ded these as one of the strongest
objections against it; so Duhring and Kropotkin (in his earlier works).

This interpretation of Darwinism was frequent in the interval between
the two main works of Darwin--"The Origin of Species" and "The Descent
of Man". But even during this interval it was evident to an attentive
reader that Darwin himself did not found his standard of good and evil
on the features of the life of nature he had emphasised so strongly. He
did not justify the ways along which nature reached its ends; he only
pointed them out. The "real" was not to him, as to Hegel, one with
the "rational." Darwin has, indeed, by his whole conception of nature,
rendered a great service to ethics in making the difference between the
life of nature and the ethical life appear in so strong a light. The
ethical problem could now be stated in a sharper form than before. But
this was not the first time that the idea of the struggle for life
was put in relation to the ethical problem. In the seventeenth century
Thomas Hobbes gave the first impulse to the whole modern discussion of
ethical principles in his theory of bellum omnium contra omnes. Men, he
taught, are in the state of nature enemies one of another, and they live
either in fright or in the glory of power. But it was not the opinion
of Hobbes that this made ethics impossible. On the contrary, he found a
standard for virtue and vice in the fact that some qualities and actions
have a tendency to bring us out of the state of war and to secure
peace, while other qualities have a contrary tendency. In the eighteenth
century even Immanuel Kant's ideal ethics had--so far as can be seen--a
similar origin. Shortly before the foundation of his definitive ethics,
Kant wrote his "Idee zu einer allgemeinen Weltgeschichte" (1784),
where--in a way which reminds us of Hobbes, and is prophetic of
Darwin--he describes the forward-driving power of struggle in the human
world. It is here as with the struggle of the trees for light and air,
through which they compete with one another in height. Anxiety about
war can only be allayed by an ordinance which gives everyone his full
liberty under acknowledgment of the equal liberty of others. And such
ordinance and acknowledgment are also attributes of the content of the
moral law, as Kant proclaimed it in the year after the publication
of his essay (1785) (Cf. my "History of Modern Philosophy" (English
translation London, 1900), I. pages 76-79.)