From devotion to the Absolute there comes only a dead spirituality. It is a purely intellectual act. No motives to activity are given in it. Even the ethic of resignation can only eke out a miserable existence on the soil of such an intellectualism. But in the mysticism of reality devotion is no longer a purely intellectual act, but one in which everything that is alive in man has its share. There is therefore dominant in it a spirituality which carries in itself [pg 243] in elemental form the impulse to action. The gruesome truth that spirituality and ethics are two different things no longer holds good. Here the two are one and the same. Now, too, the ethic of self-perfecting and the ethic of devotion can interpenetrate each other. They now become, we see, cosmic in nature-philosophy, which leaves the world as it is. Hence they cannot but meet each other in a thought (which satisfies in every direction the laws of thinking), of living devotion to Being which lives. In this thought lie passive and active self-perfecting in mutual agreement and perfect union. They comprehend each other as the working out of one and the same inner compulsion. Having become one they no longer need first of all to exert themselves to establish by joint efforts the completed ethic of influencing the world through liberation from the world. The completeness is now automatically attained. Now there ring out in wonderful harmonies all the notes in the gamut of ethics, from the vibrations in which resignation begins to be audible as ethics, up to the higher notes in which ethics pass over into the harsh noises of the commands which are proclaimed by society to be ethical. Subjective responsibility for all life which comes within his reach, responsibility which widens out extensively and intensively to the limitless, and which the man who has become inwardly free from the world experiences and tries to make a reality, that is ethics. It originates in world- and life-affirmation. It makes itself a reality in life-denial. It is completely bound up with optimistic willing. Never again can the belief-in-progress get separated from ethics, like a badly-fastened wheel from a cart. The two turn inseparably on the same axle. The basic principle of ethics, that principle which is a necessity of thought, which has a definite content, which is ever bringing itself into steady, living, and practical agreement with reality, proclaims itself to be: Devotion to life out of reverence for life. [pg 244] CHAPTER XXI THE ETHIC OF REVERENCE FOR LIFE The basic principle of the moral COMPLICATED and laborious are the roads along which ethical thought, which has mistaken its way and lost itself, must be brought back. Its course, however, maps itself out quite simply if, instead of taking apparently convenient short cuts, it keeps to its right direction from the very beginning. For this three things are necessary.