Ethical Development 459 
regarded these as one of the strongest objections against it; so 
Diihring 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 Species 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 bellum 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 Jaw, as Kant proclaimed 
it in the year after the publication of his essay (1785). 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?. 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), 1. pp. 76—79. 
2 «Herrschaft und Knechtschaft,” Phdnomenologie des Geistes, 1v. A., Leiden, 
1907. 
