But however certain it is that every age lives by the energies which have sprung from its thought about ethics, it is equally certain that up to now the ethical thoughts which have become current have after a longer or a shorter period lost their power of convincing. Why has the establishment of an ethical system never met with more than a partial and temporary success, and never been a permanency? Why is the history of the ethical thinking of [pg 023] mankind the history of inexplicable stoppages and fallings-back? Why has there been in this sphere no organic progress which allows one period to build upon the achievements of preceding ones? Why in the sphere of ethics do we live in a town full of ruins, in which one generation builds for itself here, and another there, what is absolutely necessary? “To preach morality is easy, to establish it is hard,” says Schopenhauer, and that saying shows what the problem is. In every effort of thought about ethics there is to be seen, distinctly or indistinctly, the search for a basic principle of morality, which needs no support outside itself, and unites in itself the sum total of all moral demands. But no one has ever succeeded in really formulating this principle. Elements only of it were brought to light and given out to be the whole, until the difficulties which emerged destroyed the illusion. The tree, however finely it sprouted, did not live to grow old, because it was unable to send its roots down into the permanently nourishing and moisture-giving earth. The chaos of ethical views becomes to some extent intelligible as soon as one sees that we are concerned with differing and mutually contradictory views about fragments of the basic principle. The contradiction has its foundation in their incompleteness. There is ethical matter in what Kant objects to in the ethics of rationalism, as also in what he puts in its place; in that part of Kant’s writings where his conception of the moral is opposed by Schopenhauer, as also in what is to take its place in the ethical system of the latter. Schopenhauer is ethical in the points on which Nietzsche attacks him, and Nietzsche is ethical in his opposition to Schopenhauer. What is wanted is to find the fundamental chord in which the dissonances of these varied and contradictory ethical ideas unite in producing harmony. The ethical problem, then, is the problem of a basic principle of morality, which is founded in thought. What is the common element of good in the manifold goods which we feel to be such? Is there such a universally valid [pg 024] conception of the good? If there is, in what does it consist, and how far is it real and necessary for me? What influence has it over my general disposition and my actions? Into what relations with the world does it bring me?