The conception of the rationally pleasurable, which was the legacy of Socrates, is not productive enough to keep a world alive. It is impossible to develop out of it the ideas of a utilitarianism directed to the welfare of the community, although he believed he found them in it. Ethical thought remains confined within the circle of the self-regarding. Every attempt to ennoble the rationally pleasurable ends in life-affirmation changing into life-denial. On this logical fact was wrecked the ancient West, which, after the critical awakening of the Greek spirit, could have been saved only by means of a reflective optimistic-ethical world-view. It was able to develop seriously what Socrates gave it, but not to make it capable of producing life and civilization. Plato’s abstract basic principle of the ethical. The ethic of world-negation Plato, too (427-347 B.C.), and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), the two great independent thinkers of antiquity, are incapable of producing an ethic of action, and so giving civilization a firm foundation. Plato seeks the general notion of the Good, but he abandons the path which was pointed out, even if not followed to the end, by Socrates, viz. the determination of it by a process of induction. He gives up trying to arrive at the nature of the Good by considerations of the kind, the object, and the results of action, that is to say, by its content. He wants to establish it by a purely formal process, by abstract logical thinking. In order to arrive at an ethic he uses a detour through the theory of ideas. All similar phenomena, he says, are to be conceived of as varying copies of an original—to express which he uses the word “idea.” In trees there is to be seen the idea of tree, in horses, that of horse. The idea does not come to us, as we are inclined to think, by our abstracting from trees the idea of tree, and from horses that of horse. We have it within us already. It originates, not in our [pg 041] experience of the empirical world but in the recollection which our soul brought with it from the supra-sensuous, pure world of ideas, when it began its existence in a body. In the same way we have brought with us the idea of the Good. Thus in a tortured doctrine which is disfigured everywhere with fancies and obscurities, Plato tries to found ethics on a theory about the character of our knowledge of the world of sense, and he is encouraged to this undertaking by the consideration that it is not from reflexion that we obtain our conception of the Beautiful, which is closely allied with that of the Good: we bring that conception also with us, ready made.