In the ancient world man’s natural disposition to world- and life-affirmation could not be worked out to a complete world-view of the same, because at that time deep thought about the world and life pressed resignation upon him as a necessity of thought. In the man of the modern age the mentality produced by discovery and invention unites with his natural disposition to world- and life-affirmation, and establishes him in an optimistic world-view [pg 064] without leading him to deeper thought about the world and life. The spirit of the modern age is not the work of any one great thinker. It wins its way gradually by reason of the unbroken series of triumphs won by discovery and invention. Hence it is not a result of chance that an almost unphilosophic and moreover somewhat antiquated personality like Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam (1561-1626), is the man who drafts the programme of the modern world-view. He founds it upon the sentence: “Knowledge is power.” His picture of the future he develops in his _New Atlantis_, in which he describes how the inhabitants of an island, through the practical application of all known discoveries and inventions and all possible rational reflexion on the purposive organization of society, find themselves in a position to lead the happiest possible lives._(_9_)_ Christian and Stoic Elements in Modern Ethics What is the relation between ethics and the mentality of belief in progress, and how were they influenced by it? When the ethical thought of antiquity wanted to come to clearness about itself, it fell a victim to resignation, because it tried to determine the moral as that which is rationally profitable and pleasurable to the individual. It remained shut up within the circle of the egoistic, and never reached the thought of social utilitarianism. From such a fate modern ethics are protected in advance. They have no need to produce from their own resources the thought that the ethical is action directed to promoting the welfare of others, for they find it as something already accepted as true. That is the gift of Christianity. The thought of Jesus that the ethical is the individual’s active self-devotion to others has won its way to acceptance. Ethics, [pg 065] which are making themselves independent of religion, keep, as a result of their passage through Christianity, a pronouncedly active and altruistic mode of thought. What they have to do now is to provide this possession with a rational foundation.