The ethic of ethical personality, then, and the ethic [pg 230] which is established from the standpoint of society cannot be traced back the one to the other, and are not of equal value. The first only is a real ethic; the other is improperly so called. Thought must aim at finding the basic principle of absolute ethics, if it is to reach the condition of being ethics at all, and it was because it was not clear on this point that it made so little progress. Progress in ethics consists in our making up our minds to think pessimistically of the ethic of society. The ethic which is established from the standpoint of society consists, in its essential nature, in this, that society appeals to the moral disposition of the individual in order to secure from it what cannot be forced upon it by compulsion and law. It only comes nearer to real ethics when it comes to an agreement with the ethic of personality and tries to bring its own demands on the individual into harmony as far as possible with the latter’s. In proportion as society takes on the character of an ethical personality, its ethic becomes an ethic of ethical society. The problem of a complete ethic In general, thought should have busied itself with the question of what is included in the whole field of ethics, and how the different elements within it are connected with each other. In ethics are included the ethic of passive self-perfecting, which is effected by inward self-liberation from the world (resignation); the ethic of active self-perfecting effected by means of the mutual relations between man and man; and the ethic of ethical society. Ethics are thus an extensive gamut of notes. They start from the not yet ethical, where the vibrations of resignation begin to make themselves perceptible as notes of ethical resignation. With increasingly rapid vibrations they pass from the ethic of resignation into that of active self-perfecting. Rising still higher they emerge into the notes of the ethic of [pg 231] society which are already becoming more or less harsh and noisy, and they die away finally into the legal commands of society which are never more than conditionally ethical. Up to now all ethical systems have been thoroughly fragmentary. They confine themselves to this or that octave of the gamut. The Indians and, following in their train, Schopenhauer are, on the whole, concerned only with the ethic of passive self-perfecting; Zarathustra, the Jewish prophets, and the great moralists of China only with that of active self-perfecting. The interest of modern Western philosophy is fixed almost exclusively on the ethic of society. In consequence of the starting-point which they chose, the thinkers of antiquity in the West cannot get any further than an ethic of resignation. The deeper thinkers among our moderns—Kant, J. G. Fichte, Nietzsche, and others—have inklings of an ethic of active self-perfecting.