How remarkable are the vicissitudes undergone by ethics! Utilitarianism refuses all contact with nature-philosophy. It wishes to be an ethic which is concerned only with the practical, but it does not therefore escape its fate, which is to be wrecked upon nature-philosophy. In its attempt to secure a basis for itself and to think itself out completely, it changes into biological-sociological utilitarianism. Next it loses its ethical character. Without becoming aware of it, it has, of course, at the same time got entangled with nature and natural happenings, and has given cosmic problems a place within itself. Although it pretends to be only the practical ethic of human society it has become a product of nature. It has been no good removing all the distaffs: the Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger nevertheless. No ethic can avoid coming to an understanding with nature-philosophy. [pg 165] CHAPTER XV SCHOPENHAUER AND NIETZSCHE Schopenhauer. An ethic of world- and life-denial AS bad luck will have it, the two most important ethical thinkers who speak to us in the second half of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, do not help the age in the search for what it needs, viz., a social ethic which is also true ethics. Concerned only with an individualist ethic out of which no social ethic can be developed, they offer incitements which, however valuable in themselves, cannot arrest the demoralisation in world-view which is in progress. Common to both is the fact that they are elemental moralists. They pursue no abstract cosmic speculations. Ethics are for them an experience of the will-to-live. They are therefore, from their very core, cosmic. In Schopenhauer the will-to-live tries to become ethical by turning to world- and life-denial; in Nietzsche by devoting itself to a deepened world- and life-affirmation. From the standpoint of their own elemental ethics these two thinkers, who stand in such deep contrast to each other, rise as judges of what they find accepted as ethics in their time. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) begins to publish at the beginning of the century. His _The World as Will and Idea_ appears in 1819._(_68_)_ But he first obtains a hearing about 1860 when the speculative philosophy had definitely gone bankrupt, and the unsatisfactory nature of the ethic of [pg 166] popular utilitarianism, as also of that of Kant’s successors, was generally acknowledged.