PROBLEMS OF ETHICS 413 



affords the chance for moral action; and he who calculates with 

 pleasure and pain, who tries to arrange his life as happily as possible, 

 will be restrained by shrewd calculation from injuring the prevailing 

 moral institutions. The moral man has nothing to do with such 

 considerations. When he affirms the objective morality, he does so 

 because he recognizes his moral will as identical with that of previous 

 generations which have made these forms. But the time can come 

 when he discovers that a moral life within these forms is no longer 

 possible for him, when with deep regret he sees the bond of continuity 

 break which knit him in affection with the past, when he must 

 resolve to enter new untrodden paths, just as Copernicus was forced 

 to resolve to substitute a new knowledge for those which had satisfied 

 centuries. Such a man will endure calmly and patiently the con- 

 sequences which result from such a course; he will not expect to 

 be justified, through the purity of his intentions, in the eyes of his 

 fellows, if he undertakes to lay hands on the institutions which the 

 moral consciousness of his contemporaries recognizes as valid. But 

 he will also know that these same institutions owe what sacredness 

 they possess to the blood of previous martyrs, that these shadows 

 of a past can only then speak to a living generation when they have 

 tasted the sacred blood of sacrifice. 



So then we see two great movements in our time struggling about 

 the ethical questions. The one has on its side the whole apparatus 

 of scientific conceptions, the presupposition of necessary events 

 without exceptions, the knowledge that the single individual is an 

 infinitely small element in a necessary sequence of development. It 

 can explain everything, deduce everything from its conditions. At 

 one point only its power breaks down: it cannot make the individual 

 comprehend why he should raise a finger to keep in motion this 

 machine which goes of itself. 



And, opposed to this, is the other movement, which rests upon the 

 one fact that the point of view of its opponent, the scientific, is also 

 a relation of reality to values, and that man alone introduces these 

 values into reality, measures and tests it by these values. According 

 to this movement, every new human life has the question put to it, 

 what it can accomplish with these values, whether it is capable of 

 making something out of reality, out of itself, which has in itself a 

 value such as to raise it above the flux of appearances as the bearer 

 of these values. Everything previous as well as everything subsequent 

 vanishes before these thoughts that it is now day, that the night is 

 soon coming when no man can work, that at the day's end the day's 

 work must be done. But what each recognizes as his day's work, he 

 must himself find within himself. This decision is his destiny. 



I cannot better close than with the words of the man whose life 

 had little joy, but who grappled with these questions in the solitude 



