If one analyses the mysticism of all peoples and all ages to find out its ethical content, we find that this is [pg 239] extraordinarily small. Even the ethic of resignation, which seems after all to belong naturally to mysticism, is in it more or less afflicted with impotence. Through the absence of the activist ethic with which it should normally be bound up, it to a certain extent loses its hold, and pushes itself more and more into the region of no longer ethical resignation. There then arises a mysticism that no longer helps the effort for self-perfecting, which is the deeper work to which it is called, but allows absorption into the Absolute to become an aim in itself. The purer the mysticism, the further has this evolution developed. Mysticism becomes then a world- and life-view of the merging of the finite existence in the infinite, if indeed it does not get reversed, as with the Brahmans, into the lofty mysticism of the existence of infinite existence within the finite. The ethic of self-perfecting, which should arise out of mysticism, is therefore always in danger of perishing in mysticism. The tendency of mysticism to become supra-ethical is quite natural. As a matter of fact its connexion with an Absolute which has neither qualities nor needs has nothing more to do with self-perfecting. It becomes a pure act of consciousness, and leads to a spirituality which is just as bare of content as the pre-supposed Absolute. Feeling its weakness, mysticism does all it can to be more ethical than it is, or at any rate to appear so. Even the Indian form of it makes efforts in this direction, although again, on the other hand, it has courage to be veracious enough to rank the spiritual above the ethical. In order to judge what mysticism is worth ethically one must count only what it contains in itself in the way of ethics, not what it does or says beyond that. Then, however, the ethical content of even Christian mysticism is terrifyingly small. Mysticism is not a friend but a foe of ethics; it devours it. And yet the ethic which is to satisfy thought must be born of mysticism. All deep philosophy, all deep religion, are ultimately a struggle for ethical mysticism and mystical ethics. [pg 240] Dominated by efforts to secure an activist ethical world- and life-view, we Westerners do not allow mysticism to come into its own. It leads among us a furtive, intermittent existence. We feel instinctively that it stands in antagonism to activist ethics, and we have therefore no inward relationship to it.