Jean Marie Guyau, a pupil and friend of Fouillée’s, in his _Sketch of an Ethic without Obligation or Sanction_, tries to work out the thought of this ethical life-affirmation through expansion. Ordinary ethics, he says, stand helpless before this insoluble cleft between the ego and other men, but living nature makes no stop at that point. The individual life is expansive because it is life. As in the physical sphere it carries within itself the impulse to produce fresh life like itself, so in the spiritual sphere also it wishes to widen its own existence by linking it on to other life like itself. Life includes not feeding only, but also production and fruitfulness; real living is not a taking in only, but a giving out of oneself as well. Man is an organism which imparts itself to others; its perfection consists in the most complete imparting of itself. In this philosophizing, then, Hume’s notion of sympathy is given more profound expression. Fouillée and Guyau, both of them invalids, lived together at Nice and Mentone. Trying in one another’s company to realise the ethical higher life-affirmation, they take their exercise on the very shore on which Nietzsche that same year thought out his heightened life-affirmation of _Beyond Good and Evil_. He knows their works, as they also know his, but as men they remain personally unknown to each other._(_97_)_ [pg 189] Fouillée and Guyau, because they think deeply, are led to nature-philosophy by their philosophizing about the way in which the will-to-live is to become ethical. They wish to conceive ethics, within a world- and life-affirming nature-philosophy, as a deepening, which is a necessity of thought, of life-affirmation. They thus join the procession of the Chinese monists. That which these, like Spinoza and Fichte, attempted and failed to do, they attempt again in the confidence that their nature-philosophy will be fairer to the conception of living existence than that of the others was. Navigating the rushing stream of heightened life-affirmation, they try with mighty efforts at the oars to reach the bank of the ethical. They believe that they will be able to land there . . . but the waves carry them past it, as they did all those who attempted the journey before them. That life-affirmation in its highest form, by a paradox which lies in the nature of things, becomes ethical devotion to others they cannot show convincingly. This proposition, in which they would transform the natural world-view into an ethical one, is truth only for the thought which dares to make the same jump because it sees no possibility otherwise of reaching land from the drifting boat. The ethic of Fouillée and Guyau, then, is an enthusiastic conception of life to which man pulls himself up when coming to terms with reality, in order to assert himself and exert himself in the universe in accordance with a higher value which he feels in himself.