Kant is defeated by the same fate which rules in Stoic, Indian, and Chinese monism alike. As soon as thought tries in any way to comprehend ethics in connexion with the world-process, it falls at once, whether it is conscious of it or not, into the supra-ethical manner of regarding it. Fully to shape ethics to an ethical world-view means letting them come to terms with nature-philosophy. Ethics are thereupon, as a matter of fact, devoured in one way or another by that philosophy, even if they are in word saved from that fate. The coupling of ethical idealism with epistemological is only bringing ethics and nature-philosophy into relation with one another in a roundabout way by which it is hoped to outwit the logic of facts. But this logic cannot be outwitted. The tragical result lies in the identification which has been made of the ethical with the intellectual. [pg 114] The ethical is not something irrational which becomes explicable when we betake ourselves from the world of appearance to the region of immaterial Being that lies behind it. Its intellectual character is of a peculiar kind, and rests upon the fact that the world-process, as such, comes in man into contradiction with itself. It follows that the ethical will and ethical freedom of the will are not explicable by any theory of knowledge, and cannot, moreover, serve as a support to any such theory. As a result of conceiving the moral law and empirical obedience to natural law as in absolute opposition to each other, Kant finds himself on the road which leads to a dualistic world-view. Afterwards, however, in order to satisfy the claims of the unitary and optimistic world-view which the spirit of the age prescribes to him, he manages with the stratagems which are provided for him by the combination of ethical and epistemological idealism, to work himself back on to the road which leads to the monistic point of view. Kant is great as an ethical thinker, great too with his theory of knowledge, but as shaper of a world-view he is not in the first rank. By his deepened conception of the nature of the ethical, a conception which lands him in dualistic thought, the problem of the optimistic-ethical world-view is unfolded in an entirely new way. Difficulties reveal themselves which till then no one could have imagined to exist. But he does not deal with them. He is blinded by his ambition to be the Copernicus of the optimistic-ethical world-view, believing that he can show the difficulties inherent in that view to be misunderstandings which explain themselves away as soon as, by means of his epistemological idealism, actual circumstances and relations take the place of these which are apparent but inexplicable. In reality he does nothing but replace the naïve optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world which was the basis of action for the rationalists by an artfully contrived one.