Nations are really mere abstractions; individuals alone actually exist. Thus, then, is pantheism related to ethics. But the evil and misery of the world are not in accord even with theism; hence it sought assistance from all kinds of evasions, theodicies, which yet were irretrievably overthrown by the arguments of Hume and Voltaire. Pantheism, however, is completely untenable in the presence of that bad side of the world. Only when the world is regarded entirely from without and from the _physical_ side alone, and nothing else is kept in view but the constant restorative order, and the comparative imperishableness of the whole which is thereby introduced, is it perhaps possible to explain it as a god, yet always only symbolically. But if one enters within, thus considers also the _subjective_ and _moral_ side, with its preponderance of want, suffering, and misery, of dissension, wickedness, madness, and perversity, then one soon becomes conscious with horror that the last thing imaginable one has before one is a theophany. I, however, have shown, and especially in my work “_Ueber den Willen in der Natur_” have proved, that the force which works and acts in nature is identical with the will in us. Thereby the moral order of the world is brought into direct connection with the force which produces the phenomenon of the world. For the phenomenon of the will must exactly correspond to its nature. Upon this depends the exposition of eternal justice given in §§ 63 and 64 of the first volume, and the world, although subsisting by its own power, receives throughout a _moral_ tendency. Accordingly the problem which has been discussed from the time of Socrates is now for the first time really solved, and the demand of thinking reason directed to morality is satisfied. Yet I have never professed to propound a philosophy which leaves no questions unanswered. In this sense philosophy is really impossible: it would be the science of omniscience. But _est quadam prodire tenus, si non datur ultra_: there is a limit to which reflection can penetrate and can so far lighten the night of our existence, although the horizon always remains dark. My doctrine reaches this limit in the will to live, which in its own manifestation asserts or denies itself. To wish, however, to go beyond this is, in my eyes, like wishing to fly beyond the atmosphere. We must stop there; even although new problems arise out of those which have been solved. Besides this, however, we must refer to the fact that the validity of the principle of sufficient reason is limited to the phenomenon; this was the theme of my first essay on that principle, which was published as early as 1813.