Ethics grow out of the same root as world- and [pg xiv] life-affirmation, for ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, viz. that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil. Affirmation of the world, which means affirmation of the will-to-live that manifests itself all round me, is only possible if I devote myself to other life. From an inner necessity I exert myself in producing values and practising ethics in the world and on the world even though not understanding the meaning of the world. For in world- and life-affirmation and in ethics I carry out the will of the universal will-to-live which reveals itself in me. I live my life in God, in the mysterious divine personality which I do not know as such in the world, but only experience as a mysterious Will within myself. Rational thinking which is free from assumptions ends therefore in mysticism. To relate oneself in the spirit of reverence for life to the multiform manifestations of the will-to-live which together constitute the world is ethical mysticism. All profound world-view is mysticism, the essence of which is just this: that out of my unsophisticated and naïve existence in the world there comes, as a result of thought about self and the world, spiritual self-devotion to the mysterious infinite Will which is continuously manifested in the universe. This world-affirming, ethical, active mysticism has always been hovering as a vision before Western thought, but the latter could never adopt it because in its search for a world-view it always turned into the wrong road of optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world, instead of reflecting directly on the relation which man assumes to the world under the inner compulsion of the deepest characterisation of his will-to-live. From my youth onwards I have felt certain that all thought which thinks itself out to an issue ends in mysticism. In the stillness of the primæval forest in Africa I have been able to work out this thought and give it expression. I come forward therefore with confidence as a restorer [pg xv] of that rational thought which refuses to make assumptions. I know indeed that our time will have absolutely no connexion with anything that is in any way rationalistic, and would like to know it renounced as an aberration of the eighteenth century. But the time will come when it will be seen that we must start again where that century came to a stop. What lies between that time and to-day is an intermezzo of thought, an intermezzo with extraordinarily interesting and valuable moments, but nevertheless an unhappy and fatal one. Its inevitable end was our sinking into a condition in which we had neither world-view nor civilization, and which contains in itself all that spiritual and material misery in which we languish.