There is too little among us of this kind of struggling. From the smallest who is something in the smallest business, right up to the political ruler who holds in his hands the decision for peace or war, we act too much as men who in any given case can prepare without effort to be no longer men, but merely the executive of general interests. Hence there is no longer among us any trust in a righteousness lighted up with human feeling. Nor have we any longer any real respect for one another. We all feel ourselves in the power of a mentality of cold, impersonal, and usually unintelligent opportunism, which stiffens itself with appeals to principle, and in order to carry out small interests is capable of the greatest inhumanity and the greatest folly. We therefore see among us one temper of impersonal opportunism confronting another, and all problems are executed in a useless conflict of force against force because there is nowhere at hand such a spirit and temper as will make them soluble. Only through our struggles for humanity can forces which work in the direction of the truly rational and expedient become powerful, while the present spirit and temper prevails. Hence the man who works under supra-personal responsibilities has to feel himself answerable not only for the successful result which is to be realized through him, but for the general spirit and temper which has to be created. We therefore serve society without losing ourselves in it. We do not allow it to be our guardian in the matter of ethics. That would be as if the solo violinist allowed his bowing to be regulated by that of the double-bass player. Never for a moment do we lay aside our mistrust of the ideals established by society, and of the convictions which are kept by it in circulation. We always know that society is full of folly and will deceive us in the matter of humanity. It is an unreliable horse, and blind into the bargain. Woe to the driver if he falls asleep! All this sounds too hard. Society serves ethics by giving legal sanction to its most elementary principles, and handing [pg 267] on the ethical principles of one generation to the next. That is much, and it claims our gratitude. But society is also something which checks the progress of ethics again and again, by arrogating to itself the dignity of the ethical teachers. To this, however, it has no right. The only ethical teacher is the man who thinks ethically, and struggles for an ethic. The conceptions of good and evil which are put in circulation by society are paper-money, the value of which is to be calculated not by the figures printed upon it, but by its relation to its exchange value in gold of the ethic of reverence for life. But so measured, its exchange value reveals itself as that of the paper-money of a half-bankrupt state.