The definition of ethics as a relation to things within a disposition to reverence for life, strikes one in its absolutely universal extent as cold. But it is the only complete one. Sympathy is too narrow to rank as the essence of the ethical. It denotes, of course, only interest in the suffering will-to-live. But ethics include also feeling as one’s own all the circumstances and all the aspirations of the will-to-live, its pleasure, too, and its longing to live itself out to the full, as well as its urge to self-perfecting. Love means more, since it includes fellowship in suffering, in joy, and in effort, but it shows the ethical only in a simile, although in a natural and deep one. It makes the solidarity produced by ethics analogous to that which nature calls forth on the physical side, for more or less temporary purposes between two beings which complete each other sexually, or between them and their offspring. Thought must strive to bring to expression the nature of the ethical in itself. To effect this it comes inevitably to defining ethics as devotion to life which is inspired by reverence for life. Even if the word reverence for life sounds so general as to seem somewhat lifeless, what is signified by it is nevertheless something which the man into whose thought it has made its way can never get rid of. Sympathy, and love, and every kind of valuable emotion are given within it. With a restless living force [pg 249] reverence for life works upon the disposition into which it has entered, and throws it into the unrest of a feeling of responsibility which at no place and at no time ceases to affect it. Just as the screw which burrows through the water drives the ship along, so does reverence for life the man. Arising, as it does, from an inner compulsion, the ethic of reverence for life is not dependent on the extent to which it is able to think itself out to a satisfying life-view. It need give no answer to the question of what significance the ethical man’s work for the maintenance, promotion, and exalting of life can have in the total happenings of the course of nature. It does not let itself be misled by the calculation that the maintaining and completing of life which it practises is hardly worth consideration beside the tremendous, unceasing destruction of life which goes on through natural forces. Having the will to action, it can leave on one side all the problems of the success of its work. Full of significance for the world is the fact in itself that in the ethically developed man there has made its appearance in the world a will-to-live which is filled with reverence for life and devotion to life.