The more extensive a man’s activities, the oftener he finds himself in the situation of having to sacrifice something of his humanity to his supra-personal responsibility. Out of this conflict consideration brings the average person to the decision that the wider responsibility does, as a matter of principle, annul the personal. It is with this idea [pg 263] that society addresses the individual. For the quieting of consciences for which this decision is too categorical it perhaps lays down a few principles which undertake to determine in a way that is valid for everybody, how far in any case personal morality can have a say in the matter. To the current ethic no course remains open but to sign this capitulation. It has no means of defending the fortress of personal morality, because it has not at its disposal any absolute notions of good and evil. Not so the ethic of reverence for life. That possesses, as we can see, what the other lacks. It therefore never surrenders the fortress, even if the latter is permanently invested. It feels itself in a position to persevere in holding it, and by continual sorties to keep the besiegers on the _qui vive_. Only the most universal and absolute purposiveness in the maintenance and promotion of life, which is the objective aimed at by reverence for life, is ethical. All other necessity or expediency is not ethical, but only a more or less necessary necessity, or a more or less expedient expediency. In the conflict between the maintenance of my own existence and the destruction of, or injury to, another, I can never put the ethical and the necessary together to form a relative ethical; I must choose between ethical and necessary, and, if I choose the latter, must take it upon myself to be guilty through an act of injury to life. Similarly I am not at liberty to think that in the conflict between personal and supra-personal responsibility I can balance the ethical and the expedient to make a relative ethical, or even annul the ethical with the purposive; I must choose between the two. If under the pressure of the supra-personal responsibility I yield to the expedient, I become guilty in some way or other through failure in reverence for life.