Fouillée and Guyau are, therefore, elemental moralists like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. They are not, however, like the latter, making a voyage with their rudder tightly lashed in the circle of world- and life-denial or of world- and life-affirmation; they hold on their course with sure feeling towards the mysterious union of world-affirmation, life-affirmation, and life-denial which constitutes ethical life-affirmation. . . . But this course takes them out over the boundless ocean. They never reach land. [pg 190] In order to understand themselves as a direction of the will-to-live which is a necessity of thought, and to think themselves out to an ethical world-view, ethics must come to terms with nature-philosophy. We find them, then, attempting—as did the Rationalists, and Kant, and the speculative philosophers—to read into the world, in simple or in detailed thought, an optimistic-ethical meaning, or at least, as with Spinoza, to give an ethical character in some way or other to the relation of the individual to the universe. These two men also, Fouillée and Guyau, wrestle with nature-philosophy in order from it to justify ethics and an ethical world-view as not without meaning. At the same time, however, they dare—and this is the new element which appears in them—to look straight in the face the possibility that it will perhaps be impossible to carry their undertaking through. What will then become of ethics and world-view? Although they ought really to totter and fall, they do nevertheless remain standing—so Fouillée and Guyau judge. Whether the idea of the good can finally claim any objective validity cannot be asserted with complete confidence, says Fouillée in his _Morale des Idées-forces_. Man must finally be content to force himself to acceptance of the ethically expansive life-affirmation, merely because he feels it to be the only thing which is capable of making life valuable. Out of love for the ideal he triumphs over all doubt, and sacrifices himself to it, untroubled about whether or no anything results from his doing so. Guyau’s _Sketch of a Morality without Obligations or Sanctions_ ends in similar thoughts. An inner force, he says, works upon us and drives us forward. Do we go forward alone, or will the idea eventually win for itself some influence upon nature? . . . Anyhow let us go forward! . . . “Perhaps the earth, perhaps mankind, will one day reach some as yet unknown goal which they themselves have created. There is no hand leading us, no eye watching on our behalf; the rudder was broken long ago, [pg 191] or rather there never was one at all; it has to be provided. That is a big task, and it is our task.” . . . Ethical men are crossing the ocean of events on a rudderless and mastless derelict, so to say, hoping nevertheless that they will some day and somewhere reach land.