In these sentences there is announced from a distance the disappearance of the optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world. Because they venture on renouncing this, and proclaim in principle the sovereign independence of ethics, Fouillée and Guyau belong to the greatest thinkers who have had a share in shaping our world-view. They do not, however, follow to the end the path on which they have stumbled. While they make ethics independent of whether its activity can or cannot prove itself legitimate as significant and effective in the totality of world-happenings, they assume the existence of a conflict between world-view and life-view, which philosophy down to their day had actually not noticed. But they do not investigate its nature, and do not show how it is that life-view can venture to assert itself in opposition to world-view, and even to exalt itself as the more important. They are content to prophesy that ethics and ethical world-view will grow green again as mighty oases, fed by subterranean springs, even if the sand-storms of scepticism should have turned into a desert the broad territory of the optimistic-ethical knowledge of the world, in which we once wanted to make our home. At bottom, however, they hope that nothing like this will happen, and their confidence that a nature-philosophy which deals in the proper way with the nature of Being will after all finally reach an ethic and a world-view, is not completely overthrown. Since they at first claim only a hypothetical validity for their new view, and do not carry it through as a matter of principle, Fouillée and Guyau do not exercise upon the thought of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth the influence which they ought to have. Their age was, indeed, not ready for that [pg 192] renunciation of knowledge for which their writings were preparing the way. A forerunner of their ethic is to be found in that which Friedrich Albert Lange sketches as his own at the end of his _History of Materialism_ (1866). Ethics, he says, are an imaginative creation on which we determine, because we carry an ideal within ourselves. We rise above the actual because we find no satisfaction in it. We are ethical because our life thereby obtains a definite character such as we long for. . . . Ethics mean becoming free from the world. Lange also, then, has already reached the view that from direct philosophizing about the world and life an ethical world-view results, not as a necessity of thought, but as a necessity for life. But like the two French thinkers he just throws out the thought instead of following it out into all its presuppositions and consequences.