Our age is striking out unmeaningly in every direction like a fallen horse in the traces. It is trying with external measures and new organisation to solve the problems with which it has to deal, but all in vain. The horse cannot get on its feet again till it is unharnessed and allowed to get its head up. Our world will not get upon its feet again till it lets the truth come home to it that its cure is not to be found in active measures but in new ways of thinking. But new ways of thinking can arise only if a true and serviceable world-view draws individuals within its influence. The one serviceable world-view is the optimistic-ethical. Its renewal is a duty incumbent on us. Can we prove it to be true? In the struggle of the thinkers who for centuries exerted themselves to demonstrate the truth of the optimistic-ethical world-view, and kept surrendering themselves comfortably to the illusion, always very soon shattered, that [pg 206] they had succeeded, the problem with which we are concerned reveals itself in outlines which become clearer and clearer. We are now in a position to reckon up why those or those paths, apparently so full of promise, have led to nothing, and can lead to nothing. By the insight into the problem thus won we shall be preserved from entering on impassable roads and forced to follow the only one which is practicable. The most general result of the attempts made up to the present is this: that the optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world, by which it was hoped to put the optimistic-ethical world-view on a firm foundation, cannot be carried through to a conclusion. Yet how logical and natural it seemed to tune up the meaning of life and the meaning of the world to the same note! How invitingly the path opened out of explaining our own existence from the nature and significance of the world! The path rises so naturally to the crest of the foothills that one could only believe it led up to the highest point of knowledge. But high up in the ascent it breaks off with chasms ahead.