go hand in hand with a weakening of the social instinct, the effect upon the rising and exploited classes is entirely different. The interests of those classes stand in direct opposition to the social foundations which created the reigning morality. They have not the slightest reason to defer to it, and all the reasons to oppose it. With the growth of their consciousness of their opposition to the existing social order, grows their moral indignation, their opposition to the old and antiquated morality, to which they oppose a new morality, which they advocate as the morality of society as a whole. Thus there arises in the rising classes a moral ideal, which grows in intensity with the growth of the power of these classes. At the same time, as we have already seen, the social instincts of these same classes gain in strength and are particularly developed by the class-struggle, so that with the intensity of the new moral ideal grows also the enthusiasm for the same. Thus it is that the same process of evolution which produces in the conservative and declining classes growing immorality, begets in the rising classes in a steadily increasing number those phenomena, the aggregation of which we describe as ethical idealism, which must not, however, be confounded with philosophical idealism. It is just the rising classes that often incline towards philosophic materialism, which the declining classes, on the other hand, oppose from the moment that the fact begins to dawn upon them that the natural course of evolution has sealed their doom, from which they can only escape by the intervention of some supernatural, divine, or ethical power."
