The noblest men of the period still live in the unshaken [pg 104] conviction that nothing can delay the speedy and conclusive victory of the purposive and moral. The philosophically minded mathematician and astronomer, the Marquis Marie Jean de Condorcet (1743-1794), though put by the Jacobins upon the list of the proscribed, writes, while living in concealment in Paris in a dismal room in the Rue des Fossoyeurs, his _Historical Sketch of the Progress of the Human Spirit_._(_38_)_ Then, having been betrayed, he wanders about the Clamart quarries, is recognized by the labourers, in spite of his disguise, as an aristocrat, and while confined in the prison of Bourg la Reine, puts an end to his life by poison. The document in which he gave his exposition of the ethical belief in progress concludes with a forward glance at the time, now soon to appear, when reason, having attained a position of permanent sovereignty, will put every human being in possession of the rights which belong to man as man, and will establish purposive and ethical relations in every department of life. There is one thing, it must be admitted, which Condorcet and those who share his views overlook. Their belief that the final result will be good might be considered justifiable if the will-to-progress had been endangered only through unfavourable outward circumstances, the revival, that is, of the higher estimation of reality, and the romantic idealizing of the past. But it is threatened far more seriously by something else than it is by them. The assurance displayed by rationalism rests on the fact that it regards the optimistic-ethical world-view as something proved to be correct. But it is not that. It rests like the world-views of Confucius and the Later Stoics on a naïve interpretation of the world. All deeper thought, therefore, even if it is not directed against rationalism, or even if it aims at strengthening its position, must in the long run have a damaging effect upon it. Hence Kant and Spinoza mean doom to it. Kant undermines it by his attempt to [pg 105] provide a deeper foundation for the essence of the ethical. Spinoza, the thinker of the seventeenth century, brings it to confusion when his nature-philosophy begins, a hundred years after his death, to occupy people’s attention. It is about the beginning of the new century, the nineteenth, just when the pressure exerted by material and spiritual circumstances alike begins to make itself felt, that the optimistic-ethical world-view begins to suspect the existence of the serious problems which are cropping up within it. [pg 106] CHAPTER IX THE OPTIMISTIC-ETHICAL WORLD-VIEW IN KANT Kant’s ethics, deepened, but lacking content