ehring explain that by reason of his powers of criticism and
searching investigations, the fundamental philosophy has been brought
to light and that he has thus bestowed upon us final truths of last
instance? But if Herr Duehring does not set up such a claim either on
his own behalf or that of his time, if he says that some time in the
misty future final truths of last instance will be established, and
that therefore his own statements are merely accidental and confused,
a kind of "mole-like scepticism" and "barren confusion," what is all
the fuss about, and what useful purpose is served by Herr Duehring?

If we gain no ground in the matter of truth and error we gain less in
respect of good and evil. Here we have an antagonism of ethical
significance, and ethics is a department of human history in which
final truths are but slight and few. From people to people, from age
to age, there have been such changes in the ideas of good and evil
that these concepts are contradictory in different periods and among
different peoples. But some one may remark, "Good is still not evil
and evil is not good; if good and evil are confused all morality is
abolished, and each may do what he will." When the rhetoric is
stripped away this is the opinion of Herr Duehring. But the matter is
not to be disposed of so easily. If things were as easy as that there
would be no dispute about good and evil. Everybody would know what was
good and what was evil. How is it to-day, however? What system of
ethics is preached to us to-day? There is first the Christian-feudal,
a survival of the early days of faith, which is as a matter of fact
subdivided into Catholic and Protestant, of which there are still
further subdivisions, from the Jesuit-Catholic and orthodox Protestant
to loosely drawn ethical systems. There figure also the modern or
bourgeois, and still further the proletarian future system of
morality, so that the progressive European countries alone present
three contemporaneous and coexistent actual theories of ethics. Which
is the true one? No single one of them, regarded as a finality, but
that system assuredly possesses the most elements of truth which
promises the longest duration, which existent in the present is also
involved in the revolution of the future, the proletarian.

But if we now see that the three classes of modern society, the feudal
aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletarian, have their
distinctive ethical systems, we