But why go on with this want of candour? Why keep knowledge in subservience to the will by means of a kind of infamous secret police? Any world-view deduced therefrom must ever be a poor weak thing. Let us allow the will and knowledge to come together in a relation which is honourable to both. In what has hitherto been called world-view there are two things united: view of the world and life-view. So long as it was possible to cherish the illusion that the two were harmonious and each completed the other, there was nothing to be said against this combination. Now, however, when the divergence can no longer be concealed, the wider conception of world-view which includes life-view organically within itself, must be given up. It is no longer permissible to go on naïvely believing that we get our life-view [pg 211] from our view of the world, or furtively elevating in some way or other our life-view into a view of the world. We are standing at a turning-point of thought. Critical action which clears away all prevailing _naïvetés_ and dishonesties has become necessary. We must make up our minds to leave life-view and view of the world mutually independent of each other, and see that a straightforward understanding between the two is reached. We have to admit that because our life-view is made up of convictions which are given in our will-to-live but are not confirmed by knowledge of the world, we have allowed it to go beyond the varied knowledge which makes up our view of the world. This renunciation of world-view in the old sense, that is of a unitary world-view which is complete in itself, means a painful experience for our thought. We come hereby to a dualism against which we at every moment instinctively rebel. But we must surrender to facts. Our will to live has to accommodate itself to the inconceivable fact that it is unable with its own valuable convictions to discover itself again in the manifold will-to-live which is seen manifested in the world. We wanted to form a life-view for ourselves out of items of knowledge gathered from the world. But it is our destiny to live by means of convictions which an inward necessity makes a part of our thought. In the old rationalism reason undertook to investigate the world. In the new it has to take as its task the attaining to clarity about the will-to-live. Thus we return to an elemental philosophising which is once more busied with questions of world- and life-view as they directly affect men, and seeks to give a safe foundation to, and to keep alive, the valuable ideas which we find in ourselves. It is in a life-view which is dependent on itself alone, and has come in a straightforward way to an understanding with world-knowledge, that we hope to find once more power to attain to ethical world- and life-affirmation. [pg 212] CHAPTER XVIII THE FOUNDATIONS OF OPTIMISM SECURED FROM THE WILL-TO-LIVE The pessimistic result of knowledge