1883. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra; the Will-to-Power, but in Romantic disguise.
1886. Ibsen, “Rosmersholm.” Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse.
1887-8. Strindberg, “Fadren” and “Fröken Julie.”
From 1890 the conclusion of the epoch approaches. The religious works of Strindberg and the symbolical of Ibsen.
1896. Ibsen, “John Gabriel Borkman.” Nietzsche, Uebermensch. 1898. Strindberg, “Till Damascus.”
From 1900 the last phenomena.
1903. Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter; the only serious attempt to revive Kant within this epoch, by referring him to Wagner and Ibsen.
1903. Shaw, “Man and Superman”; final synthesis of Darwin and Nietzsche.
1905. Shaw, “Major Barbara”; the type of the Superman referred back to its economic origins.
With this, the ethical period exhausts itself as the metaphysical had done. Ethical Socialism, prepared by Fichte, Hegel, and Humboldt, was at its zenith of passionate greatness about the middle of the 19th Century, and at the end thereof it had reached the stage of repetitions. The 20th Century, while keeping the word Socialism, has replaced an ethical philosophy that only Epigoni suppose to be capable of further development, by a praxis of economic everyday questions. The ethical disposition of the West will remain “socialistic” but its theory has ceased to be a problem. And there remains the possibility of a third and last stage of Western philosophy, that of a physiognomic scepticism. The secret of the world appears successively as a knowledge problem, a valuation problem and a form problem. Kant saw Ethics as an object of knowledge, the 19th Century saw it as an object of valuation. The Sceptic would deal with both simply as the historical expression of a Culture.