The attraction and tension which in Hindu thought govern the relations between world- and life-negation and ethics, afford us glimpses into the problem of ethics for which Western thought offers us no comparable opportunities. Nowhere, again, has the problem of world- and life-affirmation, both in itself and in its relation to ethics, been felt in so elemental and comprehensive a fashion as in Chinese thought. Lao-tse, Chwang-tse, Kung-tse (Confucius), Meng-tse, Lie-tse, and the rest, are thinkers in whom the problems of world-view with which our Western thought is wrestling, encounter us in a form, strange indeed, but compelling our attention. Discussing these problems with them means discussing them with ourselves also. That is why I bade our search for a world-view seek to reach clear ideas about itself, and come to a halt in order to fix its attention on the thought of mankind as a whole. My solution of the problem is that we must make up our minds to renounce completely the optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world. If we take the world as it is, it is impossible to attribute to it a meaning in which the aims and objects of mankind and of individual men have a meaning also. Neither world- and life-affirmation nor ethics can be grounded on what our knowledge of the world can tell us about the world. In the world we can discover nothing of any purposive evolution in which our activities can acquire a meaning. Nor is the ethical to be discovered in any form in the world-process. The only advance in knowledge that we can make is to describe more and more minutely the phenomena which make up the world and their course. To understand the meaning of the whole—and that is what a world-view demands—is for us an impossibility. The last fact which knowledge can discover is that the world is a manifestation in every way puzzling, of the universal will-to-live. [pg xi] I believe I am the first among Western thinkers who has ventured to recognize this crushing result of knowledge, and who is absolutely sceptical about our knowledge of the world without at the same time renouncing with it belief in world- and life-affirmation and ethics. Resignation as to knowledge of the world is for me not a hopeless fall into a scepticism which leaves us to drift about in life like a derelict vessel. I see in it that effort of honesty which we must venture to make in order to arrive at the serviceable world-view which hovers within sight. Every world-view which does not start from resignation in regard to knowledge, is artificial and a mere fabrication, for it rests upon an inadmissible interpretation of the world.