must the assumption of the two worlds to which, according to Plato and Kant, man belongs, it is nevertheless true that man lives at the same time in two worlds, and the moral law inhabits one of them, which is not the world of experience. But all the same even this world is no super-sensuous one. The two worlds, in which man lives, are the Past and the Future. The Present forms the boundary of the two. His whole experience lies in the past, all experience is past, and all the connecting links which past experience shows him lie with inevitable necessity before, or still more, behind him. In these there is nothing more left to alter, he can do nothing more in regard to them than recognize their necessity. Thus is the world of experience the world of knowing, and the world of necessity.

It is otherwise with the Future. Of it I have not the smallest experience. Apparently free it lies before me, as the world which I do not explore as one knowing it, but in which I have to assert myself as an active agent. Certainly I can extend the experience of the past into the future, certainly I can conclude that these will be even so necessarily determined as those, but even if I can only recognize the world on the assumption of necessity, yet I shall only be able to act in it on the assumption of a certain Freedom. Even if compulsion is exercised over my actions, there remains to me the choice, whether I shall yield to it, or not, there remains to me as last resort the possibility of withdrawing myself by a voluntary death. Action implies continual choice between various possibilities, and be it alone that of doing or not doing, it means accepting or rejecting, it means defending and opposing. Choice, however, assumes in advance the possibility of choice just as much as the distinction between the acceptable and the inacceptable, the good and the bad. The moral judgment, which is an absurdity in the world of the past, the world of experience, in which there is nothing to choose, where iron necessity rules, is unavoidable in the world of the unknown future – of freedom.

But not simply the feeling of freedom is assumed by action, but also certain aims. If in the world of the past, the sequence of cause and effect (causality) rules, so in the world of action, of the future; the thought of aim (Teleology). For action the feeling of freedom is an indispensable psychological necessity, which is not to be got rid of by any degree of knowledge. Even the sternest Fatalism, even the deepest conviction that man is a necessary product of his circumstances, cannot bring it about that we cease to love, and to hate, to defend and attack.

But all that is no monopoly of man but holds also of the animals. Even these have freedom of the will, in the sense that man has, namely as a subjective, inevitable feeling of freedom, which springs from ignorance of the future and the necessity of exercising a direct influence on it.

And just in the same way they have command of a certain insight into the connection of cause and effect. Finally the conception of an end is not quite strange to them. In respect of insight into the past and the necessity of nature on the one hand, and on the other in respect of the power of foreseeing the future, and the setting up of aims for their action the lowest specimens of humanity are distinguished far less from the animals than from civilized men.

The setting up of aims is not, however, anything which exists outside the sphere of necessity, of cause and effect. Even though I set up aims for myself only in the future, in the sphere of apparent freedom, yet the act of setting up aims itself, from the very moment when I set up the aim, belongs to the past, and can thus in its necessity be recognized as the result of distinct causes. That is not in any way altered by the fact that the attainment of the end is still in the future, in the sphere of uncertainty, thus in this sense in that of freedom. Let the attainment of the end be assumed as ever so far distant, the setting up of the aim itself lies in the past. In the sphere of freedom there lie only those aims which are not yet set up, of which we do not even know anything as yet.

The world of conscious aims is thus not the world of freedom in opposition to that of necessity. For each of the aims which we set ourselves, just as for each one of the means which we apply to its attainment, the causes are already given and are under certain circumstances recognizable as those which brought about the setting up of these aims and determined the way in which that was to be achieved.

It is impossible, however, to distinguish the realm of necessity and that of freedom simply as past and future; their distinction often coincides also with that of nature and society, or to be more exact, of society and that other nature from which the former displays only one particular and peculiar portion.

If we look at nature in the narrower sense, as apart from Society and then both in their relation to the future, we find at once a serious difference. The natural conditions change much slower than the Social. And the latter are at the period when men commence to philosophise, at the period of the production of wares, of a highly complicated nature, whereas there are in nature a large number of simple processes, whose subjection to law can be relatively easily perceived.

The consequence is, that despite our apparent freedom of action in the future, this action, nevertheless as far as nature is concerned comes to be looked on as determined at an early period. Dark as the future lies before me, I know of a certainty that summer will follow winter, that to-morrow the sun will rise, that to-morrow I shall have hunger and thirst, that in winter the need for warming myself will occur to me, and that my action will never be directed to escaping these natural necessities, but with the idea of satisfying them. Thus I recognize, despite all apparent freedom that in face of nature my action is necessarily conditioned. The constitution of nature external to us and of my own body produce necessities which force on me a certain willing and acting which being given according to experience can be reckoned with in advance.

It is quite otherwise with my conduct to my fellow men, my social actions. In this case the external and internal causes, which necessarily determine my action, are not so easy to recognize. Here I meet with no overpowering forces of nature, to which I am obliged to submit myself, but with factors on a level with myself, men like myself, who by nature have no more strength than I have. Over against these I feel myself to be free, but they also appear to me to be free in their relations to their fellow men. Towards them I feel love and hate, and on them and my relations to them I make moral judgments.

The world of freedom and of the moral law is thus certainly another than that of recognized necessity, but it is no timeless and spaceless and no super-sensual world, but a particular portion of the world of sense seen from a particular point of view. It is the world as seen in its approach to us, the world on which we have to work, which we have to rearrange, before all.

But what is to-day the future will be to-morrow past; thus what to-day is felt to be free action will be recognized to-morrow as necessary action. The moral law in us, which regulates this action, ceases, however, with that to appear as an uncaused cause, it falls into the sphere of experience and can be recognized as the necessary effect of a cause – and only as such cause are we at all able to recognize it, or can it become an object of Science. In that he transferred the moral from the “this side,” the sensual world, to the “other side,” the super-sensual world, Kant has not advanced the scientific knowledge of it, but has closed all access to it. This obstacle must be got rid of before everything else, we must rise above Kant if we are to bring the problem of the moral law nearer to its solution.

IV. The Philosophy of Reconciliation

The Ethic forms the weakest side of the Kantian Philosophy. And all the same it is just through the Ethic that it has won its greatest success, because it met very powerful needs of the time.

The French Materialism had been a philosophy of the fight against the traditional methods of thought, and consequently against the institutions which rested on them. An irreconcilable hatred against Christianity made it the watchword, not only of the fight against the church, but of that against all the social and political forces which were bound up with it.

Kant’s Critique of the Pure Reason equally drives Christianity from out of the Temple; but the discovery of the origin of the moral law, which is brought about by the Critique of the Practical Reason, opens for it again the door with all due respect. Thus through Kant, Philosophy became, instead of a weapon of the fight against the existing methods of thought and institutions, a means of reconciling the antagonisms.

But the way of development is that of struggle. The reconciliation of antagonisms implies the stoppage of development. Thus the Kantian Philosophy became a conservative factor.

The greatest advantage thereby was drawn by theology. It emancipated this from the quandary, into which the traditional belief had fallen through the development of science, in that it rendered it possible to reconcile science and religion.

“No other science,” says Zeller, “experienced the influence of the Kantian Philosophy in a higher degree than the Theology. Here Kant found the soil best prepared for his principles; with that, however, he brought to the traditional methods of thought a reform and an increase in depth, which it was badly in need of.” (Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie, 1873, p.519.)

Just after the outbreak of the French Revolution a specially strong need arose for a theology, which was in a position to hold its own against materialism, and to drive it out of the field among educated people. Zeller writes then further.

“Kant’s religious views corresponded exactly both to the moral and intellectual need of the time; it recommended itself to the enlightened by its reasonableness, its independence of the positive, its purely practical tendency; to the religious by its moral severity and its lofty conceptions of Christianity and its founder. German theology from now on took Kant as their authority.” His Moral Theology became after a few years the foundation on which Protestant theology in Germany almost without exception, even the Catholic to a very large extent, was built up. The Kantian Philosophy, exercised for that reason, that the majority of German theologians for close on fifty years took their start from it, a highly permanent and far-reaching influence on the general education.

Vorländer quotes in his History of Philosophy (Leipzig 1903) the word of a modern German Theologian, Ritschl, who declared:

“Thus the development of the method of knowledge by Kant implied at the same time a practical rebirth of Protestantism. (Vol. II, p. 476.)”

The great Revolution created the soil for the influence of Kant, which was strongest in the two decades after the Terror. Then this influence became paler and paler. The Bourgeoisie acquired after the thirties, even in Germany, strength and courage for more decided struggles against the existing forms of State and thought, and to an absolute recognition of the world of the senses as the only real one. Thus through the Hegelian dialectic there arose new forms of Materialism, and just in the most vigorous form in Germany, for the very reason that their Bourgeoisie was well behind that of France and England; because they had not conquered the existing state machine; because they had that still to upset, therefore they required a fighting philosophy and not one of reconciliation.

In the last decades, however, their desire to fight has greatly diminished. Even though they have not attained all that they wish, yet they have all which was necessary for their development. Further struggles on a large scale, energetic fights against the existing, must be of much less use to them than to their great enemy, the proletariat, that grew in a most menacing fashion and now for its part required a fighting philosophy. This was so much the more susceptible to the influence of materialism, the more the development of the world of the senses showed the absurdity of the existing order and the necessity of its victory.

The Bourgeoisie, on the other hand, became more and more susceptible to a philosophy of reconciliation, and thus Kantism was aroused to a fresh life. This resurrection was prepared in the reactionary period after 1848 by the then commencing influence of Schopenhauer.

But in the last decade the influence of Kant has found its way into Economics and Socialism. Since the laws of Bourgeois Society, which were discovered by the Classical Economists, showed themselves more clearly as laws which made the class war and the disappearance of the Capitalist order necessary, the Bourgeois Economists took refuge in the Kantian Moral Code, which being independent of Time and Space must be in a position to reconcile the class antagonisms and prevent the Revolutions which take place in Space and Time.

Side by side with the ethical school in Economics we got an ethical Socialism, when endeavors were made in our ranks to modify the class antagonisms, and to meet at least a section of the Bourgeoisie half way. This policy of Reconciliation also began with the cry: Back to Kant! And with a repudiation of materialism, since it denies the Freedom of the Will.

Despite the categoric imperative, which the Kantian Ethic cries to the individual, its historical and social tendency, from the very beginning on till today, has been that of toning down, of reconciling the antagonisms, not of overcoming them through struggle.

Footnotes

1. As a curiosity it may be mentioned here that it is possible to confront Bernstein’s witty remark “Kant against Cant” with the fact that Kant himself was Cant. “His ancestors came from Scotland … The father, a saddler by profession, maintained in his name the Scottish spelling Cant, the Philosopher first changed the letters to prevent the false pronunciation as Zant. [Kuno Fischer, History of Modern Philosophy, Vol.III., p.52, German Ed.] His family was very religious and this influence Kant never got over. Not less than Kant is the “cant” related to puritan piety. The word signifies first the puritan method of singing, then the puritan religious and finally the customary, thoughtless oft-repeated phraseology to which men submit themselves. Bernstein appealed, in his Assumptions of Socialism, for a Kant as an ally against the materialist “party-cant”.

2. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, Tr. by T.W. Abbott,. Lond. 1889, Sect.10, theorem II, pp.115-6.

Chapter IV
The Ethic of Darwinism

I. The Struggle for Existence

Kant, like Plato, had divided mankind into two parts, a natural and a supernatural, an animal and an angelic. But the strong desire to bring the entire world, including our intellectual functions, under a unitary conception, and to exclude all factors besides the natural from it, or in other words the materialist method of thought, was too deeply grounded in the circumstances for Kant to be able to paralyze it for any length of time. And the splendid progress made by the natural sciences, which began just at the very time of Kant’s death to make a spurt forwards, brought a series of new discoveries, which more and more filled up the gap between man and the rest of nature, and among other things revealed the fact that the apparently angelic in man was also to be seen in the animal world, and thus was of animal nature.

All the same the Materialist Ethics of the nineteenth century, so far as it was dominated by the conceptions of natural science, equally in the bold and outspoken form which it took in Germany, as well as in the more retiring and modest English, and even now French version, did not get beyond that which the eighteenth century had taught. Thus Feuerbach founded morality on the desire for happiness, Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, took on the other hand from the English the distinction between moral or altruistic feelings, and the egoistical, both of which are equally rooted in human nature.

A great and decided advance over this position was first made by Darwin, who proved in his book on the Descent of Man, that the altruistic feelings formed no peculiarity of man, that they are also to be found in the animal world, and that there, as here, they spring from similar causes, which are in essence identical and which have called forth and developed all the faculties of beings endowed with the power of moving themselves. With that almost the last barrier between man and animal was torn down. Darwin did not follow up his discoveries any further, and yet they belong to the greatest and most fruitful of the human intellect, and enable us to develop a new critique of knowledge.

When we study the organic world, it shows to us, in contrast to the inorganic, one very striking peculiarity: We find in it adaptation to end. All organized beings are constructed and endowed more or less with a view to an end. The end which they serve is nevertheless not one which lies outside of them. The world as a whole has no aim. The aim lies in the individuals themselves, its parts are so arranged and fitted out, that they serve the individual, the whole. Purpose and division of labor arise together. The essence of the organism is the division of labor just as much as adaptation to end. One is the condition of the other.

The division of labor distinguishes the organism from inorganic individuals, for example, crystals. Even crystals are distinct individuals with a distinct form. They grow, when they find the necessary material for their formation under the requisite conditions, but they are through and through symmetrical. On the other hand the lowest organism is a vesicle much less visible and less complicated than a crystal, but a vesicle whose external side is different, and has different functions to the inner.

That the division of labor is one which is suitable for the purpose, that is, one which is useful to the individual, renders his existence possible, or even ameliorates it, seems wonderful. But it would be still more wonderful if individuals maintained themselves and procreated with a division of labor which was not suitable for the purpose, which rendered their existence difficult or even impossible.

But what is the work which the organs of the organism have to accomplish? This work is the struggle for life, that is, not the struggle with other organisms of the same kind, as the word is occasionally used, but the fight with the whole of nature. Nature is in continual movement and is always changing her forms, hence only such individuals will he able to maintain their form for any period of time in this eternal change who are in a position to develop particular organs against those external influences which threaten the existence of the individual as well as to supply the place of those parts which it is obliged to give up continually to the external world. Quickest and best will those individuals and groups assert themselves, whose weapons of defence and instruments for obtaining food are the best adapted to their end, that is best adapted to the external world, to avoid its dangers and to capture the sources of food. The uninterrupted process of adaptation, and the selection of the fittest, by means of the struggle for existence produce, under such circumstances as usually form themselves on the earth since it has bourne organized beings, an increasing division of labor. In fact the more developed the division of labor is in a society, the more advanced does that society appear to us. The continual process of rendering the organic world more perfect is thus the result of the struggle for existence in it – and that probably for a long time to come will be its future result, that is as long as the conditions of our planet do not essentially alter. Certainly we have no right to look on this process as a necessary law for all time. That would amount to imputing to the world an end which is not to be found in it.

The development need not always proceed at the same rate. From time to time periods can come, when the various organisms, each in its way, arrive at the highest possible degree of adaptation to the existing conditions, that is, are in the most complete harmony with their surroundings. So long as these conditions endure they will develop no farther, but the form which has been arrived at will develop into a fixed type, which procreates itself unchanged. A further development will only then occur when the surroundings undergo a considerable alteration, when the inorganic nature is subject to changes which disturb the balance of the organic. Such changes, however, take place from time to time, either single, sudden and violent, or numerous and unnoticed, the sum total and effect of which, however, equally brings on new situations, as for example alterations in the ocean currents, in the surface of the earth, perhaps even in the position of the planet in the universe, which bring about climatic changes, transform thick forests into deserts of sand, cover tropical landscapes with icebergs and vice versa. These alterations render new adaptations to the changed conditions necessary, they produce migrations which likewise bring the organisms into new surroundings, and produce fresh struggles for life between the old inhabitants and the new incomers, exterminate the badly adapted and the unadaptable individuals and types, and create new divisions of labor, new functions and new organs or transform the old. It is not always the highest developed organisms which best assert themselves by this new adaptation. Every division of labor implies a certain one-sidedness. Highly developed organs, which are specially adapted for a particular method of life, are for another far less useful than organs which are less developed, and in that particular method of life less effective, but more many-sided and more easily adaptable. Thus we see often higher developed kinds of animals and plants die out, and lower kinds take over the farther development of new higher organisms. Probably man is not sprung from the highest type of apes, the man apes, which are tending to die out, but from a lower species of four-handed animals.

II. Self-Movement and Intelligence

At an early period the organisms divided themselves into two great groups – those which developed the organs of self motion, and those which lacked it, animals and plants.

It is clear that the power of self movement is a mighty weapon in the struggle for life. It enables it to follow its food, to avoid danger, to bring its young into places where they will be best secured from dangers and which are best provided with food.

Self motion, however, necessarily implies an intelligence, and vice versa. The one of these factors without the other is absolutely useless. Only in combination do they become a weapon in the struggle for life. The power of self-movement is completely useless, when it is not combined with a power to recognize the world in which I have to move myself. What use would the legs be to the stag, if he had not the power to recognize his enemies and his food grounds? On the other hand, for a plant intelligence of any kind would be useless. Were the blade of grass able to see, hear or smell the approaching cow, that would not in the least help it to avoid being eaten. Self-movement and intelligence thus necessarily go together, one without the other is useless. Wherever these faculties may spring from, they invariably come up together and develop themselves jointly. There is no self-movement without intelligence, and no intelligence without self-movement. And together they serve the same ends, the securing and alleviation of the individual existence.

As a means to that they and their organs are developed and perfected by the struggle for life, but only as a means thereto. Even the most highly developed intelligence has no capacities which would not be of use as weapons in the struggle for existence. Thus is explained the one-sidedness and the peculiarity of our intelligence.

To recognize things in themselves may appear to many philosophers an important task; for our existence it is highly indifferent, whatever we have to understand by the thing in itself. On the other hand for every being endowed with power of movement it is of the greatest importance to rightly distinguish the things and to recognize their relations to one another. The sharper his intelligence in this respect the better service will it do him. For the existence of the singing bird it is quite indifferent what those things may be in themselves which appear to it as a berry, a hawk, or a thunder cloud. But indispensable is it for his existence to distinguish exactly berries, hawks, and clouds from the other things among his surroundings, since that alone puts him in a position to End his food, to escape the enemy, and to reach shelter in time. It is thus inevitable that the intelligence of the animal should be a power of distinguishing in space.

But just as indispensable is it to recognize the sequence of the things in time, and indeed their necessary sequence as cause and effect. Since the movement as cause can only bring as a universal result the maintenance of existence, if it aims at special more immediate or remoter effects which are so much the more easily to be achieved, the better the individual has got to learn these effects with their causes. To repeat the above example of a bird, it is not sufficient that it should know how to distinguish berries, hawks, and thunder clouds from the other things in space, it must also know that the enjoyment of the berries has the effect of satisfying its hunger, that the appearance of the hawk will have the effect that the first small bird which it can grasp will serve it as food, and that the rising thunder clouds produce storm, rain, and hail as results.

Even the lowest animal, so soon as it possesses a trace of ability to distinguish and self movement, develops a suspicion of causality. If the earth shakes, that is a sign for the worm that danger threatens and an incentive to flight.

Thus if the intelligence is to be of use to the animal in its movements it must be organized so that it is in a position to show him the distinctions in time and space as well as the causal connections.

But it must do even more. All the parts of the body serve only one individual, only one end, the maintenance of the individual. The division of labor must never go so far that the individual parts become independent, because that would lead to the dismemberment of the individual. They will work so much the more efficiently, the tighter the parts are held together, and the more uniform the word of command. From this follows the necessary unity of the consciousness. If every part of the body had its own intellectual organs, or did each of the senses which conveys to us a knowledge of the outer world produce its own consciousness, then would all knowledge of the world in such a case and the cooperation of the various members of the body be much impeded, the advantages of the division of labor would be abolished, or changed into disadvantages, the support which the senses or the organs of movement mutually give to each other would cease and there would come instead mutual hindrance.

Finally, however, the intelligence must possess in addition the power to gather experiences and to compare. To return once more to our singing bird, he has two ways open to him to find out what food is the best for him and where it is easiest to be found; what enemies are dangerous for him and how to escape them. One, his own experience, the other the observation of other and older birds, who have already made experience. No master is, as is well known, born. Every individual can so much the easier maintain himself in the struggle for life, the greater his experience and the better arranged they are; to that, however, belongs the gift of memory and the capacity to compare former impression with later, and to extract from the common and universal element, to separate the essential from the unessential, that is: to think. Does observation communicate to us the differences, the particular factor through the senses, so does thinking tell us the common factor, the universal element in the things.

“The universal,” says Dietzgen, “is the content of all concepts, of all knowledge, of all science, of all acts of thought. Therewith the analysis of the organ of thought exhibits the latter, as the power to investigate the universal in the particular.”

All these dualities of the intellectual powers, we find developed in the animal world, even if not in so high a degree as in men, and they are often for us difficult to recognize, since it is not always easy to distinguish conscious actions springing from intelligence, from the involuntary and unconscious actions, simple reflex actions and instinctive movements which even in men play a great role.

If we find all these qualities of the intellectual faculties to be a necessary concomitant of the power of self movement already in the animal world, so do we, on the other hand, find in the same qualities also the same limitations which even the most embracing and most penetrating understanding of the highly developed civilized man cannot surmount.

Forces and capacities which were acquired as weapons in the battle for existence can naturally be made available for other purposes as well, besides those of rendering existence secure, when the organism has brought its power of self movement and its intelligence, as well as its instincts of which we will soon speak, to a high enough degree of development. The individual can employ the muscles, which were developed in it for the purpose of snatching its booty, or warding off the foe, as well for dancing and playing. But their particular character is obtained by these powers and capacities all the same, only from the struggle for life which developed them. Play and dance develop no particular muscles.

That holds good also of the intellectual powers and faculties. Each was developed as a necessary supplement to the power of self-movement in the struggle for life, in order to render possible to the organism the most suitable movement in the surrounding world for its own preservation, yet it could all the same be made to serve other purposes. To these belong also pure knowing without any practical thoughts in the background, without regard for the practical consequences which it can bring about. But our intellectual powers have not been developed by the struggle for existence, to become an organ of pure knowledge, but only to be an organ which regulates our movements in conformity with their purpose. The more completely it functions in respect of the latter, the more incomplete is it in the first. From the very beginning most intimately connected with the power of self movement, it develops itself completely only in mutual dependence on the power of self movement and can only be brought to perfection in this connection. Also the power of the human faculties of cognition and human knowledge is most intimately bound up with human practice, as we shall see.

It is the practice, however, which guarantees to us the certainty of our knowledge.

So soon as my knowledge enables me to bring about distinct effects, the production of which lies in my power, the relation of cause and effect ceases for me to be simply chance or simple appearance, or simple forms of knowledge, as the pure contemplation and thought might well describe them. The knowledge of this relation becomes, through the practice, a knowledge of something real and is raised to certain knowledge.

The boundaries of practice witness certainly to the boundaries of our certain knowledge.

That theory and practice are dependent on one another and only through the mutual permeation of the one by the other can at any time the highest result attainable be arrived at, is only an outcome of the fact that movement and intellectual powers, from their earliest beginnings, were bound to go together. In the course of the development of human society the division of labor has brought it about that the natural unity of these two factors would be destroyed, and created classes to whom principally the movement, and others to whom principally the knowing, fell. We have already pointed out how this was reflected in philosophy, through the creation of two worlds, a higher or intellectual and a lower or bodily.

But wholly were the two functions naturally in no individual to be divided, and the proletariat movement of today is directing its energies with good effect to abolishing this distinction and with it also the dualist philosophy, the philosophy of pure knowledge. Even the deepest, most abstract knowledge, which apparently is farthest removed from the practical, influence this, and are influenced by it, anti to bring in us this influence to consciousness becomes the duty of a critique of human knowledge. As before, knowledge remains in the last resort always a weapon in the struggle for existence, a means to give to our movements, be they movements in nature or society, the most suitable forms and directions.

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently,” said Marx. “The great thing, however, is to change it.”

III. The Motives of Self Maintenance and Propagation

Both powers of self movement and of knowing belong inseparably together as weapons in the struggle for existence. The one developed itself along with the other, and in the degree in which these weapons win in importance in the organism, do the other more primitive ones, which are less necessary, as for example, that of fruitfulness and of vitality diminish. On the other hand, to the degree that these diminish must the importance of the first named factors for the struggle for life increase, and it must call forth their greater development.

But self movement and knowledge form by themselves by no means a sufficient weapon in the struggle. Of what use is merely the strongest muscles, the most agile joints, the sharpest senses, the greatest understanding, in this struggle, if I do not feel in me the impulse to employ them to my preservation – if the sight of food or the knowledge of danger leaves me indifferent and awakes no emotion in me? Self movement and intellectual capacity first, then, become weapons in the struggle for existence, if with them there arises a longing for the self preservation of the organism, which brings it about that all knowledge which is of importance for its existence at once produces the will to carry out the movement necessary for its existence, and therewith calls forth this movement.

Self movement and intellectual powers are without importance for the existence of the individual without his instinct of self preservation, just as this latter again is of no importance with both the former factors. All three are most intimately bound up with each other. The instinct of self preservation is the most primitive of the animal instincts and the most indispensable. Without it no animal species endowed in any degree with the power of self movement and a faculty of intelligence could maintain itself even a short time. It rules the entire life of the animal. The same social development, which ascribes the care of the intellectual faculties to particular classes, and the practical movement to others, and produces in the first an elevation of the “spirit” over the gross “matter”, goes so far in the process of isolating the intellectual faculties, that the latter, out of contempt for the “mechanical” practice which serves for the maintenance of life, comes to despise life itself. But this kind of knowledge has never as yet been able to overcome the instinct of self preservation, and to paralyze the “practise” which serves for the maintenance of life. Although many a suicide be philosophically grounded, we always, in every practical act of the denial of life, finally meet with disease or desperate social circumstances as the cause, but not a philosophical theory. Mere philosophizing cannot overcome the instinct of self preservation.

But if this is the most primitive and widely spread of all instincts it is still not the only one. It serves only for the maintenance of the individual. However long this may endure, finally it disappears without leaving any trace of its individuality behind, if it has not reproduced itself. Only those species of organisms will assert themselves in the struggle for existence, who leave a progeny behind them.

Now with the plants and the lower animals reproduction is a process which demands no power of self movement and no faculty of intelligence. That changes, however, with the animals so soon as reproduction becomes a sexual act, in which two individuals are concerned, who have to unite in order to lay either eggs and seeds (sperm) on the same spot outside of the body, or to incorporate the sperm in the body of the individual carrying the eggs. That demands a will, an impulse to find each other, to unite. Without that can the non-sexual propagation not take place, the stronger it is in the periods favorable for reproduction, so much the sooner will it take place, so much the better will be the prospects of a progeny, for the maintenance of the species. On the other hand these prospects are bad for individuals and species in whom the impulse for self reproduction is weakly developed. From a given degree of the development consequently natural selection must develop through the struggle for life an outspoken impulse to reproduction in the animal world and ever more strengthen it.

But it does not always suffice to the attainment of a numerous progeny. We have seen that in the degree in which self movement and intellectual powers grow, the number of the germs, which the individual produces, as well as its vitality, have a tendency to diminish. On the other hand the greater the division of labor, the more complicated the organism, the longer the period which is requisite for its development and its attainment to maturity. Even if a part of this period is laid in the maternal body, that has its limits. Even from considerations of space is this body not in a position to bear an organism as big as itself. It must expel the young long before that period is arrived at. From the young animals, however, the capacities for self movement and intelligence are the latest achieved, and they are mostly very weakly developed as they leave the protecting cover of the egg or the maternal body. The egg expelled by the mother is completely without motion and intelligence. Then the care for the progeny becomes an important function of the mother: the hiding and defence of the eggs anti of the young, the feeding of the latter, etc. As the impulse for reproduction, so is it with the love for the young, especially in the animal world is the maternal love developed as an indispensable means, from a certain stage of the development on, to secure the perpetuation of the species. With the impulse towards individual self preservation these impulses have nothing to do: they often come into conflict with it, and they can be so strong that they overcome it. It is clear that under otherwise equal conditions, those individuals and species have the best prospect of reproducing themselves and handing on their qualities and impulses in whom the impulse of self maintenance is not able to diminish the impulse to reproduce and protect the progeny.

IV. The Social Instinct

Besides these instincts which are peculiar to the higher animals, the struggle for life develops in particular kinds of animals still others, which are special and conditioned by the peculiarity of their method of life, for example, the migratory instinct, which we will not farther study. Here we are interested in another kind of instinct which is of very great importance for our subject: the social instinct.

The cooperation of similar organisms in larger crowds is a phenomenon which we can discover quite in their earliest stages: the microbes. It is explained alone by the simple fact of reproduction. If the organisms have no self movement, the progeny will consequently gather round the producer, if they are not by any chance borne away by the movements of the external world, water currents, winds, and phenomena of that sort. The apple falls, as is well known, not far from the stem, and when it is not eaten, and falls on fruitful soil, there grow from the pips young trees, which keep the old tree company. But even in animals with power of self-movement it is very natural that the young should remain with the old, if no external circumstances supply a ground for them to remove themselves. The living together of individuals of the same species, the most primitive form of social life, is also the most primitive forms of life itself. The division of organisms, which have a common origin, is a later act.

The separation can be brought about by the most diverse causes. The most obvious, and certainly the most effective, is the lack of sustenance. Each locality can only yield a certain quantity of food. If a certain species of animals multiplies beyond the limits of their food supply, the superfluous ones must either emigrate or starve. Above a certain number the numbers of organisms living in one place can not go.

But there are certain species of animals, for whom the isolation, the division in individual pairs, who live only for themselves, for whom such a life affords an advantage in the struggle for existence. Thus, for example, for the cat species, which lie in wait for their booty and take it with an unexpected spring. This method of acquiring their sustenance would be made more difficult, if not impossible, if they circulated in herds. The first spring on the booty would drive all the game away for all the others. For wolves which do not come unexpectedly on their prey, but worry it to death, the foregathering in herds affords an advantage; one hunts the game to the other, which blocks for it the way. The cat nevertheless hunts more successfully alone.

On the other hand again there are animals who choose isolation because in this fashion they are less conspicuous and can easiest hide themselves, soonest escape the foe. The traps set by man have, for example, had the effect that many animals which formerly lived in societies, are now only to be found isolated, such as the beavers in Europe. That is the only way for them to remain unnoticed.

On the other hand, however, there are numerous animals which draw advantage from their social life. They are seldom beasts of prey. We have mentioned the wolf above. But even they only hunt in bands when food is scarce, in winter. In summer when it is easier to get, they live in pairs. The nature of the beast of prey is always inclined to fighting and violence, and consequently does not agree well with its equals.

The herbivora are more peaceful from the very manner in which they obtain their food. That very fact of itself renders it easier for them to herd together, or to remain together, because they are more defenceless, they win, however, through their greater numbers, new weapons in the struggle for life. The union of many weak forces in common action can produce a new and greater force. Then through union the greater strength of certain individuals is used for the good of all. When the stronger ones fight now for themselves, they fight for the good of the weaker, when the more experienced look out for their own safety, find out for themselves feeding grounds, they do it also for the inexperienced. Now it becomes possible to introduce a division of labor among the united individuals, fleeting though it he, yet it increases their strength and their safety. It is impossible to watch the neighborhood with the most complete attention and at the same time to feed peacefully. Naturally during sleep all observation of all kind comes to an end. But in society one watcher suffices to render the others safe during sleep or while eating.

Through the division of labors the union of individuals becomes a body with different organs to cooperate to a given end, and this end is the maintenance of the collective body; it becomes an organism. This is by no means to say that the new organism, society, is a body in the same way as an animal or a plant, but it is an organism of its own kind, which is far more widely distinguished from those two than the animal from the plant. Both are made up from cells without power of self motion and without consciousness of their own; society on the other hand from individuals with their own power of movement and consciousness. If, however, the animal organism has, as a whole, a power of self motion and consciousness, they are lacking nevertheless to society as well as to the plant. But the individuals which form the society can entrust individuals among their members with functions through which the social forces are submitted to a uniform will, and uniform movements in the society are produced.

On the other hand the individual and society are much looser connected than the cell and the whole organism, in both plant and animal. The individuals can separate itself from one society and join another as emigration proves. That is impossible for a cell; for it the separation from the whole is death, if we leave certain cells of a particular kind out of account, such as the sperma and eggs in the procreative processes. Again society can forthwith impose on new individuals any change of form, without any change of substance, which is impossible for an animal body. Finally the individuals who form society can. under circumstances, change the organs and organization of society, while anything of that kind is quite impossible in an animal or vegetable organism.

If, therefore, society is an organism, it is no animal organism, and to attempt to explain any phenomena peculiar to society from the laws of the animal organism is not less absurd than when the attempt is made to deduce peculiarities of the animal organism, such as self movement and consciousness, from the laws of vegetable being. Naturally this does not say there is not also something common to the various kinds of organisms.

Just as the animal, so will also the social organism survive so much the better in the struggle for existence the more unitary its movements, the stronger the binding forces, the greater the harmony of the parts. But society has no fixed skeleton, which supports the weaker parts, no skin which covers the whole, no circulation of the blood which nourishes all the parts, no heart which regulates it, no brain which makes a unity out of its knowing, its working and its movements. Its unity and harmony, as well as the coherence can only arise from the actions and will of its members. This unitary will will, however, be so much the more assured the more it springs from a strong impulse.

Among species of animals, in whom the social bond becomes a weapon in the struggle for life, this encourages consequently social impulses which in many species and many individuals grow to an extraordinary strength, so that they can overcome the impulse of self preservation and reproduction when they come in conflict with the same.

The commencement of the social impulse we can well look for in the interest which the simple fact of living together in society produces in the individuals for his fellows, to whose society he is accustomed from youth on. On the other hand reproduction and care for the progeny already render longer or shorter relations of a more intimate kind necessary between different individuals of the same species. And just as these relations have formed the starting point for the formation of societies, so could the corresponding impulses easily give the point of departure for the development of the social impulses.

These impulses themselves can vary according to the varying conditions of the various species, but a row of impulses forms the requisite conditions for the growth of any kind of society. In the first place naturally comes altruism, self sacrifice for the whole. Then bravery in the defence of the common interests; fidelity to the community; submission to the will of society; then obedience and discipline; truthfulness to society whose security is endangered or whose energies are wasted when they are misled in any way by false signals. Finally ambition, the sensibility to the praise and blame of society. These all are social impulses which we find expressed already among animal societies, many of them in a high degree.

These social impulses are nevertheless nothing but the highest virtues, they sum up the entire moral code. At the most they lack the love for justice, that is the impulse for equality. For its development there certainly is no place in the animal societies, because they only know natural and individual inequality, and not those called forth by social relations, the social inequalities. The lofty moral law, that the comrade ought never to be merely a means to an end, which the Kantians look on as the most wonderful achievement of Kant’s genius, and as the moral programme of the modern era, and for the entire future history of the world, that is in the animal world a commonplace. The development of human society first created a state of affairs in which the companion became a simple tool of others.

What appeared to a Kant as the creation of a higher world of spirits, is a product of the animal world. How narrowly the social impulses have grown up with the fight for existence, and to what an extent they originally were useful in the preservation of species, can be seen from the fact that their effect often limits itself to individuals whose maintenance is advantageous to the species. Quite a number of animals, which risk their lives to save younger or weaker comrades, kill without a scruple sick or aged comrades who are superfluous for the preservation of the race, and are become a burden to society. The “moral sense,” “sympathy,” does not extend to these elements. Even many savages behave like that.

An animal impulse and nothing else is the moral law. Thence comes its mysterious nature, this voice in us which has no connection with any external impulse, or any apparent interest, this demon or god, which since Socrates and Plato, those moralists found in themselves who refused to deduce morality from self love or pleasure. Certainly a mysterious impulse, but not more mysterious than sexual love, the maternal love, the instinct of self preservation, the being of the organism itself and so many other things, which only belong to the world of phenomena and which no one looks on as products of a supersensuous world.

Because the moral law is the universal instinct, of equal force to the instinct of self preservation and reproduction, thence its force, thence its power which we obey without thought, thence our rapid decisions, in particular cases, whether an action is· good or bad, virtuous or vicious; thence the energy and decision of our moral judgment, and thence the difficulty to prove it when reason begins to analyze its grounds. Then one finally finds that to comprehend all means to pardon all, that everything is necessary, that nothing is good and bad.

Not from our organs of knowing, but from our impulses comes the moral law and the moral judgment as well as the feeling of duty and the conscience.

In many kinds of animals the social impulses attain such a strength, that they become stronger than all the rest. Do the former come in conflict with the latter, they then confront the latter with overpowering strength as commands of duty. Nevertheless that does not hinder in such a case a special impulse, say of self preservation or of reproduction being temporarily stronger than the social impulse and overcoming it. But is the danger past, then the strength of the self preserving impulse or the reproductive instinct shrivels up, just as that of reproduction after the completion of the act. The social instinct remains however, existing in the old force, regains the dominion over the individual and works now in him as the voice of conscience and of repentance. Nothing is more mistaken than to see in conscience the voice of fright of his fellows, their opinion or even their power of physical compulsion. It has effect even in respect of acts, which no one has heard of, even acts which appear to the neighbors very praiseworthy, it can even work as repugnance of acts which have been undertaken from fear of his fellows and their public opinion.

Public opinion, praise and blame are certainly very influential factors. But their effect assumes in advance a certain social impulse, namely, ambition, they cannot produce the social impulses.

We have no reason to assume that conscience is confined to man. We would find it difficult to find even in men, if everyone did not feel its effect on himself. Conscience is certainly a force, which does not obviously and openly show itself, but works only in the innermost being.

But nevertheless many investigators have gone so far as to posit even in animals a kind of conscience. Thus says Darwin in his book The Descent of Man:

“Besides Love and Sympathy the animals show other qualities connected with the social instincts, which we should call moral in men; and I agree with Agassiz that dogs have something very like a conscience. Dogs certainly have a certain power of self control, and this does not appear to be altogether a consequence of fear. As Braubach remarks, a dog will restrain itself from stealing food in the absence of its master.” If conscience and feeling of duty are a consequence of the lasting predominance of the social impulses in many species of animals, if these impulses are those through which the individuals of such species are the most constantly and most enduringly determined, while the force of the other impulses is subject to great oscillations, yet the force of the social impulse is not free from all oscillations. One of the most peculiar phenomena is that social animals, when united in greater numbers, also feel stronger social impulses. It is for example a well known fact that an entirely different spirit reigns in a well filled meeting then in a weak, that the bigger crowd alone has an inspiring effect on the speaker. In a crowd the individuals are not only more brave, that could be explained through the greater support which each believes he will get from his fellows; they are also more unselfish, more self sacrificing, more enthusiastic. Certainly then only too often so much the more calculating, cowardly and selfish when they find themselves alone. And that applies not only in men but also in the social animals. Thus Espinas, in his book, Animal Societies, quotes an observation of Forel. The latter found:

“The courage of every ant, by the same form, increases in exact proportion to the number of its companions or friends, and decreases in exact proportion the more isolated it is from its companions. Every inhabitant of a very populous ant heap, is much more courageous than a similar one from a small population. The same female worker, which will allow herself to be killed ten times in the midst of her companions, will show itself extraordinarily timid, avoid the least danger, fly before even a much weaker ant so soon as she finds herself twenty steps from her own home.”

With the stronger social feeling there need not necessarily be bound up a higher faculty of intelligence. In general every instinct probably has the effect to somewhat obscure the exact observation of the external world. What we wish, that we readily believe, but what we fear that we easily exaggerate. The instincts have the effect that very easily many things appear disproportionately big or near, while others are overlooked. How blind and deaf the instinct for reproduction can render many animals at times is well known. The social instincts which do not show themselves as a rule so acutely and intensively, generally obscure much less the intellectual faculties. They can, however, influence them very considerably on occasions. Think, for instance, on the influence of faithfulness, and discipline among sheep, who follow their leading sheep blindly, wherever it may go.

The moral law in us can lead our intellect astray just as any other impulse. In itself it is neither a product of wisdom nor does it produce wisdom. What is apparently the most elevated and divine in us, is essentially the same as that which we look on as the commonest and most devilish. The moral law is of the same nature as the instinct for reproduction. Nothing is more ridiculous, than when the former is put on a pedestal and the latter is turned away with loathing and contempt. But no less false is it to infer that man can and ought to follow all his instincts without check. That is only so far true as it is impossible to condemn any one of these as such. But that by no means implies that they cannot come to cross purposes. It is simply impossible that any one should follow all his instincts without restraint, because they restrain one another. Which, however, at a given moment wins, and what consequences this victory brings for the individual and his society with it, there neither the Ethic of pleasure nor that of a moral law standing outside of space and time affords us any help.

If, however, the moral law is recognized as a social impulse, which like all the impulses is brought out in us by the struggle for life, the supersensuous world has lost a strong support in human thinking. The simple gods of Polytheism were already dethroned by natural Philosophy. If nevertheless a new Philosophy could arise which not only reawakened the belief in God and a supersensuous world but put it more firmly on a higher form, as was done in ancient times by Plato, and on the eve of the French Revolution by Kant, so did the cause lie in the unsolved problem of the moral law, to whose explanation neither its deduction from pleasure nor from the moral sense sufficed – and yet these offered the only “natural” causal explanation which seemed possible. Darwinism was the first to make an end to the division of man, which this rendered necessary, into a natural and animal on the one hand and a supernatural heavenly, on the other.

But with that was the entire ethical problem not yet solved. Were moral impulse, duty and conscience as well as the ground type of the virtues to be explained from the social impulse, yet this breaks down when it is a question of explaining the moral idea. Of that there is not the least sign in the animal world. Only man can set himself ideals and follow them. Whence come these’ Are they prescribed to the human race from the beginning of ail time as an irrevocable demand of nature or an eternal season, as commands which man does not produce but which confront man as a ruling force and show him the aims toward which he has ever more and more to strive? That was in the main the view of all thinkers of the 18th century, atheists as well as theists, materialists and idealists. This view took even in the mouth of the boldest materialism the tendency to assume a supernatural Providence, which indeed had nothing more to do in nature but still hovers over human society. The evolution idea which recognized the descent of man from the animal world made this kind of idealism absurd in a materialistic mouth.

All the same before Darwin founded his epoch-making work that theory had arisen which revealed the secret of the moral ideal. It was the theory of Marx and Engels.

Karl Kautsky (1854-1938)