THE reverence for life which has grown up in the will-to-live which has become reflective, contains world- and life-affirmation and ethics side by side and interpenetrating each other. It therefore cannot but continually think out and will all the ideals of ethical civilization, and bring them into agreement with reality. Reverence for life will not allow to pass as current the purely individualistic and inward conception of civilization as it rules in Indian thought and in mysticism. That man should make efforts for self-perfecting by withdrawing into himself is to it a deep, but an incomplete, ideal of civilization. In no way does reverence for life allow the individual to give up all interest in the world. It is unceasingly compelling him to be concerned about all the life that is round about him, and to feel himself responsible for it. Whenever life is in question the development of which we can influence, our concern with it, and our responsibility for it, are not satisfied by our maintaining and promoting its existence as such; they demand that we shall try to raise it to its highest value in every respect. The being that can be influenced in its development by us is man. Reverence for life compels us, therefore, to picture to ourselves and to will every kind of progress of which man and humanity are capable. It throws us into a restless condition of ever picturing to ourselves and willing civilization, but as ethical men. Even a not yet deepened world- and life-affirmation [pg 270] produces this picturing and willing of civilization, but it leaves a man to exert himself more or less without guidance. In reverence for life, however, and the willing which accompanies it, to raise men and humanity to their highest value in every respect, he possesses the guidance which leads him to complete and purified ideals of civilization which with full consciousness of their goal come to terms with reality. Defined from outside and quite empirically, complete civilization consists in making actual all possible progress in discovery and invention and in the arrangements of human society, and seeing that they work together for the inward perfecting of individuals which is the real and final object of civilization. Reverence for life is in a position to complete this conception of civilization and to supply a foundation for its most inward elements. This it does by defining what is meant by the inward perfecting of man, and making it consist in reaching the spirituality of an ever deepening reverence for life.