The others, in order not to get embarrassed with their theories, have to limit ethics exclusively to the conduct of man to man. They anxiously insist upon it that pity for animals is not ethical in itself, but has importance only in view of the kindly disposition which must ever be [pg 170] maintained among men. Schopenhauer tears down these fences, and teaches love to the most insignificant being in creation. The artificial and curious pleas, too, which the rest produce to put man into an ethical relation to organised society disappear in Schopenhauer. Fichte’s and Hegel’s ethical over-valuation of the State makes him smile. He himself is left free from the necessity of dragging into ethics things of the world which refuse to be fitted into them. He can allow the conviction that ethics consist in being different from the world to flame up in blinding clearness. He is pledged to no concessions, since he does not, like the others, represent an ethic which wishes to do something purposive in the world. Because his world-view is world- and life-denying he can be an elemental moralist when others have to renounce being such. Nor does he need, like them, to sever all connexion with Jesus and religious ethics. He can appeal as often as he likes to the fact that his philosophy only establishes what has always been accepted by the piety of Christianity and of the Indians as the essential element in the moral. It is well-known that Schopenhauer judged Christianity to have the Indian spirit, and to be probably, in some way or other, of Indian origin._(_70_)_ Elemental ethics now obtain once more their right place in a thinking world-view, and this explains the enthusiasm which Schopenhauer arouses when he at last gets known. That it was possible to ignore for nearly forty years the very significant matter which he gave to the world remains one of the most remarkable events in the history of European thought. The optimistic world-view passed at that time for so self-evident that the man who laid hands upon it even in the directly illuminating thoughts upon ethics to which Schopenhauer gave utterance, could not obtain a hearing. At a later period also many attach themselves to Schopenhauer only because of his ethical maxims with their natural and interesting appeal, and refuse to accept [pg 171] his consistent world-view of world- and life-denial. It is a right feeling which guides them. Absorption of ethics in world- and life-denial