of civilization needs a favoured minority to serve as bearers of its ideas. Beneficence and charity to the poor must therefore be practised with moderation. The need which spurs men on to active work must not be banished from the world. Another element in the course of civilization is the taking into possession of the whole earth by the race with the highest civilization, which must therefore increase its numbers as much as possible. In order to make the female population keen about the task which thus falls to them, women must be raised intellectually, _i.e._, their patriotism and national feeling must be increased as much as possible, their historical sense must be aroused, and they must be filled with enthusiasm for the principle of civilization which underlies evolution. “To effect this object, the history of civilization must be made the foundation of all instruction in the upper classes of girl-schools.”_(_100_)_ It is desirable, therefore, to make efforts to secure the “improvement of the human type,” and the attainment [pg 197] of an enhancement of civilization in which “the world-spirit becomes in increasing measure conscious of itself.” In his nature-philosophy and his philosophy of history, then, Eduard von Hartmann reaches a supra-ethical world-view in which Hegel and Nietzsche drink to brotherhood, and the principles of inhumanity and relativity, which underlie biologico-sociological ethics, sit at table with garlands on their heads. How and when the supra-ethical ethic of enhanced world- and life-affirmation passes over into the highest ethic of world- and life-denial, and in what way this highest ethic, in which we function as Redeemers of the Absolute, is to be carried out in practice, von Hartmann is, however, unable to make clear. The abstruse modulations with which, in the last chapters of his work, he tries to get from one to the other provide us with ample proof of the unnatural character of the undertaking. To produce a world-view with Hegel for body and Schopenhauer for head, is an absurdity. By his resolve to attempt it, von Hartmann admits his inability to make enhanced life-affirmation become in a natural way ethical. Eduard von Hartmann prefers to the profession of moralist that of philosopher of the history of morals. Instead of serving the world with an ethical system of morals, he makes it happy with the discovery of the principle of inherent progress in the history of morals, and thus helps to befool completely the thought of his age, which is living its life in an unethical and unspiritual optimism. From the history of ethics nothing is to be obtained except a certain amount of clearness about the problem of ethics. Anyone who discovers in it principles which promise automatic progress in the ethical development of mankind has by his miserably faulty construction of that history read these principles into the facts without any justification. [pg 198]