Nature-philosophy and ethics in Bergson, Chamberlain, Keyserling, Haeckel Henri Bergson (b. 1860)_(_101_)_ renounces altogether the attempt to bring together nature-philosophy and ethics. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (b. 1855)_(_102_)_ and Count Hermann Keyserling (b. 1880)_(_103_)_ make the attempt but without reaching any result. In his philosophizing about nature, Bergson does not go beyond the _rôle_ of the observing subject. He analyses in a masterly way the nature of the process of knowledge. His investigations into the origin of our conception of time and of the actions of our consciousness which are bound up with it, have taught us how to comprehend the course of nature in its living reality. Leading us on beyond the science which consists in external affirming and calculating, Bergson shows that the true knowledge of Being comes to us through a sort of intuition. Philosophizing means experiencing our consciousness as an emanation of the creative impulse which rules in the world. Bergson’s nature-philosophy has therefore a close inward connexion with that of Fouillée, but he does not find it necessary, as Fouillée does, to produce from it a world- and life-view. He limits himself to depicting it from the standpoint of the problem of the theory of knowledge. He does not attempt any analysis of the ethical consciousness. Year after year we have waited for him to complete his work, as he no doubt himself intended, with an attempt at producing an ethic on the basis of nature-philosophy. But he [pg 199] contented himself with developing in ever-new forms his theories about our inner knowledge of the real. He never comes to the recognition that all deepening of our knowledge of the world acquires its real meaning only so far as it teaches us to comprehend what we ought to aim at in life. He lets the waves of events roll past us, as if we were seated on an island in the stream, whereas we are in reality obliged to exert ourselves as swimmers in the stream. During the war the German picture-houses were crammed. People went to see the pictures in order to forget their hunger. Bergson’s philosophy brings before us as living events the world which Kant depicted in motionless wall-pictures. But to satisfy the hunger of to-day for ethics he does nothing. He has no world-view to offer us in which we can find a life-view. Over the whole of his philosophy there prevails a quietistic, sceptical tone. Houston Stewart Chamberlain tries to find a world-view which is based on nature-philosophy and is at the same time ethical. His work entitled _Immanuel Kant_ (1905), which is really a journey through the problems raised by philosophy with attempts to solve them, ends in the thought that we have to combine Goethe’s nature-philosophy, which conceives Becoming as an eternal Being, with Kant’s judgement about the nature of duty, if we wish to reach a real civilization. He finds himself unable, however, to carry through to completion such a world-view.