Kant, the modern restorer of the ethic of self-perfecting, sets up the conception of absolute duty, but without giving it any content. He thereby admits his inability to derive the content of ethics from the effort after self-perfecting. If the ethic of self-perfecting tries really to acquire a content, it must allow that ethics consist either in world- and life-denial or in higher world- and life-affirmation. The first need not be considered; there remains, therefore, only the other. Spinoza conceives the higher world- and life-affirmation as a thinking absorption in the universe. He does not, however, arrive thereby at a real ethic, but only at an ethically-coloured resignation. Schleiermacher uses much art to lend this ethical colouring a more brilliant tone. Nietzsche avoids the paths of resignation, but reaches thereby a world- and life-affirmation which is ethical only so far as it feels itself to be an effort after self-perfecting. The only thinker who succeeds to some extent in giving to self-perfecting within world- and life-affirmation an ethical content is J. G. Fichte. The result, however, is valueless, because it presupposes an optimistic-ethical view of the nature of the universe and of the position of man within it, which is based upon inadmissible speculation. The ethic of self-perfecting is therefore not capable of so establishing the basic principle of the moral, that it has a content which is ethically satisfying; the ethic of devotion, on the other hand, starting from the content which it [pg 224] presupposes, cannot reach a basic principle of ethics which is grounded in thought. The attempt made by antiquity to conceive ethics as that which brings rational pleasure we need no longer consider. It is only too clear that it does not take sufficiently into account the enigma of devotion, and can never solve it. There remain, therefore, for consideration only the two undertakings, so strangely opposed to one another, one of which starts from devotion as a generally accepted content of the ethical in order to conceive it as belonging to the self-perfecting of man, while the other starts from self-perfecting and seeks to conceive devotion as an item in its content which is a necessity of thought. Is there a synthesis of these two? In other words, do devotion and self-perfecting belong together in such a way that the one is contained in the other? If this inward unity has not been visible hitherto, may not the cause be that reflexion, whether upon devotion or upon self-perfecting, did not go deep enough and was not sufficiently inclusive? Ethics and a theory of knowledge. Ethics and natural happenings. The enthusiastic element in ethics