Before thought attempts to investigate more deeply and completely the nature of devotion and that of self-perfecting, it must proceed further to put clearly before itself what there is offered to it in the way of different kinds of knowledge and other considerations on its journey through the Western search for ethics. It may be accepted as something fully recognised that ethics have nothing to expect from any theory of knowledge. Depreciation of the reality of the sensible world brings them merely apparent profit. Thought believes it can draw from the possibility of a spiritualising of the world some advantage for the optimistic-ethical interpretation of it. It has been, however, established by this [pg 225] time that ethics can no more be derived from an ethical interpretation of the world than world- and life-affirmation can be referred back to an optimistic interpretation of it, and that they must instead of that find their foundation in themselves in a world which is recognised as absolutely enigmatic. At once and for ever, then, all attempts to bring ethical and epistemological idealism into connexion with one another have to be recognised as useless for ethics. Ethics can let space and time go hang. In epistemological investigations into the nature of space and time ethics feel a satisfaction which is strong but uninterested. They view them as efforts after knowledge which must be made, but they know that the results can never touch what is essential in any world- and life-view. It suffices them to know that the whole world of sense is a manifestation of forces, that is to say of an enigmatically manifold will-to-live. In this their thought is spiritualistic. It is materialistic, however, so far as it presupposes manifestation and force to be connected in such a way that any effect produced upon the former influences the force which lies behind it. Ethics feel that if it were not thus possible for one will-to-live to produce through the manifestation effects on another will-to-live, they would have no reason for existing. But to investigate how this relation between force and its manifestation is to be explained from the standpoint of epistemology, and whether it can be explained at all, ethics can leave undecided as being none of their business; they claim for themselves, just as does natural science, the right to remain free from preconceptions. In this connexion it is interesting to observe that it is among the representatives of scientific materialism that enthusiastic ethical idealism is often to be met with, while the adherents of spiritualistic philosophy are usually moralists with an unemotional temperament. With renunciation of all help from epistemological [pg 226] idealism, it follows that ethics ask for nothing and expect nothing from speculative philosophy. They declare they have nothing to do with any kind of ethical interpretation of the world.