Utilitarianism now continues on its way full of satisfaction at having found itself conceived by modern biology and in the history of evolution as something natural. But it has not thereby become either fresher or more capable. It advances more and more slowly. Its breath fails. What is the matter with it? Its ethical energy leaves it because [pg 155] it has conceived itself to be something natural. The fatal fact that ethics cease to be ethics in proportion as they are brought into harmony with natural happenings, is fulfilled not only when ethics are developed out of nature-philosophy but also when they are explained by biology. Ethics consist in this: that natural happenings in man are seen, on the basis of conscious reflexion, to carry within them an inner contradiction. The more this contradiction is removed into the sphere of that which goes back to instinct, the weaker do ethics become. The origin of ethics is assuredly this: that something which is contained as instinct in our will-to-live is taken up through conscious reflexion and further developed. The great question is, however, what this last and most original element in the instinct of solidarity is, this element which by thinking is developed far beyond everything instinctive, and in what way this development is accomplished. By proclaiming developed herd-mentality to be ethics, Darwin and Spencer show that they have not gone to the root of the problem of the relation between instinct and thinking reflexion in ethics. If nature wishes to have a perfect herd, she does not appeal to ethics, but gives the individuals, as in the ant- or the bee-kingdom, instincts by the force of which they are wholly merged in the society. But ethics are the putting into practice the principle of solidarity on a basis of free reflexion, and this practice, moreover, directs itself not only to individuals of the same species, but to everything living in general. The ethics of Darwin and Spencer are a failure from the first, because they are too narrow and do not leave the irrational its rights. The social impulse which they put in the place of the sympathy which is assumed by Hume and Adam Smith is set at a lower pitch than the latter, and is correspondingly less calculated to explain real ethics. The transition from egoism to altruism, then, it is equally impossible to carry through if one transfers the proceeding from the individual to the species. The fact that the process is thereby prolonged allows numerous series of [pg 156] most delicate transitions to be taken into account and their results to be summed up as inheritance of acquired characters. Nevertheless, that does not explain truly ethical devotion. The fruits of ethics are hung upon the bush of social impulse, but the bush itself did not bear them. The weak points in biological and sociological utilitarianism