Our great mistake, however, is thinking that we can reach without mysticism an ethical world- and life-view, which shall satisfy thought. Up to now we have done nothing but fabricate world- and life-views. They are good because they keep men up to activist ethics, but they are not true, and therefore they are always collapsing. Moreover they are not deep. Hence European thought makes men ethical indeed, but superficial, and the European, because he is surfeited with world-view which has been fabricated with a view to activist ethics, has no collectedness and no inward personality, nor indeed any feeling of need for these things. It is indeed time for us to abandon this error. Depth and stability in thinking come to the world- and life-view of activist ethics only when this springs from mysticism. The question of what we are to make of our life is not solved by our being driven out into the world with an impulse to activity, and never being allowed to collect ourselves for thought. It can be really answered only by a world- and life-view which brings man into a spiritual inward relation to Being, out of which there results of natural necessity an ethic both passive and active. The hitherto accepted mysticism cannot effect this because it is supra-ethical. The struggle of thought has therefore to direct itself upon ethical mysticism. We must rise to a spirituality which is ethical, and to an ethic which includes within itself all spirituality. Then only do we become profoundly qualified for life. Ethics must resolve to originate in mysticism. Mysticism, on its side, must never think that it exists for its own sake. It is not a flower, but only the calyx. Ethics are [pg 241] the flower. Mysticism which exists for itself only is the salt which has lost its savour. The hitherto accepted mysticism leads into the supra-ethical because it is abstract, and abstraction is the death of ethics, for ethics are a living relation for a living life. We must therefore abandon abstract mysticism, and turn to the mysticism which is alive. Abstract mysticism and the mysticism of reality. Supra-ethical, and ethical mysticism The Essence of Being, the Absolute, the World-spirit, and all similar expressions denote nothing actual, but something conceived in abstractions which for that reason it is also absolutely impossible to represent to the mind. The only reality is the Being which manifests itself in phenomena. How does thought come to such a meaningless proceeding as making man enter into a spiritual relation with an unreal creation of thought? By yielding to temptation in two ways, one general, one particular.