In Kant this overpowering of knowledge, which had till then been just naïvely allowed, was worked out systematically. His doctrine of the “Postulates of the Practical Reason” means just this: that the will claims for itself the decisive word in the last pronouncements of the world-view. Only Kant manages to arrange the matter so cleverly that the will never forces its supremacy on knowledge, but receives it from the latter as a free gift, and then makes use of it in carefully chosen parliamentary ways. It proceeds as if it had been invoked by the theoretical reason to provide possible truths with reality belonging to truths which are necessities of thought. In Fichte the will dictates to knowledge its world-view without any regard at all for the arts of diplomacy. From the middle of the nineteenth century onward there can be discerned a tendency in natural science no longer to claim that world-view shall accommodate itself to scientifically established facts. The valuable convictions of the traditional world-view are to hold good, even if they cannot be brought into harmony with the accepted knowledge of the world. After the publication of Du Bois-Raymond’s (1818-1896) lectures “On the Limits of our Knowledge of Nature” it begins with a certain school of natural science to be considered almost a part of good manners to declare oneself incompetent in questions of world-view. There grows up gradually what one may call a modern doctrine of the two-fold nature of truth. To this movement expression is given by the “Keplerbund,” which was [pg 210] founded in 1907 by representatives of natural science, and goes so far as to declare acceptable to natural science the valuable pronouncements of the current world-view, even when given in formulas provided by ecclesiastical authority. This new doctrine of the two-fold nature of truth is brought to philosophical expression by the theory of the solidity of “value-judgments.” By means of this theory Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889) and his imitators try to uphold the validity of a religious world-view side by side with a scientific one. Almost the whole religious world, so far as it tries to remain a thinking body, grasps at such expedients. Next, in William James’s (1842-1910) philosophy of Pragmatism the will admits in half-naïve, half-cynical fashion that all the knowledge professed by its world-view has been produced by itself. That the valuable assertions made by the world-view are to be traced back to the will which has been determined by valuable convictions is therefore a fact, and since Kant’s day the fact has been admitted in the most varied directions. The shock given to the feeling for veracity, which accompanies this no longer naïve but half-conscious and insidiously employed interpretation of the world, plays a fatal part in the mentality of our time.