Descartes and the ethical belief-in-progress, therefore, agree in a common neglect of nature. Both alike overlook the fact that she is living, and that she exists for her own sake, and it is because he cannot join them in this that Goethe dares to confess that he understands nothing about philosophy. His greatness is this: that in a time of abstract and speculative thought he had the courage to remain elemental. Overwhelmed by the mysterious individual life in nature, he persists in maintaining a magnificently imperfect [pg 138] world-view. With the spirit of an investigator he looks within into everything; in that of an inquirer he looks around upon everything. He wants to think optimistically. Shaftesbury’s thoughts exercise their charm upon him also. But in the chorus of optimism which makes itself heard so loudly around him, he cannot join. World- and life-affirmation is for him not such a simple thing as it is for Fichte and Schiller. He strives to reach an ethical world-view, but admits to himself that he cannot carry it through, and he therefore does not venture to attribute a meaning to nature. To life, however, he will attribute one. He seeks it in serviceable activity. To make the world-view of activity at home in nature-philosophy is to him an inner necessity. The conviction that activity provides the only real satisfaction that is to be found in life and that therein lies the mysterious meaning of existence is shown by him in _Faust_ as something which he has laboriously gained during his pilgrimage through existence and to which he will hold fast, without being able to explain it completely. Goethe struggles to arrive at a conception of ethical activity, but cannot reach one because nature-philosophy is unable to provide him with any criterion of what is ethical. What that philosophy had to refuse to the Chinese monists and to Spinoza, she cannot give to him either. The range of this world-view of Goethe’s which deals thus with reality remains hidden from his contemporaries. Its incompleteness alienates their sympathies and irritates them. For knowledge of the world and of life which cannot be reduced to a system, but sticks fast in facts, they have no understanding. They hold to their optimism and their ethic. Schleiermacher’s attempt at a nature-philosophy Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834), stands apart both from the ordinary and from the deepened rationalism because he cannot free himself from the influence of [pg 139] Spinoza._(_46_)_ His life-work is directed to preaching the Spinozan nature-philosophy as being, as far as he can make it so, both an ethic and the Christian religion. Hence he always dresses it up as one or the other of these.