That Schopenhauer carries through his pessimistic-ethical world-view, as Fichte does his optimistic-ethical, with the material provided by epistemological idealism has not the importance that he himself attributes to this fact. Indian predecessors have made this connexion easier for him. In itself, pessimism can be developed just as well without epistemological idealism. The drama of the tragical experience of the will-to-live remains the same whatever the decorations and the costumes with which it is played. Although, therefore, it makes its appearance in the dress of Kant’s theory of knowledge, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is elemental nature-philosophy. What then are the ethical elements in his ethic? Like that of the Indians it appears in a threefold shape: as an ethic of resignation, as an ethic of universal pity, and as an ethic of world-renunciation. About resignation Schopenhauer speaks in forcible words. In language which rises to the level of poetry, he [pg 169] describes how the man who is intent on his own self-perfecting does not meet the destinies of his existence in childish resistance to what is hard, but feels them as incitements to become free from the world. In the disagreeables which poison existence for him, and in the misfortune which threatens to crush him, he suddenly feels himself lifted out of everything on which he sets value, and brought to the triumphant feeling that nothing can any longer do him any harm. The field of resignation, which the philosophical ethics of modern times had allowed to lie fallow for generations, is replanted by Schopenhauer. Ethics are pity. All life is suffering. The will-to-live which has attained to knowledge is therefore seized with deep pity for all creatures. It experiences not only the woe of mankind, but that of all creatures with it. What is called in ordinary ethics “love” is in its real essence pity. In this powerful feeling of pity the will-to-live is diverted from itself. Its purification begins. How anxious Kant and Hegel and others are in their ethics to deprive direct pity of its rights, because it does not suit their theories! Schopenhauer takes the gag out of its mouth and bids it speak. Those who, like Fichte, Schleiermacher, and others, ground ethics on a painfully thought out world-scheme, expect man to run every time to the topmost attic of his reflexions to fetch down his motives to moral action. According to the sociological utilitarians he should always first sit down and calculate what is ethical. Schopenhauer bids him do something never yet heard of in philosophical ethics—listen to his own heart. The elemental ethical which has by the others been pushed into the corner, can now, thanks to him, takes its proper place again.