_Morality regarded as the highest form of protection._--Our world is _either_ the work and expression (the _modus_) of God, in which case it must be _in the highest degree perfect_ (Leibnitz's conclusion ...),--and no one doubted that he knew what perfection must be like,--and then all evil can only be _apparent_ (Spinoza is _more radical,_ he says this of good and evil), or it must be a part of God's high purpose (a consequence of a particularly great mark of favour on God's part, who thus allows man to choose between good and evil: the privilege of being no automaton; "freedom," with the ever-present danger of making a mistake and of choosing wrongly.... See Simplicius, for instance, in the commentary to Epictetus). _Or_ our world is imperfect; evil and guilt are real, determined, and are absolutely inherent to its being; in that case it cannot be the _real_ world: consequently knowledge can only be a way of denying the world, for the latter is error which may be recognised as such. This is Schopenhauer's opinion, based upon Kantian first principles. Pascal was still more desperate: he thought that even knowledge must be corrupt and false--that _revelation_ is a necessity if only in order to recognise that the world should be denied.... 412. Owing to our habit of believing in unconditional authorities, we have grown to feel a profound need for them: indeed, this feeling is so strong that, even in an age of criticism such as Kant's was, it showed itself to be superior to the need for criticism, and, in a certain sense, was able to subject the whole work of critical acumen, and to convert it to its own use. It proved its superiority once more in the generation which followed, and which, owing to its historical instincts, naturally felt itself drawn to a relative view of all authority, when it converted even the Hegelian philosophy of evolution (history rechristened and called philosophy) to its own use, and represented history as being the self-revelation and self-surpassing of moral ideas. Since Plato, philosophy has lain under the dominion of morality. Even in Plato's predecessors, moral interpretations play a most important rôle (Anaximander declares that all things are made to perish as a punishment for their departure from pure being; Heraclitus thinks that the regularity of phenomena is a proof of the morally correct character of evolution in general). 413. The progress of philosophy has been hindered most seriously hitherto through the influence of moral _arrières-pensées._ 414.