A peculiar supplement which completes the ethics of Fouillée, Guyau, and Lange, without actually going back to them, is provided by the Berlin physician, Wilhelm Stern, in an inquiry, which has attracted far too little notice, into the evolutionary origin of ethics. The essential nature of the moral, he says, is the impulse to maintenance of life by the repelling of all injurious attacks upon it, an impulse through which the individual being experiences a feeling of relationship to all other animate beings in face of nature’s injurious attacks upon them. How has this mentality arisen in us? Through the fact that animate beings of the most varied kinds have been obliged through countless generations to fight side by side for existence against the forces of nature, and in their common distress have ceased to be hostile to one another, so that they might attempt a common resistance to the annihilation which threatened them, instead of succumbing in a common ruin. This experience, which began with their first and lowest stage of existence and has become through thousands of millions of generations more and more [pg 193] pronounced, has given its special character to the psychology of all living beings. All ethics are an affirmation of life, the character of which is determined by perception of the dangers to existence which living beings experience in common. How much deeper Wilhelm Stern digs than Darwin did! According to Darwin, experience of the never-ceasing, universal danger to existence produces finally nothing but the herd-instinct, which holds together creatures of the same species. According to Stern, there is developed by the same experience a kind of solidarity with everything that lives. The barriers fall. Man experiences sympathy with animals, as they experience it, only less completely, with him. Ethics are not only something peculiar to man, but something which, though in a less developed form, is to be seen also in the animal world as such. Self-devotion is an experience of the deepened impulse to self-preservation. In the active as well as in the passive meaning of the word the whole animate creation is to be included within the basic principle of the moral. The fundamental commandment of ethics, then, is that we cause no suffering to any living creature, not even the lowest, unless it is to effect some necessary protection for ourselves, and that we be ready to undertake, whenever we can, positive action for the benefit of other creatures. In Fouillée, Guyau, and Lange ethics come to terms with nature-philosophy, but without any advance towards making themselves cosmic. They fall into the anachronism of regarding themselves still, even at that date, as nothing beyond the regulating of the temper and disposition of man towards his fellow-men, instead of widening themselves out so as to deal with the conduct of man towards every living creature and towards Being in general. In Stern they take this obvious, further step.