All true knowledge passes on into experience. The nature of the manifestations I do not know, but I form a conception of it in analogy to the will-to-live which is within myself, and thus my knowledge of the world becomes experience of the world. The knowledge which is becoming experience does not allow me to remain in face of the world a subject who merely knows; it forces upon me an inward relation to the world, and fills me with reverence for the mysterious will-to-live which is in everything. By making [pg 246] me think and wonder, it leads me ever upwards to the heights of reverence for life. There it lets my hand go. It cannot accompany me further. My will-to-live must now find its way about the world by itself. It is not by informing me what this or that manifestation of life means in the sum-total of the world that knowledge brings me into connexion with the world. It goes about with me not in outer circles, but in the inner ones. From within outwards it puts me in relation to the world by forcing my will-to-live to feel everything around it as also will-to-live. With Descartes, philosophy starts from the dogma: “I think, therefore I exist.” With this poverty-stricken, arbitrarily chosen beginning, it is landed irretrievably on the road to the abstract. It never finds the entrance to ethics, and remains entangled in a dead world- and life-view. True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness, which says: “I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live.” This is not a cleverly composed dogmatic formula. Day after day, hour after hour, I live and move in it. At every moment of reflexion it stands fresh before me. There bursts forth again and again from it as from roots that can never dry up, a living world- and life-view which can deal with all the facts of Being. A mysticism of ethical union with Being grows out of it. As in my own will-to-live there is a longing for wider life and for the mysterious exaltation of the will-to-live which we call pleasure, with dread of annihilation and of the mysterious encroachment on the will-to-live which we call pain; so is it also in the will-to-live all around me, whether it can express itself before me, or remains dumb. Ethics consist, therefore, in my experiencing the compulsion to show to all will-to-live the same reverence as I do to my own. There we have given us that basic principle of the moral which is a necessity of thought: It is good to maintain and to promote life; it is bad to destroy life or to obstruct it. [pg 247]