fe 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).[206] Kant really came to his ethics by the way of evolution,
though he afterwards disavowed it. Similarly the same line of thought
may be traced in Hegel though it has been disguised in the form of
speculative dialectics.[207] And in Schopenhauer's theory of the blind
will to live and its abrogation by the ethical feeling, which is
founded on universal sympathy, we have a more individualistic form of
the same idea.

It was, then, not entirely a foreign point of view which Darwin
introduced into ethical thought, even if we take no account of the
poetical character of the word "struggle" and of the more direct
adaptation, through the use and non-use of power, which Darwin also
emphasised. In _The Descent of Man_ he has devoted a special
chapter[208] to a discussion of the origin of the ethical
consciousness. The charact