Every moral principle which shows itself in history (von Hartmann asserts) changes itself by starting on a search for the completion which lies nearest to it. It lives itself out, and then makes way for the higher moral principle which issues logically from it. That is how the ethical consciousness in individuals and in mankind works itself up from one moral principle to another till it reaches the highest knowledge. From the primitive moral principle of aiming at individual pleasure it travels past the authoritarian, the æsthetic, the sentimental, and the intellectual moral systems, which are one and all subjective, to the objective morality of care for the general happiness. But still beyond this it is led to the evolutionary moral principle of the development of civilisation, and here it learns to think on supra-moral lines. It grasps the notion that for moral consideration there is still something higher than the prosperity of individuals and of society, namely “contest and struggle for the maintenance and enhancing of civilization.” This according to usual ideas unethical conception of ethics has to live itself out completely, so that it may then be resolved into an ethic of world- and life-denial. By this insight into the logic of the course of ethical evolution, von Hartmann is saved from making any protest, as an ordinary ethical thinker would, against the unethical civilization-ethics of the close of the nineteenth century. He knows, on the contrary, that he is helping the cause of rightly understood ethical progress, if he treats them with respect as a necessary phenomenon, and urges that they be allowed to live themselves out with the utmost completeness. We have learnt (he therefore proclaims) to see through the ethic which aims at making men and peoples happy as being a piece of sentimentality, and we ought now to make up our minds to deal seriously with the supra-ethical ethic of the enhancing of life and civilization. We must learn to regard as good whatever is necessary for the development of civilization, and we [pg 196] are no longer at liberty to condemn war in the name of ethics. “The principle of the development of civilization compels us to recognize all these protests as unsound, since wars are the chief means of carrying on the struggle between races, _i.e._, the process of natural selection within mankind, and preparation for the effective waging of war has formed one of the most important means of education and training for mankind in every phase of the development of their civilization, as it will also, so far as we can see, in the future.”_(_99_)_ Economic misery too, and the struggles which arise from it, are seen by the ethical spirit which looks further ahead to subserve a higher objective. The sufferings under the wage system, which are far greater than those under slavery, are necessary for the course of civilization. The struggle which they evoke calls forces into being and has an educative result. The course