He does not take the trouble to ask in what the optimistic [pg 115] ethical world-view consists, to what final items of knowledge and demands it leads, and how far these are confirmed by experience of the moral law. He takes it over without examination in the formula: “God, Freedom (or Virtue), and Immortality,” which was supplied to it by rationalism, and wishes to raise it in this naïve form to a certainty. There is thus in Kant’s philosophy the most terrible want of thought interwoven with the deepest thinking. New truths, weighty in their novelty, make their appearance in it. But they get only half-way on their journey. The absoluteness of ethical duty is grasped, but its content is not investigated. Experience of the ethical is recognized as the great secret by means of which we comprehend ourselves as “other than the world”; but the dualistic thinking which goes with it is not worked out any further. That the final items of our knowledge of our world-view are assertions of the ethical will is admitted, but the consequences of this supremacy of the will over knowledge are not thought out to a conclusion. Kant stimulates powerfully the men of his time, but is unable to make secure for them the optimistic-ethical world-view in which they have lived. His mission is, although both he and they are content to deceive themselves in the matter, to deepen it, and ... to let it become less secure than before. [pg 116] CHAPTER X NATURE-PHILOSOPHY AND WORLD-VIEW IN SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ Spinoza’s attempt to reach an optimistic-ethical nature-philosophy JUST when Kant is beginning to influence men’s minds, the entirely different ideas of a thinker who had now been dead for a century, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677),_(_40_)_ begin to interest those who are searching for a world-view. The _Critique of Pure Reason_ appears in 1781. In 1785 F. H. Jacobi in his letters addressed to Moses Mendelssohn, _Concerning the Teaching of Spinoza_, draws attention once more to the philosopher whom hitherto everyone had attacked without making any effort to understand him. Spinoza desires to obtain an ethic from a real nature-philosophy. He makes no attempt to give an optimistic-ethical interpretation of the universe, or to refashion it with any theory of knowledge. He accepts it just as it is in every respect. His philosophy is therefore elementary nature-philosophy, but his method of expounding it is by no means elementary. Acquiescing in the way Descartes puts the problem and the language he uses, he makes his own thought about the universe proceed “in geometrical fashion” in a series of axioms, definitions, precepts, and proofs. Nature-philosophy is embodied in his philosophizing in a magnificent way, but it is as stiff as an ice-bound landscape.