Thanks to belief in progress, new life streams into ethics. The inner relations between ethics and world- and life-affirmation begin to have their effect. The elementary impulses to activity which are embodied in the Christian ethic are set free, and the belief in progress gives them an aim and object: the transformation of the circumstances of society and of mankind. It is not any really deeper ethical thinking that brings the modern age in, but the influence exerted by the belief in progress, which arose out of the achievements of discovery and invention, on the ethic which drew its life from Stoic and Christian thought. The cart is drawn by the belief in progress, and at first ethics have only to run along beside it. But as the cart gets heavier and the road more difficult to negotiate, so that ethics ought to lend their strength to help, they refuse, because they have no strength of their own. The cart begins to run backward, and carries belief in progress, and ethics with it, down the hill. The task before philosophy was to change the world- and life-affirmation which arose out of enthusiasm over the attainments in discovery and invention into a deeper, inner one arising out of thought about the universe and the life of man, and on that same foundation to build up an ethical system. But philosophy could do neither. About the middle of the nineteenth century, when it has become perfectly clear that we are living with a world- and [pg 070] life-affirmation which has its source merely in our confidence in discovery and invention and not in any deeper thinking about the world and life, our fate is sealed. The modern optimistic-ethical world-view, though it has done so much for the material development of civilization, proves to be like a building erected already to a considerable height but on rotten foundations, and has to collapse. [pg 071] CHAPTER VII LAYING THE FOUNDATION OF ETHICS IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES Hartley, Holbach. Devotion as Enlightened Egoism MODERN times find world- and life-affirmation so self-evident that they feel no need to give them a sure foundation, and to deepen them, by thought about the world and life. Pessimism they brush aside as reactionary folly, without suspecting how deep down into thought it has sent its roots. They do, however, see the necessity of establishing the nature of the ethical. How do they proceed to do this? That the ethical means action directed to promoting the common good is their firm belief from the first, and they are safe from the fate of ancient thought, viz. sticking fast in the mud of resignation while trying to give the ethical a proper foundation. Instead of that they have to answer the question how the unegoistic makes it appearance beside the egoistic, and in what inner relation they stand to each other.