The reflexion that the meaning of human life must be conceivable within the meaning of the world is such an obvious one to thought, that the latter never lets itself be led from its path by the failure, one after another, of all attempts in that direction. It merely concludes that it has not tackled the problem in the right way. It therefore has resort to the whisperings of the theory of knowledge, and undertakes to impugn the reality of the world in order to deal with it more successfully. In Kant, in the speculative philosophy, and in much “spiritualistic” popular philosophy which has been current almost down to our own day, it preserved its hope of reaching its goal by some sort of combination of epistemological with ethical realism. Hence the philosophy of academic manuals declaims against the unprejudiced thinking which tries to reach a world-view without first having been baptised by Kant with fire and the Holy Spirit. But this too is a vain proceeding. The refined and underhand attempts to form a [pg 207] conception of the world with an optimistic-ethical meaning meet with no better success than the naïve ones. What our thinking tries to proclaim as knowledge is never anything but an unjustifiable interpretation of the world. Against the admission of this, thought guards itself with the courage of despair, because it fears it will find itself in that case with no idea of what to do in face of the problem of life. What meaning can we give to human existence, if we must renounce all pretence of knowing the meaning of the world? Nevertheless there remains only one thing for thought to do, and that is to adapt itself to facts. The hopelessness of the attempt to find the meaning of life within the meaning of the world is shown first of all by the fact that in the course of nature there is no purposiveness to be seen in which the working of men, and of mankind as a whole, could in any way intervene. On one of the smaller among the millions of heavenly bodies there have lived for a short space of time some human beings. For how long will they continue so to live? Any lowering or raising of the temperature of the earth, any change in the inclination of the axis of their planet, a rise in the level of the ocean, or a change in the composition of the atmosphere, could put an end to their existence. Or the earth itself may fall, as so many other heavenly bodies have fallen, a victim to some cosmic catastrophe. We are entirely ignorant of what we mean for the earth. How much less then may we presume to try to attribute to the infinite universe a meaning which has us for its object, or which can be explained in terms of our existence!