Ethics and the Materialist
Conception of History.
CHAPTER I.
Ancient And Christian Ethics.
In the history of philosophy the question of Ethics comes to the fore soon after the Persian War. The fact of having successfully repelled the great Persian despotism had had a similar effect on the tiny Hellenic people to that made by the defeat of the Russian despotism on the Japanese. At one blow they became a world power, in command of the sea which surrounded them, and with that its trade. And if now in Japan an era of great industry is being inaugurated on a scale the extent of which they themselves are hardly yet fully aware, 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, in which he missed all the traditional supports on which he had relied; and, indeed, the more so the higher he stood socially; thus he found himself left wholly to himself. And yet, despite all this seeming Anarchy, everyone
