whole; in this form of morality there is a great danger of overestimating external conditions of life, and of levelling and weakening life. Certain great thinkers have advocated a morality of pure reason, which elevates man above the sphere of the useful and the pleasant; and gives to him an inner independence; but with all its greatness this morality is too formal and too abstract for us; and, besides, we lack to-day the certainty of an invisible world, which alone can give a secure foundation to this type of morality. Lastly, we have an individualistic morality, a morality of beautiful souls, which regards the complete development of one's own particular nature, the harmonious cultivation of the whole range of one's powers, as the aim of conduct, but which not only necessitates individuals who are far greater and far more characteristic in nature than we find in experience in general, but also has little power to arouse us to effort, and, if accepted exclusively, soon tends to degenerate into a refined self-enjoyment and vain self-reflection. The presence of all these tendencies and motives in morality subjects us to-day to an abundance of ethical stimuli; but it does not give us an ethic. At the most it conceals the fact that the multiplicity of activities do not form for us a universal task, which could counteract the separation into individuals, parties, particular departments, and give us the consciousness of serving in our work aims that transcend the well-being and preference of mere man. We are in need of a morality that proceeds from our own life; and in this we need much more than we are conscious of needing. For we have no universal aim that we might take up in our disposition, and by which we might test all individual activities; and so life must become disunified and inwardly alien; we lose all spiritual relation to the world. The world surrounds us in the first place as a dark and immovable fate; we do not make ourselves masters of this fate, just because we give ourselves too much to do with things. Rather, to accomplish this, we must transform reality from its very foundation by our own activity and decision; we must wage war against obscurity and irrationality, and this conflict must tend to divide our whole existence into friend and enemy, good and evil, but along with this first give to life complete activity, and lead it to world-embracing greatness. Only in this way does man, from being simply a spectator, become a co-operator in the building up of the world; only thus does that which occurs within him become in the fullest sense his own. Everything which obscures the ethical character of human life involves, therefore, a loss in greatness and dignity; a degeneration to a state of servitude, to being a mere part of an alien whole. Particular parties may be in agreement with and find satisfaction in this condition; humanity as a whole will not rest content with it. As