The path which this attempt has to follow runs parallel to that which led the successors of Socrates into the abyss of the paradoxical. In order to get from egoism into altruism and so think out to a conclusion the ethic of the rationally-pleasurable, the Epicureans wished to use the same scale of values for spiritual and material pleasure alike. The only result was that their ethic transformed itself into resignation. Now again, in modern times, and again for the sake of ethics, spiritual happiness is to be regarded as happiness in the same way as material happiness is, and here again the result is a paradox. Material and spiritual happiness are not so related that the one can find its continuation in the other. If the second is for the sake of ethics called in with the first, it does not strengthen the first, but paralyses it. The man who does earnestly try to guide himself by the light of spiritual as well as material happiness, ends by finding that the recognition accorded him by his fellow-men, which at first seemed to him to make almost the whole of spiritual happiness, becomes more and more meaningless. It is to him a miserable lump of solder which drops down between material and spiritual happiness without being able to fasten them together. More and more exclusively he experiences spiritual happiness as the condition in which he is at one with himself and therefore can justifiably accord himself a certain amount of self-appreciation. Spiritual happiness is sufficient unto itself. Either the man is led to resolve on ethical conduct because he expects from it a moulding of the outward circumstances of his being which will bring him profit and pleasure; or he chooses it because he finds his happiness in obeying his inner compulsion to ethical action. In the latter case he [pg 075] has left far behind him all calculations about the interdependence of his morality and his material happiness. The fact that he is a moral man is in itself his happiness, even though it land him in the most disadvantageous situations. But if spiritual happiness can never be welded into union with material, it is useless trouble to try to depict altruism as an ennobling of egoism. If the ordinary conception of pleasure, that it may be brought into union with ethics, is submitted to a process of refining, it ends by being refined away. In ancient ethics, in which the refining is done under the influence of an ethical system which is definitely egoistic, it transforms itself into the pleasure of being without pleasure, and allows ethics to end in resignation. In modern ethics, in which the pleasure to be refined is under the influence of altruism, it works itself up into an irrational and immaterialistic enthusiasm. In both cases there is the same paradoxical proceeding, only that in one case it goes in the negative direction, in the other in the positive.