CHAPTER XVI

THE ISSUE OF THE WESTERN STRUGGLE FOR A WORLD-VIEW

Academic thinkers: Sidgwick, Stephen, Alexander, Wundt, Paulsen, Höffding

THE attempts of speculative philosophy to find a foundation for ethics in knowledge of the nature of the world have come to grief. Ethics based on science and sociology have shown themselves powerless. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, although they bring back into general acceptance some elementary questions of ethics, are unable, nevertheless, to establish a satisfying ethic.

In the later decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, ethics find themselves in an unenviable position. They remain of good courage, however, being confident that they have at their disposal a sufficiency of “scientifically” recognized results to guarantee them an assured existence.

This conviction is produced by a series of inter-related works—chiefly academic manuals of ethics. Their authors are of the opinion that ethics can be built, like the arch of a bridge, upon two piers. One of their piers is the natural ethical disposition of man; the other they allow themselves to find in those needs of society which influence the spirit and temper of individuals. They consider their task to be the bringing into actual existence of the arch (the possibility of completing which they take for granted), with the solid material of modern psychology, biology, and sociology, and the dividing of the load in the best calculated way between the two piers. Fundamentally they do nothing beyond restoring with new means the standpoint of Hume.

The following writers try to carry through this adjustment of the ethics which start from the standpoint of [pg 182] ethical personality and those which start from that of society: Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900),_(_76_)_ Leslie Stephen (1832-1904),_(_77_)_ Samuel Alexander (b. 1859),_(_78_)_ Wilhelm Wundt (b. 1832),_(_79_)_ Friedrich Paulsen (1846-1908),_(_80_)_ Friedrich Jodl (b. 1849),_(_81_)_ Georg von Gizyki (1851-1895),_(_82_)_ Harald Höffding (b. 1843),_(_83_)_ and others. Of these ethical writers who, in spite of the variety of experience they bring to bear on the subject, are essentially related to one another, the most original is Leslie Stephen, the scientifically soundest is Wilhelm Wundt, the most ethical is Harald Höffding.

Höffding makes the ethical originate partly out of a consideration which limits the sovereignty of the present minute. “An action (he says) is good which preserves the totality of life and gives fulness and life to its content; an action is bad which has a more or less decided tendency to break into and narrow the totality of life and its content.” Supporting this consideration come also instincts of sympathy, which make us feel pleasure in the pleasure of others, and pain at their pain. The aim of ethics is general prosperity.

Of these ethical writers some put the chief emphasis on the ethical disposition of the individual, while others hold that ethics are constituted chiefly by their content, which aims at the good of society. What is common to them all [pg 183] is that they try to combine the ethic of ethical personality and the ethic of utilitarianism without having inquired into their higher unity. That is why the chapters in which they touch on the problem of the basic principle of the moral are always the part of their works which is the least clear and the least living. One is conscious of how happy they feel when they have waded through this swamp, and can launch out into consideration of the different ethical standpoints which have emerged in history, or can face questions on single points in ethical practice. And when they handle practical questions, it is obvious that they are not in possession of any usable basic principle of the moral. Their coming to terms with reality is a mere groping here and there. The considerations on the strength of which they decide are set out now in this sense, now in that. Hence these ethical writers frequently offer very interesting discussions on ethical problems, but the conception of the moral never gets from them any real explanation or any deepening. The criterion of a real ethic is whether it allows their full rights to the problems of personal morality and of the relation of man to man, problems with which we are concerned every day and every hour, and in which we must become ethical personalities. These academical works do not do this. Therefore, although they may arrive at results which deserve attention, they are not capable of giving effective ethical impulses to the thought of their time.

The ethic of self-perfecting. Kant’s successors: Cohen, Herrmann

This mediating ethic is not left uncriticized. In Germany inheritors of the Kantian spirit like Hermann Cohen (b. 1842)_(_84_)_ and Wilhelm Herrmann (1846-1922)_(_85_)_ oppose [pg 184] it, and in English-speaking countries successors of the Intuitionists like James Martineau (1805-1900),_(_86_)_ F. H. Bradley (b. 1846),_(_87_)_ T. H. Green (1836-1882),_(_88_)_ Simon Laurie (1829-1909),_(_89_)_ and James Seth (b. 1860)._(_90_)_

In spite of wide differences in detail these thinkers agree in refusing to derive ethics either from the ethical disposition of man or from the claims of society. They represent them as produced entirely through the ethical personality. To become ethical personalities, however, (so they say) we step out of ourselves and work for the good of the community.

Cohen and Herrmann attempt to reach an ethic which is a consistent unity by using logic to put a content into the empty categorical imperative of Kant. They wish to make good what he missed in his _Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten_ (Foundations for a Metaphysic of Morals) and in his _Metaphysik der Sitten_ (A Metaphysic of Morals). Cohen finds the origin of ethics in the pure Will thinking out the idea of one’s fellow-man and that of the associating of men to form a state, his ethical ego being brought into existence by this logical operation. The ethic thus attained consists in honesty, modesty, loyalty, justice, and humanity, and culminates in the representation of the state as the highest creation of the moral spirit. But that this ethic is only the offspring of mental ability is betrayed by the whole story of its appearance. The “pure will” is an abstraction which cannot start anything.

Instead of obtaining an ethic by deduction, using abstract logical methods, Wilhelm Herrmann opens for it the back-door of experience. He does indeed make ethics consist in “the bowing of the individual before the power [pg 185] of a something which is universally valid in thought,” but that content of ethics which is a necessity of thought we are to reach by seeing ourselves in each other as if in a mirror, and deciding what kind of conduct makes us mutually “reliable.” The thought of the unconditional claim originates, therefore, spontaneously in us, but awakes to the fact that it is determined by its content “through experience of human intercourse, and in the relation of reliability.”

Herrmann did not carry this philosophic ethic through to completion. He sketches it as an introduction to a not less artificial theological ethic. His conception is allied to Adam Smith’s theory of the impartial third party (see page 82).

Martineau, Green, Bradley, Laurie, Seth, and Royce

Martineau, Green, Bradley, Laurie, and Seth try to reach an ethic which is a consistent unity by making the whole of ethics originate in the need of self-perfecting. Of these, Martineau goes more on the lines of the moralists of the eighteenth century, known as the Cambridge Platonists. Ethics consist for him in thinking ourselves into the ideal of perfection, which God gave us with our life, and letting ourselves be determined by it. T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, Simon Laurie, and James Seth show more or less the influence of J. G. Fichte. The ethical is with them founded on the fact that man wishes to live his life out in the deepest way as an effective personality, and thereby attain to true union with the infinite spirit. This thought is expounded best by T. H. Green. He is also led at the same time to the relation between civilization and ethics, and lays it down that all the achievements of human activity, especially the political and social perfecting of society, are nothing in themselves, and have a real meaning only so far as they render more thorough inward perfecting attainable by individuals. A spiritualized conception of civilization is therefore now struggling [pg 186] for acceptance. An upholder on American soil of this ethic of self-perfecting is Josiah Royce (1855-1916)._(_91_)_

In the effort to conceive of ethics as a whole as being an ethic of self-perfecting, that is to say of conduct which springs from inward necessity, these thinkers express thoughts which belong to a living ethic. To be energetically concerned with the basic principle of the moral, even though one be led in the direction of the universal and apparently abstract, always brings with it results which are valuable for practice, even if the solution of the problem itself is not thereby advanced beyond a certain point.

These thinkers go so far on these lines as to conceive of ethics as higher life-affirmation, consisting in devoting ourselves to the activity which the world-spirit wills for us. They represent the mysticism of activity taught by J. G. Fichte, but without its speculative foundation.

They leave unsolved, however, nay, they do not even put the question, how the higher life-affirmation comes to give itself a content which stands in contradiction to the course of nature. They conceive of higher life-affirmation as self-devotion, that is to say as life-affirmation within which life-denial is active. But how does this paradox come about? How far is this direction of the will, which contradicts the natural will-to-live, a necessity of thought? Why must men become different from the world in order to exist and work in the world in true harmony with the world-spirit? And what meaning has this conduct of his for the happenings which take place in the universe?

Nature-philosophy and ethics. Fouillée, Guyau, Lange, Stern

The thought of Alfred Fouillée (1838-1913)_(_92_)_ and Jean [pg 187] Marie Guyau (1854-1888)_(_93_)_ also circles round the conception of ethics as higher life-affirmation. They too conceive of the ethical as devotion, that is to say, as life-affirmation within which life-denial is present, but they dig deeper than the English and American representatives of the ethic of self-perfecting, in that they seek to conceive of ethics within a nature-philosophy. Hence questions come to be discussed which remain unnoticed in the former. The problems of the basic principle of the moral and that of the optimistic-ethical world-view are once more opened up and, for the first time, in a comprehensive and elemental way.

Fouillée philosophises in a noble way about the will-to-live. The ideas which arise in us, directed towards ethical ideals, are (he says), like our ideas generally, not simply something produced by thought, but are the expression of forces which press within us towards making existence full and complete._(_94_)_ Speaking generally, we must in this matter clearly understand that the evolution which in the course of the world produces and maintains existence is the work of re-presentative forces (_idées-forces_), and is therefore to be explained in the last analysis as psychic. It reaches its highest point in man’s ideas, which will their ends with clear consciousness. In this highest being, man, reality gets so far as to produce ideals which go out beyond reality, and by their means to be led on beyond itself. Ethics are therefore a result of the evolution of the world. The idea of self-perfecting through devotion, which we experience as the puzzling element within us, is after all a natural manifestation of the will-to-live. The ego which has reached the farthest height of willing and representing enlarges itself by overflowing upon other human existences. Devotion is, therefore, not a surrender of the self, but a [pg 188] manifestation of its expansion._(_95_)_ The man who analyses himself more deeply learns by experience that the highest life-affirmation comes about, not by the natural will-to-live simply rising into will-to-power, but by its “expanding.” “Act towards others as if you became conscious of them at the same time as you become conscious of yourself.”_(_96_)_

Jean Marie Guyau, a pupil and friend of Fouillée’s, in his _Sketch of an Ethic without Obligation or Sanction_, tries to work out the thought of this ethical life-affirmation through expansion. Ordinary ethics, he says, stand helpless before this insoluble cleft between the ego and other men, but living nature makes no stop at that point. The individual life is expansive because it is life. As in the physical sphere it carries within itself the impulse to produce fresh life like itself, so in the spiritual sphere also it wishes to widen its own existence by linking it on to other life like itself. Life includes not feeding only, but also production and fruitfulness; real living is not a taking in only, but a giving out of oneself as well. Man is an organism which imparts itself to others; its perfection consists in the most complete imparting of itself. In this philosophizing, then, Hume’s notion of sympathy is given more profound expression.

Fouillée and Guyau, both of them invalids, lived together at Nice and Mentone. Trying in one another’s company to realise the ethical higher life-affirmation, they take their exercise on the very shore on which Nietzsche that same year thought out his heightened life-affirmation of _Beyond Good and Evil_. He knows their works, as they also know his, but as men they remain personally unknown to each other._(_97_)_

[pg 189]

Fouillée and Guyau, because they think deeply, are led to nature-philosophy by their philosophizing about the way in which the will-to-live is to become ethical. They wish to conceive ethics, within a world- and life-affirming nature-philosophy, as a deepening, which is a necessity of thought, of life-affirmation. They thus join the procession of the Chinese monists. That which these, like Spinoza and Fichte, attempted and failed to do, they attempt again in the confidence that their nature-philosophy will be fairer to the conception of living existence than that of the others was.

Navigating the rushing stream of heightened life-affirmation, they try with mighty efforts at the oars to reach the bank of the ethical. They believe that they will be able to land there . . . but the waves carry them past it, as they did all those who attempted the journey before them.

That life-affirmation in its highest form, by a paradox which lies in the nature of things, becomes ethical devotion to others they cannot show convincingly. This proposition, in which they would transform the natural world-view into an ethical one, is truth only for the thought which dares to make the same jump because it sees no possibility otherwise of reaching land from the drifting boat.

The ethic of Fouillée and Guyau, then, is an enthusiastic conception of life to which man pulls himself up when coming to terms with reality, in order to assert himself and exert himself in the universe in accordance with a higher value which he feels in himself.

Fouillée and Guyau are, therefore, elemental moralists like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. They are not, however, like the latter, making a voyage with their rudder tightly lashed in the circle of world- and life-denial or of world- and life-affirmation; they hold on their course with sure feeling towards the mysterious union of world-affirmation, life-affirmation, and life-denial which constitutes ethical life-affirmation. . . . But this course takes them out over the boundless ocean. They never reach land.

[pg 190]

In order to understand themselves as a direction of the will-to-live which is a necessity of thought, and to think themselves out to an ethical world-view, ethics must come to terms with nature-philosophy. We find them, then, attempting—as did the Rationalists, and Kant, and the speculative philosophers—to read into the world, in simple or in detailed thought, an optimistic-ethical meaning, or at least, as with Spinoza, to give an ethical character in some way or other to the relation of the individual to the universe. These two men also, Fouillée and Guyau, wrestle with nature-philosophy in order from it to justify ethics and an ethical world-view as not without meaning. At the same time, however, they dare—and this is the new element which appears in them—to look straight in the face the possibility that it will perhaps be impossible to carry their undertaking through. What will then become of ethics and world-view? Although they ought really to totter and fall, they do nevertheless remain standing—so Fouillée and Guyau judge.

Whether the idea of the good can finally claim any objective validity cannot be asserted with complete confidence, says Fouillée in his _Morale des Idées-forces_. Man must finally be content to force himself to acceptance of the ethically expansive life-affirmation, merely because he feels it to be the only thing which is capable of making life valuable. Out of love for the ideal he triumphs over all doubt, and sacrifices himself to it, untroubled about whether or no anything results from his doing so.

Guyau’s _Sketch of a Morality without Obligations or Sanctions_ ends in similar thoughts. An inner force, he says, works upon us and drives us forward. Do we go forward alone, or will the idea eventually win for itself some influence upon nature? . . . Anyhow let us go forward! . . . “Perhaps the earth, perhaps mankind, will one day reach some as yet unknown goal which they themselves have created. There is no hand leading us, no eye watching on our behalf; the rudder was broken long ago, [pg 191] or rather there never was one at all; it has to be provided. That is a big task, and it is our task.” . . . Ethical men are crossing the ocean of events on a rudderless and mastless derelict, so to say, hoping nevertheless that they will some day and somewhere reach land.

In these sentences there is announced from a distance the disappearance of the optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world. Because they venture on renouncing this, and proclaim in principle the sovereign independence of ethics, Fouillée and Guyau belong to the greatest thinkers who have had a share in shaping our world-view.

They do not, however, follow to the end the path on which they have stumbled. While they make ethics independent of whether its activity can or cannot prove itself legitimate as significant and effective in the totality of world-happenings, they assume the existence of a conflict between world-view and life-view, which philosophy down to their day had actually not noticed. But they do not investigate its nature, and do not show how it is that life-view can venture to assert itself in opposition to world-view, and even to exalt itself as the more important. They are content to prophesy that ethics and ethical world-view will grow green again as mighty oases, fed by subterranean springs, even if the sand-storms of scepticism should have turned into a desert the broad territory of the optimistic-ethical knowledge of the world, in which we once wanted to make our home. At bottom, however, they hope that nothing like this will happen, and their confidence that a nature-philosophy which deals in the proper way with the nature of Being will after all finally reach an ethic and a world-view, is not completely overthrown.

Since they at first claim only a hypothetical validity for their new view, and do not carry it through as a matter of principle, Fouillée and Guyau do not exercise upon the thought of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth the influence which they ought to have. Their age was, indeed, not ready for that [pg 192] renunciation of knowledge for which their writings were preparing the way.

A forerunner of their ethic is to be found in that which Friedrich Albert Lange sketches as his own at the end of his _History of Materialism_ (1866). Ethics, he says, are an imaginative creation on which we determine, because we carry an ideal within ourselves. We rise above the actual because we find no satisfaction in it. We are ethical because our life thereby obtains a definite character such as we long for. . . . Ethics mean becoming free from the world.

Lange also, then, has already reached the view that from direct philosophizing about the world and life an ethical world-view results, not as a necessity of thought, but as a necessity for life. But like the two French thinkers he just throws out the thought instead of following it out into all its presuppositions and consequences.

A peculiar supplement which completes the ethics of Fouillée, Guyau, and Lange, without actually going back to them, is provided by the Berlin physician, Wilhelm Stern, in an inquiry, which has attracted far too little notice, into the evolutionary origin of ethics. The essential nature of the moral, he says, is the impulse to maintenance of life by the repelling of all injurious attacks upon it, an impulse through which the individual being experiences a feeling of relationship to all other animate beings in face of nature’s injurious attacks upon them. How has this mentality arisen in us? Through the fact that animate beings of the most varied kinds have been obliged through countless generations to fight side by side for existence against the forces of nature, and in their common distress have ceased to be hostile to one another, so that they might attempt a common resistance to the annihilation which threatened them, instead of succumbing in a common ruin. This experience, which began with their first and lowest stage of existence and has become through thousands of millions of generations more and more [pg 193] pronounced, has given its special character to the psychology of all living beings. All ethics are an affirmation of life, the character of which is determined by perception of the dangers to existence which living beings experience in common.

How much deeper Wilhelm Stern digs than Darwin did! According to Darwin, experience of the never-ceasing, universal danger to existence produces finally nothing but the herd-instinct, which holds together creatures of the same species. According to Stern, there is developed by the same experience a kind of solidarity with everything that lives. The barriers fall. Man experiences sympathy with animals, as they experience it, only less completely, with him. Ethics are not only something peculiar to man, but something which, though in a less developed form, is to be seen also in the animal world as such. Self-devotion is an experience of the deepened impulse to self-preservation. In the active as well as in the passive meaning of the word the whole animate creation is to be included within the basic principle of the moral.

The fundamental commandment of ethics, then, is that we cause no suffering to any living creature, not even the lowest, unless it is to effect some necessary protection for ourselves, and that we be ready to undertake, whenever we can, positive action for the benefit of other creatures.

In Fouillée, Guyau, and Lange ethics come to terms with nature-philosophy, but without any advance towards making themselves cosmic. They fall into the anachronism of regarding themselves still, even at that date, as nothing beyond the regulating of the temper and disposition of man towards his fellow-men, instead of widening themselves out so as to deal with the conduct of man towards every living creature and towards Being in general. In Stern they take this obvious, further step.

No ethic short of one that has made itself universal and cosmic is capable of taking in hand the investigation of the basic principle of the moral; only such an ethic can [pg 194] really come to terms in intelligible fashion with nature-philosophy.

Nature-philosophy and ethics in Eduard von Hartmann

In Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906)_(_98_)_ also, ethics try to comprehend themselves within nature-philosophy. His _Philosophy of the Unconscious_ is largely in line with the thoughts of Fouillée, but in the matter of world-view he goes off in another direction. Instead of allowing ethics, when they are coming to terms with nature-philosophy, to experience their freedom from it, he compels them to base themselves on such a philosophy. His nature-philosophy is pessimistic. It confesses to being unable to discover any principle which contains a meaning in the course of nature. Therefore (so Hartmann concludes, as do the Indians and Schopenhauer), the world-process is something which must come to a standstill. Everything that exists must gradually enter on the blessed condition of will-lessness. Ethics are the disposition which brings this development into action.

In language obscure enough von Hartmann formulates at the end of his _Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness_ his pessimistic-ethical world-view as follows: “Existence in the world of matter is the Incarnation of the Godhead; the world-process is the history of the Passion of the Incarnate God, and at the same time the way to the Redemption of Him who is crucified in the flesh; but morality is co-operation for the shortening of this road of suffering and redemption.”

Then, however, instead of unfolding what this ethic is, and how it is to come into force, he undertakes to show that all ethical standpoints which have ever made their appearance in any way in history have their own justification. He wants to house them all within an evolution which necessarily leads to a pessimistic ethic.

[pg 195]

Every moral principle which shows itself in history (von Hartmann asserts) changes itself by starting on a search for the completion which lies nearest to it. It lives itself out, and then makes way for the higher moral principle which issues logically from it. That is how the ethical consciousness in individuals and in mankind works itself up from one moral principle to another till it reaches the highest knowledge. From the primitive moral principle of aiming at individual pleasure it travels past the authoritarian, the æsthetic, the sentimental, and the intellectual moral systems, which are one and all subjective, to the objective morality of care for the general happiness. But still beyond this it is led to the evolutionary moral principle of the development of civilisation, and here it learns to think on supra-moral lines. It grasps the notion that for moral consideration there is still something higher than the prosperity of individuals and of society, namely “contest and struggle for the maintenance and enhancing of civilization.” This according to usual ideas unethical conception of ethics has to live itself out completely, so that it may then be resolved into an ethic of world- and life-denial.

By this insight into the logic of the course of ethical evolution, von Hartmann is saved from making any protest, as an ordinary ethical thinker would, against the unethical civilization-ethics of the close of the nineteenth century. He knows, on the contrary, that he is helping the cause of rightly understood ethical progress, if he treats them with respect as a necessary phenomenon, and urges that they be allowed to live themselves out with the utmost completeness. We have learnt (he therefore proclaims) to see through the ethic which aims at making men and peoples happy as being a piece of sentimentality, and we ought now to make up our minds to deal seriously with the supra-ethical ethic of the enhancing of life and civilization. We must learn to regard as good whatever is necessary for the development of civilization, and we [pg 196] are no longer at liberty to condemn war in the name of ethics. “The principle of the development of civilization compels us to recognize all these protests as unsound, since wars are the chief means of carrying on the struggle between races, _i.e._, the process of natural selection within mankind, and preparation for the effective waging of war has formed one of the most important means of education and training for mankind in every phase of the development of their civilization, as it will also, so far as we can see, in the future.”_(_99_)_ Economic misery too, and the struggles which arise from it, are seen by the ethical spirit which looks further ahead to subserve a higher objective. The sufferings under the wage system, which are far greater than those under slavery, are necessary for the course of civilization. The struggle which they evoke calls forces into being and has an educative result. The course of civilization needs a favoured minority to serve as bearers of its ideas. Beneficence and charity to the poor must therefore be practised with moderation. The need which spurs men on to active work must not be banished from the world.

Another element in the course of civilization is the taking into possession of the whole earth by the race with the highest civilization, which must therefore increase its numbers as much as possible. In order to make the female population keen about the task which thus falls to them, women must be raised intellectually, _i.e._, their patriotism and national feeling must be increased as much as possible, their historical sense must be aroused, and they must be filled with enthusiasm for the principle of civilization which underlies evolution. “To effect this object, the history of civilization must be made the foundation of all instruction in the upper classes of girl-schools.”_(_100_)_

It is desirable, therefore, to make efforts to secure the “improvement of the human type,” and the attainment [pg 197] of an enhancement of civilization in which “the world-spirit becomes in increasing measure conscious of itself.”

In his nature-philosophy and his philosophy of history, then, Eduard von Hartmann reaches a supra-ethical world-view in which Hegel and Nietzsche drink to brotherhood, and the principles of inhumanity and relativity, which underlie biologico-sociological ethics, sit at table with garlands on their heads.

How and when the supra-ethical ethic of enhanced world- and life-affirmation passes over into the highest ethic of world- and life-denial, and in what way this highest ethic, in which we function as Redeemers of the Absolute, is to be carried out in practice, von Hartmann is, however, unable to make clear. The abstruse modulations with which, in the last chapters of his work, he tries to get from one to the other provide us with ample proof of the unnatural character of the undertaking. To produce a world-view with Hegel for body and Schopenhauer for head, is an absurdity. By his resolve to attempt it, von Hartmann admits his inability to make enhanced life-affirmation become in a natural way ethical.

Eduard von Hartmann prefers to the profession of moralist that of philosopher of the history of morals. Instead of serving the world with an ethical system of morals, he makes it happy with the discovery of the principle of inherent progress in the history of morals, and thus helps to befool completely the thought of his age, which is living its life in an unethical and unspiritual optimism.

From the history of ethics nothing is to be obtained except a certain amount of clearness about the problem of ethics. Anyone who discovers in it principles which promise automatic progress in the ethical development of mankind has by his miserably faulty construction of that history read these principles into the facts without any justification.

[pg 198]

Nature-philosophy and ethics in Bergson, Chamberlain, Keyserling, Haeckel

Henri Bergson (b. 1860)_(_101_)_ renounces altogether the attempt to bring together nature-philosophy and ethics. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (b. 1855)_(_102_)_ and Count Hermann Keyserling (b. 1880)_(_103_)_ make the attempt but without reaching any result.

In his philosophizing about nature, Bergson does not go beyond the _rôle_ of the observing subject. He analyses in a masterly way the nature of the process of knowledge. His investigations into the origin of our conception of time and of the actions of our consciousness which are bound up with it, have taught us how to comprehend the course of nature in its living reality. Leading us on beyond the science which consists in external affirming and calculating, Bergson shows that the true knowledge of Being comes to us through a sort of intuition. Philosophizing means experiencing our consciousness as an emanation of the creative impulse which rules in the world. Bergson’s nature-philosophy has therefore a close inward connexion with that of Fouillée, but he does not find it necessary, as Fouillée does, to produce from it a world- and life-view. He limits himself to depicting it from the standpoint of the problem of the theory of knowledge. He does not attempt any analysis of the ethical consciousness. Year after year we have waited for him to complete his work, as he no doubt himself intended, with an attempt at producing an ethic on the basis of nature-philosophy. But he [pg 199] contented himself with developing in ever-new forms his theories about our inner knowledge of the real. He never comes to the recognition that all deepening of our knowledge of the world acquires its real meaning only so far as it teaches us to comprehend what we ought to aim at in life. He lets the waves of events roll past us, as if we were seated on an island in the stream, whereas we are in reality obliged to exert ourselves as swimmers in the stream.

During the war the German picture-houses were crammed. People went to see the pictures in order to forget their hunger. Bergson’s philosophy brings before us as living events the world which Kant depicted in motionless wall-pictures. But to satisfy the hunger of to-day for ethics he does nothing. He has no world-view to offer us in which we can find a life-view. Over the whole of his philosophy there prevails a quietistic, sceptical tone.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain tries to find a world-view which is based on nature-philosophy and is at the same time ethical. His work entitled _Immanuel Kant_ (1905), which is really a journey through the problems raised by philosophy with attempts to solve them, ends in the thought that we have to combine Goethe’s nature-philosophy, which conceives Becoming as an eternal Being, with Kant’s judgement about the nature of duty, if we wish to reach a real civilization. He finds himself unable, however, to carry through to completion such a world-view.

Roused by Chamberlain, Hermann Keyserling goes in the aims of his thinking far beyond Bergson. He wants to reach clear ideas not only about knowledge of the world, but also about life and work in the world. From the pinnacle, however, to which he mounts, he sees only the field of wisdom; that of ethics is veiled in mist. The highest idea, so he declares at the conclusion of his work _The Structure of the World_, is that of truth. We want to know, because knowledge, “whether it visibly serves life at present or not, already implies in itself a purposive reaction to the outer world.” In correct knowledge the [pg 200] human spirit enters into reciprocal relations with the universe. Life carries within itself its own purposive character.

Keyserling finds it quite in order that the world-view of great men should be superior to ordinary moral standards. One must not reproach Leonardo da Vinci for working as willingly in the service of the French king, Francis I., as he had done previously in that of the Sforzas whom Francis expelled. “Almost every great spirit is a complete egoist.” If any one has experience of life in its full extent and depth and living force, and works in reciprocity with the universe, interest in the human race is for him a kind of specialization which is no longer incumbent on him.

In the Preface to the second edition of _The Structure of the World_ (1920), Keyserling admits that he has not reached a decision about the ethical problem. In his _Philosophy as Art_ (1920), he declares it to be the foremost duty of our time to “make the wise man a possible type, to draw him out by education, and give him all necessary publicity and scope for his activities.”

The wise man is the one man who is capable of veracity, the man who lets all the tones of life sound in him, and seeks to be in tune with the fundamental bass-note which is given in him. He has no universally valid world-view to impart to others. He has not even for himself one that is definite and final; he has only one which is liable to constant alteration for the better. He himself is unalterable only in this, that he wants to live his life in its entirety and in the most vital co-operation with the Universe, and at the same time ever strives to be himself. Veracious and emphatic life-affirmation is therefore the last word of this philosophizing about the world and life. . . .

Thus does nature-philosophy admit that it cannot produce an ethic.

With the lesser spirits self-deception goes further. The ordinary scientific monism, the greatness of which consists in its being an elemental movement towards veracity in an [pg 201] age which is weary of veracity, is still convinced that from its insight into the essential nature of life, into the development of lower life into higher, and into the inner connexion of the individual life with the life of the universe, it can somehow or other arrive at an ethic. But it is significant that its representatives take altogether different roads in the search for an ethic. An incredible absence of thought and of plan reigns in the ethical philosophizing of the ordinary scientific nature-philosophy. Many of its representatives have before their mind’s eye a conception of the moral as a becoming one with the universe, a conception which is related to that of the Stoics and Spinoza. Others, influenced by Nietzsche, entertain the thought that true ethics are an enhanced and aristocratic life-affirmation, and have nothing to do with the claims of the “democratic” social ethics._(_104_)_ Others again, like Johannes Unold in his work _Monism and its Ideals_ (1908), try to bring together nature-philosophy and ethics just in such a way as to let them conceive of the human activity which is directed to social ends as the final result of the development of the organic world. There are also scientific nature-philosophers who are content to put together out of what is commonly regarded as moral an ethic which is universally accepted, and to exalt it, so far as they can, into a product of nature-philosophy. In Ernst Haeckel’s (1834-1919) work _The Riddle of the Universe_ (1899), there is an ethic of that character built on to the palace of nature-philosophy like an outside kitchen. The basic principle of monistic ethical theory is (so it is here maintained) the equal justification of Egoism and of Altruism, and then a balance between them. Both are laws of nature. Egoism serves the preservation of the individual, altruism that of the species. This “golden rule of morality” is said to be of equal significance [pg 202] with the rule which Jesus and other ethical thinkers before him are said to have enunciated in the demand that we shall love our neighbour as ourselves. Spencer and water is poured out under a Christian label.

The death-agony of the optimistic-ethical world-view

An inexorable development of thought, then, brings it about that the philosophy of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, either advances to a supra-ethical world-view, or finds itself living in an ethical ruin. What happens in the great German speculative philosophy of the beginning of the nineteenth century is a prelude to the _dénouement_ of the drama. In that philosophy an ethical world-view tries to find itself a foundation in speculative nature-philosophy, and in doing so becomes, as stands confessed in Hegel, supra-ethical. Later, ethics believe themselves capable of providing a “scientific” conception of themselves, thanks to the results reached by psychology, biology, and sociology, but in proportion as they effect this, their energy decreases. Later still, when through the growth of science and the inward changes in thought a nature-philosophy which is in harmony with scientific observation of nature becomes the only possible philosophy, ethics have once more to make a real attempt to found themselves in a nature-philosophy which is directed upon the universe. There is nothing, however, but the enhancement and perfecting of life which nature-philosophy can give as the meaning of life. Hence ethics must struggle to conceive the enhancement and perfecting of life as something which comes to pass within the field of ethical ideas, and it is this that the most modern thought is striving for, on lines of development which are often apparently irreconcilable, without ever attaining its goal.

Whenever ethics really rely in any way upon nature-philosophy for the production of the convincing, ethical world-view which the age is longing for, they get wrecked [pg 203] upon it in one way or another. Either they actually attempt to give themselves out to be somehow a natural enhancement of life and thereby so alter their character that they cease to be really and truly ethics. Or they abdicate; perhaps, as with Keyserling, leaving the field free to supra-ethical world-view, perhaps, as with Bergson, leaving nature-philosophy and ethical questions with it, to rest in peace.

Thus the sun of ethics becomes darkened for our generation, nature-philosophy pushing forward like a wall of cloud. Just as an inundation overwhelms pastures and fields with its water-borne _débris_, so do the supra-ethical and the unethical ways of thinking break in upon our mentality. They bring about the most terrible devastations without anyone having any clear idea of what the catastrophe means, or indeed being conscious of anything wrong beyond that the spirit of the time is rendering all ethical standards powerless.

Everywhere there grows up an unethical conception of civilization. The masses reconcile themselves in an incomprehensible way to the theory of the relativity of all ethical standards and to thoughts of inhumanity. Freed from any obligation of ethical intention, the belief in progress suffers a process of externalization which increases from year to year, becoming finally nothing better than a wooden façade which conceals the pessimism behind it. That we have lapsed into pessimism is betrayed by the fact that the demand for the spiritual advance of society and mankind is no longer seriously made among us. We have now resigned ourselves, as if no explanation of it were needed, to the fate of being obliged to smile at the high-flying hopes of previous generations. There is no longer to be found among us the true world- and life-affirmation which reaches down to the depths of the spiritual nature of man. Unavowed pessimism has been consuming us for decades.

Delivered over to events in a temper and disposition which is powerless because it is entirely without any true [pg 204] and ethical ideals of progress, we are experiencing the collapse of material and spiritual civilization alike.

By its belief in an optimistic ethical world-view the modern age made itself capable of a mighty advance towards civilization. Its thought, however, has not been able to show this world-view to be founded in the nature of things, and we have therefore sunk, consciously and unconsciously, into a condition in which we have no world-view at all, a condition of pessimism, too, and of absence of all ethical conviction, so that we are on the point of complete shipwreck.

The bankruptcy of the optimistic-ethical world-view was announced beforehand as little as was the financial bankruptcy of the ruined states of Europe. But just as the latter was gradually revealed as having actually come about by the constantly diminishing value of the paper-money that was issued, so is the former being gradually revealed by the constantly diminishing power among us of the true and profound ideals of civilization.

[pg 205]