Ordinary ethics seek compromises. They try to lay down how much of my existence and of my happiness I must sacrifice, and how much of them I may preserve at the cost of the existence and happiness of other lives. With this distinction they produce an experimental, relative ethic. They offer as ethical what is in reality not ethical but a mixture of non-ethical necessity and ethics. They thereby establish a huge confusion, and allow the starting of an ever-increasing obscuration of the conception of the ethical. The ethic of reverence for life knows nothing of a relative ethic. It allows to rank as good only the maintenance and promotion of life. All destruction of and injury to life, under whatever circumstances they take place, it condemns as evil. It does not keep in store adjustments between ethics and necessity all ready for making up. It is always again and again and in ways that are always original coming to terms in men with reality. It does not abolish for man all ethical conflicts, but compels him to decide for himself in each case how far he can remain ethical and how far he must submit himself to the necessity for destruction of and injury to life, and therewith incur guilt. It is not by receiving instruction about agreement between ethical and necessary, that a man makes progress in ethics, but only by coming to hear more and more plainly the voice of the ethical, by becoming ruled more and more by the longing to preserve and promote life, and by becoming more and more obstinate in resistance to the necessity for destroying or injuring life. In ethical conflicts man can arrive only at subjective decisions. No one can lay down for him at what point, on each occasion, lies the extreme limit of possibility for [pg 256] his persistence in the preservation and promotion of life. He alone has to decide, by letting himself be guided by a feeling of the highest possible responsibility towards other life. We must never let ourselves become blunted and dull. We are living in truth, when our experience in these conflicts is ever deepening. The good conscience is an invention of the devil’s. Man and other living creatures What does reverence for life say about the relations between men and the animal world? Whenever I injure life of any sort, I must be quite clear whether it is necessary. Beyond the unavoidable, I must never go, not even with what seems insignificant. The farmer who has mown down a thousand flowers in his meadow to feed his cows, must be careful on his way home not to strike off in thoughtless pastime the head of a single flower by the roadside, for he thereby commits a wrong against life without being under the pressure of necessity.