But what is the reason that the ethic of self-perfecting, in spite of all its efforts, cannot get out of the circle of the passive? It is that it allows the spiritual inward devotion to Being to be directed to an abstract notion of Being instead of to real Being. Thus it approaches nature-philosophy in a wrong way. Whence this error? It is a result of the difficulties which the ethic of self-perfecting meets when it attempts to comprehend itself in nature-philosophy. In a fashion which is deep, though it strikes us as unfamiliar, Chinese thought undertakes to arrive at this agreement. It thinks that it is somehow or other in the “impersonal” element of the world’s activity that the secret of the truly ethical lies. It accordingly makes spiritual devotion to Being consist in this, that we look away from the subjective stirrings within ourselves, and relate ourselves to the laws of objectivity which we discover in the course of nature. It is with this deep “becoming like the world” that the thought of Lao-tse and that of Chwang-tse are concerned. The motifs of such an ethic make themselves heard in a wonderful fashion in Lao-tse’s _Taoteking_; but they cannot be made to produce a complete symphony. The meaning of what happens in the world is a thing we cannot investigate. What we do understand of it is that all life tries to live itself out. The true ethic of life, therefore, “in the spirit of what happens” would seem to be that of Yang-tse and Friedrich Nietzsche. On the other hand the assumption [pg 237] of an objectivity, dominant in the course of nature, which can be a pattern for our activity is nothing else than an attempt, undertaken with the palest of colours, to paint the world as ethical. Correspondingly, this existence in the spirit of the world means with Lao-tse and Chwang-tse an inward liberation from the rule of passion and from outward occurrences, which is accompanied by marked depreciations of all tendencies to activity. Whenever life in the spirit of the world leads to a really activist ethic as with Confucius, Mo-Di, and others, there has been a corresponding interpretation of the meaning of the world. Whenever, in general, human thinking raises being-like-the-world to an ethic, the ethical willing of mankind has read somehow or other into the world-spirit an ethical character in order to be able to find itself in it later. Since no motives to ethical activity are to be discovered in the course of nature, the ethic of self-perfecting must allow both the active and the passive ethic to originate side by side in the bare fact of spiritual inward self-dedication to Being. It must derive them both from the act as such, without any presupposition of any sort of ethical quality in Being. Then first will thought have reached a complete ethic without having been guilty of any sort of naïve or tricky proceedings.