Ethical Development 459 



regarded these as one of the strongest objections against it ; so 

 Duhring and Kropotkin (in his earlier works). 



This interpretation of Darwinism was frequent in the interval 

 between the two main works of Darwin — The Origin of Spec vV.s and 

 The Descent of Man. But even during this interval it was evident 

 to an attentive reader that Darwin himself did not found his standard 

 of good and evil on the features of the life of nature he had 

 emphasised so strongly. He did not justify the ways along which 

 nature reached its ends ; he only pointed them out. The " real " was 

 not to him, as to Hegel, one with the "rational." Darwin has, indeed, 

 by his whole conception of nature, rendered a great service to ethics 

 in making the difference between the life of nature and the ethical 

 life appear in so strong a light. The ethical problem could now be 

 stated in a sharper form than before. But this was not the first time 

 that the idea of the struggle for life was put in relation to the ethical 

 problem. In the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes gave the first 

 impulse to the whole modern discussion of ethical principles in his 

 theory of helium omnium contra omnes. Men, he taught, are in the 

 state of nature enemies one of another, and they live either in fright 

 or in the glory of power. But it was not the opinion of Hobbes that 

 this made ethics impossible. On the contrary, he found a standard 

 for virtue and vice in the fact that some qualities and actions have 

 a tendency to bring us out of the state of war and to secure peace, 

 while other qualities have a contrary tendency. In the eighteenth 

 century even Immanuel Kant's ideal ethics had — so far as can be 

 seen — a similar origin. Shortly before the foundation of his definitive 

 ethics, Kant wrote his Idee zu einer allgemeinen Weltgeschichte 

 (1784), where — in a way which reminds us of Hobbes, and is 

 prophetic of Darwin — he describes the forward-driving power of 

 struggle in the human world. It is here as with the struggle of the 

 trees for light and air, through which they compete with one another 

 in height. Anxiety about war can only be allayed by an ordinance 

 which gives everyone his full liberty under acknowledgment of the 

 equal liberty of others. And such ordinance and acknowledgment are 

 also attributes of the content of the moral law, as Kant proclaimed 

 it in the year after the publication of his essay (1785) 1 . Kant really 

 came to his ethics by the way of evolution, though he afterwards 

 disavowed it. Similarly the same line of thought may be traced in 

 Hegel though it has been disguised in the form of speculative 

 dialectics 2 . And in Schopenhauer's theory of the blind will to live and 

 its abrogation by the ethical feeling, which is founded on universal 

 sympathy, we have a more individualistic form of the same idea. 



1 Cf. my History of Modern Philosophy (Eng. transl. London, 1900), i. pp. 76—79. 



2 " Herrschaft und Knechtschaft," Phdnomenologie des Geistes, iv. A., Leiden, 

 1907. 



