The temptation to combine with the ethical into a relative ethical the expedient which is commanded me by the supra-personal responsibility is especially strong, because it can [pg 264] be shown, in defence of it, that the person who complies with the demand of this supra-personal responsibility, acts unegoistically. It is not to his individual existence or his individual welfare that he sacrifices another existence or welfare, but he sacrifices an individual existence and welfare to what forces itself upon him as expedient in view of the existence or the welfare of a majority. But ethical is more than unegoistic. Ethical is nothing but the reverence felt by my will-to-live for every other will-to-live. Whenever I in any way sacrifice or injure life, I am not within the ethical, but I become guilty, whether it be egoistically guilty for the sake of maintaining my own existence or welfare, or unegoistically guilty for the sake of maintaining a greater number of other existences or their welfare. This so easily made mistake of accepting as ethical a violation of reverence for life if it is based upon unegoistic considerations, is the bridge by crossing which ethics enter unintentionally the territory of the non-ethical. The bridge must be broken down. Ethics go only so far as humanity does, humanity meaning respect for the existence and the happiness of individual human beings. Where humanity ends pseudo-ethics begin. The day on which this boundary is once for all universally recognized and marked out so as to be visible to everyone, will be one of the most important in the history of mankind. Thenceforward it can no longer happen that ethics which are not ethics at all are accepted as real ethics, and deceive and ruin individuals and peoples. The ethics hitherto current have hindered us from becoming as earnest as we must be by the fact that they have utterly deceived us as to the many ways in which each one of us, whether through self-assertion, or by actions justified by supra-personal responsibility, become guilty again and again. True knowledge consists in being gripped by the secret that everything around us is will-to-live and seeing clearly how again and again we incur guilt against life. Fooled by pseudo-ethics, man stumbles about in his [pg 265] guilt like a drunken man. If he becomes instructed and earnest he seeks the road which leads him least into guilt.