When once thought has become clear to itself about the relation in which world-view and life-view stand to each other, it is in a position to reconcile resignation as to knowledge with adherence to world- and life-affirmation and ethics. Our view of life is not dependent on our view of the world in the way that uncritical thought imagines it to be. It does not wither away if it cannot send its roots down into a corresponding world-view, for it does not originate in knowledge although it would like to base itself thereon. It can safely depend upon itself alone, for it is rooted in our will-to-live. World- and life-affirmation and ethics are given in our will-to-live, and they come to be clearly discerned in it in proportion as it learns to think about itself and its relation to the world. The rational thought of other times aimed at getting to know the world, and at being able in that knowledge to conceive of the highest impulses of our will-to-live as purposive in view of the universe and its evolution. But that aim was unattainable. We are not meant to unite the world and ourselves in such harmony with one another. We were naïve enough to assume that our view of life must be contained in our view of the world, but the facts do not justify this assumption. The result is that our thought finds itself involved in a dualism with which it can [pg xii] never finally settle. It is the dualism of world-view and life-view, of knowing and willing. To this dualism all the problems with which human thought has busied itself ultimately go back. Every fragment of the thought of mankind which has any bearing on man’s view of the world—whether in the world-religions or in philosophy—is an attempt to resolve this dualism. It is sometimes softened down, but only to let a unitary, monistic world-view be adopted in its place; at other times it is left current, but is transformed into a drama with a monistic issue. Innumerable are the expedients which thought used in trying to get rid of dualism. Everything it has undertaken commands respect, even the staggering _naïvetés_ and the meaningless acts of violence to which it committed itself, for it was always acting under the compulsion of an inner necessity: it wanted to rescue a serviceable world-view from the abyss of dualism. But from this continuous mishandling of the problem no solution could issue capable of satisfying thought. We were to be taken over the abyss on tottering bridges of snow.