Or it may perhaps be that pessimism comes over us, like the bliss of complete rest over those who, tired out, sit down in the snow. No longer to be obliged to hope for and aim at what is commanded us by the ideals which are forced upon us by the deepened will-to-live! No longer to be in a state of unrest when by lessening our efforts we can have rest! . . . Gently comes the appeal from knowledge to our will to tune itself down to the facts. . . . That is the fatal state of complete rest in which men, and civilised mankind as a whole, grow numb and die. And when we think that the enigmas by which we are surrounded can no longer harm us, there once more rises up before us somewhere or other the most terrifying of them all, the fact that the will-to-live can be shattered in suffering or in spiritual night. This enigma, too, before which our will-to-live shudders as before the most inexplicable of all inexplicable things, we must learn to leave unsolved. Thus does pessimistic knowledge pursue us closely right on to our last breath. That is why it is so profoundly significant that the will-to-live rouses itself at last and once for all to insist on its freedom from having to understand the world, and shows itself capable of letting itself be [pg 220] determined solely by that which is given within itself. With humility and courage it makes its way through the endless chaos of enigmas, fulfilling its mysterious destiny, making a reality of its union with the infinite will-to-live. [pg 221] CHAPTER XIX THE PROBLEM OF ETHICS, STARTING FROM THE HISTORY OF ETHICS An ethic of self-devotion, or an ethic of self-perfecting? THOUGHT, then, which reaches bottom, arrives at an unshakeable world-and-life affirmation. Let it now try whether it can lead us to an ethic. But that it may not proceed with us, as it so often does, merely at random, it shall gather from the thought which has hitherto been devoted to ethics all the guidance which is there to be found. What does the history of ethics teach? As a quite general principle we learn from it, that the object of all ethical enquiry is the discovery of the universal basic principle of the moral. The basic principle of the moral must show itself to be a necessity of thought, and must bring man to an unceasing, living, and practical conflict and understanding with reality. The principles of the moral which have hitherto been offered us are absolutely unsatisfying. This is clear from the fact that they cannot be thought out to a conclusion without leading to paradoxes, or losing in ethical content. Classical thought tries to conceive of the ethical as that which brings rational pleasure. It did not succeed, however, from that starting-point in arriving at an ethic of active devotion. Shut up within the egoistic-utilitarian, it ends in an ethically-coloured resignation.