Martineau, Green, Bradley, Laurie, and Seth try to reach an ethic which is a consistent unity by making the whole of ethics originate in the need of self-perfecting. Of these, Martineau goes more on the lines of the moralists of the eighteenth century, known as the Cambridge Platonists. Ethics consist for him in thinking ourselves into the ideal of perfection, which God gave us with our life, and letting ourselves be determined by it. T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, Simon Laurie, and James Seth show more or less the influence of J. G. Fichte. The ethical is with them founded on the fact that man wishes to live his life out in the deepest way as an effective personality, and thereby attain to true union with the infinite spirit. This thought is expounded best by T. H. Green. He is also led at the same time to the relation between civilization and ethics, and lays it down that all the achievements of human activity, especially the political and social perfecting of society, are nothing in themselves, and have a real meaning only so far as they render more thorough inward perfecting attainable by individuals. A spiritualized conception of civilization is therefore now struggling [pg 186] for acceptance. An upholder on American soil of this ethic of self-perfecting is Josiah Royce (1855-1916)._(_91_)_ In the effort to conceive of ethics as a whole as being an ethic of self-perfecting, that is to say of conduct which springs from inward necessity, these thinkers express thoughts which belong to a living ethic. To be energetically concerned with the basic principle of the moral, even though one be led in the direction of the universal and apparently abstract, always brings with it results which are valuable for practice, even if the solution of the problem itself is not thereby advanced beyond a certain point. These thinkers go so far on these lines as to conceive of ethics as higher life-affirmation, consisting in devoting ourselves to the activity which the world-spirit wills for us. They represent the mysticism of activity taught by J. G. Fichte, but without its speculative foundation. They leave unsolved, however, nay, they do not even put the question, how the higher life-affirmation comes to give itself a content which stands in contradiction to the course of nature. They conceive of higher life-affirmation as self-devotion, that is to say as life-affirmation within which life-denial is active. But how does this paradox come about? How far is this direction of the will, which contradicts the natural will-to-live, a necessity of thought? Why must men become different from the world in order to exist and work in the world in true harmony with the world-spirit? And what meaning has this conduct of his for the happenings which take place in the universe? Nature-philosophy and ethics. Fouillée, Guyau, Lange, Stern