A century of purely extensive effectiveness, excluding big artistic and metaphysical production—let us say frankly an irreligious time which coincides exactly with the idea of the world-city—is a time of decline. True. But we have not _chosen_ this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our _destiny_, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant. Therefore, in approaching a problem of the present, one must begin by asking one’s self—a question answered in advance by instinct in the case of the genuine adept—what to-day is possible and what he must forbid himself. Only a very few of the problems of metaphysics are, so to say, allocated for solution to any epoch of thought. Even thus soon, a whole world separates Nietzsche’s time, in which a last trace of romanticism was still operative, from our own, which has shed every vestige of it. Systematic philosophy closes with the end of the 18th Century. Kant put its utmost possibilities in forms both grand in themselves and—as a rule—final for the Western soul. He is followed, as Plato and Aristotle were followed, by a specifically megalopolitan philosophy that was not speculative but practical, irreligious, social-ethical. This philosophy— paralleled in the Chinese civilization by the schools of the “Epicurean” Yang-chu, the “Socialist” Mo-ti, the “Pessimist” Chuang-tsü, the “Positivist” Mencius, and in the Classical by the Cynics, the Cyrenaics, the Stoics and the Epicureans—begins in the West with Schopenhauer, who is the first to make the _Will to life_ (“creative life-force”) the centre of gravity of his thought, although the deeper tendency of his doctrine is obscured by his having, under the influence of a great tradition, maintained the obsolete distinctions of phenomena and things- in-themselves and suchlike. It is the same creative will-to-life that was Schopenhauer-wise denied in “Tristan” and Darwin-wise asserted in “Siegfried”; that was brilliantly and theatrically formulated by Nietzsche in “Zarathustra”; that led the Hegelian Marx to an economic and the Malthusian Darwin to a biological hypothesis which together have subtly transformed the world-outlook of the Western megalopolis; and that produced a homogeneous series of tragedy-conceptions extending from Hebbel’s “Judith” to Ibsen’s “Epilogue.” It has embraced, therefore, all the possibilities of a true philosophy—and at the same time it has exhausted them.