The most important among the earlier of these is Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841). His importance lies in the department of psychological investigation. It is on a psychological foundation that he tries to establish ethics in his _General Practical Philosophy_ (1808). He traces the moral back to five direct and ultimate judgments, which are not derivable from anything beyond themselves, and which may be compared with æsthetic judgments. They are these: the ideas of inward freedom, of perfection, of benevolence, of right, and of equity. By submitting itself to this mode of outlook, which starts from pure intuition and is confirmed as correct for human beings by the course of their experience, the will becomes ethical. Instead, therefore, of seeking one basic principle only for the moral Herbart accepts several ethical ideas which appear side by side. This anæmic ethical theory possesses no convincing power. In his teaching, however, about society and the State Herbart does produce something solid. To the earlier successors of Kant there belongs also Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797-1879), a son of J. G. Fichte, the so-called Younger Fichte, with his _System of Ethics_ (2 vols., 1850-1853), which in its time enjoyed considerable repute. Schopenhauer is the first representative in Western thought of a consistent world- and life-denying ethic. The suggestions which brought him to it came to him from the philosophy of India, which early in the nineteenth century began to be known in Europe._(_69_)_ For the exposition of his world-view he starts, like Fichte, from Kant’s epistemological idealism. Like Fichte he defines the essence of things in themselves (which is to be accepted as underlying all phenomena) to be Will, not, however, like [pg 167] Fichte as will to action, but more directly and more correctly as will-to-live. The world, he says, I can understand only by analogy with myself. Myself, looked at from outside, I conceive as a sensible phenomenon in space and time, but looked at from within, as will-to-live. Correspondingly, everything which meets me in the phenomenal world is a manifestation of the will-to-live.