Nietzsche is at bottom no more unethical than Schopenhauer. He is misled by the ethical element which there is in life-affirmation into giving the status of ethics to life-affirmation as such. Thereby he falls into the absurdities which follows from an exclusive affirmation of life, just as Schopenhauer falls into those of an exclusive denial of life. Nietzsche’s will-to-power should cause no more offence than Schopenhauer’s will-to-self-annihilation, as it is explained in the passages in his works which deal with asceticism. It is interesting to note that neither of the two men lives in accordance with his view of life. Schopenhauer is no [pg 180] ascetic but a _bon vivant_, and Nietzsche does not lord it over his fellow men but lives in seclusion. Life-affirmation and life-denial are both for a certain distance ethical; pursued to a conclusion both are unethical. This result, which was reached by the optimistic thought of China and the pessimistic thought of India, makes its appearance in Europe in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer because they are the only thinkers in this continent who philosophise in elemental fashion about the will-to-live, and venture to follow the paths of one-sidedness. Each completing the other, they pronounce sentence on the ethics of European philosophy by bringing into daylight again the elemental ethical thoughts contained in life-denial as well as in life-affirmation, thoughts which philosophy was keeping buried. Arriving as they do at the non-ethical by thinking out to a conclusion, one of them life-denial, the other life-affirmation, they corroborate, if taken together, the statement that the ethical consists neither of life-denial nor of life-affirmation, but is a mysterious combination of the two. [pg 181] CHAPTER XVI THE ISSUE OF THE WESTERN STRUGGLE FOR A WORLD-VIEW Academic thinkers: Sidgwick, Stephen, Alexander, Wundt, Paulsen, Höffding THE attempts of speculative philosophy to find a foundation for ethics in knowledge of the nature of the world have come to grief. Ethics based on science and sociology have shown themselves powerless. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, although they bring back into general acceptance some elementary questions of ethics, are unable, nevertheless, to establish a satisfying ethic. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, ethics find themselves in an unenviable position. They remain of good courage, however, being confident that they have at their disposal a sufficiency of “scientifically” recognized results to guarantee them an assured existence.