My rights too the ethic of reverence for life does not allow to belong to me. It forbids me to quiet my conscience with the reflexion that as the stronger, but by quite legitimate means, I am advancing myself at the cost of one who is weaker than I. In what the law and public opinion allow me it sets a problem before me. It bids me think of others, and makes me ponder whether I can allow myself the inward right to pluck all the fruit that my hand can reach. Thus it may happen that in obedience to consideration for the existence of others I do what seems to ordinary opinion to be folly. Yes, it may even show itself to be folly by the fact that my renunciation has not been of the slightest benefit to him for whom it was made. And yet I was right. Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal. What it commands has its own significance, even if it seems foolish or useless. We all look, of course, in one another, for the folly which indicates that we have higher responsibilities making themselves felt in ourselves. Yet it is only in proportion as we all become less rational, in the meaning given it by ordinary calculation, that the ethical disposition develops in us, and allows problems to become soluble which have hitherto been insoluble. Nor will reverence for life grant me my happiness as my own. At the moments when I should like to enjoy myself without restraint, it wakes in me reflexion about misery that I see or suspect, and it does not allow me to drive away the uneasiness thereby caused to me. Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but [pg 260] always in the experience which is going on around me. It is an uncomfortable doctrine which the true ethic whispers into my ear. You are happy, it says; therefore you are called upon to give much. Whatever more than others you have received in health, natural gifts, working capacity, success, a beautiful childhood, harmonious family circumstances, you must not accept as being a matter of course. You must pay a price for them. You must show more than average devotion of life to life. To the happy the voice of the true ethic is dangerous, if they venture to listen to it. When it calls to them, it never damps down the irrational which glows within it. It assails them to see whether it can get them out of their rut and turn them into adventurers of self-devotion, people of whom the world has too few. . . .