With the lesser spirits self-deception goes further. The ordinary scientific monism, the greatness of which consists in its being an elemental movement towards veracity in an [pg 201] age which is weary of veracity, is still convinced that from its insight into the essential nature of life, into the development of lower life into higher, and into the inner connexion of the individual life with the life of the universe, it can somehow or other arrive at an ethic. But it is significant that its representatives take altogether different roads in the search for an ethic. An incredible absence of thought and of plan reigns in the ethical philosophizing of the ordinary scientific nature-philosophy. Many of its representatives have before their mind’s eye a conception of the moral as a becoming one with the universe, a conception which is related to that of the Stoics and Spinoza. Others, influenced by Nietzsche, entertain the thought that true ethics are an enhanced and aristocratic life-affirmation, and have nothing to do with the claims of the “democratic” social ethics._(_104_)_ Others again, like Johannes Unold in his work _Monism and its Ideals_ (1908), try to bring together nature-philosophy and ethics just in such a way as to let them conceive of the human activity which is directed to social ends as the final result of the development of the organic world. There are also scientific nature-philosophers who are content to put together out of what is commonly regarded as moral an ethic which is universally accepted, and to exalt it, so far as they can, into a product of nature-philosophy. In Ernst Haeckel’s (1834-1919) work _The Riddle of the Universe_ (1899), there is an ethic of that character built on to the palace of nature-philosophy like an outside kitchen. The basic principle of monistic ethical theory is (so it is here maintained) the equal justification of Egoism and of Altruism, and then a balance between them. Both are laws of nature. Egoism serves the preservation of the individual, altruism that of the species. This “golden rule of morality” is said to be of equal significance [pg 202] with the rule which Jesus and other ethical thinkers before him are said to have enunciated in the demand that we shall love our neighbour as ourselves. Spencer and water is poured out under a Christian label. The death-agony of the optimistic-ethical world-view