THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
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 Kccent ^oofes bp ^uso ifluafitcrbcrff 
 
 PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE. Boston, 1899. 
 
 GRUNDZUGE DER PSYCHOLOGIE. Leipzig, 1900. 
 
 AMERICAN TRAITS. Boston, 1902. 
 
 DIE AMERIKANER. Berlin, 1904. 
 
 PRINCIPLES OF ART EDUCATION. New York, 1905. 
 
 THE ETERNAL LIFE. Boston, 1905. 
 
 SCIENCE AND IDEALISM. Boston, 1906. 
 
 PHILOSOPHIE DER WERTE. Leipzig, 1907. 
 
 ON THE WITNESS STAND. New York, 1908. 
 
 AUS DEUTSCH-AMERIKA. Berlin, igo8. 
 
 PSYCHOTHERAPY. New York, 1909. 
 
 THE ETERNAL VALUES. Boston, 1909.
 
 THE ETERNAL VALUES
 
 THE JETERNAL 
 VALUES 
 
 BY 
 
 HUGO MUNSTERBERG 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 5OUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 <^ ^\)e RitcrjsiDc JDrcsiS Cambridge 
 1909
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY HUGO MUNSTERBERG 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published May iqoq
 
 H5S 
 
 To 
 JOSIAH ROYCE 

 
 PREFACE 
 
 This is the first time that I have ventured to write a book 
 in both English and German. So far the author in me has 
 presented a case of double personality. For many years the 
 one person has written English, but has published only light 
 books and essays ; all that time the other person has written 
 in German, but has insisted on writing scholarly papers and 
 systematic works. The one tried to address a wider public ; 
 the other sought only the ear of the scholar. Neither knew 
 what the other was doing. 
 
 In this way my publications of the last year were again 
 divided. When I wanted to discuss popularly the relations of 
 psychology to law and to medicine, the American in me came 
 to the front and wrote in light vein "On the Witness Stand" 
 and "Psychotherapy." But when the philosophical striving 
 of my whole life had led me to a new idealistic standpoint 
 from which I saw the ultimate problems of the world in a 
 new light, it seemed only natural that the German in me 
 should say it in his mother tongue and with the seriousness 
 of scholarly formulation. The product was my " Philosophie 
 der Werte." 
 
 Yet the hardly expected warmth of welcome which the 
 volume found in wide spheres soon suggested to me that after 
 all the task of the book was not only to address scholars who 
 do not care in what language a book is written. Far beyond 
 the circle of philosophers it was greeted as an expression of the 
 new desires of our time, which seeks its own understanding 
 of life and world, and is tired of the mere naturalism and posi- 
 tivism and skepticism and pragmatism of the past decades. 
 The ethical idealism of the book seemed to touch the most 
 widely different layers of the community. That suggested
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 the hope that the book might fulfil a similar mission in the 
 world of American thought and here too might help to liberate 
 from the ghosts of the past. Therefore I undertook for the 
 first time the translation of a book of mine. 
 
 Yet this volume can hardly be called a translation. Much 
 in this English version is newly added and much is omitted 
 from the previous text. Many side issues, especially such as 
 connected the work with particular German movements, are 
 entirely left out, and not a few additions refer to recent 
 American discussions. Other parts are greatly condensed. 
 
 While in this way the book has become almost a new one, 
 I have not altered its external shape: the form of a philo- 
 sophical system. It would not have been difficult to re- 
 move these sharp boundary-lines and to resolve systematic 
 separations into looser forms, more attractive to the casual 
 reader. I have not yielded to this temptation because I sin- 
 cerely believe that too much in the American method of 
 philosophizing has become antagonistic to the real character 
 of philosophy. More and more the aim seems to be the 
 writing of philosophy in brilliant epigrams and clever discus- 
 sions. Especially our younger philosophers dash down their 
 thoughts in an impressionistic style which captivates and 
 does not need the slightest effort to follow. Who will doubt 
 that such picturesqueness is stimulating and attractive? Yet 
 after all it is serving the ultimate purpose of knowledge no 
 better than a picturesque and epigrammatic mathematics 
 or chemistry. Philosophy is a movement of thought which 
 demands the thoroughness of the expert, and which can be 
 followed only with concentrated attention. Everything de- 
 pends upon inner consistency, and only a closely knit system 
 can secure it. In all times only such systems have marked 
 the great periods of philosophical insight. 
 
 This must not be misunderstood. First it does not mean 
 that the philosophical understanding of the world should lead 
 us away from the reality of life and should rely on meta-
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 physical speculations. On the contrary, this world of our 
 real life is the material of our philosophical effort. In the fol- 
 lowing volume the last chapter alone faces metaphysical 
 problems. The discussion on truth and beauty, on happiness 
 and love, on science and art, on development and progress, 
 on industry and law, on morality and religion, fills the bulk 
 of the book and is not at all metaphysical. It aims to grasp 
 our real experience in its original fulness and in its true 
 significance. Every line of those chapters might be accepted 
 even by those who see other ways of solving the metaphysical 
 problem. 
 
 Moreover my insisting on the difficulty of the philosophical 
 task must not be misunderstood as if it pleaded for a philo- 
 sophical "art for art's sake." On the contrary, everybody's 
 life is controlled by some kind of philosophy, however hap- 
 hazard and inconsistent and fragmentary it may be, and 
 every true philosophy aims finally to reach the conviction 
 of the masses. But just as the physicist must work out his 
 formulae, in a way which the average reader would hardly 
 understand, before his calculations can harness nature in the 
 service of the millions, so the philosopher too will build up 
 and reform and serve human progress only if he makes no 
 concession to "common sense." Common sense, with refer- 
 ence to the problems of world and life, always means only the 
 echo of the scholarly philosophy of preceding centuries. If 
 serious, thorough thought has distilled some truth, it will be 
 distributed quickly enough through thousands of popular 
 channels. 
 
 Yet while the formulae of philosophical calculation ought 
 not even to tempt the reader who simply wants to sip the 
 wisdom of the world, no philosophy will really lead forward 
 which is not after all the expression of the deepest striving 
 of its time. The sincere conviction that this holds true for the 
 idealistic philosophy of "The Eternal Values," from the start 
 gave the real aim and meaning to this work. Throughout our
 
 X PREFACE 
 
 life a new wave is rising, a new seeking and a new longing, 
 a new feeling and a new certainty : may this book now help 
 in the New World too to bring these young and yet so old 
 ideals to clear self-consciousness and through it to inner 
 strength and power! I cannot symbolize this hope better 
 than by dedicating this work, in friendship of heart and 
 thought, to the same man whose name it carried when it 
 went forth on its first voyage. 
 
 Hugo Munsterberg. 
 
 Harvard University, 
 May, 1909.
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 Introduction 1 
 
 Skepticism and Relativism, 1 ; Idealism, 3 ; The Need of a 
 New Philosophy, 4. 
 
 PART I. THE MEANING OF VALUES 
 
 I. Physical Nature 9 
 
 The World as Material Mechanism, 9; Man and the Uni- 
 verse, 12. 
 
 11. The Psychical Nature 15 
 
 The Aim of Psychology, 15; Voluntaristic Psychology, 17; 
 Content of Consciousness, 19; Pleasure and Pain, 20; The 
 One-sidedness of Psychology, 22; Immediate Reality, 23. 
 
 III. The Personalities 27 
 
 The Individual Will, 27; Economic Values, 29; Highest 
 Values, 31 ; Modern Relativism, 34; Unconditioned Values, 
 37; Pragmatism and Idealism, 41. 
 
 IV. The Obligations 46 
 
 The Validity of Absolute Values, 46 ; A Misinterpretation 
 of the Absolute, 48; The Necessity of Action, 50; The 
 Social Norms, 51 ; The Values and the Ought, 54 ; The Ob- 
 ligation of Knowledge, 58; The Obligation of Morality, 60; 
 Self-consistency, 63 ; The Obligations and the Pure Will, 64. 
 
 V. The Satisfaction of the Will 65 
 
 Satisfaction and Pleasure, 65; Satisfaction and Fulfilment, 
 69; Pure Will Actions, 71 ; The Meaning of Realization, 72. 
 
 VI. The Eternal Values , ... 75 
 
 The Demand for a World, 75 ; The Self-assertion of Experi- 
 ence, 77 ; The System of Values, 78 ; The Prejudices against 
 Systematic Philosophy, 80 ; Philosophy and Life, 81.
 
 xii TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PART II. THE LOGICAL VALUES 
 
 VII. The Values of Existence 87 
 
 The Identity of Experience, 87; Judgment and Reality, 
 88 ; The Life Experience and Real Existence, 90. 
 
 A. Things 94 
 
 The Practical Test of Existence, 94; The Postulate of 
 Existence, 96 ; The Space-Time Form, 97; The Existence 
 
 of Mental Things, 100. 
 
 B. Persons 100 
 
 The Naturalistic Idea of Persons, 102; The Real 
 Knowledge of Others, 104; The Practical Test, 106. 
 
 C. Valuations 112 
 
 The Over-personal Will Acts, 112; The Absoluteness of 
 the Valuation, 114. 
 
 VIII. The Values op Connection 116 
 
 Identity as Principle of Connection, 116; The Ideal of 
 Science, 119. 
 
 A. Nature 121 
 
 The Totality of Things in their Connection, 121; The 
 Single Facts and the General Laws, 122; The Concep- 
 tion of Causality, 126 ; The Causal Laws and the Recog- 
 nition of Identities, 129 ; The Description and Explana- 
 tion, 130; The Natural Sciences and Psychology, 134; 
 The Absolute Value of Science, 136. 
 
 B. History 138 
 
 The Connection of Will Acts, 138; History and the 
 Objective Time, 142 ; History and Causality, 144 ; The 
 Understanding of Persons, 149; The New Will Acts, 151 ; 
 History and Things, 152, 
 
 C. Reason 155 
 
 The Connection of Evaluations, 155; The Connection 
 
 of Judgments, 159. 
 
 PART III. THE ESTHETIC VALUES 
 
 IX. The Values of Unity 165 
 
 Unity and Beauty, 165 ; The Psychological Aspect of 
 Esthetics, 167 ; The .Esthetic Introjection, 170 ; The
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS xiii 
 
 Esthetic Unity, 172; The Will of Nature, 175; Esthetic 
 Reality, 176 ; ^Esthetic Manifoldness, 177 ; Esthetic and 
 Logical Values, 180. 
 
 A. Harmony 183 
 
 The Sensuous Enjoyment, 183 ; The Beauty of Nature, 
 185 ; Natural Beauty and Art, 187. 
 
 B. Love 188 
 
 Harmony of Wills, 188; Love and the Moral Values, 
 190; Love and Pleasure, 193. 
 
 C Happiness 195 
 
 Happiness and Morality, 195 ; Happiness and Pleasure, 
 197; The Unity of Will, 198; The Will Character of 
 Happiness, 200; The Propagation of Happiness, 202. 
 
 X. The Values op Beauty 204 
 
 The Inner Agreement of the Manifold, 204 ; The Applied 
 Arts, 205; Beauty and Reality, 207; The Unreality of 
 Art, 208; Self-deception, 211; The Freedom of the Artist, 
 212 ; The Artistic Form, 217. 
 
 A. Fine Arts 218 
 
 The Content of the Picture, 218; Art and Science, 220; 
 The Form of the Picture, 223; The Lines and Colors, 
 224. 
 
 B. Literature 227 
 
 The Field of Literature, 227; The Meaning of Life, 228; 
 Historical Reality, 230 ; The Three Types of Literature, 
 233 ; The Meaning of the Drama, 234 ; The Form of 
 Literature, 237 ; Rhythm and Sound, 238. 
 
 C. Music 241 
 
 The Psychology and Esthetics of Music, 241 ; Rhjrthms 
 and Sounds, 243 ; Melody, 246 ; The Meaning of Musical 
 Beauty, 249; Music and the Inner World, 251. 
 
 PART IV. THE ETHICAL VALUES 
 
 XI. The Values of Development 257 
 
 Being and Becoming, 257; Purpose and Realization, 260. 
 
 A. Growth 263 
 
 Teleology in Natural Science, 263; The Intentions of 
 Nature, 267; The Pseudo-intentions of Nature, 270; The 
 Material of Human Deed, 273.
 
 xiv TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 B. Progress 277 
 
 History and Progress, 277; The Naturalistic View of 
 Society, 281 ; The Will of the Community, 285 ; The Indi- 
 vidual Standpoint and the Group Standpoint, 286; The 
 Stages of Civilization, 289; Progress and Regress, 293. 
 
 C. Self-Development 294 
 
 The Unfolding of the Will, 294; The Fundamental Will, 
 298. 
 
 XII. The Values of Achievement 301 
 
 The Intentional Securing of the Development, 301. 
 
 A. Industry 304 
 
 Economy, 304; The Spirit of the Economic Life, 306; 
 Nature and the Purposes of Man, 310; 'The Technical 
 Development, 314. 
 
 B. Law 317 
 
 The Historic Relativity of Law, 317; Law and Morality, 
 321; The Coercive Measures of Law, 323; Law and the 
 Economic Life, 325 ; The Absolute Value of Law, 328. 
 
 C. Morality 329 
 
 Morality and Law, 329 ; The Content of the Moral Action, 
 331; Morality and Development, 333; The Self as Value, 
 337; The Immoral Action, 340; The Moral Obligation, 
 342. 
 
 PART V. THE METAPHYSICAL VALUES 
 
 XIII. The Values of Holiness 347 
 
 The Manifoldness of Values, 347; The Conflict of Values, 
 350; The Identification of Values, 352; Religion and Philo- 
 sophy, 354; Development and Religion, 357. 
 
 A. Creation 359 
 
 God and Natural Science, 359; The Oriental Religions, 
 363; Christianity, 367. 
 
 B. Revelation 370 
 
 Revelation and History, 370; The Divine Order, 372; 
 Revelation in the Historical Religions, 373. 
 
 C. Salvation 376 
 
 The Life after Death, 376 ; Buddhism, 378 ; Christianity 
 and Salvation, 380 ; Immortality and Time, 382.
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS xv 
 
 XIV. The Values op Absoluteness 385 
 
 The Presupposition of the Values, 385; The Unification 
 of the Values, 387 ; Knowledge and Conviction, 392 ; The 
 Over-experience, 395 ; The Over-will, 398. 
 
 A. World 402 
 
 The World and the Will, 402 ; The Material of the World, 
 405; Time and Space, 407; The World and the Deed 
 
 of the Over-self, 410. 
 
 B. Mankind 412 
 
 The Individual and the Over-self, 412; The Individual 
 and the Body, 415; The Metaphysical Meaning of Man- 
 kind, 416; The Upbuilding of Values, 418. 
 
 C. Over-self 420 
 
 The Contradictions in the Self, 420 ; The Meaning of the 
 World, 422; The Meaning of Life, 426.
 
 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Is there anything in the world valuable in itself? That is our 
 question. Of course there are many things which we value 
 because you or I like them, or because they are useful for 
 a certain purpose; they are helpful to us. But such values 
 depend upon our special standpoint. A thing may be use- 
 ful to me and useless to my neighbor. It may be agreeable 
 to our social group, but disagreeable to other nations or to 
 other ages. Even the truths of to-day were not the truths 
 of yesterday and may not be valued as truths to-morrow. 
 The beauties of one school may mean ugliness to another. The 
 moral laws of one tribe may demand what is forbidden in the 
 next. Religious values have always been objects of dispute. 
 Everything seems dependent upon individual standpoints, de- 
 pendent upon individual desires. Truth is nothing but that 
 which helps us to fulfil our purposes ; beauty is nothing but 
 that which appeals agreeably to our senses ; morality is no- 
 thing but useful prescriptions which secure comfort for our par- 
 ticular social group; religion is nothing but suggestions which 
 give us hope. In short, our so-called values seem to be merely 
 means of personal gratification, changing from age to age, 
 from people to people, from group to group, from man to man. 
 Outspoken or not, that is the philosophical creed of the 
 overwhelming majority of thinking persons to-day. The 
 faithful believer, to be sure, feels that his religion really 
 brings him in contact with something which is absolutely 
 valuable. The moral man who sacrifices his life to follow 
 the call of duty believes in his deepest heart that the moral 
 deed is of absolute value. The artist who creates a thing of
 
 2 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 beauty imagines that his inspiration, too, opens to him a 
 world of absolute value. The social reformer and the states- 
 man, the pioneer and the captain of industry, when they 
 work and fight for the progress of mankind, feel that the 
 human advance is something absolutely valuable. The judge 
 when he serves on the bench is filled with the belief that it is 
 absolutely valuable to have justice prevail among men. And 
 in the midst of his scholarly research the seeker for truth is 
 indeed uplifted by the conviction that the full truth is some- 
 thing eternally valuable. But all these convictions and be- 
 liefs, these faiths and inspirations, must fade away, it seems, 
 as soon as the philosopher begins to examine them. He shows 
 that they are nothing but illusions which pleasantly deceive 
 the striving men, and that in reality no absolute values can 
 exist. Everything is relative, everything is good only for a 
 certain purpose, for a certain time, for a certain social group, 
 for a certain individual. Goodness and beauty and progress 
 and peace and religion and truth merely have pragmatic value. 
 They help us to our personal ends. Our ideals and our lives 
 are of no value in themselves. What we dream of eternal values 
 should simply be explained psychologically like the fancies 
 of a fairy-tale. Philosophical skepticism and relativism are 
 thus the last word, and their answer harmonizes with a thou- 
 sand disorganizing tendencies of our time. 
 
 To examine whether their answer is really true and the 
 whole truth, is the purpose of this philosophical volume. It 
 will show that it is the relativism and the skepticism which 
 move from misunderstanding to misunderstanding; it will 
 show that idealism is justified, nay, is demanded, by true sci- 
 ence and true philosophy, that the believers are right and the 
 pragmatists wrong, and that we may stand firmly with both 
 feet on the rock of facts, and may yet hold to the absolute 
 values as eternally belonging to the structure of the world. 
 Such an end can never be reached by simply affirming once 
 more a faithful belief and an enthusiastic conviction. To
 
 INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 profess idealism never means to prove its right. The popular 
 way of the sentimental appeal, the enthusiasm of the min- 
 ister or of the reformer, of the scholar or of the artist, of 
 the pioneer or of the moralist, cannot defend our cause. We 
 have to take the way of dispassionate logical argument; it 
 is the way of sober philosophy. But this way may divide 
 itself and reach its end by two different methods. We may 
 simply enter into a critical discussion of the positivism and 
 pragmatism and skepticism of our time. We may show 
 where their error begins and why they must lead to failure. 
 This has often been done, and successfully done; and yet it 
 never has led and never can lead to a new view of the world. 
 It is negative ; it destroys the opposing argument, but has 
 nothing better to offer; and while we may become convinced 
 that this or that relativistic philosophy is wrong and hollow, 
 we listen willingly again to every new effort in the same spirit. 
 But there is another way open. The philosopher might 
 try, not only to destroy, but to build up ; not only to criticise, 
 but to open new perspectives. Our time needs a new philo- 
 sophy. The mere heaping up of facts no longer satisfies us ; 
 the world is tired of the pose of a mere triumphal march 
 from discovery to discovery without ever asking what it all 
 means. We have come to feel that life is not more worth 
 living by the mere accumulation of collected facts. But our 
 time is tired, too, of the skeptical and relativistic philosophy 
 which always follows the periods of technical progress and 
 the advance of naturalistic knowledge. The world longs for 
 a new expression of the meaning of life and reality. Our 
 age begins to feel anew that the true riddles of the universe 
 are after all not those which the naturalist declared to be such, 
 and that we do not understand the world we live in by simply 
 decomposing it into its physical and psychical elements. Our 
 time again feels instinctively that it is not sufficient to re- 
 new the old system of the sophists; they taught, indeed, like 
 the sophists of to-day, that there is no value in any ideals,
 
 4 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 and that the individual man is the measure of all things. 
 Our time certainly welcomes every achievement of the sci- 
 ences, — the physical and the mental ones, — and does not 
 want to lose any of their conquests, but it begins to reject 
 the superficiality with which such physical and psychological 
 knowledge is raised to the dignity of a philosophy. The sci- 
 ences themselves begin to urge a critical examination of 
 their foundations, and that means that they ask about the 
 real value of truth. And in practical life, also, everywhere an 
 uncanny feeling prevails that our hasty, busy life has lost its 
 aim, that our efficiency has grown, but that the meaning of 
 our life is in danger, that everything is scattered, and that 
 we need a new unity. Clearer and clearer shine the values 
 through the world of facts. 
 
 We need a philosophy which will do justice to all the know- 
 ledge and all the aspirations of the twentieth century, and 
 yet avoid the shallowness of modern skepticism. The time 
 may not be ripe for such a new unity of its self-expression, 
 but the time for it will never come if the effort is not made 
 again and again, seriously and consistently. Mere preaching 
 and mere enthusiasm are utterly insufficient. Hard, thor- 
 ough, patient labor is needed, and no one ought to believe that 
 easy-going epigrammatic philosophy can relieve us from the 
 burden of such difficult work. Nor is it sufficient simply 
 to renew the historic systems of classical idealists from the 
 days of Plato to those of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. The know- 
 ledge of science has become new since those days, especially 
 through psychology, which has opened the widest vistas. New 
 fields of practical tasks have been secured for us. We have 
 become new types of human beings. All that must be in- 
 cluded and developed by a laborious thought, abstract and 
 apparently removed from practical life ; it must be anchored 
 in the depths of conviction. And it is certain, if our time is to 
 have a new philosophy which may give meaning to life and 
 reality, and liberate us from the pseudo-philosophic doubt
 
 INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 of our ideals, that the problem of values must stand in the 
 centre of the inquiry. The meaning of what is valuable must 
 decide our view of the world. Of course others may have 
 their full share in the study of what mankind accredits as 
 value. Sociologists and psychologists, historians and biolo- 
 gists, economists and theologians, may and must approach 
 the problem of values from new and ever new sides. They 
 have to describe and classify, and especially to explain, the 
 whole manifoldness of that which men value in the world. 
 They have to make us understand how this endless variety 
 of valuations has grown and how it originated. They may 
 enter into the fight and favor some groups of values and 
 disclaim other groups; they may try to make a change in the 
 valuations of our time and stamp new values for mankind ; 
 and yet the fundamental problem remains untouched by all 
 of them. The philosopher alone is called to answer it. 
 
 The philosophical inquiry into values is not planned to 
 give or to deny value to anything in heaven or earth, or to 
 create new values, or to reshape or to transvaluate the ac- 
 knowledged values. Still less can its goal be to explain the 
 mental process of preference by means of natural science or 
 psychology. Philosophy has rather to seek an answer to the 
 one question, how far we have a right to give to our values 
 an objective character. Philosophy needs to understand what 
 the fundamental meaning of any valuation is, and to exam- 
 ine whether and in what sense absolute valuation is pos- 
 sible at all. Philosophy never has to do with the problems 
 of special experiences, but always has to ask how and in what 
 sense such experience is possible. The philosopher leaves it 
 to the naturalists and to the historians to discover the special 
 facts of reality, and to bring them into systematic connection. 
 He keeps for his own inquiry only the deeper problem of the 
 theory of knowledge, what the real meaning of such facts can 
 be, and what it means to have such knowledge of the world 
 at all. It is the same in the domain of values. The special
 
 6 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 sciences have to study what has been valued or has been re- 
 jected, here or there, or now or then, and specialists have to 
 consider whether it would be right or wrong, useful or dan- 
 gerous, to accept or reject certain valuations. But the phi- 
 losophic theory of values seeks only what it means to have 
 values. In what sense can they be really valuable ? In what 
 sense are they dependent upon our personal standpoint? Is 
 there anything in the world valuable except our personal 
 likings and pleasures, anything worthless but the sources of 
 our personal discomfort? Is there any value which we ought 
 to acknowledge without reference to our personality ? Is 
 there any moral or logical or aesthetic or religious sin which 
 we ought to reject without reference to our personal disliking ?
 
 PART I 
 
 THE MEANING OF VALUES
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE PHYSICAL NATURE 
 
 Our question is, whether we have to acknowledge anjrthing 
 in our world as absolutely valuable. Yet if we formulate our 
 problem in this way, we should at once make clear who the 
 "we" are who are to value the world, and still more which 
 "world" is meant of which the worth or worthlessness is to 
 be weighed. The world can be defined in so many ways. The 
 theologian means something different by the " world " from 
 the physicist, and with every interpretation of the world of 
 course the question concerning its values changes. The same 
 holds true of ourselves. We too are something entirely dif- 
 ferent for the historian and for the biologist, for the chemist 
 and for the moralist, and our attitude must always get a 
 new meaning. A special way of looking on us as individuals, 
 moreover, belongs together with a special way of looking on 
 the world. The world in which we live our lives as historical 
 personalities is not the same world in which we react as bio- 
 logical organisms. That first world in which we fight the 
 struggles of our practical life, the world which we experience 
 in every pulse-beat of our real aiming and working, indeed, 
 lies far from the world of the scientist with its atoms and its 
 causal laws. We must therefore discriminate carefully of 
 which world we are to speak. It would seem most natural to 
 begin with that world of immediate subjective experience, 
 which has not been revised by scientific conceptions, but 
 which we find naively in us and with us. Yet the modern 
 man is hardly prepared to begin his outlook with a view of 
 such immediate reality. We all stand so fully in the grasp 
 of our school knowledge, and we have been so completely
 
 10 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 trained to see things with the eyes of natural science, that it 
 appears much more in harmony with our habits of thought 
 if instead we start with a picture of the world which physics 
 draws for us. That may be our first step. It is indeed quite 
 unimportant with which view of the world we begin, so long 
 as we take care to be consistent and not to mix the various 
 aspects of reality. Thus we ask as our first preparatory 
 question : What is valuable in the world which the scientist 
 explores and explains, in the world of the causal laws ? 
 
 Then we deliberately take at first the standpoint of the 
 naturalist, and look on the world as if reality itself were 
 nothing but this system of objects in space and time and 
 in causal connection. The scientist does not ask, and has 
 no right to ask, whether space and time and causality exist 
 without exception. He simply presupposes them. If he is an 
 astronomer, he knows that he would not deepen his astro- 
 nomy but distort it, if he were to look out with his telescope 
 to ascertain whether there is somewhere no space, or if he 
 were to make calculations whether there is somewhere an 
 effect without cause. The scientist studies only the details of 
 this world, but the fundamental forms and the fundamental 
 scheme of that world he accepts beforehand. There can- 
 not be anything in his world which is not included in the 
 forms of time and space and causality. Such a ground plan 
 of a causal world, however vague, is somehow in the mind of 
 even the most naive person as soon as he seeks a cause for any 
 happening, or tries to foresee an effect which is to be expected. 
 The progress of science means only the further elaboration 
 and detailed discovery of this causal world. And now we 
 ask what there is valuable in this world of the scientist. 
 
 The ideal of such a world is a material mechanism. If we 
 pad it out into a philosophy, it gives us a logically impossible 
 materialism; but if we take it simply as the foundation of 
 physical sciences, it is invulnerable. Even the demand to 
 substitute energies for the material substances only appar-
 
 THE PHYSICAL NATURE 11 
 
 ently changes such a view of the world, and is without con- 
 sequences for our problem. In the language of three thousand 
 years, we should therefore have to say that every occur- 
 rence in the universe is ultimately only a change of position 
 of smallest indivisible bodily particles, of which each is com- 
 pletely determined in its movement by preceding movements 
 in the whole system. Even all the life-processes are only 
 physical and chemical occurrences, and every chemical and 
 physical change resolves itself finally into mechanical move- 
 ments of atoms. It is quite indifferent for us how far natural 
 science is still removed to-day from the solution of this task. 
 Important only for us is the fact that natural science is bound 
 by its presuppositions never to acknowledge any unmechani- 
 cal life-energies, any over-natural influences, any mystical 
 agencies. These demands would remain even if the history of 
 its successes had not so completely affirmed the right of its 
 presuppositions. 
 
 What can be good or bad in such a turmoil of atoms? 
 There are combinations of particles which are fugitive and 
 which crumble, or which are lasting in their connections. 
 Some are simple and others are complex, some are similar to 
 one another and some are dissimilar, but nothing gives us the 
 slightest hold for the claim that the complex is better than 
 the simple, that the lasting is more valuable than the fugi- 
 tive, that the repeated is more worthy than the unique. The 
 natural scientist speaks of progress and of development when 
 he follows up the transition from the infusor to the verte- 
 brate, or from the acorn to the tree; but such conceptions, 
 which like development and progress involve a certain evalu- 
 ation, are after all disloyal to his real intention. If he is really 
 consistent with his mechanical view of the world, he has to 
 acknowledge that there would be nothing worse and nothing 
 better if the transition should lead from the mammal to the 
 amoeba, from the organism to the lifeless, from the formed 
 to the shapeless, from the cosmos to the chaos. Our own po-
 
 12 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 sition in the universe cannot change this, as we ourselves are, 
 in such a system of nature, nothing but organisms. As little 
 as the astronomer has the right to think of our earth as the 
 centre of the universe, has the biologist a right to make any 
 concessions in favor of the human organism. In the consistent 
 system of nature, the existence of man is in itself not more 
 desirable than that of pebbles on the beach. Whether the 
 earth with all the teeming organisms on its surface will sink 
 into the sun, or whether the human organism will develop 
 itself into a much more complex being with a still more com- 
 plicated brain, are two hypotheses concerning the future 
 which the naturalist has to consider with equal neutrality. 
 Whether one will occur or the other, whether man will be 
 destroyed or will climb on, is from such a point of view equally 
 without any value. Either would be simply a fact and no- 
 thing but a fact. 
 
 Of course that would at once be completely changed if 
 the one product of nature, man, should stand as something 
 absolutely valuable in the mechanical universe. PYom this 
 point of view, then, everything would become illuminated, 
 and the rays would be reflected on other things, and finally 
 everything in the universe would be shaded in accordance 
 with its relation to man. In that case, evidently, the growth 
 of the race from the simplest animal to the most complex 
 would indeed deserve to be called a development, that is, 
 a change from the worse to the better, from the less valuable 
 to the more valuable. In the same way, the cooling of the 
 earth's surface would have represented a real progress. But 
 we undermine the whole system of nature, if we destroy its 
 equilibrium at any one place by such an arbitrary valua- 
 tion. Just as it would be indifferent for the system of nature 
 whether the law of causality should be broken at a few or 
 at many points, in the same way it makes no difference 
 whether we give value to a few or to many molecular bodies. 
 Nature is no longer nature when the chain of causality is
 
 THE PHYSICAL NATURE 13 
 
 broken at any point, and nature is no longer nature when 
 any causal process in it is acknowledged as more valuable 
 than any other. Man's life cannot make an exception there. 
 Every evaluation and every preference evidently presup- 
 poses a will which takes an attitude and which finds its sat- 
 isfaction. But in the conception of the causal system of na- 
 ture lies included the complete independence of any attitude 
 and any will. The things of the world enter into the mechani- 
 cal system only in so far as they are conceived in relation to 
 one another, and without relation to the will of the spec- 
 tator. Surely that is a one-sidedness of the naturalistic view ; 
 it is an aspect which is foreign to our immediate reality of 
 life. In our practical experience things have their meaning 
 just through our attitude; their existence is bound up with 
 our interest in them. But the whole significance of the nat- 
 uralistic view of the world lies in this one-sidedness by prin- 
 ciple; the naturalist cannot know anything, and does not 
 want to know anything, but the objects in their causal rela- 
 tions among themselves. To look on things as parts of nature 
 means to reconstruct and to remodel them in our conceptions, 
 until they come in question only as causes and effects. The 
 consciousness which knows the mechanical universe is thus 
 no longer the individual with his will and his purposes, but 
 merely a passive spectator, a consciousness which without 
 any interest simply becomes aware of the interplay of ener- 
 gies in this world. Such a personality of course is not a real 
 man. The standpoint of the naturalist is an artificial one ; it 
 involves certain abstractions. The world is in a way cut off 
 from our real life-attitudes, and has been made a mere object 
 of awareness ; but in this abstraction lies at the same time its 
 incomparable strength. It allows us to understand the pro- 
 cesses in the world as results of laws, and thus to bring them 
 into mathematical relations and finally to master them and 
 to put nature in harness. We can go even further. The 
 standpoint of the naturalist differs from that of real man
 
 14 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 with his life-interests, not only by abstracting from his will 
 and preference, but by extinguishing his individuality. Na- 
 ture as such does not exist for this spectator or that spectator, 
 for you or for me. It is conceived as being the same for every 
 one. The knower of nature is ultimately an impersonal con- 
 sciousness, which has not only no influence on the processes 
 of nature, but which has not even any individual place in its 
 system. In short, nature is conceived as if it exists in itself, 
 independent of the subjects who know it. Nature is simply 
 another name for the totality of things which are by principle 
 independent of any subject, and therefore without relation 
 to any will, and therefore without any value. 
 
 To be sure, that does not at all exclude the fact that the 
 relation to man may play an important role also in natural 
 science ; but in that case man is himself considered as such a 
 part of nature. For instance, the chemist may consider cer- 
 tain chemical substances in their effect on the human organ- 
 ism, and classify them as food, or as drugs, or as poisons ; and 
 from that point of view he is justified in calling the foods 
 valuable and the poisons harmful. But if we take it rigor- 
 ously, we must say that in the chemical system as such the 
 substances which feed man and the substances which kill 
 man are equally neutral, inasmuch as man himself is in that 
 system only a chemical substance, and the assimilation or 
 destruction of that chemical complex offers from the chemical 
 standpoint no reason to leave the neutral position of mere 
 description. Of course, nothing is changed if, instead of the 
 single human being, perhaps the whole human race is eval- 
 uated. As part of nature even all mankind is nothing but an 
 object of explanation.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PSYCHICAL NATURE 
 
 We have so far spoken of only one half of nature. We have 
 narrowed the conception in such a way that it contained only 
 the system of physical objects and excluded the mental ob- 
 jects. Such a simplification makes it easier to grasp the idea 
 of a system which is free from values. As soon as the contents 
 of the psychical experience are added to that physical expe- 
 rience, new and unaccustomed difficulties arise. And yet it 
 is evident that a description of all the objects of experience 
 which we find in the world must include also the mental con- 
 tents, the ideas and thoughts, the feelings and emotions. 
 The naturalist may interpret them as products of the organ- 
 ism, and the psycho-physicist may consider their occurrence 
 as determined by processes in the brain, but in every case 
 they remain, after all, something different from the space- 
 filling material objects. A sensation is never a nerve-cell and 
 is never mechanical energy, and yet no one denies that such 
 sensations have just as much real existence in the world as 
 the nerves, and that psychology has therefore the right to 
 exist as well as physics. Of course, if we are really to consider 
 the mental world as part of the causal system of nature, we 
 must treat it also as a series of objects which we find, and 
 which are to be described, to be classified, and to be explained. 
 The analysis of the elements, and the causal explanation of 
 the processes, is then the true aim of psychology. 
 
 This aim of psychology is nowadays under a discussion 
 which has often confused the issues. The popular literature 
 is always inclined to think of psychological study as going on 
 where inner life is interpreted in its meaning, or analyzed in
 
 16 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 its intentions, or understood in its internal relations of pur- 
 pose. In the popular use of the word, perhaps, we call the 
 poet, or the skilful lawyer, or the clever politician a great 
 psychologist. But we must be clear from the start that there 
 we give to psychology a meaning which is fundamentally dif- 
 ferent from that which it has in the realm of science. The sit- 
 uation is this. In our immediate life-reality, which the poet ex- 
 presses, which the historian interprets, and in which our legal 
 or political or moral or social interests lie, we feel ourselves 
 as personalities, and as such characterized by our unity, by 
 our freedom, and by our purposiveness. In every act of ours, 
 in every feeling and every volition and every thought, we 
 are conscious as a self which expresses its aims and meanings. 
 Every idea of ours points beyond itself, every volition binds 
 us in our decisions, and every experience gets meaning by 
 our attitudes. The most immediate task which life demands 
 from us in the understanding of ourselves and of others is 
 therefore to interpret our ideas, to draw the consequences of 
 our will, to appreciate the attitudes, to measure them by 
 higher standards. We do that in our practical life all the 
 time, and there are many scholarly pursuits which carry out 
 just this aim in a most systematic fashion. The jurist, for 
 instance, systematically interprets in such a way certain will- 
 acts, or the mathematician develops consistently the conse- 
 quences of certain ideas in our minds. The historian speaks 
 of man in the full reality of his purposive self. As a matter 
 of course, all that is most important and most necessary, if 
 we want to understand man and his inner life, and yet it is 
 absolutely no psychology in the technical sense of the word. 
 Psychology has no other aim but, like any natural science, 
 to describe and to explain its material, while every interpre- 
 tation and appreciation of mental life belongs to entirely 
 different spheres of human interest. It is true, psychology 
 has not had the good fortune to reach, even in scientific quar- 
 ters, that complete clearness about its own task which, for
 
 THE PSYCHICAL NATURE 17 
 
 instance, astronomy or chemistry has. Silently those two 
 different ways of looking on mental life are mixed together. 
 While no astronomer nowadays would any longer confuse the 
 appreciation of the stars with the description and explana- 
 tion of their movements, as they still did in the seventeenth 
 century, in psychology the descriptive and the explanatory 
 account of mental life are still too often intert\vined with an 
 effort to examine the ideas in their meaning and the inner 
 purposive relations of the will. 
 
 Whoever insists that both groups of endeavors belong to 
 psychology ought to feel obliged to recognize two funda- 
 mentally different kinds of psychology. We have first the 
 causal psychology, which considers all inner experiences as 
 material for description and explanation. That means that 
 it treats the inner experience like objects. They are then 
 simply contents of consciousness, which must be analyzed 
 into their elements in the same way in which the anato- 
 mist dissects the body into its tissues and the tissues into 
 their cells. And, finally, those contents of consciousness are 
 to be explained as the physicist explains the changes in the 
 contents of space. But we should have in the second place 
 another kind of psychology, which some like to call volun- 
 taristic psychology, which interprets the meaning of the self 
 and follows up the inner will-relations. There is no harm in 
 the double use of the word so long as in this way the two 
 methods are cleanly and clearly separated. A danger for 
 intellectual straightforwardness sets in only when both are 
 carelessly mixed, as too often happens. The result is a multi- 
 colored pseudo-psychology, which tries to suit every one 
 and therefore does not really suit any one. The truth, how- 
 ever, is, that if we look deeper into those two tasks, we can 
 easily recognize that voluntaristic psychology has essentially 
 to answer questions which find their natural place in the field 
 of logic, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of history and religion, 
 and that the name of psychology ought to be left simply to
 
 18 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 that other group which deals in a descriptive and explanatory 
 way with the inner experience. 
 
 To us here only the one fact is essential, namely, that 
 such a scientific causal objective treatment of mental life is a 
 possible view of inner experience. We can abstract from the 
 question whether other aspects are also rightly or wTongly 
 called psychology. We certainly have to consider at the pre- 
 sent stage of our discussion only that descriptive psychology, 
 if we really want to answer the question whether there is 
 anything valuable in the world which the naturalist can find. 
 The naturalist is for us any one who looks on the world as 
 material of description and explanation only. Mental life is 
 a part of his world only in so far as it is considered also as 
 a system of describable and explainable objects, and not as 
 expression of a will and of a self. 
 
 Hence, the true psychologist sees the whole manifoldness of 
 perceptions and thoughts, of feelings and emotions, of judg- 
 ments and volitions, lying before him as the physicist sees 
 the manifoldness of bodily things. There in the outer world 
 it rains and it snows, here in the inner world joy arises or 
 anger, a volition appears, a judgment comes in, ideas enter 
 and depart; it is a piece of unbodily nature controlled by 
 laws, and the spectator is the mere consciousness. It does not 
 influence them and does not interfere with them; it simply 
 becomes aware of them. The idea of the own "1" is then 
 only one special content among other contents of conscious- 
 ness, and every inner activity and act of attention and every 
 decision must be understood as a mere change in the elements. 
 The atoms of the physical universe alter their positions, and 
 produce in this way the unlimited manifoldness of forms in 
 the outer world. The psychical elements alter their strength 
 and their vividness, and the resulting play produces the 
 unlimited manifoldness of those psychical contents. Such a 
 psychological view is again entirely unfit to be proclaimed 
 a philosophy. It would be a superficial positivism, which
 
 THE PSYCHICAL NATURE 19 
 
 indeed has too often been honored as a philosophical view of 
 the world, and yet is not more fit for it than the materialism 
 of the physicist. But while both positivism and materialism 
 are entirely insufficient to give us an ultimate view of reality, 
 both are necessary means for the concrete scientific task. 
 The materialistic view is essential as presupposition of nat- 
 ural science, and the positivistic view is essential as founda- 
 tion of scientific psychology. Psychologists and physicists 
 are not responsible for the fact that their special scientific 
 aspects are misunderstood as complete views of the world. 
 They know that they have to deal with abstractions, but that 
 those abstractions are essential for the solution of their par- 
 ticular problems, which serve the tasks of life. 
 
 We now return to our starting-point. If we consider the 
 inner life from a psychological point of view, that is, as part 
 of nature, is there in our contents of consciousness anything 
 which has value? The temptation to answer that question 
 affirmatively lies near. For instance, we find feelings of plea- 
 sure which we like to keep. Does not that mean that we treat 
 them as valuable, as against, for instance, feelings of pain 
 which we dislike? But now we must look more carefully into 
 this fact. Our presupposition was that we consider our inner 
 life as mere content of consciousness. We experience it only 
 as passive spectators. The "we" which tries to keep the 
 pleasure and tries to reject the pain is therefore not really the 
 same "we" which experiences that whole process. The "we" 
 which experiences is simply the consciousness. But this con- 
 sciousness does not reject or attract anything, this conscious- 
 ness only becomes aware of what is going on. Now, in the 
 midst of the contents which consciousness finds, there occurs 
 the idea of our self, and there also occurs the pain or the plea- 
 sure, and we become aware that this self reenforces the plea- 
 sure and suppresses the pain; but all that goes on in the 
 midst of the content. The pleasure is therefore in harmony 
 with another content of our consciousness, namely, with the
 
 20 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 idea of ourselves, and the pain is in disharmony with that 
 idea which we find in our consciousness. But pain and plea- 
 sure are neither in harmony nor in disharmony with us, the 
 spectators. For us as spectators, the idea of ourselves, and 
 that other content which we call pleasure or pain, are equally 
 nothing but objects of awareness. Like spectators, we note 
 how this idea of our "I," which is crystallized about the sen- 
 sations of our body, contains those efforts to reject the pain 
 and to continue the pleasure. For us as spectators, pain and 
 pleasure stand only in line with the rank and file of the other 
 contents of consciousness. They have an effect on certain 
 other contents, but they are neither pleasurable nor displea- 
 surable, neither valuable nor worthless, for the spectator. 
 That is, from a strictly psychological point of view, pleasure 
 and pain are as indifferent as the molecules of the universe 
 are indifferent in the system of physics. No atom is more 
 valuable than another atom for the physicist, no feeling is 
 more valuable than another feeling for the psychologist. In 
 the procession of the passing contents of consciousness, a 
 state of rejection follows the feeling of pain and a state of 
 desire follows the feeling of pleasure, but that is interest- 
 ing only for the description of the psychical connections, it 
 has no significance for the value of pleasure and pain. It is 
 never the consciousness itself which desires or which rejects. 
 The desire and the rejection are only parts of that idea of the 
 self which is itself nothing but one of the neutral contents of 
 consciousness. 
 
 Of course it is evident that all that would be entirely 
 changed, if we acknowledged that pleasure is in itself a valu- 
 able content of consciousness. The whole mental content, 
 and through it the whole human life, and through it the 
 whole process of the universe, could then easily be shaded in 
 accordance with its worth and worthlessness. Everything 
 would become valuable in accordance with the degree with 
 which it caused psychical pleasures in consciousness. We
 
 THE PSYCHICAL NATURE 21 
 
 might then only quietly agree that the pleasure of two per- 
 sons is a still more valuable content of consciousness than the 
 pleasure-feeling of only one, and at once we should be pre- 
 pared to pass judgment upon history and the whole cosmos. 
 Indeed, that is the method with which superficial thought 
 proceeds every day, and the biological and "monistic" ethics 
 takes its life from such thoughtlessness. All that would be 
 very simple indeed, if in the framework of such biological- 
 sociological-monistic view of the world there existed any rea- 
 son to give more value to one content of consciousness than 
 to another, to consider pleasure and joy and ecstasy miore 
 valuable than hunger or toothache. Whoever has once seri- 
 ously said, " Nature ! " must know that he has entered a world 
 of physical and psychical objects in which everything is 
 equally neutral. All exhaust their whole existence by the 
 mere fact that they are parts of the causal system. In their 
 relations of cause and effect are expressed all the relations 
 which are thinkable for them. As parts of physical or psychi- 
 cal nature they cannot also enter into relation with the will 
 of the spectator, and thus get value by his like and dislike. 
 But that certainly does not mean simply that the physicist 
 or psychologist as such has to ignore the values of nature, and 
 that therefore some one else from another point of view may 
 still recognize values in the natural system. No ; wherever an 
 evaluation begins, the object is no longer conceived as part 
 of the physical-psychological universe. If we say good or 
 bad, the physical or mental objects which are meant to be 
 causes and effects only are transformed into something new 
 which has no place in the system of nature. As soon as we 
 acknowledge that the living man is more valuable than the 
 grain of sand, and that the feeling of pleasure is more valu- 
 able than a foul-smell sensation, everything is sacrificed. 
 The equilibrium is then destroyed, the Archimedic point is 
 found from which nature can be thrown off its balance. But 
 we do know only that man is more complex than a grain of
 
 22 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 sand, and that the joy-feeling connects itself with one kind of 
 efiort-feelings and the foul-smell sensation with another kind. 
 We do not know that one is better than the other. If the 
 crank of the world-machine were turned backward, and every 
 change were to go on in such a way that the complex would 
 become simpler and simpler and that pain would become per- 
 manent, we should have no right to consider that worse than 
 the accustomed series of natural events, which only inconsist- 
 ent naturalists call a development, and which only inconsist- 
 ent psychologists call a progress. In the world of physics and 
 psychology this is the last word. 
 
 But is it possible that physics and psychology are ever the 
 last word for the thinking spirit? Can we ever acknowledge 
 the world which is conceived as mere nature, as the totality 
 in which our real life is moving? Yes, would it even be pos- 
 sible to have the science of physics and the science of psy- 
 chology as such, if the physical universe and the psychical 
 content of consciousness were the totality of the real, that 
 is, if there were only objects for a passive spectator? Are not 
 these judgments of the physicist and psychologist themselves 
 demonstration of the one-sidedness of such an aspect ? Of 
 course, it might be replied that the thoughts of the naturalist 
 and of the psychologist are then themselves to be considered 
 as psychical objects, which as such would be neutral contents 
 of consciousness. But that is impossible. The mere existence 
 of psychical contents is not a psychological description and 
 explanation any more than the existence of the stars is as- 
 tronomy. The thoughts of the physicist and psychologist can 
 be considered as psychical objects, and thus can be made 
 material of psychology, only in case a psychologist of a higher 
 order stands behind them and compares, analyzes, describes, 
 connects, explains them like all other contents of conscious- 
 ness. The science of causal processes which are given to a 
 passive spectator is itself possible only because the scientist 
 as such is no passive spectator. He takes his attitude, se-
 
 THE PSYCHICAL NATURE 23 
 
 lects and connects his material, and his very act of abstrac- 
 tion is such a purposive activity. The scientist has to think 
 the world as content of an inactive consciousness, for the 
 purpose of grasping it as a causal system, but his thinking 
 itself is activity. 
 
 Correspondingly we can say, in general, that the mass of 
 physical and psychological contents must be thought as free 
 from every value, as we have seen, but this thought itself has 
 the character of an evaluation. The objects of the scientific 
 judgments are without value, but the scientific judgments 
 themselves are affirmations of value. Thus the simple fact 
 of a scientific statement proves that reality is more than a 
 system of natural objects. The question whether there exist 
 real values is therefore in no way denied so long as we have 
 only found that there are no values in the system of physi- 
 cal and psychical objects. Those systems have resulted 
 from the reconstructing thought of the scientist who thinks 
 the world without value for the purpose of thinking it in 
 causal connection; but this work itself moves in a reality 
 which logically precedes the reconstructing system, and in 
 which the thinking itself demonstrates the relation to values 
 as it aims towards the value of truth. 
 
 From the system of nature which the abstracting thought 
 of the thinker reconstructs, we find in such a way the bridge 
 to the immediate reality in which his scholarly thought pro- 
 ceeds. But as soon as we have reached that reality, we easily 
 recognize that it is not only the sphere in which our scientific 
 thought goes on, but that it is the sphere of our whole prac- 
 tical life. Whenever in the changing days I follow my desires 
 and am obedient to my duties, when I use things and under- 
 stand men, when I am in joy or in grief, when I praise or 
 blame, at first I do not know anything of things or men or 
 aims in the way in which the scientist or the psychologist 
 knows them and treats them. My feeling and willing, my 
 hope and my regret, are for me not a content of consciousness
 
 24 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 which is simply found like an object. They have lost their ori- 
 ginal meaning when they are confronted with consciousness 
 like objects. In reality we are to ourselves not created nature, 
 but free creators ; our self is not found, but with immediate 
 certainty it is felt and asserted in the act of our attitude. 
 
 Together with the "I," we know the "thou." There, too, 
 an immediate experience is transformed into a result of arti- 
 ficial thought, if a piece of psychological nature is substituted 
 for the other man. Such naturalistic transformation may be 
 necessary for certain purposes, but surely it is no longer the 
 fresh pulsating life which speaks to us in the "thou "-expe- 
 rience of immediate reality. The psychologist may explain to 
 us that w^e perceive in nature only physical organisms, and 
 that the similarity of their movements to our own leads us 
 to the conclusion that those other bodies have consciousness 
 like ourselves. That is perfectly true in the system of natural 
 science, but the life-experience of every hour tells us that our 
 immediate relation to friend and foe has after all anentirely 
 different meaning. When we meet in conversation, we do 
 not come in question for each other as objects. The other 
 person with whose plans I agree or disagree is to me primarily 
 no object of perception, but a subject which I acknowledge. 
 He is no thing which I find, but a will w^hich I support or 
 fight; in short, he is a piece of reality which as such does not 
 belong in the system of nature. As I feel myself as the sub- 
 ject of attitude and will, my friends, too, are to me first per- 
 sonalities which take attitudes, and which as such want to 
 be understood and interpreted and appreciated. 
 
 Finally, the things. They, too, are in the immediate reality 
 not physical and psychical objects without values, seen be- 
 hind the conception-gate of the causal sciences. The physicist 
 tells me that those blossoming trees before my window stand 
 there independent of me as physical things ; the psychologist 
 adds that all that I know of those trees are my perceptions, 
 and that those trees as such perceptive ideas are my content
 
 THE PSYCHICAL NATURE 25 
 
 of consciousness. Thus they show me two groups of objects, 
 the psychical and the physical; the psychical with its rich- 
 ness of color included within my consciousness, the physical 
 composed of uniform atoms. But when I turn my eyes to the 
 trees and their glorious beauty, I do not know anything of 
 that doubleness of which the sciences speak. In reality, I do 
 not find there any perceptive idea in me ; but there without 
 the window I have the branches and the blossoms, there 
 without is the perceived thing, and no reality puts any spe- 
 cial image of it into my own person. Again, the demand for 
 causality may lead me to that separation. I may for certain 
 purposes feel obliged to split the real object into that which 
 is common to all and which I call physical, and into that which 
 is related to me alone and which I call psychical. But no im- 
 mediate reality suggests to me that these two separated sys- 
 tems of objects exist from the beginning. 
 
 There is no limit. If the perceived world is undivided, the 
 same must be true for all which memory brings to us or which 
 imagination creates. The artificial doubleness is nowhere 
 content of reality. In my memory, for instance, I really grasp 
 the past object, and at first do not know anything of the 
 doubleness which separates the physical external thing of 
 past days from my present memory-idea. Finally, in that 
 immediate reality in which the things are neither atoms with- 
 out nor psychical contents within me, but are still unbroken, 
 really experienced things, in that reality I myself am never 
 merely a passive spectator of the things. I am always a self 
 for which the things are means and ends, objects of fear and 
 hope, of desire and dislike. 
 
 Here we do not have to ask whether it is our duty to recon- 
 struct the subjectively experienced world for certain pur- 
 poses as a physical-psychical system of nature. This ques- 
 tion will come to us as soon as we examine the value of science. 
 But it is evident, indeed, that we have left the immediate life 
 behind us, when we look around in the system of nature. In
 
 26 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 life we and the others with us are subjects of will and of atti- 
 tude, and the things are not objects of a passive spectator, but 
 aims and means of a purposive will. We have seen fully that 
 the causally conceived nature must be thought as without 
 any values, but that cannot lead us to any materialistic or 
 positivistic denial of values. It only leads us to the more 
 important question, in what sense we can acknowledge val- 
 ues in the world of immediate life, in that world in which 
 the thought of a nature without value itself arises only as a 
 mental deed in the service of a valuable purpose.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PERSONALITIES 
 
 In the realm of natiire, the bodily and the mental nature, 
 we could not find any values because nature as such has no 
 relation to will. Now we enter the realm of immediate life- 
 experience. Here we are subjects of will. Here our decision is 
 no longer the effect of foregoing causes, but comes in question 
 with reference to our purposes and to our aims. Have we now 
 a firm anchorage for the values of the world? Can we under- 
 stand the value in its pure validity from the will of individ- 
 uals? But this question evidently has no meaning so long as 
 we simply identify value with that which is the goal of our 
 will. In that case we could not desire an5d:hing which would 
 not by this mere fact of our desire be raised to the dignity of 
 a value. For certain human interests we are accustomed to 
 such terms. The political economist, for instance, is in the 
 habit of calling the things which are desired, values. If the 
 philosopher follows in this path, he needs of course, every 
 time, qualifying additions, if his inquiry into values is to have 
 any meaning. If he studies the character of values, he does 
 not intend to discuss the value of butter and eggs. The phi- 
 losopher in his sphere of thought might even hesitate to call 
 food valuable at all, in spite of the fact that the hungry man 
 longs for it, that the consumer enjoys it, and that the grocer 
 in buying and selling measures it by the standard of other 
 desired things. If the philosopher is ready to use the word 
 "value " in such a colorless way, and to concede to the econo- 
 mist that everything is valuable which is object of desire, 
 he has simply to divide the values at once into two large 
 groups. He must make from the start a sharp demarcation
 
 28 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 line between relative values and absolute values. Whether 
 in reality two such kinds of values exist has to be examined. 
 It would be thinkable that only the relative values have 
 existence, that is, that everything would be valuable only for 
 this or that individual, in this or that position, under this or 
 that condition. But even if the reality of absolute values is 
 denied, this separation remains necessary. In the spirit of crit- 
 ical philosophy, value always means an absolute value. But 
 if we use the word in its wider sense, our question is now 
 clear. That there exist relative values in the world of imme- 
 diate life is then a matter of course to us. As it is a world in 
 which the personalities are subjects of will, everything which 
 is object of their will must have such conditional value. Our 
 real question remains. It is the question whether, in this 
 sphere of individual desires, there exist also unconditional ab- 
 solute values, values which are valuable in themselves with- 
 out reference to this or that individual and his wishes. So 
 long as we were speaking of nature, the separation into rela- 
 tive and absolute values was superfluous, as a world in which 
 there is no will can have no values whatever. 
 
 If all values in the world are based on the fact that indi- 
 viduals as individuals desire and prefer for themselves certain 
 things, evidently we have only the one class of values, the 
 relative ones. Every one who wants to acknowledge only the 
 absolute values as true values would have to claim in this 
 case that the world has merely pseudo-values. Indeed, it is 
 impossible ever to deduce an absolute value from the world 
 of individual personal desires. There exists no bridge from 
 the individual pleasure and displeasure to the absolute value. 
 So long as we start from the selfish desire of individuals, — 
 and there may be unlimited millions of them, — we shall 
 always come only to social and economic values which have 
 relative validity. A value which without reference to indi- 
 vidual pleasures and displeasures belongs to the world of 
 reality itself, and which thus stands above all individual de-
 
 THE PERSONALITIES 29 
 
 sires, remains out of the question there. Nature did not know 
 any unconditional values, because nature had no relation at 
 all to will ; but the world of personal desires has no uncondi- 
 tional values, because in it every relation to will lacks the 
 general necessary unconditional character. Whoever is con- 
 vinced that all values in the world can be, and ultimately 
 must be, based on the desire for pleasure in individuals, is 
 certainly more consistent if he denies every absolute value 
 than if, as frequently happens, he bolsters up the conditional 
 values into eternal ones. 
 
 Indeed, there never has been a lack of efforts to proclaim 
 unconditional values in the sphere of personal desires. The 
 speculations about value in political economy have shown 
 the way. Everybody agreed that the value of things referred 
 to the needs of personalities, but the mutual relations of such 
 individual desires allow the building up of certain systems 
 of goods. In these systems everything may have its defi- 
 nite position, which thus becomes independent of the chance 
 desires of a particular individual. For instance, we may de- 
 termine the value by the relation of the human needs to the 
 available amount. That which exists in an unlimited quan- 
 tity, then, has no economic value in spite of its use, and that 
 which does not satisfy any need has no economic value either. 
 Or we may determine the value by its relation to the mutual 
 exchange of things. But whatever our principle may be, in 
 every case we aim towards a scale of things which has social 
 and thus individual character. That alone allows us to speak 
 of the economic value of certain goods without asking whether 
 they merely please Tom, Dick, and Harry. Diamonds are ob- 
 jectively more valuable than pebbles, and this value is inde- 
 pendent of the caprice of any individual. If, nevertheless, 
 the economist sometimes says that such an evaluation refers 
 to subjective and not to objective conditions, he takes the 
 word "objective" in the sense of physical as against psychi- 
 cal. He only wants to say by that, that it is not the physical
 
 30 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 quality of the mineral which makes diamonds more desirable 
 than pebbles, but that it is the mental desire of human beings 
 in their vanity and their longing for self-adornment which 
 makes the value. Yet if we mean by objective that which is 
 independent of subjective arbitrariness, we have to acknow- 
 ledge that the pebbles are objectively less valuable. In the 
 money-system these objective values are brought to their 
 simplest expression, and the individual has to accept the fact 
 that in the world in which he moves the one thing is cheap, 
 the other expensive. 
 
 Nevertheless, there ought not to be any lack of clearness 
 about the fact that such economic evaluations represent 
 merely relative goods. Their economic value remains, after 
 all, determined by their power to satisfy the demands of indi- 
 viduals as such. Under definite social conditions, where defi- 
 nite needs and desires are prevalent, we can build up such an 
 economic pyramid of values, in which a few things are at the 
 top and many things at the bottom. But as soon as the needs 
 of the groups change, and the conditions of production and 
 distribution and consumption are altered, this whole pyramid 
 falls to pieces. It certainly does not belong to the meaning 
 of the universe, nor to the foundation of reality, that the one 
 thing stands high and the other low in the scale of market- 
 values. If nature were to regulate our needs in such a way 
 that the means for their satisfaction were at the disposal of 
 every one in an unlimited supply, the economic values would 
 disappear altogether; and yet nothing would be changed in 
 the meaning of reality. Hence it is clear that that kind of 
 objectivity of values which is expressed by the market price 
 still lies entirely in the circle of relative values which are 
 determined by the needs of individuals. 
 
 Ultimately we are not led to any higher point by those 
 theoretical speculations which try to determine the values 
 by the character of the desires. Here it is no longer the ques- 
 tion of mere objects of exchange and thus of marketable
 
 THE PERSONALITIES 31 
 
 things. Every possible content of our interests, every mate- 
 rial of our impressions and thoughts, can be considered from 
 the point of view of its desirability. If we take such an atti- 
 tude of appreciation as a standard, we can say that every- 
 thing is valuable in accordance with its desirability, or, in 
 the language of other theories, in accordance with its pleasant- 
 ness. Of course such systems demand from the start many 
 supplementary restrictions. Not every value, for instance, 
 presupposes an actual desire. Often it must be sufficient that 
 we should have the desire, if the object were not already in 
 our possession. That which we own remains valuable to us 
 in spite of the fact that it is no longer an object of an actual 
 desire. We can also easily enter into many subdivisions. 
 These theories separate, for instance, those values which are 
 in themselves pleasant and those which are only causes of 
 pleasant effects. And from there we can go further on to the 
 subtlest classification of the agreeable and of the useful. Such 
 theories can now again easily advance to so-called objective 
 values, which are superior to and independent of the chance 
 desires and the haphazard pleasures. We can take as stand- 
 ard the intensity of the feeling or the expansion of the feeling, 
 and so on. For instance, the desire for a fugitive stimulus is 
 less intense than that for a source of lasting happiness. The 
 drama and the symphony furnish a deeper satisfaction than 
 the nursery -rhyme and the street-song; the noble deed of 
 one's friend wakens a more vivid pleasure than the conven- 
 tional politeness ; the scholarly work secures a richer enjoy- 
 ment than a superficial talk. 
 
 In this way I may be able ultimately to find the climax- 
 values, perhaps even one which is highest of all and which, 
 therefore, I prefer to all others. It may be the mild peace of a 
 soul without desires, or it may be the completeness of a har- 
 monious active life. As soon as I have acknowledged such 
 highest value, it becomes necessarily the objective point of 
 comparisons for all the other special values. And yet it can-
 
 32 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 not be denied that even such supreme value gets its excep- 
 tional position, after all, only through comparison with the 
 others. In itself it is in no way different from the remainder 
 of the sources of pleasure. From the most fleeting pleasure 
 of my tongue to the highest satisfaction in life leads a con- 
 tinuous path of small steps, and there is nowhere a decisive 
 turn in the road from the personal to the over-personal. That 
 apparently definite point of comparison has its own position 
 only in the midst of a system which itself has no definite 
 absolute position. 
 
 We do not reach any other result if we take as a standard 
 the expansion of the field. The higher value then belongs 
 to that which gives pleasure to many and not only to one. 
 The greatest pleasure of the greatest possible number be- 
 comes the apparently independent background of every 
 valuation. But even if a miracle occurred which satisfied 
 every desire on earth and filled every heart with pleasure, 
 would there exist any reason to acknowledge by principle a 
 difference between such a pleasure and the pleasure of those 
 who enjoy a feast? The illusion of absoluteness may arise 
 still more vividly, if we abstract entirely from concrete indi- 
 viduals, and refer our evaluation to a not-existing ideal per- 
 sonality. Such an ideal person is indeed introduced into the 
 world of conceptions as soon as the theories speak of a being 
 whose feelings are determined by a complete knowledge of 
 all the qualities and effects of things. Of course, no real man 
 can boast such a perfect acquaintance, and every practical 
 evaluation among men must accordingly have its sources of 
 error. We may deceive ourselves as to the effects of a thing. 
 The pleasure which we expected may not come up, or may 
 be overshadowed by accompanying displeasures from the 
 same source. Thus a real evaluation ought to be determined 
 by an ideal man, who foresees exactly whether or not things 
 really will give us pleasure. 
 
 But have we really gained anything new by principle in
 
 THE PERSONALITIES 33 
 
 such a way? Such an ideal being cannot accomplish any- 
 thing except a certain supplementation and correction of 
 that which the erring individual might have desired. But in 
 its character and significance, its activity is not different 
 from that of the average individual. The average physical 
 man of the statistical tables may walk nowhere on the earth, 
 and nevertheless his energies are in no way superhuman. In 
 the same way the judgments of value at which the completely 
 informed ideal men would arrive would be more reliable than 
 those of the chance individual, but they would not show in- 
 dividual type any the less. There is no limit to such auxiliary 
 constructions. We may abstract from any special sides of the 
 personalities, and construct accordingly systems of goods with 
 reference to any kind of abstract men. We may thus gain neat 
 classifications of the sources of pleasure, perhaps for a certain 
 group, or a certain nation, or a certain historical period. Yet 
 it is clear that such a classification, with all its superordi- 
 nations and subordinations, refers only to the desires of indi- 
 vidual beings. 
 
 In still another direction the evaluation has sometimes 
 been detached from the desires of individuals. It has been 
 said that the significance of a real value lies in the steadiness 
 of the desire. Only that can be acknowledged as value for 
 which a lasting disposition of desire exists. The forming of 
 values would then show a certain analogy to the forming 
 of conceptions. The idea of a value would bring unity into 
 the chaos of possible demands, just as our conceptions unify 
 our ideas. All that has its truth. We may even acknowledge 
 that a repeated desire may bring about a mental disposition 
 by which the object appears as a value when no pleasure can 
 be expected from it in the concrete situation, as is perhaps 
 the case with the value of money for the miser. Our desire for 
 pleasure may find its unified organization in values, or may 
 be projected into them even when it has disappeared as desire. 
 But none of these ways opens to us the view of a value which
 
 34 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 is superior to individual desire. However we may try to 
 escape the conclusion, we cannot come beyond the ultimate 
 result that from personal pleasure and displeasure there is no 
 path to values which mean more than that they are enjoy- 
 able to this or that man, or to many or to most people, now 
 or then or usually. From individual desires we always can 
 come merely to conditional values. 
 
 At all times the effort has been made to suit the demand 
 for a general philosophy with such individualistic conceptions 
 of value. Yes, modern relativism in all its forms, the Ameri- 
 can Pragmatism like the German Empirio-Criticism, glories 
 in its nakedness. What these theories of knowledge try to 
 argue with philosophical endeavor is reached without any 
 toil by the naivete of monistic and positivistic philosophy. 
 These are satisfied in their poverty of thought as soon as it 
 is demonstrated that the tastes and norms are different at 
 various times and among various peoples, and that even the 
 most important evaluations are frequently changing. They 
 triumphantly show that even in the highest spheres of human 
 valuation everything changes and fluctuates. In the sphere 
 of art we see how often at the same time, in the same nation, 
 sometimes the same works are adored and detested. The same 
 grotesque contradictions appear in the values of wisdom; 
 that which is true to one generation may be error to the next. 
 What alarming contrasts appear in the religious values which 
 are so often praised as over-personal, while science shows that 
 in every part they have the stamp of passing civilizations. 
 What chaos is found in the moral evaluation of the peoples ; 
 the one places as the highest of values what another tribe 
 may condemn as heinous. 
 
 The sociologists have indeed accumulated such over-rich 
 material of this kind, that the philosophic philistines of our 
 time must look down only with condescension to those un- 
 scientific minds which still dare to doubt the relativity of all 
 valuation. It may even be said that no anthropological voy-
 
 THE PERSONALITIES 35 
 
 ages to the Pacific islands are necessary for the discovery of 
 such contrasts. Every one of us can find such fiat contradic- 
 tions in his narrowest circle only a little below the surface. 
 And here comes the great chance for the Pragmatist and the 
 Humanist and all their intellectual kin. They show us that 
 all which we call truth is indeed only an organization of 
 our experiences in the service of our changing purposes, and 
 that the value of truth must thus by its own meaning be 
 understood as a relative value only. Finally, that agrees 
 splendidly with the favorite thought of evolutionistic philo- 
 sophers. They have demonstrated long ago that only those 
 brains could find the conditions for development, the ideas of 
 which are useful for the survival of man, and that therefore 
 everything which we call truth is only a product of selection 
 in the phylogenetic development. 
 
 Such contributions to ethnology, to sociology, to biology, 
 and to psychology are without doubt of high importance 
 for the anthropological aspect of the process of evaluation. 
 But that cannot possibly determine their significance for the 
 ultimate problems of philosophy. In the circle of biologi- 
 cal studies, of course we have to inquire how the processes 
 of thinking came to their natural development in evolution. 
 We ought not to overlook, however, that the meaning and the 
 whole value of such an inquiry are entirely dependent upon 
 the more fundamental question of whether or not we accredit 
 to such biological arguments the value of truth. The value of 
 truth thus ultimately depends, not upon the biological devel- 
 opment, but our right to follow up a biological development 
 depends upon the acknowledgment of the value of truth. 
 
 Those beginnings of the race from which the biologist 
 starts are certainly not known to us as an immediate experi- 
 ence. In the service of causal explanation we have reached 
 the idea of those beginnings by h5T)othetical speculations 
 deduced from our really perceived world. To accept them 
 means, therefore, to consider those thoughts and their search
 
 36 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 or causes as true; and that means as valuable. Only if the 
 value of truth is valid can we have a right to include those 
 constructed beginnings in our view of reality ; and only if we 
 do that can we become able to deduce ultimately the life 
 which surrounds us as the late product of those early begin- 
 nings. The idea that our thinking of truth is to be conceived 
 as an evolutionary product of the past generations thus can- 
 not itself derive its value of truth from its evolutionary ori- 
 gin. Its significance must be understood entirely out of our 
 present logical purposes. Our thinking creates the thought of 
 biological development with its selection and adjustment. 
 How, after that, the thinking itself can be conceived as part 
 of such a development remains a purely biological question. 
 Any answer to this question, therefore, does not belong in 
 the circle of philosophy, if philosophy is to inquire into the 
 ultimate problems of thought. 
 
 This holds by principle for all the pragmatic relativistic 
 theories. The value of truth is demonstrated as a relative 
 value which is adjusted to changing experiences; its whole 
 significance lies in its function of suiting individual needs. 
 But all that becomes demonstrated with logical arguments 
 and conclusions, and yet these conclusions and proofs have 
 no power, and even no meaning, unless we have acknowledged 
 beforehand the independent value of truth. If such a proof 
 of the merely individual significance of truth has itself only 
 individual importance, it cannot claim any general mean- 
 ing ; the possibility of its validity must therefore be acknow- 
 ledged from the very start. On the other hand, if this rela- 
 tivistic proof demands for itself the right to be taken as 
 generally valid, the possibility of a general truth is then 
 acknowledged from the start, at least for this one assertion. 
 As soon as this one exception is granted, it offers the firm 
 point from which the whole illusory universe of relativism 
 may be overthrown. 
 
 But at this moment we are not engaged in the proof that
 
 THE PERSONALITIES 37 
 
 there exist absolute values. All that we want to bring out 
 here is that we really seek values ; for instance, in the inquiry 
 for truth, which cannot possibly be thought as mere relative 
 ones. It may be an illusion that we presuppose the existence 
 of unconditioned values. In our individual seeking and striv- 
 ing for the over-individual lies no proof of its validity. Here 
 we have only to stop and to make sure that all that which we 
 can deduce from the individual desires is not identical with 
 that which we are really seeking and acknowledging. The 
 truth which I seek in my search for knowledge is an uncon- 
 ditional one, as such truth has lost its meaning as goal for my 
 inquiry as soon as I presuppose that the contrary may pos- 
 sibly have the same truth-value. That has nothing to do with 
 the changing standpoint of individuals. There may be at my 
 left what there is at the right of others ; there may be past 
 for me that which was future for others ; I may put things into 
 my picture of the world which were unknown in the previous 
 periods ; these are not contradictions in the truth itself which 
 I am seeking. The question is not, anyhow, how far I can par- 
 ticipate in the truth. The question is only whether I can refer 
 my search for truth to any truth which is conceived as one of 
 merely individual character. Do I really seek in truth simply 
 something which is agreeable and helpful to me or my neigh- 
 bors or millions of contemporaries? Do I not demand from 
 any truth that its value be independent of the feelings of any 
 majorities and temporal currents, and that we have to subor- 
 dinate ourselves to the truth in a way which excludes every 
 relation to individuals, however much they may agree in 
 their needs? We may be satisfied with provisional formula- 
 tions, but their purpose is after all determined by the demand 
 that they approach a truth whose unconditional reality is 
 presupposed. To deny every truth which is more than rel- 
 ative means to deprive every thought, including skeptical 
 thought itself, of its own presuppositions. 
 
 Whoever believes that every thinking about the world is
 
 38 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 only a personal grouping and shaping of the individual ex- 
 periences, must become aware of his error as soon as he starts 
 to communicate his views. The effort to convince others must 
 be meaningless, if it is not acknowledged beforehand that we 
 agree in the fundamental thought-forms. The world to which 
 all our thoughts refer must thus be acknowledged beforehand 
 as thought alike by every one. The view of the world which 
 our exchange of thoughts aims at must therefore be presup- 
 posed as a truth of general value. Whoever denies that, ought 
 to give up the effort to refer his thought to a world which 
 he wants to share with others. He knows practically only a 
 world of his dreams, with reference to which there cannot be 
 any real thinking or any seeking of truth. 
 
 The possibility of knowledge would be the more excluded, 
 as a skepticism which is directed against the other beings 
 would be turned with the same right against the own mental 
 acts which lie outside of the present moment. My present 
 thought aims to make use of my earlier experiences, and yet 
 that, too, has a meaning only if I presuppose that my previous 
 acts and the present ones refer to the same objective world. 
 Such transcending of the present moment to gain the unity 
 of my personal experiences represents, indeed, at least the 
 first germ of the thought of a real world and an objective 
 truth. But the act by which I acknowledge my past act as 
 connected with my present transcends my immediate real- 
 ity not less than the further act by which I acknowledge 
 the other subjects as logically coordinated. If I am afraid of 
 the one act, I have no right to recklessly perform the other. 
 In short, if I want to be a logical skeptic, even my own "I" 
 crumbles, and all that remains is a flashing life-instant which, 
 as such, cannot, indeed, admit any over-individual truth- 
 value. 
 
 Self-destructive in the same way as the logical relativism 
 is that skepticism which denies the over-individual value 
 of the moral actions. The skeptic denies that there is any
 
 THE PERSONALITIES 39 
 
 duty which has absolute binding power. Every motive for 
 action has then only a personal individual character. But 
 whoever speaks so, wants to perform by such assertion a 
 definite action and to reach a definite goal, namely, the 
 acknowledgment of ethical denial on the part of his hear- 
 ers. Yet the hearers who were inclined to trust the skeptic 
 would have to doubt from the beginning whether the speaker 
 really brings his true conviction to outer expression. Who- 
 ever is not bound by any duty may lie, may therefore deny 
 his true view, and in spite of his words may be fully convinced 
 that there exist over-individual duties. The skeptic, there- 
 fore, cannot expect any belief for his claim, and he thus 
 undertakes an action by which, through his own efforts, he 
 makes it impossible to reach his goal. 
 
 Here, too, it is not necessary to sharpen the contrasts in 
 such an artificial way. The question is, at first, not whether 
 our will frustrates itself, but what the will intends. Our moral 
 consciousness affirms immediately that when we are carried 
 by moral will, we do not aim at goals whose value is de- 
 termined by our personal like or dislike. When we will 
 the morally good, we do indeed wish that the good also give 
 us joy, but we know that it is not the good simply because 
 it gives us pleasure. Even if we acknowledge the pleasure 
 in the minds of other beings as goal for our moral action, the 
 moral itself is not therefore based on pleasure. The essential 
 fact lies in our feeling of obligation. We feel it our duty 
 to serve the pleasure of others, but this duty cannot itself 
 come in question as a pleasure. We may submit to it with 
 pleasure, but we do not submit to it because it gives us plea- 
 sure. Otherwise it would not be acknowledged as a duty. 
 
 Such a view cannot be changed by the discussions of explan- 
 atory science. The biologist may explain that the welfare 
 of the whole to which the individual belongs has become 
 the psychological motive for the impulse of the individuals. 
 What we feel in our immediate experience is not changed in
 
 40 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 its meaning and significance by such explanations. The expe- 
 rience is complete in itself and in its life-reality ; it does not 
 at all refer to preceding causes, but is to be interpreted and 
 appreciated for itself. We will the right and the good and 
 the just, and in this will lies a reference to a goal which in 
 this act itself remains entirely independent of any conscious 
 relation to our own welfare. The meaning of this purposive 
 will is therefore not in the least changed when we consider 
 it from another point of view as a process which can be 
 causally connected with our personal pleasure. In the pur- 
 posive will-connection itself the over-personal relation of 
 the will remains valid. The action may refer to this or that 
 neighbor, or to the nation, or to the totality of individuals; 
 but in our moral aim we point towards a duty which as such 
 stands above all merely personal interests. It has for us the 
 validity of something which we acknowledge absolutely. The 
 man who really thinks in the spirit of morality knows that his 
 deepest longing is falsified if it becomes deprived of a rela- 
 tion to something which is independent of merely individual 
 desires. Whoever says "duty" means a value which is not 
 founded on individual pleasures. 
 
 Such an aspect reaches out far beyond truth and morality. 
 The beautiful, too, may awake in us personal pleasure, the 
 progress of mankind may yield us personal joy, even the re- 
 ligious fulfilment may awake in us agreeable expectations; and 
 yet all that does not decide anything in our belief in the value of 
 art and progress and eternity. Whatever biology and psycho- 
 logy may explain as to the pleasantness of aesthetic objects, 
 everybody who has experienced the true meaning of high art 
 knows there a relation to something absolute for which all 
 explanatory questions remain insignificant. Our submission 
 under the eternal laws of pure beauty must be grasped in its 
 meaning and not in its causal effects. There is no life so 
 poor that the thought of the progress of civilization has not 
 brought light and warmth into it, and yet who has the right
 
 THE PERSONALITIES 41 
 
 to claim that the individual has gained from such progress, 
 and that he would have suffered if history had moved back- 
 ward ? No one can assert that the advance of culture has 
 added to the total amount of pleasure in the individuals, and 
 has made them freer from displeasure. The real value of cul- 
 tural development is acknowledged by us as valid, without 
 our connecting its goal with the personal will of any individ- 
 uals. The meaning of our life is broken, the world to which all 
 our purposes refer must crumble, if our will cannot orientate 
 itself with reference to ideals which are conceived as ulti- 
 mately independent of all desires of special individuals, even if 
 those individuals are billionfold. Those who consider the over- 
 individual values as products of mere individual demands, — 
 and that means who consider the eternal ideals as illusions, 
 — stand indeed where the Sophists stood at all times. How- 
 ever much the modern relativists may try to convince us that 
 there exists no conviction, it remains that old sophistry which 
 Socrates has overpowered once for all. 
 
 Such criticism must not be misinterpreted as if it meant to 
 say that this new movement of German Empirio-Criticism, 
 or of American Pragmatism, is without any element of truth 
 and without helpful suggestions for the philosophy which our 
 time needs. Like the old Sophists they fight against the gods 
 of the past, a fight in which Socrates was entirely in agree- 
 ment with the Sophists. The new idealism, which has come 
 to stay, is in the same way in full agreement with the rela- 
 tivists when they aim to subdue the pseudo-gods of our recent 
 naturalistic past. They are welcome fellow-combatants in 
 the battle against that clumsy naturalism which accepts the 
 constructions of physics and psychology as ultimate fact, 
 and which thus acknowledges atoms or sensations as a last 
 reality. A philosophy which turns from such naturalism back 
 to the immediate life-experience of the individual is certainly 
 in the right there. Such a philosophy, then, recognizes easily 
 that all physical and psychological things, the movements
 
 42 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 of the molecules and the tissues of the associations, are 
 reconstructions of immediate experience and have left life- 
 reality behind. At last we reach again the true life with the 
 pulse-beat of individuality. History again comes into its 
 right, man's will and purpose become the decisive starting- 
 point, and the psycho-physical mechanism disappears from 
 metaphysics; positivism is succeeded by voluntarism. 
 
 No step should be retraced there, but whoever goes no 
 farther has after all not gained anything decisive for a new 
 view of the world. It is certainly necessary to return to the 
 life-experience as a starting-point. The philosophers had to 
 recognize that the way from such a starting-point towards 
 naturalism is a blind alley. An ultimate lasting and funda- 
 mental reality can never be gained from immediate experi- 
 ence, if the thought moves in the direction of naturalism. 
 But nothing better is secured, if the thinker simply returns to 
 the immediate life-experience, and does not dare to leave the 
 starting-point at all. What we found there is surely given 
 with immediate vividness, but it is after all nothing more 
 than life-impression, and not a real world. We have found 
 the will in its immediacy, but we nowhere discover a goal 
 towards which the will can be directed. Instead of withered 
 conceptions we have again found the warm life, but no 
 content which overcomes the life-instant, no content which 
 makes the life worth living. 
 
 It is not easy to maintain the standpoint of immediate 
 experience. Such a philosophy of immediacy too readily 
 slips back into the berth of ordinary psychology. Yet the 
 superficial arguments against it ought not to count. We often 
 hear that in the immediate experience we do not know any 
 other subjects; but it may readily be answered that we find the 
 questions and replies, the suggestions and objections, of the 
 other persons in our own experience with exactly the same 
 immediacy with which we find the help and the resistance of 
 things. Others claim that we perceive in immediate experi-
 
 THE PERSONALITIES 43 
 
 ence only the physical things, and that we ourselves clothe 
 them with our thoughts, which themselves are no experi- 
 ence. But that again is certainly a misunderstanding. In our 
 true life-experience we find thought and thing at first as a 
 unity, and as equally immediate, and we separate the two only 
 through secondary considerations. Out of this unity we elab- 
 orate the thing and deduce from it the remainder as thought, 
 but we never experience the thing alone and cover it with 
 thought afterwards. Finally, still others object by saying 
 that we have an immediate experience only of our psychical 
 sensations, and that we make conclusions as to the physical 
 things merely from those psychical sensations. But those 
 who argue in such a way are still deep in the confusion of 
 naturalism, which naively puts our whole external experi- 
 ence into the capsule of an individual consciousness. In our 
 real life we know nothing of this artificial doubleness, we do 
 not separate the perceived thing without and the perceptional 
 idea within. Our ideas, and their elements the sensations, are 
 felt there without, where we see and hear and touch them, 
 and only by abstractions we reach a new view in which we 
 refer some aspect of the things to ourselves and thus project 
 their image into ourselves. 
 
 No such arguments can disturb the philosophy of immedi- 
 acy and its relativism. And yet it remains true that such a 
 philosophy of immediate experience is a view of the world 
 which lacks nothing but a world. Such a philosophy deals 
 with a haphazard dream in which the chance desire is deci- 
 sive. No will subordinates itself there before an absolute and 
 eternally valuable will which must hold unconditionally for 
 every possible subject. Therefore there can be no room for 
 morality and beauty and truth in the ultimate meaning of 
 these ideals. After all the errors and vagaries of the natural- 
 istic period, which had no philosophy at all, it looks like 
 the beginning of a better time to return to the will of the 
 individual as a starting-point; but simply to stand still at
 
 44 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 that which is meant ultimately as merely individual, even if 
 millions of such individuals are in question, would mean 
 nothing but to substitute nihilism for dogmatism. Hence in 
 every relativistic philosophy, in all its many modern denom- 
 inations, including Pragmatism and its kin, we have to sepa- 
 rate two elements. We have on the one side the return to 
 the immediate life-experience with man's will in its centre, 
 as against a naturalistic pseudo-philosophy. And secondly, 
 there is the claim that this will has merely individual charac- 
 ter, and therefore no absolute value. The anti-naturalistic 
 element and the anti-absolute element are most intimately 
 intertwined. Moreover, that doubleness allows a conven- 
 ient method of defence. Whenever the naturalists attack the 
 anti-naturalism of such a philosophy, suddenly the emphasis 
 is laid on the common fight against absolutism. But when 
 the idealists attack its anti-idealism, they are set at rest by 
 the common antipathy to naturalism. Now the return to the 
 immediate life-experience is the thoroughly sound action of 
 the relativists, but they can hardly claim that they deserve 
 any credit there for a new movement. The idealists have 
 never ceased to fight this battle, and have with much deeper 
 arguments demonstrated that all physicism and pyscholo- 
 gism, all atomism and all sensationalism, in short, all natural- 
 ism, is an artificial construction of experience necessary for 
 certain purposes. That is the real life-element of idealism, 
 and while it is true that in periods of shallow unphilosophy, 
 even this philosophic commonplace was forgotten, the philo- 
 sophers at least cannot forget that the great idealists, like 
 Kant and Fichte, who preceded the recent naturalistic period, 
 have made that a lasting part of philosophical insight. There 
 is nothing whatever new in such an aspect. 
 
 Contrary to the spirit of such classical idealism is only that 
 other claim, that our will, in aiming towards truth or moral- 
 ity or the other ideals, cannot transcend the individual desire 
 and cannot reach anything absolute. It is this relativistic
 
 THE PERSONALITIES 45 
 
 and not the anti-naturalistic element of Pragmatism which 
 demands stubborn resistance, and such a resistance has to be 
 the more serious as those two elements form an almost un- 
 recognizable mixture. The opposition to this anti-truth and 
 anti-morality character is too easily charmed and brought 
 to silence by the many strong points which such a philosophy 
 makes against the naturalistic superficiality. We must insist 
 that these two factors have nothing to do with each other. 
 We must leave naturalism behind us, we must come back to 
 immediate experience as a starting-point, we must recognize 
 the human will as the centre of every search for reality, and 
 yet we must acknowledge that this will is bound by absolute 
 and necessary eternal values.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE OBLIGATIONS 
 
 We have now gained a twofold insight. First, the causal 
 system of nature contains no absolute values, because nature 
 itself must by principle be conceived as without any relation 
 to will and therefore without any value. Secondly, the system 
 of the purposes of individuals contains no absolute values, 
 because the reference to individual personalities can always 
 lead only to relative values. That means that any uncondi- 
 tional general values of the world can be neither contents of 
 the causal nature nor demands of historical origin. If they 
 have existence at all, they must belong to an over-causal and 
 over-individual reality of the world. But we have seen that 
 we cannot doubt their validity. We recognized that there 
 exist only two possibilities: we have a world with over-per- 
 sonal unconditional values, or we have no real world at all, 
 but merely a worthless chance dream, in which to strive 
 for truth and morality can have no meaning whatever. We 
 recognized that we have not even a choice whether we want 
 to refer our striving really to a world or to a meaningless hap- 
 hazard chaos, without truth and morality, as our whole com- 
 mon task is here to seek the truth logically and to stand up 
 for the truth morally. Whatever psychologists and biologists 
 and historians may tell us of how all this thinking and aim- 
 ing can be explained, does not matter. We know well that 
 our particular idea of truth can be construed as the product 
 of our brains ; that our individual ideas are the effects of the 
 social influences among which we have grown up ; that our 
 theories are the results of a historical development ; and that 
 our convictions are shaped by the traditions of our time. Yet 
 in our effort to reach the truth and to defend the truth, we
 
 THE OBLIGATIONS 47 
 
 do not refer our will to causes, but to ideals ; we seek a truth 
 which is meant as something which is absolutely valuable, 
 and that means as something of which the opposite is impos- 
 sible. In the same way, in upholding the truth we do not ask 
 how our desire for truth-speaking originated. We believe in 
 the absolute value of our duty, and in this our belief lies a 
 reference for which no mere social request can be substituted. 
 We seek a truth which we conceive in our search as inde- 
 pendent of its possible useful consequences ; and we submit to 
 a duty which in our submission we conceive as independent of 
 any practical effects. We saw that every doubt of absolute 
 values ultimately destroys itself. As thought it contradicts it- 
 self, as doubt it denies itself, as belief it despairs of itself. No 
 way leads from it to the reality of the own self beyond the 
 immediate instant. All strife and effort has lost its goal. But 
 we are striving here, we are in the midst of an effort, as we 
 want to convince others ; that means we have already chosen, 
 and we are resolved to maintain the conviction that there is 
 a world independent of chance individuals. Absolute values 
 must therefore be presupposed by us as real, must have valid- 
 ity for us superior to the relativistic values which historical 
 individuals create. We have therefore to ask what the real 
 meaning and real significance of such unconditioned abso- 
 lute values is. Natural science and history cannot find them. 
 Where, after all, can they be found? What are they made of ? 
 How do they hang together ? How do we individuals reach 
 them ? What do they contribute to the meaning of our per- 
 sonal life, and what is their own ultimate purpose? 
 
 But before we turn to these fundamental questions, we 
 ought to eliminate at least one complete misunderstanding 
 which is responsible for much in the relativistic vagaries. The 
 values which we are seeking are to find their foundation in 
 the unconditional character of the world, and are to maintain 
 their absolute validity, however much or little we historical 
 individuals may grasp them. Such a postulate is at once dis-
 
 48 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 torted into pre-Kantean metaphysics as soon as it is misin- 
 terpreted, as if we assert the eternal existence of a world 
 which is independent of the experiencing consciousness. The 
 rationalistic philosophy and the empirical philosophy of a 
 precritical age agreed in just such a metaphysical presupposi- 
 tion. Both the rationalists, like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leib- 
 nitz, and the empiricists from Bacon to the encyclopaedists, 
 claimed that there exists a reality which is independent of the 
 mental conditions of knowledge. Their disagreement referred 
 only to the question whether the thinking of reason or the 
 experience of the senses would be the right method to gain 
 access to that independent world and thus to win the truth. 
 But the idea of such super-reality has beeen definitely re- 
 moved from critical philosophy by Kant. The world of ex- 
 perience is the only world to which our knowledge can have 
 reference, and the reality which we want to grasp in our truth 
 is therefore completely bound up with the conditions of our 
 mental experience. The true world is independent of the 
 single individual as such, and therefore absolute with refer- 
 ence to the individual ; but it is a world of which we can have 
 knowledge at all only if its forms are determined by the con- 
 ditions of consciousness. A world which is possible material 
 for knowledge must be thought beforehand as a world which 
 stands under the conditions of possible conscious experience. 
 A reality of which the kind and form is not conceived as in 
 relation to consciousness can never be understood as a pos- 
 sible object of knowledge. The absolute values must therefore 
 completely lie in a world whose totality stands under the 
 condition of being a possible object of experience. Even 
 where the conviction transcends the world of experience and 
 seeks an over-experience, such a last reality must still remain 
 dependent upon the conditions of consciousness. 
 
 The absolute world with its eternal values, if it exists, is 
 thus certainly not something which hangs in an own atmos- 
 phere, eternally separated from our consciousness. The
 
 THE OBLIGATIONS 49 
 
 values which we seek in reality do not point from an experi- 
 enced world to a sphere beyond experience. On the contrary, 
 everything which can be acknowledged as unconditional 
 must be conceived beforehand as belonging to the sphere of 
 possible material of consciousness, and it is absolute only for 
 the world in which every subject can participate. The values 
 are absolute for the only world which we can know at all. 
 This mutual relation goes so far that, on the other hand, we 
 can acknowledge as subjects only those who can experience 
 such a world. If there were a spirit directed towards a higher 
 world than that of our possible experience, the exchange of 
 thought with such a subject would lose all meaning for 
 us, and nothing absolute could be brought over from there 
 out of his incomprehensible special world into our world of 
 experience. The absolute values have unexceptional validity 
 because they are valid for every possible subject who shares 
 the world with us, and who relates his thinking and striving 
 to our world. In such thinking and striving the values remain 
 independent of any particular individual will, and it makes 
 no difference whether such individuals take their attitude 
 individually or in the cooperation of millions. The values 
 stand above the individual. But they would become mean- 
 ingless if they were conceived as independent of the conditions 
 of consciousness. All that ought to be common property since 
 the days of Kant and Fichte, and every new time only de- 
 mands a new adjustment of these fundamental insights to the 
 changing knowledge of the period. But it ought no longer to 
 be necessary to defend idealism against attacks which really 
 are meant only against the caricatures of idealism. There is 
 no true philosophical idealist who means by an absolute a 
 gigantic monster which swims behind the clouds without rela- 
 tion to the subjects of experience. Only on this basis we ask 
 once more for the meaning of such real absolute values. 
 
 We find our will bound by values. We cannot affirm a 
 judgment in accordance with our caprice ; we are bound by
 
 50 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 the truth. We cannot act in accordance with every desire ; we 
 are bound by duties. What binds our will? The two replies 
 which are most usual are either a necessity or an obligation. 
 It almost sounds as if that is the antithesis of a solution be- 
 side which no third solution is possible. But it is clear from the 
 start that the binding by a necessity in the sense of a natural 
 law cannot be the solution for us at all. It would lead us back 
 from the sphere of free personalities to the sphere of psycho- 
 logical processes. It ought to be a matter of course that in the 
 sphere of causal connections, the psychical phenomena of will 
 and value cannot represent an exception. The subordination 
 of the will as a psychical process under the psychological idea 
 of value must be explained by psychical and physiological 
 causes. But such an explanation stands on the same level on 
 which we explain that perhaps a pain sensation awakes an 
 impulse of rejection. The fact that the idea of a value has a 
 controlling effect on the will is simply a chapter of the psy- 
 chology of suggestion, and as such stands in near neighbor- 
 hood to the problems of attention, inhibition, and hypnosis. 
 Such a psycho-physical necessity has in no way the charac- 
 ter of absoluteness. Like any other inherited or acquired reac- 
 tion, it can be remodelled by new training and can be entirely 
 suppressed by new conditions. Moreover, we saw beforehand 
 that such a psychological explanation of our submission to 
 the value cannot have any philosophical bearing at all. Its 
 philosophical significance is eliminated by the fact that the 
 truth of such a causal connection of psychological facts is 
 itself a value. We must already have accepted this value if 
 we want to explain the psychological phenomena of valuation 
 by psychological laws. But we may add that the connection 
 between the value and the will is not even one of causal 
 necessity. We may have the idea of the moral value, for 
 instance, in our mind, and yet our action may remain unin- 
 fluenced : we turn towards sin and crime. It is not true that 
 we must act by necessity in accordance with a value.
 
 THE OBLIGATIONS 51 
 
 Just here starts the much deeper reply which says that our 
 will is bound not by necessity, but by obligation. We are not 
 forced to act in accordance with a value, but we ought to act 
 in accordance with it. The value is thus an obligation. To be 
 sure, any "ought" can also be easily translated into the terms 
 of natural science. The biological treatment of obligation 
 appears almost as a necessary part of naturalistic sociology. 
 Experience teaches us that the real effects may not always 
 bring the expected pleasure. We connect the valuation, there- 
 fore, in our mind with those effects which are most frequent 
 or most tj^ical. That gives us certain rules for action which 
 are crystallized in norms. The individual finally acts in his 
 own well-understood interest in accordance with the pre- 
 scriptions and norms, even when the special circumstances 
 suggest the desire to escape the norms. The consciousness of 
 obligation is from such a sociological point of view a kind of 
 apparatus for the inhibition of desires which may be ulti- 
 mately harmful. It is an impulse to do what has shown itself 
 to be useful in the great average, and a warning not to do 
 what may appear tempting for the moment, but has usually 
 shown itself to be dangerous. The feeling of obligation is thus 
 psychologically what the smell-sensation is for our appetite. 
 If we had a full knowledge of the chemical constitution of a 
 substance and of its physiological effects on the organism, it 
 would be unnecessary to take any notice in eating of the 
 feeling which connects itself with the preceding smell. But 
 nature substitutes for this complete knowledge the feeling 
 of smell. We rely on the general rule that that will agree 
 with us which smells well, and that will not agree with us 
 which smells badly, in spite of the fact that in the particular 
 case the sweetly-smelling substance may be a poison. 
 
 It is evident that such a conception of obligation cannot 
 bring us nearer to our goal. That which we ought to do is 
 here again ultimately only that which we wish to do in the 
 interests of our pleasure. The only difference is that the
 
 52 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 expectation of pleasure is attached not to the immediate 
 impression, but to a calculation of averages condensed in a 
 prescriptive formula. The personal welfare again stands at 
 the central point. Not to be obedient to the obligation means 
 only to play a risky game. The possible gain may be tempt- 
 ing, but the probability is that one loses the game. The value 
 which ought to be aimed at is, then, in no way uncondi- 
 tional. On the contrary, it differs from the opposite which we 
 ought not to do, only through the greater probability of the 
 resulting pleasure. 
 
 In the same circle of thought move the usual deductions of 
 social norms. When the stronger forces the weaker to subor- 
 dinate himself, and demands from him that he act against his 
 own desire, the obeying actor does not do anything but sim- 
 ply weigh his personal pleasure and displeasure. He performs 
 what is demanded from him, and what he "ought" to do, 
 because the threatened punishment in case of his not doing 
 it is anticipated with still greater displeasure than the unde- 
 sirable action. There the will of the stronger has on the 
 weaker exactly the same effect as a situation in nature which 
 forces on us an uncomfortable effort for the purpose of escap- 
 ing an injury. This subordination under the power has no- 
 thing to do with the acknowledgment of eternal norms. The 
 one who threatens and the one who obeys are equally com- 
 pelled by motives of pleasure and displeasure. 
 
 All social norms in the sense of social psychology can be 
 reduced to this fundamental scheme, however manifold the 
 forms of development and the abbreviations of the mental 
 process may be. Thousandfold are the sources of power and 
 authority, thousandfold the means of the stronger or of the 
 majority to force their desires on the weaker and the fewer, 
 and thousandfold the ideas of customs, morality, law, and 
 religion in which the demands of the social majority are 
 brought to expression. Ultimately, it always means that the 
 members of an association, from the family to the nation and
 
 THE OBLIGATIONS 53 
 
 civilized mankind, create values as a result of their own social 
 desire for self-conservation which the individual is forced to 
 acknowledge. In the mind of the individual the consciousness 
 of this real connection disappears ; the feeling of fear is trans- 
 posed through a mental abbreviation from the threatened 
 punishment over to the forbidden action itself. It is just as a 
 child soon refers the dislike which belongs to the chastisement 
 to the forbidden action, and expands the pleasure to every- 
 thing which at first was artificially connected with reward. 
 Even the highest social psychological norms thus remain by 
 principle on the level of social hygiene. The hygienic pre- 
 scriptions of the police, even if they were useful for all man- 
 kind, would yet remain in principle different from everything 
 which in a philosophical sense has to be acknowledged as a 
 valid obligation. 
 
 The right of such sociological constructions is not at all to 
 be denied. If we are to study evaluation as a phenomenon of 
 social psychology, the inquiry cannot move in any other lines. 
 General and valid, then, indeed is every evaluation which 
 serves the development of the psycho-physical society, and 
 this utilitarian goal necessarily remains ultimate. The psy- 
 chologist has no right to acknowledge any metaphysical ends. 
 Even the thought of a metaphysical evaluation could mean 
 nothing for the social psychologist, unless the thought itself 
 is taken as the means to a utilitarian end. He might acknow- 
 ledge that it is useful for the welfare of society that its mem- 
 bers live in the illusion of the belief that there exist values 
 which are independent of pleasure and welfare. And if the 
 psychologist discovers that such an idealistic belief is after all 
 not useful for society, he will simply relegate such meta- 
 physics to the accidental, or perhaps even to the pathological, 
 phenomena of the social psyche. From his utilitarian point of 
 view such a belief then means for society what dreams mean 
 for the individual consciousness. 
 
 But the "ought" can be found also on a much purer
 
 54 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 height, where all relativism and all sophisticism are left far 
 behind, and the critical philosophy is ready to reach out to 
 its last consequences. Especially in the modern German 
 philosophy the conviction is growing that the conception of 
 being itself is founded on the conception of obligation. The 
 existence of reality is given to us in judgments, and their 
 affirmation ultimately has no other reason than the fact that 
 our thought faces a rule, an " ought," which obliges our will to 
 judge. There is no positive judgment of existence in which 
 the will is not affirming, no negative judgment in which the 
 will is not denying. Yet the will which affirms in the judg- 
 ment the existence of a certain thing does not follow an in- 
 dividual caprice. The individual yields there to the pressure 
 of facts. But is this pressure perhaps the effect of an inde- 
 pendently existing reality which our judgment simply tries to 
 copy? That would throw us back into the crudest metaphy- 
 sics, the more as the existence of such an independent world 
 would have the value of truth again only for the one who 
 judges, and thus it would still leave open the question : What 
 external power forces this metaphysical judgment? No, the 
 will which affirms the existence of anything real is not de- 
 termined by something which has an independent existence, 
 but is determined by an "ought" which decides upon the 
 value of the judgment. The judgment which ought to be 
 affirmed is a valuable judgment, and that means a true judg- 
 ment. Such an "ought" does not belong to the existing 
 object, but belongs to the will of the subject as its deepest 
 significance, by which alone experience becomes possible. To 
 think the truth would then mean to subordinate the affirm- 
 ing will to an obligation. 
 
 In this way the difference between knowledge and moral- 
 ity disappears. He who seeks the truth and he who will per- 
 form his deed subordinates himself equally to an "ought" 
 which is independent of his individual desires. It is the ab- 
 solute validity of this "ought" which gives meaning to the
 
 THE OBLIGATIONS 55 
 
 ideals of truth and morality. In the same way we should have 
 to interpret the manifoldness of the aesthetic values. They 
 tell us how we ought to interpret the world. The artist obeys 
 his aesthetic conscience, an "ought" which appeals to his will 
 to seek beauty. We think and feel and will in accordance with 
 absolute values. We are loyal to the way in which we ought 
 to think and ought to feel and ought to will. If we become 
 disloyal to our obligations, we enter into error, into the ugly, 
 into the immoral, into the sin. Here at least we have a view 
 of the world which, endlessly superior to all naturalism and 
 realism and pragmatism, really acknowledges the absolute 
 values. The evaluation precedes the existence. All values 
 are founded on the relations of will, and are super-ordinated 
 to every possible individual will. The logical, ethical, aesthetic, 
 and religious values are based on the same fundamental 
 principle, and do not refer to a transcending existence, but to 
 a fundamental determination of will. All this is never again 
 to be lost. And yet we must raise the question whether the 
 doctrine of the value as an "ought" can be really accepted 
 as an ultimate goal. Is the conception of the obligation really 
 fit to lead us into the ultimate depths of absolute validity? 
 Certainly all philosophical right is on the side of the "ought," 
 when this conception is brought into contrast with the real- 
 istic conception of the "must," or with the relativistic con- 
 ception of the desire. But are the possibilities of will really 
 exhausted in such a way ? 
 
 One limitation is evident at once. The "ought" which is 
 sought in the value contributes nothing to bring together the 
 scattered values of our life. Truth is valuable and also beauty, 
 justice is valuable and also morality, progress and develop- 
 ment are valuable and also religious fulfilment, but no tie 
 connects the diverging ideals. If knowledge and art and his- 
 tory and morality and religion each demands an obligation 
 of a special kind, they remain separated grounds of reality. 
 The philosophers of the "ought" point to history to show
 
 56 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 how the consciousness of one obligation after another was 
 developed, but that only suggests that we gather the historical 
 elaboration of the values in an external way. For instance, 
 we could not foresee whether or not entirely new values might 
 arise to-morrow, and we could not understand why others 
 have not come up before. The logical "ought" which binds 
 the mathematician, the aesthetic "ought" which binds the 
 sculptor, the ethical "ought" for which the martyr suffers, 
 have nothing in common. We do not find a connected system 
 of values, but a chaos of diverging valuations. Whoever really 
 seeks a united view of the world must ultimately demand 
 that the values can be understood as interrelated and as 
 connected parts of a whole ; we must be able to deduce them 
 from one and the same principle. 
 
 Moreover, can we overlook that the conception of the 
 "ought" does not really contribute anything to the deeper 
 understanding of the validity of the values ? Valuable is that 
 which we ought to accept, and that which we ought to accept 
 is valuable. Thus we do not add anything new to the concep- 
 tion of value if we reduce it to an obligation, or rather we 
 do not reduce it, as we do not move forward at all. That does 
 not mean that the treatment of values as forms of obligation 
 is entirely superfluous. It is not only a new name for it. If 
 we say "ought" instead of "value," if we say " obligation to 
 think " instead of " value of truth," we do much more than to 
 call the same thing by a different name. The characteristic 
 features of the new conception indeed contribute something 
 very significant to the understanding of the problem. Our 
 only objection would be that the thing which is expressed by 
 the idea of obligation is essentially something negative. To 
 say, for instance, that the value of truth is based on obliga- 
 tion means in the first place that it does not result from a 
 metaphysical existence. The old dogmatism said that a true 
 judgment is valuable because it agreed with an existing reality 
 which is independent of thinking. Such an unphilosophical
 
 THE OBLIGATIONS 57 
 
 view is energetically rejected by the doctrine of the ''ought." 
 The doctrine emphasizes that there exists no other basis for 
 our truth than the necessity of our judgment. And just as the 
 "ought" rejects such dogmatic empiricism, it also turns with 
 full clearness against any relativism which denies the absolute 
 character of the truth. In both directions the conception of 
 value would be at first powerless to suppress the wrong the- 
 ories, but as soon as the conception of value is surrounded 
 by the conception of obligation this negative task becomes 
 completed. Every mixture of the philosophy of value with 
 mere empiricism or with mere relativism then becomes ex- 
 cluded. The same holds for the ethical and aesthetic values. 
 The conception of obligation brings to sharpest distinction 
 the fact that the value of the moral deed is not based on its 
 objective effect in the existing world, as utilitarianism would 
 like to teach us. The value of the duty lies in the obligation 
 itself and not in its usefulness. As far as we are anxious to 
 fight against the usual falsification of the absolute values, 
 there indeed exists no more effective means than to point to 
 the difference between the "is" and the "ought." For such 
 negative purposes in the service of idealism the conception 
 of obligation is excellent. 
 
 But in contrast to this negative achievement, we must 
 insist that the positive character of the conception of obliga- 
 tion is directly misleading. It brings into the conception of 
 value certain characteristics which do not belong to it, and 
 which hinder the grasping of its deepest meaning. As long as 
 it is a question of fighting realism and utilitarianism and 
 empiricism, the conception of "ought" may be unavoidable. 
 As soon as we come to an ultimate theory, we must try 
 to get rid of the conception of obligation, because we must 
 recognize that in its ultimate meaning the value does not 
 represent an "ought." The idea of an "ought" evidently lies 
 before us most clearly, and comes first to the mind of every 
 one in the field of moral obligation. What does it mean there?
 
 58 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 We have before us a manifoldness of possibilities of action. 
 Some are tempting. They promise pleasure, but only one 
 action may be demanded by our duty. The obligation faces 
 us here in our choice of action. We feel that we can do that 
 which our duty forbids. We alone have to decide. This is 
 evidently the commonplace meaning of obligation. We should 
 not speak of obligation at all in such a case, if there were no 
 opportunity for a choice, no decision, not at least the possi- 
 bility to will that which we ought not to will. 
 
 Let us accept for the first moment this every-day idea of 
 duty. Have we any right to say that it really holds for the 
 value of truth or beauty or justice? When I want to judge, 
 do I really stand before a decision whether I want the true 
 judgment or its opposite? Is it not rather the case that, if 
 I will to judge at all, I never desire to choose anything but 
 the true valuable judgment? Of course, it may be that I am 
 not especially interested in judging at all ; I do not care for 
 knowledge and for the seeking of the truth. Society may 
 then remind me that it is my duty to seek the truth, but that 
 is evidently an ethical duty, not a logical one. Society wants 
 me to think in a way which makes me an agent of truth. But 
 as soon as I want to think at all, I certainly do not feel any 
 choice between my will for the truth and my will for the 
 error; I always will only the true judgment and never the error. 
 The truth does not come to me as an obligation which warns 
 me against my opposite desire. Whenever I want to judge, I 
 stand before a question which I am anxious to solve. I seek a 
 solution which is valuable to me because it gratifies my desire 
 for the removal of the difficulty. In this point the relativistic 
 philosophers are perfectly right. The relativists put them- 
 selves in the wrong when they add that this gratification is 
 dependent only upon the personal conditions and has no 
 general necessity. There is necessity. We feel it. But here 
 begins the mistake of the other side when the idealists claim 
 that this necessity is an obligation. Not everything which
 
 THE OBLIGATIONS 59 
 
 is necessary for every will — that is, which suits the will 
 without reference to the individual desires — must be an obli- 
 gation. If I seek truth, I seek a connection by which a 
 particular difficulty is removed, a particular problem is solved. 
 If I feel that the problem does not lie before me as an indi- 
 vidual only, but must be common to all who share the world 
 with me, I feel the complete solution as a satisfaction which 
 refers to no merely personal need, but which has absolute 
 validity. But no obligation enters into it. It is an over-per- 
 sonal satisfaction of the will. 
 
 Often an error may tempt me, but it can tempt me only 
 so long as I take it for truth ; that is, for a real solution of 
 my problem. I never want the error as such. I never prefer 
 a judgment unless it bears the value of truth for myself, and 
 thus makes me believe that every other possible subject 
 would feel it in the same way as gratification of his will. Of 
 course that loses its meaning if I give it a psychological inter- 
 pretation. It does not mean that my psycho-physical mechan- 
 ism stands under the necessity of choosing the true judgments 
 and of inhibiting the untrue ones. Most of the judgments 
 which the brain produces are errors. It is not a question of 
 a causal process any more than it is a question of obligation. 
 To will the action is neither the result of a natural law nor 
 of a rationalistic obligation. I will the truth because that 
 which it offers is really a complete satisfaction of my will; 
 and yet this value is unconditional because my will is ul- 
 timately not related to me or to anything individual, but 
 to something absolute and over-personal. Here lies the real 
 problem : How is it possible that I will something, and yet that 
 I will it without any reference to myself and merely with 
 reference to something which by principle is independent of 
 me as an individual ? 
 
 In the same way, we do not find any obligation in the field 
 of aesthetics. There, too, society may suggest the practical 
 request that he who has a talent ought to create beauty, but
 
 60 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 that is a moral obligation. Such an ethical duty demands 
 that you realize that which has aesthetic value, but the ac- 
 knowledgment of the aesthetic value is already presupposed. 
 Beauty is a completeness which our will wants, and if we 
 grasp it at all, we can never will it otherwise. We never will 
 the ugly. The obligation of an "ought" against which an 
 opposite will is fighting does not exist there. We will the 
 beautiful. Yet here, too, it is not only an individual desire like 
 the will for the charming and pleasing. The individual in his 
 devotion to beauty is not bound by an obligation, he wills 
 it with his own longing; but his will raises him over the merely 
 individual desires. It is again an over-personal and pure will. 
 Always again the same problem : How can we will without 
 reference to our own pleasure? But this alone is indeed the 
 question which experience puts before us. If instead we sim- 
 ply say that we will because we ought, we cut off the signifi- 
 cant question instead of answering it. 
 
 But there now remains at least the "ought" of the moral 
 value. There we certainly have a real choice between the 
 action which we ought to do in accordance with our duty 
 and the action which we want to do because it promises us 
 pleasure. Thus in the moral sphere the equation of value and 
 obligation appears entirely justified. Yet as soon as we look 
 somewhat carefully into the situation, we find here the same 
 thing which we find in truth and beauty. The moral value, 
 too, is in reality a value which we always will, and which 
 is never fought by any not-willing. The moral value never 
 stands in real contradiction to our own true will, and thus 
 has no reference to an "ought." We have to consider care- 
 fully here the whole situation, which is very easily misinter- 
 preted. It is not difficult to see Vv^hy the usual interpretation 
 misplaces the accent. 
 
 Whoever does harm to his neighbor acts against the moral 
 value, and whoever gives his own to his neighbor acts in 
 accordance with the moral value. We have the free choice
 
 THE OBLIGATIONS 61 
 
 whether we want to follow the norm, or whether we want to 
 transgress it in an immoral spirit. Yet even on the surface it 
 is clear that the external effects of our actions do not charac- 
 terize them as morally good or bad. The one who injures a 
 neighbor is not acting immorally, if he as a physician causes 
 the wound in the service of a surgical operation; and he 
 who gives presents to his neighbor does not act morally, if he 
 wants to bribe him to misuse his influence. The activity itself 
 is therefore indifferent, the motive alone decides about the 
 moral value of the action. Thus the moralist usually pre- 
 sents his doctrine of obligation in the nobler form that there 
 is ultimately only one obligation. We ought to fulfil our duty, 
 that is, we ought to perform that action which we ourselves 
 conceive as the action which ought to be done. Which action 
 we consider the right one in the particular case depends upon 
 a thousand circumstances, and belongs to our traditions and 
 education and our social surroundings. It has in itself nothing 
 to do with the moral value. The moral value demands only 
 that we remain loyal to our conviction, and that in spite of 
 tempting pleasure and advantage we do what we with our 
 best knowledge believe to be the right deed. 
 
 This is perfectly true. We have indeed no right to claim 
 that any moral value is involved in considering one action 
 rather than another as the action which we ought to do. If a 
 man has not learned which actions ought to be done, he is not 
 immoral but amoral. If he is practically unable to attach 
 value to certain actions, we speak of moral insanity. We do 
 not call a man a thief because he prefers the action of stealing 
 to the honest action. On the contrary, if he had a view of life 
 according to which stealing is the action which as action has 
 a special value, and he lived up to his principles, we should try 
 to protect society against such a dangerous individual and 
 would put him in an asylum, but we should avoid any moral 
 attitude. We call him a thief only if he feels that the honest 
 action is the valuable action, and if he feels it as valuable.
 
 62 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 it is the action which he himself really wants, while the steal- 
 ing as action he does not want. If there were only the choice 
 between the two actions as such, stealing and not stealing, he 
 would never hesitate, he would always prefer the valuable 
 honest action. His difficulty is only that, while he wills of the 
 two actions only the one, the honest one, he wills and desires 
 at the same time the booty, and to get it he has to steal. 
 Stealing itself does not become desirable by it. And so the 
 situation of the criminal is that he wavers between what as 
 action he really wills, namely the honest one, and another 
 action which he must perform if he is to reach a desired 
 pleasurable result. On the one side, he has an action which is 
 willed without reference to its result, and on the other, he has 
 an action which he does not will at all as action, but which 
 he does want in the service of the agreeable effect. Where this 
 contrast does not exist, there we never have a moral situation. 
 Now it is clear that in this part of the process there exists 
 no obligation. That we have learned not to will this feeling 
 and to will the honest action belongs to our past develop- 
 ment, and to social traditions, and to the influences of our sur- 
 roundings. It may be different in every nation and in every 
 social group. No one is responsible as an individual for the pre- 
 ference for certain actions. We begin with any moral demand 
 only as soon as these preferences have really taken hold of 
 us. The child and the insane person, like the beast, have no 
 moral obligation because they have not learned to give pre- 
 ference to certain special types of actions, and thus consider 
 the possibilities of action only with reference to the effects. 
 The social pressure which society exerts to impress the indi- 
 vidual with the desirability of certain types of action, there- 
 fore, still lies outside of the ethical obligation. 
 
 But here begins the real "ought." The moral man ought 
 under any circumstances to perform that action which he 
 really prefers as action. No hope of pleasure and no fear of 
 pain ought to tempt him to perform instead the opposite
 
 THE OBLIGATIONS 63 
 
 action which he really does not want as action. The desire 
 for the booty ought not to lead to stealing, if the individual 
 feels that the opposite action is the action which he prefers 
 as action. The starting-point for a moral decision is therefore 
 always that there are in view two possible actions, of which 
 the one is desired only as means to an effect, while the other 
 is desired as action itself and for itself, and therefore without 
 reference to any pleasurable effect. Such action is willed, 
 then, only as an expression of the will, as a realization of the 
 personality. He alone thinks morally who performs the action 
 which he wants to perform, not for any result, but only as an 
 expression of his whole real will. Moral merit belongs only to 
 the one who brings to realization that particular action which 
 he himself really wants as action. Hence moral value comes 
 in question only where a man chooses what he really wants 
 himself, and what expresses his own deepest will; in short, 
 when he is loyal to himself. The moral value is therefore not 
 attached to the resulting action, and not to the preceding 
 will for an action, but is attached to the agreement between 
 the two. Moral is the self-realization of the mind by which 
 the kind of action which we really want is performed. 
 
 This self-consistency is the only thing in the world which is 
 morally valuable. But in the face of that, have we still a right 
 to speak of an obligation? Is this value not just like truth 
 and beauty, a satisfaction of the will which is never opposed 
 by an opposite will? As little as the thinking mind ever wants 
 to think the error, does a thinking mind ever want to prosti- 
 tute itself, ever want to become disloyal to itself, ever want 
 to give up itself. Even the criminal prefers the carrying 
 through of the honest action which he really values as action. 
 His dishonest performance does not at all indicate that the 
 disloyalty against his own will tempts him more than loyalty. 
 On the contrary, if he is a criminal and not an insane person, 
 the value of self -consistency remains steadily before his mind. 
 Just because he values this loyalty, he feels sharply that he
 
 64 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 himself lost in worth when, under the temptation of a pleas- 
 ure, he realized that action which as action he did not will 
 at all. He has never wavered between the will to moral self- 
 consistency and the will to inconsistency; he never did not 
 will the consistency ; in other words, he never did not will the 
 moral. He did fluctuate between his will for the moral and 
 his will for a pleasure, and he chose the pleasure, but by that 
 the moral never became something which he did not will. The 
 only thing which is valuable in actions, namely, the self- 
 consistency, needs no outside obligation, but is thoroughly 
 based on the own will. No one cannot will it. But here, too, it 
 must be acknowledged that it is a will which is ultimately 
 over-personal, necessary, and general. I want to be consistent 
 with myself in my actions, and thus want to be myself, not 
 for the purpose of getting a personal pleasure from this con- 
 sistency, but to satisfy a will in me which has no reference 
 to my individual advantage. It is a will which, however 
 much it concerns my personality, is ultimately not referring 
 to my self but serving an eternal cause. It is a will which 
 uses the consistency of my self as means for building up an 
 absolutely valuable world. 
 
 Ultimately the real value of morality is then as little an 
 obligation as the value of truth and of beauty. They are all 
 objects of will only. The will never can prefer the untrue, the 
 unbeautiful, the immoral, and the "ought" loses all meaning 
 if a decision between different desires is excluded. But in 
 every case the will which prefers a value is independent from 
 the individual personality, that is, it is a pure will which is not 
 touched by personal pleasure and displeasure. The problem 
 which the conception of obligation has simply pushed aside 
 instead of solving is now at last clearly before us. To under- 
 stand the absolute values means to understand how our will 
 can become an over-personal demand which, without refer- 
 ence to any one's personal pleasure or displeasure, finds its 
 satisfaction in truth and beauty and morality and religion.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE SATISFACTION OF THE WILL 
 
 Now at last we see our whole field before us. The path which 
 we have travelled necessarily led us to this vista. We saw 
 that it is meaningless to deny the reality of absolute values. 
 It is necessary to seek and to understand them. Nature, the 
 physical and the psychical, is without values because it can- 
 not have any reference to the will, and every value must in- 
 volve a satisfaction of the willing personality. On the other 
 hand, every individual will is determined by pleasure and dis- 
 pleasure ; it serves personal desires and can therefore never be 
 general and absolute. Even if millions demand the same 
 thing, it lies in the meaning of personal will that it cannot be 
 necessary, and therefore that it cannot posit any absolute 
 values. To explain the absoluteness of the value by a ne- 
 cessity is impossible, as the will would then become a part of 
 causal nature. It seemed tempting to deduce this dependence 
 of the individual will from an ought, but we saw that this 
 solution also is unsatisfactory. The value is not an obligation, 
 because there exists no not-willing of the value and therefore 
 no choice and decision which would give meaning to an obli- 
 gation. Thus we stand before the fundamental fact that there 
 exists a will the fulfilment of which satisfies us, and that 
 means is valuable for us, and which yet is without reference 
 to any individual pleasure or displeasure, necessary for every 
 possible subject, and therefore absolutely valid. 
 
 This brings us to two separate questions : Why do we feel 
 satisfaction from something which has no reference to our 
 pleasure or displeasure? And, secondly. Why does our will de- 
 mand something which has nothing to do with our pleasure
 
 66 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 or displeasure? . We turn first to the former question, which 
 is after all only a preparatory one. Can we feel satisfaction 
 without awakening pleasure or the relief from displeasure, that 
 is, without reference to our own personal states ? Of course the 
 popular psychological view is that our will is always directed 
 by the pleasure or the displeasure which we expect. The will 
 is satisfied when the expected pleasure arises, inasmuch as the 
 pleasure is just the satisfaction which we seek. Whatever we 
 strive for, it must contain some glimmer of pleasure, and as 
 soon as we have reached the goal, the desired pleasure enters 
 our consciousness and no further explanation of our satisfac- 
 tion is needed. But the situation is not quite so simple. Its 
 complexity begins with the fact that the word "feeling " has 
 many meanings. If, for instance, we speak of a pain as a feel- 
 ing, we do not say whether we mean the disagreeable pain 
 content or the dislike with which we experience the content. 
 Headache and toothache are two different contents of feeling, 
 but the dislike in both cases is the same. In a corresponding 
 way the tickling and the sexual excitements are agreeable con- 
 tents of feeling, both of which may be separated from our 
 attitude of liking towards them These contents, however, 
 are evidently nothing but sensations, just like blue and green ; 
 in a stricter sense, the psychologist ought not to call them 
 feelings at all. The toothache or the sexual experience are 
 sensations, and the displeasure of the ache, that is the real feel- 
 ing, lies entirely in our attitude of disliking. We may dislike a 
 foul smell more strongly than a slight pain. Wherever we 
 speak of a feeling in the narrower sense of the word, we mean 
 our liking and disliking, and not the content to which they 
 refer. These contents, which are merely bodily sensations, are 
 usually called feelings only because they are accompanied by 
 especially vivid attitudes of liking and disliking. 
 
 As soon as we turn to the more complex objects of feeling, 
 to our memory-ideas and so on, no bodily sensations are any 
 longer involved. The satisfaction or dissatisfaction which
 
 THE SATISFACTION OF THE WILL 67 
 
 results from the fulfilling or not fulfilling of the will thus cer- 
 tainly has nothing to do with the pleasure-sensations or the 
 pain-sensations. But what is our liking and disliking, our 
 pleasure in the sweet and our displeasure in the bitter? We 
 point to the only essential factor. Our feeling of pleasure in 
 the stimulus is our striving for its continuation which fuses 
 with our perception. Our displeasure in the stimulus is our 
 striving for the removal of the stimulus which also blends 
 with our perception. Such striving is not consciously chosen. 
 From the standpoint of the biologist, we should say the re- 
 moval of the disagreeable, for instance of the pain-sensation, 
 is the general rebellion of the organism against the injury. 
 Consciousness has not chosen it, consciousness simply expe- 
 riences both the pain-sensation and the activity of defence as 
 completed facts. And now sets in the process which is decis- 
 ive for the experience of feeling. The sensation of rebellion 
 fuses with the sensation of the stimulus into a unity. The 
 defence becomes apparently an element of the impression 
 itself, and the pain-sensation thus gains a new quality, its 
 disagreeableness. Our own defence thus becomes somewhat 
 a part of the impression itself, and that characterizes the dis- 
 like element. 
 
 Exactly the same process distinguishes all the other feeling- 
 tones of external stimuli, only with the difference that the 
 pain-sensation alone produces the reaction with such com- 
 plete regularity. In the case of other stimuli, much depends 
 upon the special preparedness or unpreparedness of the indi- 
 vidual. But in every case where there is a feeling, the in- 
 truding stimulus produces reactions w^hich work towards the 
 continuation or towards the removal. The reaction results in 
 every case without intellectual meddling, and is not felt as 
 a special action. With the higher senses the process is more 
 complex. The effort to continue or to discontinue the stimu- 
 lus then becomes dependent upon a larger and larger num- 
 ber of conditions and is itself more ramified. The inhibitions
 
 68 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 and resettings of the higher motor nervous system control 
 the situation, but here, too, the reaction remains the basis of 
 the feeling. It is always dependent upon the whole situation 
 of the individual system. If we come to the world of our ideas 
 and thoughts, the reacting apparatus is no longer the mere 
 organism, but the whole personality with all its memories 
 and expectations; and yet again the reaction is produced 
 without conscious interference. Out of the whole composite 
 of mental states there results in every particular case either 
 a movement towards the continuity or a movement towards 
 the removal of the content of consciousness. Pleasure or 
 displeasure is thus the same in the highest as in the lowest 
 case. Whether we like a life position or a smell sensation, 
 our liking is nothing but a reaction of the whole personality. 
 Our reaction becomes in a way the psychical over-tone for the 
 fundamental tone of our perception. The reaction does not 
 set in because the feeling precedes, but the feeling is given 
 because the reaction has set in. The pleasure-experience is 
 thus in itself not at all an especially agreeable content of 
 consciousness. As content it is entirely indifferent ; it is only 
 a sum of sensations of activity, sensations of approach, shad- 
 ings of attention, associations, and similar processes, which 
 are held together only by the common purpose of reenforc- 
 ing the stimulus. In the same way the displeasure-feeling 
 as a content is not disagreeable, but neutral ; it is a sum of 
 tension-sensations, inhibitions, organic sensations, associa- 
 tions, and similar states serving as defence against the in- 
 trusion. In both cases everything becomes significant only 
 as addition to the idea with which the various feeling-ele- 
 ments are now fusing. The pleasure is not agreeable and the 
 displeasure is not disagreeable, but their existence indicates 
 to us that the stimulus or the idea with which they are fusing 
 is welcome or unwelcome to the psycho-physical system. It 
 is thus the stimulus which is agreeable or disagreeable, 
 and not the feeling. Of course we must not forget that we
 
 THE SATISFACTION OF THE WILL 69 
 
 recognized the pain or tickling as mere sensations; they are 
 no feelings at all. 
 
 If that is the case, then it is evidently absurd to assert that 
 our will works towards the creation of pleasure or towards 
 the removal of displeasure. I will a stimulus, perhaps the taste 
 of a fruit, or the view of a landscape ; I bite into the fruit or I 
 wander to the landscape, and my will is satisfied. We asked 
 for the source of this satisfaction, and received the reply that 
 we got it from the pleasure which we gain and which itself is 
 the satisfaction. Now it is clear that cause and effect have 
 been exchanged here. It is true the taste of the fruit is plea- 
 surable, but it is not the pleasure which I was seeking; the 
 pleasure is only expression of the fact that I desire the 
 continuation of the taste of the fruit. The feeling connected 
 itself with that taste-sensation before the juice reached my 
 tongue, when it was only an anticipated idea in me. That 
 means my psycho-physical system worked towards the re- 
 enforcement of that taste-sensation by giving me the im- 
 pulse to bite into the fruit. My will desires not the pleasure 
 which the fruit brings with it, and which as such has no 
 agreeableness, but my will wants the fruit-taste which I wish 
 to continue, and which therefore seems pleasurable. The goal 
 of the will is thus not the pleasure but the realization of the 
 stimulus which is welcome to my individual system, and 
 which is therefore agreeable. The pleasure only brought it 
 about that the will turned to this goal. Wherever there is 
 pleasure we must will its object, inasmuch as pleasure cor- 
 responds to the inner movement towards the reenforcement 
 of the object. What the will-activity desires and reaches is 
 thus the realization of the anticipated stimulus. And if the 
 fulfilment of the will brings satisfaction, it is evidently this 
 realization which is satisfactory. That the realized stimulus 
 is accompanied by pleasure does not contribute anything to 
 the satisfaction, then. It only indicates that the stimulus 
 harmonizes with the whole situation of the personality, and
 
 70 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 that the individual thus favors its continuation. The satis- 
 faction may exist no less when the anticipated excitement 
 which becomes realized by the will is not accompanied by any 
 pleasure. The absence of such a feeling-tone means only that 
 the stimulus anticipated and realized stands in no definite 
 relation to the particular personality. It neither threatens 
 with a disturbance of the inner equilibrium nor does it pro- 
 mise to remove an existing disturbance. 
 
 Our unavoidable preliminary question is now answered. 
 Satisfaction of the will is independent of pleasure and dis- 
 pleasure; satisfaction of the will results from the realization 
 of the anticipated stimulus. Pleasure and displeasure ex- 
 press only the relation of the stimulus to the personality 
 without being themselves sources of satisfaction or dissatis- 
 faction. If the anticipated stimulus has a feeling-tone of 
 pleasure or displeasure, it stimulates the will towards the 
 particular action. But if the will arises without a particular 
 relation of the stimulus to the equilibrium of the personality, 
 the fulfilment of the will involves no less satisfaction. It 
 must therefore be perfectly possible to get deepest satisfac- 
 tion in a sphere in which no pleasure and displeasure exist. 
 If we can show that the will, and that means the striving for 
 realization, can exist without being stirred up by pleasure 
 or displeasure, we understand that the fulfilment of such 
 striving can satisfy. And the consequence is that values may 
 be entirely over-personal, without any reference to the in- 
 dividual equilibrium, and that means without reference to 
 pleasure or displeasure, and may yet be true values, sources 
 of complete satisfaction. 
 
 We called all this a preliminary question because it does 
 not answer our general question how values are possible. We 
 have sho\Mi that experiences without any relation to personal 
 pleasure and displeasure may give satisfaction, if they real- 
 ize the end of a will. But we have not touched the deeper 
 question: How can there be will-movements which are not
 
 THE SATISFACTION OF THE WILL 71 
 
 directed by reference to the own interest, that is, by pleas- 
 ure and displeasure? If we call the will which is not con- 
 trolled by pleasure or displeasure a pure will, we must ask : 
 Can there exist at all pure will-actions ? If such pure will- 
 actions exist, we now understand at last that the pure will 
 may bring us no less satisfaction than the will which creates 
 pleasure and relieves displeasure. Even this may now be 
 clear from the start, that if there exists a pure will at all, 
 both kinds of will and therefore both kinds of satisfaction 
 may be mixed in a single action. The pure will may drive 
 towards a goal from its o^vn motives, and yet that goal may 
 have at the same time relation to the personal equilibrium. 
 The realization may thus satisfy the pure will and represent 
 a pure absolute value, and yet may at the same time remove 
 a personal disturbance and may satisfy by it a selfish side- 
 will. In this way the beautiful may perhaps at the same time 
 cause pleasure by its agreeableness, the true may at the same 
 time bring pleasure by its usefulness, the moral may secure 
 in the world somewhere a happiness which reflects on us with 
 enjoyment, and even the religious may at the same time give 
 a pleasurable comfort. But all that remains, indeed, a double 
 play, which at any time may also turn into counter-play ; the 
 pure will may and must often turn against the pleasure- will. 
 As yet, however, we do not have to examine these complica- 
 tions ; we do not yet know whether we have a right to acknow- 
 ledge at all the beautiful, the true, the moral, as cases of pure 
 will, inasmuch as we have not found out whether a pure v/ill 
 can exist at all. So far we only know that all those ideals can 
 fulfil their meaning only if they are conceived without rela- 
 tion to personal pleasure and displeasure, and we now know 
 further that the will which lacks such a relation can bring 
 us complete satisfaction. 
 
 That which fulfils our will brings us satisfaction and is 
 thus valuable for us. But what does it mean to fulfil our 
 will ? We say our will is fulfilled when the idea which we try
 
 72 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 to maintain becomes realized. We must elaborate that state- 
 ment further. What does this realization mean? We may 
 say, in the first place, it means the identity of content be- 
 tween the preceding and the resulting experience. In the 
 language of psychology, we should say that in every com- 
 plete will-action the idea of the end must precede the per- 
 ception of the end. If I long for the taste of the fruit and the 
 result is that I taste chocolate, the sweet taste of chocolate 
 may give me pleasure, but it does not give me satisfaction 
 of my will. It is not a fulfilment of that which I long for. 
 The satisfaction is left out because the taste of chocolate is 
 not a realization of my anticipated idea of the taste of fruit. 
 The one is not identical in its content with the other. It is 
 evidently just this identical anticipation of the end which 
 makes the will a function for which the personality is respon- 
 sible. If we did not know the end beforehand, we should not 
 be able to inhibit the action by associated ideas of undesir- 
 able consequences. The anticipated idea of the effect makes 
 it possible to stir up associations which represent our whole 
 life-experiences and our principles. Through them we can 
 reenforce or suppress the action which is to realize the idea. 
 If there were no identity between the anticipated and the real- 
 ized experience, we should never feel responsible, and instead 
 of a will-action, we should have merely a chance activity. 
 
 This identity does not involve that I must think the con- 
 tent from the start in the same material of sensations in which 
 it is later to be realized. On the contrary, it may be that I do 
 not know at all what I want to reach. It is then for my will 
 at first an unknown X, which is defined only by its relations. 
 I feel the satisfaction of the fulfilment of will as soon as the 
 equation is solved and the unknown unveiled. If, for in- 
 stance, I try to remember a name, my desire is fulfilled, if 
 under the pressure of this will the name enters my conscious- 
 ness. The sound of this name itself is evidently not in me 
 beforehand. If the name itself had been there, I should not
 
 THE SATISFACTION OF THE WILL 73 
 
 have sought it, and yet that which I grasped beforehand, 
 that idea of the forgotten name, was in its content identical 
 with the name which I finally found. If this idea of the un- 
 known name had not preceded my desire, the final appear- 
 ance of the name would not have been felt at all as the result 
 of my effort, and therefore not as the product of will. In this 
 way the working of our imagination or our reason may lead 
 us to results which certainly were not beforehand in conscious- 
 ness. But the artistic creation or the scientific thought does 
 not strike us as a chance result ; it comes to us as a deed of our 
 will because the goal which we reach is identical in content 
 with that which we aimed at. The artist or the scholar had 
 this end in his mind only in an indistinct way. The realization 
 was given by his elaboration. The forms in which such a 
 transmutation into a new but identical content goes on are 
 of course numberless. We must not confuse this transition 
 by thinking of the difference between psychical and physical ; 
 we do not have a will-action only if the first content is a 
 psychical idea and its realization a physical process. Even in 
 that case the final factor is not the physical process as such, 
 but the psychical perception of it. It is always the transition 
 from one content of consciousness to another content, from 
 the idea to the perception. The reference to a reality outside 
 of consciousness does not contribute anything essential. If 
 I have a hazy and sketchy idea and disentangle it and de- 
 velop it by logical thinking, and finally reach a clear con- 
 sistent thought, this end is reached by my will, while the whole 
 transmutation went on in my consciousness. The only essen- 
 tial thing always remains the identity between the starting- 
 point and the end. 
 
 But finally, what is the difference between the starting- 
 point and the end? They are identical in content. Why do 
 we go over from one to the other ? Why do we aim from the 
 idea to its realization, and what do we mean by the realiza- 
 tion? To point again at once to the centre, we seek the new
 
 74 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 form because it allows us a new action. Every realization is 
 the starting-point for a new possibility of action, which is im- 
 possible as long as the content exists only in the preceding 
 form. Whether I take a tool in my hand, or bring the fruit 
 to my lips, or recall a name, or think a thought consistently 
 to its end, each time a certain action becomes possible by 
 which the particular content expresses its meaning. I can 
 make use of the tool, I can swallow the juice of the fruit, I 
 can pronounce the name, I can carry out the development 
 of thought. To realize always means to remodel a given ex- 
 perience in such a way that the content remains the same, 
 except that it takes a form in which a special action becomes 
 possible. The transition from the idea of the end to its real- 
 ization is a transition from a vague, indefinite, unsatisfactory 
 starting-point to a definite, satisfactory basis of action. Prac- 
 tical life leads us to will-actions because it constantly leads 
 us into situations in which we can satisfy our desires only 
 by transforming our ideas into realities, that is, by transform- 
 ing our contents of consciousness in such a way that they 
 allow us definite application while their content remains the 
 same. We can now say in general that we have the satisfaction 
 of fulfilment whenever we maintain the content-experience 
 and secure the identical content in a new form as part of a 
 new situation which allows a new activity. It is the identity 
 in the transition which satisfies us, and whatever provides 
 this identity is therefore valuable. And from here we can 
 take our last step.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 Every instant of our experience is in itself without any value ; 
 it is just a flash of life, a momentary thrill of consciousness. 
 If life were nothing but such a momentary flash, if no instant 
 referred beyond itself, if no content remained beyond the 
 flying experience, life would have no meaning and we should 
 have nothing which we might call a world. To hold this ex- 
 perience when a new pulse-beat of life comes with its new sit- 
 uation and its new needs, and to find in it once more the iden- 
 tical content, is the one fundamental demand which liberates 
 us from the mere flashlike character of life. We seek the iden- 
 tical content once more, and if we find it, we have a bit of a 
 world. And because to have a world means thus to secure in 
 the new experience identical content with the old, such a 
 world gives us exactly that which we have recognized as the 
 condition for every satisfaction; that means, it is valuable. 
 In short, whatever secures us a world, that is, whatever al- 
 lows us to transcend the isolated flashlike experience, must 
 be valuable to us. Here we have the deciding fact from which 
 everything else will follow. 
 
 We seek the identity of experience. That is the one funda- 
 mental act which secures for us a world. It is the one act 
 which we cannot give up, and yet which has nothing what- 
 ever to do with personal pleasure and pain. We demand that 
 there be a world; that means that our experience be more 
 than just the passing experience, that it assert itself in its 
 identity in new experiences. Here is the one original deed 
 which gives eternal meaning to our reality, and without which 
 our life would be an empty dream, a chaos, a nothing. We
 
 76 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 will that our experience is a world. We do not say that our 
 experience points toward a world, or that our experience is an 
 image of a world, as if there is still something beyond experi- 
 ence in an immutable transcendence. If we were to grasp 
 such an over-world, it would again become an experience for 
 us and would lead to the same problems. No, the experi- 
 enced content itself becomes such a world for us by that one 
 fundamental deed of seeking identities. Whoever does not 
 want to perform this deed cannot have ans^thing but mere 
 flying experiences. Moon and stars are merely personal sen- 
 sations to him ; friends and foes, norms and sins, are merely 
 personal impressions. Nothing has validity beyond its mere 
 being experienced, nothing has independent content, nothing 
 is of independent significance, nothing of independent life. 
 
 No one can be forced to perform that deciding deed. It 
 has to be done in full freedom, and yet only for those who 
 have performed it has it a meaning at all to speak about the 
 world and its values. We did not start to prove that the 
 values exist, and still less did we intend to preach that those 
 who do not believe in them ought to submit to such a creed ; 
 we asked only what such values mean for those who know 
 them. He who does not know them, and who therefore must 
 deny even the value of reality for anything which transcends 
 his immediate experience, must, of course, deny also the 
 reality of any other subject. He stands, therefore, entirely 
 outside the circle of those who combine for the common in- 
 quiry into values. Whoever wants to discuss and to examine 
 with us must have acknowledged already the reality of other 
 subjects, and must have affirmed the independent reality of 
 these experiences. Only we who have taken this first decisive 
 step, and who have thus affirmed the independent existence 
 of the contents of our experience, that is, their identity in new 
 and ever new experiences — we alone can examine and test 
 anything together. If there are beings who do not will to 
 perform this first act, they must be eliminated as possible
 
 THE ETERNAL VALUES 77 
 
 subjects of such a discussion. They do not want to have a 
 world; they are satisfied with having merely instantaneous 
 experiences of which no one is thought as the same in con- 
 tent with another. They may not be aware that they then lose 
 even the possibility of their self -identity, and that their life 
 cannot be anything but a meaningless chaotic dream. But 
 certainly they are not bound together with us by a common 
 interest, as our interest is to imderstand the world, and thus 
 to presuppose the self-assertion of our experiences in their 
 identities. But we who have taken the step and affirmed 
 this self-assertion of our experience, and thus gained a world, 
 now want carefully to examine throughout this book whether 
 or not this one act of affirmation of an independent world 
 necessarily determines all its pure values and gives to them 
 an eternal absolute significance. 
 
 If every inner occurrence remained isolated and appeared 
 only to disappear forever without trace, we should not have 
 a world. The self-assertion of the occurrence, and that means 
 the world-character of the experience, consists in the identical 
 recurrence, and this recurrence constitutes the ground for our 
 satisfaction, as we recognized that all satisfaction results from 
 the finding of identities. If we approach the event with the 
 will that it is not a dream but a self-asserting independent 
 world, every recurrence, every self -identity in the experiences 
 must be for us a fulfilment. But as this will to have a world 
 has no relation to personal pleasure and pain, and must hold 
 for every possible subject with whom we can discuss the 
 world, this satisfaction must have validity for every con- 
 sciousness which wills with us the reality of a world. A sat- 
 isfaction which must hold for every one who wants to have 
 a world at all is a pure value independent of personal pleasure. 
 The assertion of identity among the changing experiences is 
 thus the fundamental absolute valuation. On the other hand, 
 only in so far as such identity offers itself is the experience 
 at all a self-dependent real world. Hence the world of values
 
 78 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 is the only true world, and for every one who wants to have a 
 world at all, all the relations which result from the self-asser- 
 tion of the experiences must be acknowledged as absolutely 
 valid for the true world. The system of values must then be 
 recognized as soon as we ask what has been really posited by 
 this act of world-assertion. It will be the topic of all the fol- 
 lowing inquiries. 
 
 The fundamental directions of evaluation can now be re- 
 cognized at once. If the experiences are to assert themselves 
 as a self-dependent world, and are to realize themselves in 
 new and ever new experiences, and are to remain identical 
 with themselves, we must demand a fourfold relation. First, 
 every part must remain identical with itself in the changing 
 events; secondly, the various parts must show in a certain 
 sense identity among themselves, and thus show that they 
 agree with one another and that no one part of the world is 
 entirely isolated ; thirdly, that which changes itself in the ex- 
 perience must still present an identity in its change by show- 
 ing that the change belongs to its own meaning and is only its 
 own realization. This threefold identity in the chaos of life- 
 events gives a threefold self-assertion, a threefold fulfilment 
 of our demand for an independent world of our experiences, a 
 threefold over-personal satisfaction of the subject, a threefold 
 pure value. We may call them the value of conservation, the 
 value of agreement, the value of realization. But if the world 
 is completely to assert itself, that is, to hold its own identity, 
 these three values must ultimately be identical with one an- 
 other, one must realize itself in the other. Then only the pure 
 will gains its absolute satisfaction; and then we gain the 
 fourth value of completion. 
 
 Hence we have four postulates which supplement each 
 other and which cooperate to make a world possible at all, 
 and thus to overcome the mere chance events. Whoever 
 affirms a world must demand this conservation and agree- 
 ment and realization and completion of the world as guarantee
 
 THE ETERNAL VALUES 79 
 
 for the self-assertion of the experience. In each of these four 
 forms life demonstrates itself as a piece of reality. Each single 
 occurrence as such, each instantaneous experience as such, is 
 without value. But it is of absolute value that it asserts itself 
 and thus builds up a world. Wherever our will reaches the 
 contact with this world-fulfilment, and finds an experience 
 identical with itself in a new event, there the pure will is 
 satisfied and a pure value is gained. The true world is there- 
 fore the world of our experiences in so far as they assert them- 
 selves. In their own independent self-assertion they become 
 realized while they are for us only experiences. Our question 
 as to the validity of pure values can have no other meaning 
 except in reference to this true world, and it is now evident 
 that it would be meaningless to deny the question. The true 
 world must be filled with these pure values, inasmuch as it 
 is just the world which we build up in affirming the inde- 
 pendence of our experiences. The true world has validity 
 only in so far as it does fulfil this demand, and thus satisfies 
 the pure will, that is, in so far as it has absolute value. We 
 single individuals may not be able to grasp the true world ; 
 but the world which we are seeking and the values which we 
 want to recognize are a world for which the validity of these 
 values is presupposed. We can say with a technical term : 
 the satisfaction of our pure will for identities is the only 
 " a-priori " for the true world which we are upbuilding. Our 
 experience is nothing but just our experience, or else it be- 
 longs to a world which is absolutely valuable. There cannot 
 be a third possibility. If it is a world at all, it must be abso- 
 lutely valuable, that is, it must satisfy the pure will, because 
 it becomes a world only by its self-assertion, that is, by its 
 identical recurrence, and this identity means fulfilment, 
 means satisfaction, means value. 
 
 This deed, which raises the experience to its independent 
 selfhood, is performed by us naively. We have posited such 
 an evaluation already whenever we give to things or to per-
 
 80 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 sons an own value of existence. But out of these naive evalu- 
 ations of life arise the purposive efforts which serve the sys- 
 tematic upbuilding of such a self-asserting and therefore abso- 
 lutely valuable world. Such purposive efforts in the service 
 of the absolute values, we call the labor of civilization. Hence 
 we must separate the values which naive life posits from the 
 values which civilization posits intentionally. In each of 
 these two large groups, the life- values and the culture-values, 
 we then have the four heads of the values of conservation, 
 agreement, realization, and completion. Thus we have eight 
 classes of values, but each must be divided three times, inas- 
 much as experiences which are to assert themselves can be- 
 long to three different fields, either to the experience of the 
 outer world, or to the experience of our fellow-world, or to 
 the experience of our inner world. Hence we have a system 
 of eight times three groups of values, and yet all these twenty- 
 four values are only ramifications of the one value which 
 fulfils our will that our experience is to belong to a self- 
 dependent, self-asserting world. 
 
 We have not avoided the word "system," and yet we know 
 well that it awakens in many minds a deep-rooted aversion. 
 They have the vision of dry, secluded pedants, who " cut up 
 thought and knowledge into a scheme of neatly formulated 
 and mutually exclusive departments." They see in such 
 system-makers perhaps the successors of the mediaeval scho- 
 lastics who carried their Aristotelianism to a point where they 
 lost contact with the concrete experience, and they would like 
 to remind such modern scholastics that they ought rather to 
 drink deeper from the well of Platonic philosophy. What is 
 the use of the demarcation lines which such systems, far from 
 the real world, demand, if the world itself comes to us in an 
 inexhaustible manifoldness of transitions and intermediate 
 regions of half-lights and mysteries ? To build systems means 
 to leave out the best that really exists. But those who speak 
 in such a mood still stand outside of the temple of philosophy.
 
 THE ETERNAL VALUES 81 
 
 They still think with the man on the street, that the world of 
 existence, which is object of our real knowledge, can be found 
 as an immediate life-experience, and that all our inquiry into 
 its traits and values is simply a discovering and exploring 
 of that which really exists ready-made beforehand. As soon 
 as he has left the street and has entered the temple, he be- 
 comes aware that the thought-form of existence itself pre- 
 supposes a definite act and attitude of the will. We do not 
 find an existing world, but we make it out of the raw mate- 
 rial of immediate life. Existence is a goal, not a starting- 
 point. Existence is a value which we assign to the things 
 of life in the service of the aim of following up their iden- 
 tity. The whole world to which our knowledge refers is a 
 world determined and shaped by such attitude of our will. 
 
 We make the world. That does not mean that we construct 
 it arbitrarily like the game of chess. Our constructions do not 
 speak of a world which we shape in order that we may have 
 new problems about which to think while the true world 
 goes on not caring for our constructions. No, we make the 
 world, but the world which we make is the only one with re- 
 gard to which any knowledge has meaning. It is the world of 
 nature and of history and of norms, a world which we build 
 up, but in which alone every possible truth lies. Mere life does 
 not contain it; life is only the clay from which we have to 
 mould the world which has the value of truth. And if we un- 
 derstand that, we see that the act of affirming the true world 
 belongs together with the act of affirming the beautiful world 
 and the moral world ; and we have no right to give any more 
 emphasis to the one act than to the other. The world which 
 maintains itself in existence, and is therefore true, has no 
 more reality than the world which realizes itself in morality 
 and the world which agrees with itself in beauty. In short, 
 to speak of the values of life means not to speak of that which 
 is given, but of that which is to be performed . In that case, what 
 remains of the blame against the system-maker? If the world
 
 82 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 were really something completed, which we simply have to 
 explore, then indeed he would be petty and narrow, if he 
 believed that he could make out beforehand what may be 
 found in the world. The next day might overrun his little 
 system, and the big meshes of his conceptional net might 
 prove themselves unfit to hold all which gayly swims in the 
 ocean of reality. But if it is a world of tasks which we are to 
 perform, and if the world of existence and of progress and of 
 harmony and of completeness is to be a world by our own work, 
 then nothing has reality which is not determined by the char- 
 acter of our task. We reach reality only in so far as we 
 are loyal to our purpose, and we understand reality only in so 
 far as we are clear about these, our purposes. And as to these 
 purposes, we surely need not wait until we have brought in 
 all the knowledge which a future may secure by its discover- 
 ies. All that future knowledge must itself stand in the ser- 
 vice of our particular purposes. To divide the field of thought 
 into a scheme of departments is thus not the presumptuous- 
 ness of one who believes that he knows everything in the 
 world, and that he can tell beforehand exactly how the sepa- 
 rate sub-departments in the world really look, instead of mod- 
 estly waiting until our knowledge is richer. To understand 
 the task which we are to fulfil, to understand the duties to 
 which we must live up if our life is to give us the meaning 
 of a world, demands only a full expression of that which lives 
 in us and a full clearness as to our own actual purposes. 
 
 Of course there remains a personal difference in man which 
 is ultimately one of temperament. Not every one seeks an 
 ultimate understanding of reality; many a mind may be 
 rather fascinated by the one or the other aspect of the ex- 
 isting world. No one is obliged to take the mathematician's 
 r61e, and we can deal with the things without counting them 
 and measuring them. But no one has the right to blame the 
 mathematician if he refers the manifoldness of our things to 
 the system of numbers, and the manifoldness of our space
 
 THE ETERNAL VALUES 83 
 
 to the system of three dimensions. He does not have to wait 
 until it is found out that three dimensions exist, because 
 these three dimensions are forms of his truth-positing activ- 
 ity. He does not deny by it that you can move in any num- 
 ber of directions ; his system has room for every possible di- 
 rection. And still less the man on the street ought to accuse 
 the philosopher of living removed from the world, from 
 the reality of life, from the pulse-beat of immediate experi- 
 ence. On the contrary, common-sense which deals with the 
 world of knowledge, that is, with the true constructions of 
 science, as if it were the world of our immediate experience, 
 is really far from the truth of life. The philosopher who re- 
 cognizes that the world of existence is a world which the log- 
 ical thought has shaped, and who therefore understands 
 reality out of the manifoldness of our tasks and purposes, 
 brings us back to the apprehension of the life which we really 
 live. It has always been the true grandeur of philosophy that 
 it has brought mankind nearer to life again, and has secured 
 by it new life-energies. The more abstract its language, and 
 the more technical its system, the more fully has it always 
 performed its upbuilding work and fulfilled its duty. The 
 history of mankind has shown that the more abstractly and 
 consistently and systematically philosophy carried out her 
 labor, the more influential her work has been for the true 
 progress of striving mankind. Next to religions, rigid philo- 
 sophical systems which the man on the street hardly under- 
 stood in their original form have been the most powerful 
 factors in the history of the last two thousand years; they 
 have made revolutions and they have brought reforms. All 
 popular compromises of thought have been historical seda- 
 tives. Only the laborious self-consistent systematic thought 
 can give us the full truth, and only the full truth can make 
 us free.
 
 PART II 
 
 THE LOGICAL VALUES
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 
 
 In our first part we have reached a theory of pure values. 
 The work which lies before us is to elaborate the system of 
 values. We have recognized in what sense values are possible 
 at all and how they must be apprehended. Now we must ex- 
 plore the whole universe of values and separate carefully its 
 various parts. We recognized as absolutely valuable that 
 which constitutes a world. On the other hand, that which is 
 necessary for the constitution of a world must be acknow- 
 ledged beforehand as belonging eternally to the only world 
 which we seek and which we can know. The only thing which 
 is fundamentally necessary for it and which gives to us the 
 absolute satisfaction is the self-assertion of the world. It trans- 
 forms our mere chance experience from a chaotic dream into 
 a world. We find this self-assertion by the recognition of 
 identities in the experience. The first demand is then natural, 
 that any part of the experience can be found identical with 
 itself in new experiences. Naive life finds this identity and 
 correspondingly values it. The resulting value is that of ex- 
 istence. But the history of knowledge is the great effort to 
 elaborate this value and to assert the identities of the parts 
 of experience where naive life would not recognize them. This 
 systematic effort leads us to a new group of values, the values 
 of connection. Both the naive values of existence and the 
 cultural values of connection serve the same need, to re- 
 cognize every element of experience as identical with itself 
 in new experiences. This effort of civilization is called sci- 
 ence. Both the naive and the elaborate efforts, those simple 
 acknowledgments of existence and those scientific recogni-
 
 88 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 tions of connections, represent together the logical values, 
 and we may turn first to them, beginning with the values of 
 existence. 
 
 And so we are to speak of existence, of that real absolutely 
 valid being which stands in contradiction to not-being. No 
 other attitude is demanded from us there but the mere 
 acknowledgment which expresses itself in the affirmative 
 judgment. The being of a thing or of a person demands 
 no appreciation such as we might give to an achievement, 
 demands no joy such as we might have in the beautiful, 
 demands no conviction such as we might have for the meta- 
 physical values. The being simply wants to be accepted, to 
 be recognized, to be affirmed, and demands that submission 
 which calculates with the fact that this or that is given. 
 
 The value of existence becomes material of communica- 
 tion in the form of a judgment ; for instance, " It rains." The 
 first impression may be that we put the accent in the wrong 
 place. It might be said that what is valuable is not the ex- 
 istence of the rain, but the judgment about its existence. 
 The valuable is not that which is expressed by the judgment, 
 but the valuable is the truth of the judgment. That means 
 that the judgment which agrees with the real existence is 
 valuable. Knowledge is valuable, but not the known. Yet let 
 us discriminate carefully there. The popular confusion re- 
 sults from the dogmatic idea that our judgments refer to a 
 world which is independent of our experience and which is to 
 be deciphered in our judgments. Whoever wants to overcome 
 such dogmatism and wants to carry through the critical at- 
 titude must not only demand that all knowledge have refer- 
 ence to the world of our experience, but that the world of ex- 
 perience build itself up only in our knowledge. We do not 
 have a world of experience which is only object of awareness. 
 Our only world is an acknowledged, an asserted, a judged, a 
 logically formulated world. The objects of knowledge and 
 the knowing judgments are not two, but are one. And only
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 89 
 
 the conceptional formulation in the interests of communica- 
 tion is something additional. At first the only logically sig- 
 nificant thing is the acknowledgment of that which is given, 
 and in itself this acknowledgment demands no conceptions 
 and no formulations, but only the act of will which exists in 
 the affirming an experience as being. The system of our ac- 
 knowledgments as they find their expression in our judgments 
 is at the same time the system of our real experiences. An 
 experience which is not object of judgment exists for us as 
 little as a reality which is hidden behind the experience. It 
 is therefore impossible to seek the logical value in the fact 
 that the judgment renders correctly the experience, inasmuch 
 as experience comes in question only as object of judgment. 
 The value of a judgment as act of acknowledgment coincides 
 with the value of existence of that which is asserted in the 
 judgment. The value of the judgment of existence means the 
 same as the value of the existence of the world. We do not 
 know as object of knowledge any other reality than the one 
 which is shaped and acknowledged in our judgments. Con- 
 sequently it is misleading to speak of an agreement between 
 the two and of a value which belongs to this agreement. 
 
 Of course we all find difficulties in overcoming dogmatism. 
 We are inclined to believe that the earth stands firm while 
 the sun is moving. In the same way we always refer the value 
 of our knowledge to the agreement between our judgments 
 and a world which is independent of our judgments. We eman- 
 cipate ourselves with the more difficulty from such habits of 
 thought as we have all gone through the school of psychology. 
 Certainly the psychologist treats the experiences as contents 
 of our individual consciousness entirely separated from the 
 physical things. For the psychologist the judgment is a com- 
 bination of ideas in our consciousness, and its value consists 
 in the harmony between those ideas in the capsule of our 
 consciousness with the outer physical world. All that is per- 
 fectly true in the midst of psychology, but the true results
 
 90 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 of scientific psychology are misinterpreted if they are taken 
 as expressions of the pure reality of life. If our personality is 
 to be interpreted in its real willing and acting, it must not be 
 brought under the point of view of a science which works by 
 principle with far-reaching artificial abstractions. Such psy- 
 chologizing philosophy is ultimately the same misuse as that 
 which in past days distorted the true teachings of physics into 
 a wrong philosophy. At that time there arose a hastily built 
 materialism, which met its downfall as soon as serious phi- 
 losophy approached it. On its crumbling ruins psychologism 
 has settled itself. 
 
 If we really want to find what the assertion of existence 
 expresses, we must return to the immediate experience before 
 it is transformed and reshaped by psychology or any other 
 special science. What does it mean in the pure reality of life 
 that we acknowledge anything as really existing? Everybody 
 must start, of course, from his own self. Now I find myself in 
 view of a manifoldness of contents as a self which takes atti- 
 tude towards them. This difference of content and self I find 
 in every experience of which I can give an account. But this 
 contrast between content and self has nothing to do with the 
 separation of physical and psychical. The content of my real 
 experience is neither psychical nor physical because it is still 
 both together ; it is the still undifferentiated real thing there 
 without which I grasp. On the other hand, the self in its 
 attitude is neither psychical nor physical content because it 
 cannot be content in any case. The real self as I find it in my 
 true life-experiences is never a content which I perceive; I 
 know myself in my attitude by becoming certain of my self 
 through my activity and my effort. Whoever makes the con- 
 cession that he finds his own self as a content of consciousness 
 is lost in the artificiality of psychologism and cannot find his 
 way back to true life-experience. 
 
 In contrast to this, my real self and its attitudes, I find the 
 contents. They are not packed together in my self, but they
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 91 
 
 are scattered over the universe ; they are not yet pulverized 
 by the physicist into atoms and not yet transformed by the 
 psychologist into sensations. There without in the sky I ex- 
 perience the stars, and I do not know anything of my con- 
 sciousness which reflects them and still less of my brain which 
 is to produce them as sensations. That true thing is every- 
 where, but never in me, the self, which takes attitudes. Fur- 
 ther, just as my true objects are never spatially in me, but are 
 there and there, in the same way the true objects are not 
 pressed together into the present moment of experience. If I 
 psychologize them, my ideas are all present in me now; the 
 perceptions which refer to the present, the memory ideas 
 which refer to the past, the expectation ideas which refer to 
 the future, are all present in me in this instant. But in the 
 true life-experience this double relation does not exist at all. 
 My remembering does not involve a content which is present 
 now; my self turns directly towards the past objects, and 
 in my expectation my self turns directly towards the future 
 content. To treat those contents as experiences which are 
 experiences of the present moment involves the whole trans- 
 formation which psychology introduces. 
 
 The contents which I know in my real life are further never 
 given to a passive spectator, like those which natural science 
 deals with. The physicist may and must abstract from every 
 self which takes attitudes. The true things thus become 
 merely perceivable objects. But in reality I know the things 
 only as starting-points of my attitude, of my interest, of my 
 acceptance, or of my rejection. The things are means and 
 ends for me, tools of my will and of my attention, never merely 
 content of an indifferent awareness. The true experience is 
 thus a will directed towards goals, and only afterwards does 
 the will separate itself as a felt attitude of the self from its 
 goal as an experienced content. If I ask myself how in my 
 real experience the will and the goal, that is, the self and the 
 content, can be discriminated at all, I feel ultimately one last
 
 92 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 simple fact : in the feeling of self I always experience an inner 
 contrast which does not exist in the content. In this will of 
 the self is always a certain inner relation to an opposite. I 
 cannot agree without excluding the disagreement; I cannot 
 disagree without refusing the agreement. In every liking and 
 disliking, loving and hating, desiring and resisting, lies such 
 an opposition. And only in this contrast I know mj'^self as 
 the subject of attitude, and that means as a real personality. 
 After eliminating that which moves in such opposition, I 
 call the remainder of the experience content. The real life can 
 never overcome this fundamental relation. Experience may 
 be developed towards the height of scholarly thought, and 
 yet even the world of the scientist remains content for the 
 will of a self which takes attitude. The physicist conceives 
 the universe in such a way that it is thought as an object 
 for a passive spectator. But in doing so he gains a system 
 made up from the mechanical universe on the one side and 
 that abstract, passive spectator on the other side, and this 
 whole system is now itself not at all object for a passive 
 spectator, but is content for the will of the purposive think- 
 ing physicist. 
 
 Yet the reality of life is still richer. As such a subject of 
 will, I find myself not only in relation to the outer world, but 
 from the start also in relation to the fellow- world. In the 
 immediate life-act I take attitude to friend and foe, and work 
 sympathizing or resisting in continuous reference to other 
 subjects of will. The individual will thus finds itself always 
 in relation to objective things and to subjective beings. But 
 finally a third antithesis : the individual will finds its limita- 
 tions not only in the outer world, and in the fellow- world, but 
 also in its own inner world. The self finds itself bound by the 
 structure of certain own will-acts. I find will-attitudes alive 
 in me which I cannot change arbitrarily, will-acts which seem 
 to be valid in me with an over-personal power, acts of logical, 
 ethical, aesthetic valuation. The outer world, the fellow-world,
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 93 
 
 and the inner world have importance for my individual will. 
 In each of the three realms, I must make my decision whether 
 that which my will finds there is merely my individual expe- 
 rience which has exhausted its energy by its being experi- 
 enced, or whether it has an independent reality. If the im- 
 pression of the outer world, the suggestion of the fellow-world, 
 the demand of the inner world, are merely that which they ap- 
 pear as experience, namely, just an impression, a suggestion, 
 a demand, then they have no real independent existence, no 
 right to the claim of absolute acknowledgment, in short, no 
 absolute value. If impression, suggestion, and demand are 
 merely our personal experience, our will may take attitude 
 towards them entirely with reference to the personal desires 
 and liking. The decision will not have any bearing beyond 
 the particular act. On the other hand, if our will holds them 
 with the postulate that they are real beyond the particu- 
 lar experience, and if they can be found identical again, they 
 become parts of a real world, which as such satisfies our fun- 
 damental demand for a self -asserting reality. That which ful- 
 fils this absolute demand for a world, we recognized as a value. 
 The particular value which must be acknowledged here is the 
 value of existence. 
 
 Hence we must examine whether our will that the impres- 
 sions, suggestions, and demands remain identical can really be 
 fulfilled, that is, whether the value of existence has validity. 
 From this standpoint everything is without value which does 
 not belong to the world of really existing things, beings, and 
 demands, and which is thus nothing but our personal expe- 
 rience. The question is therefore ultimately: What in the 
 immediate experience is experience of the real? We separate 
 the examination, as we shall always do, into the three realms 
 of the outer world, the fellow- world, and the inner world, in 
 spite of the fact that just in this group of values the three 
 groups hang most closely together. We know existence of 
 the things because we acknowledge other subjects, and the
 
 94 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 acknowledgment of other subjects would not be valid if we 
 did not know the things. 
 
 A. — THINGS 
 
 How does practical life proceed? The most trivial thing 
 may teach us. I believe I remember that at the end of this 
 forest path there stands a wooden bench. Do I deceive my- 
 self, or has the bench which I remember reality ? If I walk on, 
 I shall find out whether the thing had meaning only for my 
 remembering, or whether it has an independent existence. 
 If I can find again that which I seek, it is demonstrated that 
 this remembered object had the value of existence. The case 
 is the same with the perceived as with the remembered. 
 There on the moss I believe I see a curious bird. Am I de- 
 ceiving myself ? Is it not perhaps a shadow or a stone ? I 
 go nearer to it to find out whether the thing which attracts 
 my attention will offer itself also in the further experience 
 as a bird, and will thus remain identical with that which I 
 believe I perceive. In short, the recurrence in a new experi- 
 ence raises the perceived or remembered impression above 
 the level of unreality. In a similar way we know another 
 method which helps us in practical life perhaps still more fre- 
 quently. I try to grasp and to touch the thing which at first 
 I only saw, or I try to see that which at first I only heard. In 
 short, that which I perceived at first in one form is sought 
 in a new form and yet has an identical content. Every dis- 
 appointment teaches me about the existence of the thing. 
 
 Such methods are thoroughly useful, and within certain 
 limits reliable. Experience warns us constantly to respect 
 those limits, and trains us in applying each method only where 
 it is usually helpful. If I believe I hear a cry and I want to 
 prove that it was no deception, that the cry had a real exist- 
 ence, it would be absurd to examine whether the cry still lasts 
 in the way in which the bench still stands by the road. No 
 other sense can teach me whether the moon which I see really
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 95 
 
 exists in the sky or is merely my hallucination. Even the 
 bench in the forest may have been there at my last walk and 
 may have been removed now. Certainly no principle of fun- 
 damental character is involved in this way of testing real ex- 
 istence. No one can claim by principle that the impressions 
 represent a real existence only if they return unchanged in 
 our later experience, or if they admit of perception by other 
 senses, too. Yet even this scheme emphasizes the decisive 
 point. The experience is sought as identical in a new experi- 
 ence ; the recurrence in a new effect fulfils the desire of the 
 subject and brings him satisfaction. The source of this satis- 
 faction is the identity. Neither the original experience nor 
 the finding by other senses or in a later occurrence is in itself 
 valuable, but the fact that both are identical and the one 
 fulfils the demand of the other for continuity is satisfactory ; 
 it is the value of existence. 
 
 As soon as we speak in a fundamental way about the 
 existence of things, we postulate a much more extensive 
 recurrence. Even in the circle of practical life, we rely pre- 
 ferably on a more systematic method of testing, namely, 
 the affirmation by other observers. I can soon ascertain 
 whether the cry which I believe I heard was a real sound. I 
 ask my neighbors whether they heard the same cry, and if no 
 one of them perceived anything, it was an illusion or a halluci- 
 nation ; the sound had no real existence. The external world 
 is real to us when it can stand the social test and is a common 
 object. But here, too, the principle is the same. The experi- 
 ence is found identical in a new realization, this time in the 
 acknowledged experience of the neighbors, and this time, too, 
 it is a recurrence of the identical which constitutes the true 
 value of the existence. But even this social agreement has 
 narrow limits. The other observers may err as well as I my- 
 self. They may stand under the same prejudices and sugges- 
 tions under which I stand. Moreover, every one must per- 
 ceive things from his own particular aspect, and that does
 
 96 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 not refer only to space and time, but to the mental relations 
 as well. Many things, probably, no one at all can share 
 with me. The ultimate decision whether we recognize the 
 real existence cannot remain dependent upon such external 
 chances. The fundamental meaning of the value of existence 
 is characterized by the practical agreement upon the part 
 of some neighbors as little as by the affirmation of our own 
 senses at a later time. 
 
 But we need progress only one step further in the same di- 
 rection. It is not sufficient that other persons find by chance 
 that identity in their experiences, if we want to elaborate the 
 value of existence fundamentally. But ever3d:hing is done if, 
 instead of this, we say that the content of our experience is 
 demanded as experience for every other being under the same 
 circumstances. The mere experience is hereby transcended 
 and a postulate is put in its place. We demand that our con- 
 tent of the outer world is possible object for every possible 
 subject. Only now we have separated it from our personal 
 situation and have made it independent. On the other hand, 
 this independence of the content does not indicate, of course, 
 that it has stopped being an object. If it ceased to have the 
 character of an object, it would be annihilated. Our things 
 become independent not by ceasing to be objects for the sub- 
 jects of will, but by ceasing to be objects for one subject only. 
 It has absolute existence as soon as it can be conceived as 
 being by principle a possible object for every subject. Again 
 we must say, the fact that the other subjects have the object 
 is not more valuable than the fact that I have it myself. The 
 value lies exclusively in the fact that it is identically the same 
 object which the others and I demand. As now the recur- 
 rence is referred to every possible subject, the satisfaction 
 transcends every personal wish and constitutes an abso- 
 lutely valid valuation. 
 
 It is evident that such a valuation is really a deed of the 
 postulating will, inasmuch as the experience of every possible
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 97 
 
 subject, of course, lies outside of any possible concrete life. 
 Nevertheless, such a postulate is not independent of experi- 
 ence. Every contradiction of any other being interferes with 
 the postulate. If, perhaps, I tried to conceive the playthings 
 of my imagination or my dreams as real objects, I should find 
 at once the opposition of my fellows, and I should be as power- 
 less as if I wanted to settle in castles in the air. On the other 
 hand, if I tried to annihilate my reminiscences as unreal, and 
 tried to make them merely personal ideas, and thus denied 
 the real existence of the remembered things, the social con- 
 tradiction would set in. The value of existence is accordingly 
 no fact of mere experience, nor is it a postulate which can 
 be settled independently of experience. The existence-value 
 of the things is indeed no physical discovery. Where there is 
 no postulate of a will which seeks a world, no experience can 
 force it on the subject. Whoever believes that the flame is 
 unreal because he does not acknowledge real existence cannot 
 be taught more by burning his fingers in it. The seeing of the 
 flame and the pain in the hand are equally personal experi- 
 ences. In the same way the heavy, the hard, the big, do not 
 stand nearer to the consciousness of existence than the lumi- 
 nous and odorous and sounding. The plastic has no higher 
 value of existence than the flat. It is absurd to think, as is 
 often done, that the personal experience is a kind of surface 
 view and the valuation of a real existence is in a way to add 
 the third dimension. The imagined landscape which we con- 
 ceive as not really existing has yet its full dimensions of depth. 
 In a quite different way, space and also time are indeed 
 connected with the objective existence of the things. The 
 value of existence presupposes that our experience of things 
 can be found again identical in everybody's existence. The 
 individual space-time perspective must on this account be 
 replaced by an over-personal unalterable space-time system 
 which makes it possible to eliminate the individual differences. 
 Wliat is at my right and yet at your left could not be con-
 
 98 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 ceived as an identical object, if the leftness and Tightness be- 
 longed to the character of the object. That which is past for 
 one and present for the other and future again for still others 
 could not be the same, if this personal time-aspect remained 
 an element of the thing. In my immediate personal experi- 
 ence these space- values and these time-values are at first only- 
 subjective attitudes. The things are before me or behind me, 
 right or left, above or below, near or far, and each direction 
 and distance demands its particular way of action and atti- 
 tude. In the same way past and present and future are re- 
 lated to my will. Present is that towards which my action is 
 directed, future is that for which I prepare my action, past is 
 that which is beyond my action. All these attitudes are effec- 
 tive in my personal system of experience without involving 
 any objective space or objective time. 
 
 Still in quite a different way I find space-time determina- 
 tion in my real world of things. Every particular object may 
 have its particular space-form, may be round or angular, star- 
 shaped or tree-shaped or house-shaped. Everything may 
 have its particular time-form, may be iambic or dactylic, may 
 sound in waltz rhythm or in the rhjrthm of a funeral march, 
 may flash regularly or irregularly, may touch me quickly 
 or slowly. Here, too, the temporal and spatial forms remain 
 qualities of the thing, just like tone or color. They do not con- 
 tain any reference to a general space-time form. The things 
 have their space shape, but they are not parts of one space ; 
 they have their time shape, but they do not lie in time. If 
 a manifoldness of things comes together opposite each other 
 or after each other, then new, more complex shapes are formed ; 
 but as long as I consider it all merely as my experience I 
 have no reason to transcend this primary shape. 
 
 This whole situation is changed at once, if I try to conceive 
 the object in such a way that it can be thought as identical 
 with itself in everybody's experience. Now we have to re- 
 think all spatial and temporal differences of direction and of
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 99 
 
 form in such a way that they become entirely independent 
 of the personal standpoint and yet do not become eliminated. 
 Various ways might be permissible. The simplest one, which 
 has proved entirely satisfactory, is to detach these differences 
 of directions which originally belong to our own attitude with 
 reference to the things, and instead to refer them to the 
 mutual relations of the things themselves. If I acknowledge 
 the same right to the standpoint of every subject, I must 
 acknowledge that everything may be right and left, may be 
 above and below, may be near and far, may be past and pre- 
 sent and future. In other words, those rays of direction which 
 at first irradiate from me must be conceived as starting from 
 every possible object. Things are now past and future, right 
 and left, no longer with reference to subjects, but with refer- 
 ence to other things. Consequently we gain a system of rela- 
 tions between the objects themselves without reference to 
 subjects of will. A thing is now past or future in relation to 
 another thing; one object is near or far from other objects. 
 Thus we gain a net of space-time relations, and with its help 
 every space-time shape also can be translated into a series of 
 distances and directions. As soon as that is carried through, 
 the things are independent of the chance personal standpoints. 
 What is round for one can no longer be elliptical for another, 
 inasmuch as the form is now expressible in space measure- 
 ments. Hence the thing can remain the same spatially and 
 temporally for everybody's experience, even if every one 
 looks into the street from a different window and the one 
 comes later and the other earlier to his outlook. The inde- 
 pendent existence of things demands in this way an inde- 
 pendent form of space and time. But for this absolute space 
 and this absolute time the same is true which showed itself 
 for existence. It is a free postulate, which far transcends 
 every possible actual experience, and yet it is everywhere 
 controlled by experience and develops itself only where the 
 experience suggests it.
 
 100 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 The value of existence thus belongs to the objects dis- 
 tributed over space and time as soon as we perceive or remem- 
 ber or expect them with the conviction that these identical 
 things can be objects of experience for every possible sub- 
 ject. Whatever we cannot hold with this conviction possesses 
 for us no real value of existence and does not belong to the 
 existing things in our world. At the first glance this seems 
 to be contradicted by the fact that we are accustomed to 
 attribute real existence also to ideas; for instance, to our 
 imaginative ideas. They have their existence in a particular 
 consciousness, but certainly the psychologist presupposes 
 their full existence for his analytical studies. But such an 
 argument is deceitful. From the standpoint of real experi- 
 ence in which we wanted to remain at first, the imaginative 
 idea indeed has no reality; as a psychical content of con- 
 sciousness enclosed within the personality, the imaginative 
 ideas do not come in question here. We have to ask at first 
 what such imagination means in real life. If my imagination 
 erects beautiful castles in the fairy forest, they are in my real 
 experience not ideas of castles with ideas of forests both en- 
 closed in my brain, but they are for me the walls and towers 
 at the place where I believe them to be, exactly as the land- 
 scape which I see here from my piazza is perceived there 
 without and not in my brain. From this standpoint of real 
 experience the landscape which I see has real existence and 
 that fairy castle has not. That which by principle is found as 
 an object of experience for me alone has as such not a kind 
 of diminished or faded or transparent existence, but it has 
 absolutely no part in the world which is maintained by the 
 absolute value of real existence. 
 
 If the value of existence meant simply that an object is 
 given to many subjects, we might perhaps think that the 
 object which is given to one subject only has at least a small 
 fraction of true existence. Such an imagined object then 
 might have a kind of diluted value of existence which we
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 101 
 
 mean by psychical existence. But that is not the case at all. 
 The value of existence did not result from the mere appear- 
 ance in many subjects, but the fundamental point was always 
 the consciousness of the identity among those various appear- 
 ances. Wherever this recurrence of the original, this fulfilment 
 of the thought, in short, this realization fails, no over-personal 
 satisfaction can result, and therefore no value of existence. My 
 castle in the fairy forest has no value of existence whatever. 
 The meaning in which, later, the dreamed, the desired, the 
 hoped, the expected, the imagined, may enter after all into the 
 world of the really existing as a psychical fact is entirely dif- 
 ferent. We shall follow up this process as soon as we discuss 
 the world of subjects. The subject as centre of will is as such 
 never an existing object, but we shall see that it has never- 
 theless its existence. The subject is characterized and is to 
 be understood by its activities, its acts of attitude, and these 
 activities are related to objects, and these objects of activity 
 of course may be now either the really existing objects or the 
 merely individual experienced objects. To understand the real 
 subjects it will thus become necessary to consider also those 
 things which have only a personal relation. And in this way 
 the mere illusions and imaginations become connected with 
 the world of the real. We shall see later that the systematic 
 science which connects the facts from this starting-point can 
 develop a whole system, the system of psychology. But as 
 long as we deal merely with the problem of existence and do 
 not enter into the question of connection, the imaginative idea 
 is no real process in us nor a real psychical object in our con- 
 sciousness, but is merely and only that which has no reality. 
 Whether the valuation of existence in the particular case 
 is justified or not, that is, whether the existential judgment is 
 right or wrong, has of course nothing to do with our exam- 
 ination of the principle of existence. Philosophy does not 
 have to discriminate which things are real and which are not. 
 That is a problem of social importance, and society examines
 
 102 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 it with all the means of its specialized sciences. If I say that 
 I see there in the field a raven, my assertion of existence is 
 not changed if the zoologist can prove it to be a crow, or if 
 I myself find upon nearer inspection that it was a piece of 
 coal, or if the physician finds that I suffer from hallucina- 
 tions. The only decisive factor was that it had for me and 
 for every one a reasonable and necessary meaning when I 
 claimed for the thing which I experienced an absolute value of 
 existence. We had to examine what is meant by this ab- 
 solute value, but whether my raven by chance possesses this 
 value is without any fundamental significance. We know 
 now that the affirmation which gives meaning to such ex- 
 istence-judgments demands that the experienced object can 
 be maintained as identical in the experience of everybody. 
 In the negative existential judgment, just this is denied in 
 saying this thing does not exist. Whoever affirms or denies 
 may be in error or may find contradiction ; but what affirma- 
 tion and denial mean must stand firm not only for himself, 
 but must be beyond every possible contradiction, if his judg- 
 ment is to have a meaning at all. 
 
 B. — PERSONS 
 
 When we discussed the existence of things, we were always 
 turned to the experience of other beings. My experience of 
 objects meant a real piece of the world because other subjects 
 experienced it too. How do I know those other subjects, and 
 in what sense do I acknowledge their absolute existence also? 
 The natural sciences and the naturalistic psychology have 
 a simple and convenient solution for the whole problem. 
 The other living beings, we are assured, are for us at first only 
 objects of external perception. But their characteristic series 
 of movements remind us of our own movements and their 
 form reminds us of our own form. On the other hand, we 
 know from our inner experience that we ourselves represent 
 not only a physical but also a psychical manifoldness. We
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 103 
 
 find in ourselves contents of consciousness. Thus it seems a 
 justified conclusion of analogy that those other organisms 
 are also supplied with such inner attachment, and that they 
 also carry ideas and similar contents packed into their brains. 
 
 It is evident that our deduction of the existence of things 
 would become impossible by such conclusions. We deduce 
 the existence of things from the fact that they belong to the 
 experience of other subjects. That would become a vicious 
 circle if we really knew the other subjects at first as existing 
 things. But does such a view correspond in the least to the 
 true life-experience from which we have to start ? Is not the 
 whole meaning of our relation to our fellows, with its warmth 
 and immediacy, destroyed by every effort to express the life- 
 relation from man to man by the clumsy forms of the percep- 
 tion of things ? Whoever acknowledges no other experience 
 but the sensations of contents is surely obliged to confine the 
 totality of experience to physical and psychical things, and 
 thus to reduce all life-relations ultimately to relations of things. 
 Inasmuch as this special way of treatment is the particular 
 task of natural science and psychology, such views would 
 demand that psychological and biological researches alone 
 have to interpret what our fellow-man is. Certainly it is sur- 
 prising what an overwhelming power belongs to the habit of 
 naturalistic thought, and how difficult it is for all of us to re- 
 turn to the immediate experience of life. We all have learned 
 too much from those smooth explanations in the sphere of 
 the world of things. The effort to explain us and other men 
 from foregoing causes pushes itself into the foreground even 
 when we really start not to explain but to interpret and to 
 understand ourselves and our relation to other men. Every 
 effort to explain refers of course to the things, and reenforces 
 the suggestions of the natural sciences that everything can be 
 understood completely when it is conceived as an object. 
 
 Nevertheless, our view of the world must remain distorted 
 if we cannot liberate ourselves from such suggestions. We
 
 104 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 must be emancipated from them, if we are not to lose ourselves. 
 We must emphasize here most strongly what we touched on 
 once before, that we do not find ourselves in the present expe- 
 rience as objects. Of course I can at any time consider myself 
 as such experienceable object after the pattern of describing 
 and explaining psychology. In that case my bodily sensa- 
 tions stand in the centre ; my actions are then expressed by the 
 sensations which come from my muscles and joints and ten- 
 dons and skin, together with associated ideas, and my I is the 
 system of my psycho-physical processes of reaction, associa- 
 tions, and inhibitions. But when I move in the midst of life, 
 I know my self in a way which has nothing in common with 
 such objectification of my personality. Then I do not perceive 
 myself, but I feel my self. My action is not a process which I 
 find as a content in my consciousness, but I myself am the 
 attitude and the decision and the will. I know myself in my 
 will-event most immediately in a way which is fundamentally 
 different from every knowledge of objects. If I tried to de- 
 scribe it, I should already deviate into the world of objects. 
 But whoever would deny this uniqueness of the will has only 
 to feel his own denying to become aware that his intention in 
 such an act of denying is not something which can be found 
 as an object, but is valid in its deed-character. As soon as 
 we fixate our attitude and deed by conceptions for the pur- 
 pose of communication and discussion, the conceptions by 
 which we think them are of course objects for us, but that 
 which is to be thought by those conceptions is not remodelled 
 by it into an object itself. Such an act of attitude as we ex- 
 perience it in every pulse-beat of our self-certainty is funda- 
 mentally different from every possible experience of an object, 
 and exactly of this kind is every other subject of will for us. 
 As we become conscious of ourselves in our will, our fellows, 
 too, meet us in every act by their attitudes, and only by their 
 attitudes does their will immediately reach us. Those who are 
 inextricably entangled in the nets of naturalistic conceptions
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 105 
 
 fancy that such a relation of wills must be something mystical 
 or " metaphysical." Perhaps they think of telepathy, in which 
 the psychical in one organism has an unexplainable influence 
 on the psychical in another body. But all this represents 
 exactly the opposite. Telepathy is an unexplainable process 
 in the system of bodily nature in which everything ought to 
 be explained, and in which everything must be explainable by 
 principle. But when my will meets your will, agrees with it 
 or disagrees with it, there is nothing at all unexplainable, be- 
 cause it has no reference at all to a system which demands 
 explanation. It belongs to a manifoidness for which the ques- 
 tion of explanation, the question of cause and effect, would be 
 just as absurd as the question whether the will is triangular 
 or has the color of violet. The will in its life-reality is not to 
 be explained, but is to be interpreted in its meaning, is to be 
 understood in its bearing, is to be developed in its purposes 
 and consequences. I do not experience the fellow-will as 
 something which I think into the perceived body by a kind 
 of analogy on the basis of external similarities. On the con- 
 trary, the will of the other man approaches me as the very 
 first experience, and I know it in sympathizing with its inten- 
 tions, in understanding its attitude, in imitating or rejecting 
 its decision. 
 
 Whoever asks how I can experience the fellow-will other- 
 wise than by starting from the perception of bodily move- 
 ments is already on the track of naturalistic explanation. If 
 my knowledge of the other will is to be explained causally, 
 the whole system of relations must of course be expressed in 
 the form of perceivable objects. But in reality the under- 
 standing of the foreign will is in every case the only true 
 starting-point from which nothing refers at all to preceding 
 causes. This life-event begins there, and the whole situation 
 is completely elucidated as soon as it is completely interpreted 
 in its meaning. That we can acknowledge another will is the 
 first step ; that we conceive this other will in its relation to
 
 106 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 that object which is central for it, namely in relation to the 
 other man's body, is the second step. This reference to the 
 body has for us interest only because it gives to the will 
 of the other man the characteristic space-time order of his 
 objects and thus interprets his individual perspective of the 
 world. But it is the will alone which binds together this world 
 of the fellow-man, and which demands our interest in his indi- 
 viduality. All this ought not to be misinterpreted as if it were 
 an artificial construction. On the contrary, the experience of 
 every life-instant contains the whole truth here, and we have 
 only to remove the artificial elaborations of the causal sci- 
 ences to reach again the pure immediate experience. But this 
 we must do because just at the starting-point everything must 
 be perfectly cleared from reminiscences of scientific trans- 
 formations. As soon as we have broken those chains which 
 have become by far too convenient to most of us, as soon as 
 we have reached once more the immediate certainty of our- 
 selves and of our fellow-men in their original community of 
 will, then alone we have the possibility of really reaching a 
 consistent view of reality. Then the pseudo-necessity of the 
 causal laws disappears for our will and we are free ; the bound- 
 aries of time disappear and we are eternal ; the relativity of 
 our purpose is annihilated and our values grow to the height 
 of absolute validity. 
 
 But at first we should not discuss here the last fulfilling of 
 purposes. We start at the starting-point where everything 
 essential must be given, not in ideal situations, but in the most 
 trivial life-experiences. When I converse with friends and 
 quarrel with opponents, when I help my neighbor and under- 
 stand what he proposes, when I sympathize with his pain or 
 try to convince him, when I praise or blame, in short, in the 
 trivialities of every hour of life, the fellow-man is a subject of 
 attitude and will to me. What he brings to me is a suggestion, 
 a proposition, a decision, a question, a contradiction, long 
 before it becomes a process. A meaning is understood before
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 107 
 
 a content is perceived. On this basis arises the question 
 of what it means that I acknowledge the existence of such 
 acts. In my personal experience it is only an excitement 
 which I feel, a suggestion or a proposition, and thus it may 
 be nothing but just this particular excitement of my will. 
 Whether it is more than such a personal experience of mine 
 I do not know at first, and as I may skeptically contend that 
 the things are more than my impressions, I may also deny 
 that the fellow-beings are more than suggestions which my 
 will feels in itself as starting-points of attitudes. 
 
 In reality, however, we do not doubt that as there is ex- 
 istence in the things, certainly the other beings have an in- 
 dependent existence, too. We give the same reality to them 
 which we give to ourselves. The importance of the problem 
 is too easily overlooked. In the history of the theory of know- 
 ledge no question has been answered in such an unsatisfac- 
 tory way as the question of the reality of other subjects. 
 The poorest means of help borrowed from naturalistic think- 
 ing have been carelessly taken over into philosophies which 
 by their principles directly contradict such pseudo-thoughts. 
 Thus we ask, on the basis of the real immediate experience, 
 what is meant when we give to the suggestion which arises for 
 our will the value of a really existing subject. As in the case 
 of the objects, here, too, practical experience may show us 
 a way. In the case of the things, we found that I ascribe 
 existence to the house which I perceive, but not to the fairy 
 palace of my imagination, because only that house can be 
 found by my neighbors, while my palace does not return in 
 the experience of any one else. Now we have to deal with sub- 
 jects instead of objects, and as subjective we acknowledged 
 that act of attitude which we understand. But attitude is 
 always attitude to an object. As there could not be a thing 
 which is not an object for a subject, there cannot be an atti- 
 tude which is not directed towards an object. If I agree with 
 an attitude, it means that I take the same subjective will-
 
 108 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 relation to a thing as that which has been proposed to me. 
 The object had its real existence when it was experienceable 
 also for other subjects. The subject has its real existence when 
 it takes attitude also to other objects. 
 
 This is indeed the method by which we judge in our daily 
 life. Suggestions approach our will continually, and at every 
 moment we have to discriminate between those which we 
 understand as expressions of real existing beings and those 
 which are nothing but just suggestions behind which no ex- 
 isting subject stands. The neighbor who talks with me sug- 
 gests to me in every sentence acts of attitude which I imitate 
 or reject. In the same way the child who laughs or cries at 
 my side wants my sympathy, the dog wants to be stroked, 
 the flower wants to be picked, the fruit wants to be tasted, 
 the beautiful curve of the line tempts me to follow its move- 
 ment, the rhythmic sound suggests to me impulses in accord- 
 ance with it. It is true the psychologist tells us at once that 
 in the last cases we have to do only with objects ; their per- 
 ception realizes certain impulses to action only through asso- 
 ciations. But that does not help us at all. Such explanatory 
 comment might be applied with exactly the same right in the 
 cases of the first kind, to the dog and to the child and to the 
 neighbor. We do not stand here before a problem which can 
 be solved by explanation of causes. The suggestion which 
 comes from the rhythmic sound or from the swinging curve 
 is just as original and unique an experience of will as the 
 suggestion which approaches us from the sentences of the 
 speaker or from a smiling face. If we refer only some sugges- 
 tions to existing beings and others not, if we give the value 
 of real existence to the neighbor, the child, the dog, perhaps 
 also to the earthworm, but not to the flower, the melody, the 
 curved line, a new principle of selection must have entered. 
 
 The soft waving of the flowering branch before me wakens 
 my inner harmony with its mild rhythmical movement ; what 
 the branch wills and suggests finds a welcome in me just like
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 109 
 
 that which the laughing, playing child at my side wakens in 
 me. I laugh with the child, and I surrender myself to the play 
 of the rising and falling motion. What the child wills and 
 what the branch wills are to me equally suggestions to will 
 the same. But now I show the child a piece of candy and he 
 grasps for it with vivid will ; I take away his toy and his tears 
 show his regret. The same will takes attitude toward new 
 and ever new situations. The waving branch, on the other 
 hand, the moving curve, even the flower, all will something, 
 but their will never turns to a new goal. The one suggestion 
 which we experience from them expresses their whole will. 
 An attitude which transcends that first experience and re- 
 lates to other objects is denied to them. Their will cannot ad- 
 just itself to any new purpose. On this, indeed, is based the 
 decision with which our daily life is satisfied. We separate 
 the suggestions in which the will turns towards other objects 
 from those in which the will plays itself out in the one de- 
 mand. The situation thus corresponds completely to the 
 separation of objects. With the experienced impressions, we 
 have to ask whether they are also objects for other subjects ; 
 with the experienced suggestions, we have to ask whether 
 this will also takes attitude towards other objects. Where 
 the latter is the case, where the will can be found again in a 
 new attitude as the identical will, there we have again the 
 condition for a true value of existence. Only the will which 
 takes other attitudes towards other things means to us the 
 will of really existing subjects. On the other hand, those sug- 
 gestions which exhaust themselves in the one experience are 
 as little real existing subjects as the objects of imagination 
 are real existing things. 
 
 The demarcation line between real subjects and things 
 which lack subjectivity has consequently no longer anything 
 to do with an external similarity between the things and our- 
 selves. If the naturalist really believes that we ascribe con- 
 sciousness to the monkey or the earthworm or the jelly-fish
 
 110 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 because they are so similar to us, his argument is as good and 
 as bad as all the other biological demonstrations for the ex- 
 istence of consciousness in animals. Some biologists put the 
 emphasis on the power to learn, others on the existence of 
 memory, others on the ability to adjust the behavior. Who- 
 ever looks into the depths of the problem must see clearly 
 that an investigation which comes from without can never 
 bring any proofs for the existence of psychical processes 
 either with the jelly-fish, or with the monkey, or with our 
 neighbor. He who wants to explain must explain all the 
 actions, including the actions apparently produced by mem- 
 ory, from strictly physical causes, and the exigencies of ex- 
 planation never can determine whether psychical factors are 
 accompanying the physical ones. The biologist finds a modi- 
 fiability of behavior and not a psychical learning, he finds 
 an after effect of earlier stimuli, but not a psychical memory. 
 That there is consciousness must be presupposed and cannot 
 be proved by demonstration. With animal as with man we 
 simply have to acknowledge the other will before we can find 
 the particular image of the world which belongs as object to 
 that particular will. Where the demarcation line lies de- 
 pends thus entirely upon our actual acknowledgment, which 
 cannot be found out by a biological experiment. Whoever in 
 sentimental mood feels in the expression of the flower not 
 only the present suggestion of the flower's lovely desire, but 
 goes so far as to believe that the same will may take attitude 
 towards new situations, that it is the same will which re- 
 sists the breaking of its stem or which longs to refresh itself 
 on sweet dew — he indeed gives the value of real existence 
 to the will of the flower. 
 
 If we observe in this way that a will takes attitude also 
 towards other objects, it will be sufficient for our practical 
 purposes. Yet such an empirical motive does not reach fur- 
 ther than the corresponding one in the realm of things. We 
 saw there, too, that we gave existence to the things when
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 111 
 
 one or the other neighbor divided the experience with us, or 
 when we ourselves found the identical experience again. In 
 the same way, we now give existence to the subject when the 
 will turns towards this or that other object, or takes a changed 
 attitude towards the same object. But to gain a firm ground, 
 independent of chance experiences, we had to go further and 
 to demand that a really existing thing must be experience- 
 able for every possible subject. The subject reaches the same 
 detachment from the chance experiences when it is conceived 
 in its relation not to the one or the other object, but to every 
 possible object. Only if a being is acknowledged as the possible 
 subject for the total world of things is its selfhood completely 
 detached from that chance attitude which it takes towards 
 us ; then alone it has an absolute real existence. This postu- 
 late can be fulfilled only if we posit in the place of the things 
 a world of words, of conceptions ; only by language does it be- 
 come possible to bring the whole world of possible objects into 
 the sphere of will for every being. Only by the conceptions 
 does the subject complete its independence from the chance 
 object. This corresponds exactly to the independence which 
 the object found by our gaining the forms of absolute space 
 and time. The objective system of conceptions becomes the 
 place of absolute relation for the subject, as space and time 
 are the place of absolute relation for the object. Again we 
 have transcended the mere experience. It is a postulate with 
 which we approach our fellow-men, if we demand from every 
 being that he be able to take attitude towards everything 
 which can be determined by conceptions; but again it is 
 experience which has to guide our postulate. If, without 
 motive of experience, we tried to give real existence to every 
 suggestion which comes to our will, we should stand in a 
 romantic world of dreams, just as if we were to give exist- 
 ence to the things of our imagination. And such a single 
 suggestion has now gained not a kind of faint value of exist- 
 ence, but it has none at all, inasmuch as we saw that it is
 
 112 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 just this recurrence of the identical which is the only condi- 
 tion of fulfilment, and that means of value. 
 
 Now we also understand what constitutes the existence 
 of the subject for himself. We give value of existence to a 
 subject as soon as we find his will in a new attitude towards 
 new goals as the identical will. Consequently a really exist- 
 ing person must have the possibility of maintaining himself in 
 every new act of will. This conservation of the same will 
 cannot mean the temporal lasting of it, because such mere 
 lasting in time we recognized as a trait of objects. We saw 
 that objects alone are conceived in the absolute time. If a 
 subject of will is to remain identical with itself, it cannot mean 
 its temporal continuity, but it must mean a continual self- 
 assertion by which the will knows itself as identical in every 
 new act. It is a subjective self-continuity, which as such is 
 untemporal, and which eternally binds all particular acts of 
 the individual. This inner self-relation of the will is that 
 which we have to call the soul. 
 
 C. — VALUATIONS 
 
 Our individual will is not only bound by the fellow-world 
 and the outer world. We acknowledge not only the other 
 persons and things as limitations to our individual willing and 
 desiring. In the inner world, too, the will finds its boundaries 
 which no individual desire has created. There is no need of 
 returning to our fundamental argument that this inner world 
 does not mean the psychical in the sense of psychology. We 
 started from the immediate experience. In it everything 
 which is object of our will, that which the psychologist would 
 call our ideas, perceptions, or memories, belongs entirely to 
 the outer world; only our acts of attitude, our personality, 
 our soul as deed, is our original inner world. If this soul- 
 world is to find in itself something binding, it must be again 
 a will. Every part of experience which does not represent a 
 will would have to be experienced as object; it would thus
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 113 
 
 belong to the world of impressions, but not to the self. In 
 our inner world, any objective value like that of the things 
 in the outer world or of the persons in the fellow-world can 
 belong only to a will which is our will and yet which we do 
 not will as individuals. In our experience the impressions and 
 suggestions had real existence when they showed themselves 
 as independent and self-asserting beyond the first occurrence. 
 Their existence was absolute if they remained identical in 
 every possible experience. In the same way our will must be 
 acknowledged as having an independent absolute existence 
 as soon as this will is thought as recurring identical every 
 time in such a situation. Thus our will can be a part of the 
 existing world, which is by principle independent of our in- 
 dividual personality. It is a world of the over-personal will, 
 which gives the firm background to the wavering individual- 
 ity in the same way that the world of the real things gives 
 background to the play of our personal ideas. 
 
 Such over-personal will-acts are the absolute valuations. 
 Compared with them, the will-acts from personal needs and 
 from personal desires have only chance character. In the 
 system of the absolute valuations these merely personal acts 
 are as unreal and as non-existent as the things of imagination 
 are in the realm of existing nature. But that which gives 
 to the over-personal will-acts the absolute value of existence 
 is again only the one fact that we will them with the con- 
 sciousness that they are not willed only in this particular ex- 
 perience. Here, too, of course we have at first simply the mo- 
 tives of experience. We may have to-day a will with a vague 
 feeling that we probably shall will that always. Yet this re- 
 mains still in the limits of conditional value, however much 
 it may become the starting-point for a complete development. 
 Our will is anchored in the depths, and has become a valua- 
 tion with absolute existence as soon as we will with the con- 
 sciousness that we cannot possibly will otherwise as long as 
 we will a world at all ; that we would give away ourselves and
 
 114 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 that our world would lose its meaning, if we were not to will 
 this will. 
 
 The progress is evidently the same as with things and per- 
 sons. Here, too, the original experience, the single volition, 
 is maintained to be found identical in new experience and by- 
 postulate in every possible experience. As with things and 
 persons, here again the value of existence is not based simply 
 on the fact that the same event really occurs again, but that 
 it is held in our experience with the demand that it remain 
 identical and thus assert itself. The value of objective exist- 
 ence for the valuations differs from that for the things and 
 persons only by the one important fact, that the latter point 
 beyond themselves. The things demand the acknowledgment 
 of other persons, the persons demand reference to other 
 things, but the existence of the valuations always leads back 
 to the self, to the inner world. The valuations for which we 
 must thus acknowledge absolute existence have of course 
 objects just like any other will. The objects of these over- 
 personal attitudes are the values. It is practically the same 
 thing, whether we speak of the absolute existence of the 
 valuations or of the absolute validity of the values. It is 
 merely a difference of standpoint. The values belong to the 
 world which we will, the valuation belongs to the will which 
 forms a world. That the values are absolute cannot express 
 anything else than that the valuation of the values is a will-act 
 which is independent of any individual volition. Our will has 
 absolute existence as soon as we will it with the consciousness 
 that there exists no world at all, and thus no reality, if we do 
 not maintain this will in every possible experience. On this 
 foundation the whole absoluteness of the values is based. 
 Accordingly it must be possible to deduce the totality of the 
 absolute valuations, and that means the totality of the abso- 
 lutely valid values, from this one fundamental principle. 
 Those volitions posit absolute values which result from the 
 demand that there exists at all a real world. The question
 
 THE VALUES OF EXISTENCE 115 
 
 which values have to be acknowledged as really existing is of 
 course not a new question for us, inasmuch as it is exactly 
 and exclusively the problem of this whole book. The philo- 
 sophy of the eternal values cannot be anything else but the 
 systematic deduction of all possible absolutely valid values 
 from one principle, and for us this one principle is now founded 
 on the deepest rock of our inner world — on the will to have 
 a world which is self-asserting.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 
 
 We submit to the things, we acknowledge the persons, and 
 we believe in the valuations without any efforts of thought. 
 We feel that these values of mere existence are immediately 
 given with the postulate of a real world. It is different with 
 the connections which hold together the experiences. More- 
 over, our world of the connected things, persons, and valua- 
 tions is endlessly larger than the mere circle of impressions, 
 suggestions, and decisions which we find in our immediate 
 experience. We transcend this circle by reflection and re- 
 search, by explanation and exploration and reasoning, and 
 thus by our own activity we reach new experiences. One 
 thing leads to another, the present to the past and the future, 
 the given to the calculated. From the single experience, we 
 thus reach a connected independent reality which we acknow- 
 ledge in the same way as the mere existence. But indeed, it 
 is not given any more immediately; it must be discovered. 
 The exploration of the connections is thus a purposive con- 
 scious effort, which is slowly performed in the historical life 
 and is never completed ; it is the task of science. 
 
 When I say : " It rains," I want to express that I affirm the 
 independent existence of the present rain. But when I say : 
 "It has rained, because the street is wet," I transcend the 
 affirmation of the perceived wetness. I assert on the basis of 
 reflection that there is a connection between the wetness and 
 the not-perceived rain. This connection has for me as much 
 existence as the perceived object itself. As soon as I have 
 discriminated what there is really existing in my experience 
 and what there is not, and as soon as I have found all the real
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 117 
 
 connections in which the experience stands, I have found 
 everjlhing which can be possible material of my knowledge. 
 We have only to convince ourselves now that such connec- 
 tions also are not merely personal acts of thought, but have 
 the over-personal reality value. We must ascribe such abso- 
 lute value to the connections, if we can show that in the con- 
 nections too the experience is maintained as self-identical. 
 Indeed, this will be the goal of our demonstration. We shall 
 recognize that to find connections always ultimately means 
 to follow out the postulate of self-assertion of the things, of 
 the persons, and of the valuations. Effort is needed to dis- 
 cover such further identities. The will to maintain the given 
 must overcome hindrances here, and cannot be simply satis- 
 fied with the postulate only, as is the case of mere existence ; 
 but here, too, it is the fulfilment of this will for identity which 
 gives the complete satisfaction, and which thus gives to the 
 relation between the given and the recurrent that independ- 
 ent value which we call the value of connection. 
 
 If all connection is based on identity, things can hang to- 
 gether only with things, persons with persons, valuations with 
 valuations. In this way we find the three large fields in which 
 independent values of connection demand our acknowledg- 
 ment. The connection of things is expressed in the relations 
 of cause and effect. Their system is the system of nature, 
 their ideal is the conception of natural processes as a complete 
 identity of all given things in every possible new experience. 
 This ideal is aimed at by the natural sciences. The natural 
 scientist thus seeks fundamentally the same thing which the 
 simple assertion of existence tries to reach, namely, the de- 
 tachment and declaration of independence of the thing. But 
 for the mere assertion of existence, it was sufficient to show 
 that our thing occurs also in the experience of other subjects ; 
 for the connections which natural science seeks, it must fur- 
 ther be demanded that the thing never ceases to be real object. 
 The totality of the present things must then be identical with
 
 118 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 the totality of the past and with the totality of the future. 
 To make it possible to conceive the world accordingly, every 
 single object must be transformed in our conceptions. Na- 
 ture is accordingly the world of things conceived in such away 
 that it can be thought as identical with itself through all time. 
 Nature is the world of things with reference to their identity. 
 
 The connection of persons stands under entirely different 
 conditions. With nature everything results from the char- 
 acter of the object ; the persons enter into the connection as 
 subjects. The naive assertion of mere existence demands 
 from the person only that the will which he experienced as 
 an attitude towards one thing must be able to direct itself 
 also to other things. If the idea is to be carried further, we 
 must here also maintain the given will with the demand that 
 it may be found identical in other subjects. Only as far as 
 the old will can be found again in a new will can we find 
 real connection between the persons. The assertion of this 
 connection of the subjects is the science of history. The 
 world of history is the world of the subjects of will under 
 the point of view of identity. The ideal is that every ex- 
 perience of will is conceived in its identity with the will of 
 other subjects. Again only in this identity lies the reality of 
 the historical connection. 
 
 The valuations, too, hang together. Historical acts are the 
 acts of individuals which as such are free, and consequently 
 one act of the historical personality does not bind any other 
 act. If they were to bind each other, they would be inde- 
 pendent of the free decision of the personality and therefore 
 over-personal. Such over-personal relations we find in the 
 valuations. The relations of identity between these valuations 
 are therefore also independent of the particular beings, and 
 the recurrence of the one valuation in the other again must 
 give an absolutely valuable connection. It is a connection of 
 teleological character. The system of reason is this world of 
 valuations under the aspect of identity. Its ideal is the de-
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 119 
 
 duction of all logical, aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical valu- 
 ations as purposively identical with one fundamental will, 
 the absoluteness of which is not accessible to any doubt. 
 
 The judgments in which the results of such connecting labor 
 are communicated are the truths. We have therefore causal, 
 historical, normative truths. They form the real sciences, 
 and presuppose the judgments of existence with reference 
 to the things, persons, and valuations. The scientific value 
 lies accordingly in the transformation of the given in the 
 interest of a system of identities, and that means in the 
 interest of maintaining a self -asserting world. As a matter 
 of course the complete system of nature, history, and reason 
 is an unattainable ideal for the individual, as the manifold- 
 ness of things, persons, and valuations is unlimited, and as 
 the experiences into which they may enter as identities lie 
 before us unlimited, too. The connection of the total world, 
 therefore, cannot be reached by any thinking and investiga- 
 tion, but it is constantly presupposed because the postulate 
 of this connection alone makes the world itself possible. 
 Something which is absolutely isolated cannot enter into the 
 world of our knowledge at all. On the other hand, the real sci- 
 ence has not at all a vague, unlimited task. There lie before it 
 always new, but always definite concrete problems as the 
 investigation is constantly guided by the real experience. 
 Given motives must induce us to seek the identities just for a 
 concrete section of the postulated world, a section which is 
 determined by our own definite experiences. Every experi- 
 ence which interests us and which does not completely hang 
 together with the given, and which is therefore not completely 
 understood, is like an equation in which the unknown quan- 
 tity is to be found, but it is experience which must propose 
 the equations. The situation for which we seek the unknown 
 identity must be suggested by our own next purposes and 
 ends. 
 
 The transition from the given to the identical and new
 
 120 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 realization is indeed the only factor which is common to all 
 scientific inquiries, however often just this essential factor 
 may seem hidden. If we seek the effect of a cause, at first we 
 seem to connect two entirely unlike things. Yet the connec- 
 tion has the value of truth only because through it cause and 
 effect can be conceived as parts of two whole situations of a 
 system of things which is identical with itself. The over- 
 personal satisfaction in this transition is again based upon 
 the fulfilment of the absolute demand to conceive the given 
 as independent of our experience and as asserting itself and 
 lasting. That which gives these satisfactions is always the 
 connection itself between the two phases of the identical part 
 of the system ; it may be the system of nature, or of history, 
 or of reason. 
 
 The value of existence had for us absolute character, but 
 that had nothing whatever to do with the question whether 
 the existing thing or person was valuable also in any other 
 direction, perhaps ethically or sesthetically. In the same way 
 the connections of science are valuable in themselves with- 
 out reference to the further question whether the relation 
 which we find represents, for instance, a progress or a regress. 
 It is not the connected parts that are valuable, but the valu- 
 able thing is that the parts are connected, that every isola- 
 tion is eliminated, that we have before us a world in which 
 everything is determinable by other things, and in which, 
 therefore, order and connection control the system in an abso- 
 lutely valid way. That is after all the last word concerning all 
 knowledge. These values of connection, painstakingly elabo- 
 rated and never complete, arise from our desire for identity. 
 And everything which satisfies this desire has not personal 
 but absolute value, because the striving for identity results 
 from the absolutely necessary postulate that our experience 
 stands for a world. The absolute validity of everything which 
 satisfies this, our demand for the self-assertion of the world, 
 is consequently the necessary presupposition for all possible
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 121 
 
 knowledge of connections in the world of nature, of history, 
 and of reason. Our task now is to illuminate the characteris- 
 tic traits of these three realms. We have to study the special 
 conditions to understand how in every particular case the 
 given must be transformed to solve the problems of natural 
 science, of historical science, and of normative science. But 
 this we know now: every transformation that serves the 
 purpose of connecting and that means the apprehension of 
 identities is for us scientifically valuable and its affirmation 
 is truth. The world which is transformed in our conceptions 
 in such a way is therefore the only world which from the 
 standpoint of scientific knowledge can be called real. In 
 this sense the given world of experience, as it is given, is 
 nothing but an illusion, and only science grasps the absolute 
 reality of the things, of the persons, and of the values. 
 
 A. — NATURE 
 
 Nature is for us the totality of the existing things in their 
 connection, in their order, in their self-assertion. Only those 
 things which have real existence enter into nature, not those 
 to which we deny the value of existence because they are ob- 
 ject for one single experience only. On the other hand, the 
 things alone enter into nature, not the persons, the subjects 
 of will who take their attitude towards the things. And finally, 
 the things enter into nature only as far as they are connected. 
 Nothing which is isolated can be a part of nature. This alone 
 is that nature the secrets of which the natural sciences try 
 to explore. 
 
 When we examined the meaning of the conception of value, 
 we began with the statement that there cannot be any values 
 in the system of nature. It might appear as if we want to 
 withdraw that assertion, inasmuch as we now ask for the 
 value of nature. Yet there is no contradiction. In the sys- 
 tem of natural objects as such there can indeed be no value. 
 Every valuation, we asserted, demands the attitude of a sub-
 
 122 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 ject, and subjects have no place in nature, where everything 
 is conceived as object for a passive spectator. In nature man 
 is conceived as an organic being, and the processes in such 
 a man are again parts of nature, but not real attitudes. If 
 reality were nothing but the sum of natural objects, there 
 could not be any values at all. But here our question is an 
 entirely different one. We ask here for the values which can 
 be found when the objects of nature are conceived in relation 
 to the judging scientist. Nature is now only a part of a much 
 richer system, a system constituted from nature plus natu- 
 ralist, and in this wider system values surely can exist. The 
 naturalist takes real attitudes, and we all are such naturalists 
 whenever we observe nature and expect its processes. We 
 the observers and calculators then stand outside of nature. 
 The most immediate value of such objects of the naturalist 
 was that of existence. We now have to study the more com- 
 plex value which results from the self-assertion of things 
 through all times. It is the value of connection. 
 
 The ultimate purpose of natural science has often been 
 distorted. The scientist himself is too easily inclined to think 
 that his real aim is not the exploration of the concrete na- 
 ture, but the discovery of the general laws which control it 
 and the general conceptions under which we must think it. 
 Philosophers have recently supported this interest in the law 
 by acknowledging two different kinds of knowledge of nature. 
 They claim that it is the task of history to report to us what 
 happened once in the development of the universe, while to 
 overcome this manifoldness of facts by bringing them together 
 under laws and conceptions is indeed to be recognized as 
 the only purpose of natural science. The leading thought, 
 namely, that a separation between natural science and his- 
 tory is necessary, ought to be maintained. We must indeed 
 understand that natural science cannot express the total 
 reality, and can never do justice to the real life. We must 
 maintain that our true personality, with its rights and duties
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 123 
 
 and morality and truth and beauty, can never be understood 
 from the view of the natural scientist. This philosophical 
 movement which emphasizes the difference between natural 
 science and history was therefore the justified reaction against 
 the immodesty of a triumphing natural science. Too long 
 an unphilosophical age fancied that natural science is the 
 only true way to knowledge. Psychologists and sociologists 
 followed with eagerness. The whole inner life of the indi- 
 vidual and of society became object of explanation and de- 
 scription after the naturalistic methods ; the duties and ideals 
 of mankind became the necessary effects of psycho-physical 
 causes, and nothing seemed to remain in reality about which 
 physics and psychology did not have to speak the last word. 
 It is not surprising that such short-sightedness demanded a 
 counter-movement. 
 
 That does not mean, however, that theonly way to overcome 
 the modern naturalism must be the discrimination between a 
 science of general laws and a science of single facts. If we 
 start with the presupposition that every experience must be 
 of the object type, then we must seek the differentiating 
 principles of the different sciences in the method of treatment. 
 Under these conditions it is indeed convenient to say that we 
 treat reality at one time under the point of view of the general 
 occurrences and call it natural science, and at another time 
 under the point of view of the single facts in their uniqueness 
 and call it history. But we have declined from the start such 
 a. presupposition ; we have seen that our will and the will of 
 others are given to us in an entirely different way from the 
 world of things. The original material of reality is of two 
 kinds. We have from the beginning the material which is of 
 the thing type and the material which is of the will type. If 
 this separation is acknowledged and that of the thing t3rpe 
 is recognized as the material of natural science, we at once 
 reserve for another kind of science a large special field ; then 
 we have that which is of the will type as material of history.
 
 124 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 Thus we do not need any separation by method in order to 
 gain a new field of knowledge besides the natural science, in- 
 asmuch as the twoness is given by the contents themselves. 
 History has not to deal with the things at all, but with the 
 will. On the other hand, the natural science of the world of 
 things has to deal with the single facts as well as with the 
 general ones, has to describe the unique development of the 
 totality as well as the general laws which control it. 
 
 Indeed, we are too much accustomed to consider the gen- 
 eral in the natural sciences as the most important part and 
 the law as the ideal of scientific inquiry. This habit has 
 practical social reasons, not logical significance. The real 
 goal of natural science remains the one unique nature con- 
 ceived in its connection. Thus the real material is that which 
 is unique, which has happened once, and it is only to be illumi- 
 nated by the general law. The totality of naturalistic judg- 
 ments represents nature in its unique givenness. On the other 
 hand, the only world of things to which all our knowledge 
 can be referred must really have all those characteristics 
 which the general conceptions and the laws project into them. 
 The laws and conceptions are artificial abstractions, but if 
 those abstractions are demanded by the purposes of our search 
 for a connected world, that is, if those conceptions and laws 
 are true, they are the expression of the only reality, beside 
 which no other reality can be conceived. If chemistry de- 
 mands that I conceive a certain substance as a combination of 
 atoms, this substance is really composed of those atoms as 
 far as it is part of the only nature which is object of knowledge. 
 The naturalist is entirely within his rights there. It is wrong 
 to say in opposition that the atoms are nothing but a product 
 of abstraction, and that they do not really belong to nature, 
 as they are only conceived by thought to calculate certain 
 regular occurrences. Yes, such abstract conceptions are pro- 
 jected into nature by thought, but the nature which is recon- 
 structed through thought is the only real nature, the only
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 125 
 
 nature which can be object of knowledge. The general con- 
 ception and the law are not the goal of the naturalist, but 
 only his tool. The goal is the recognition of the one process 
 of nature in its connection. 
 
 The general conception of the naturalist is as secondary- 
 there as the words of language. It has been claimed that 
 Raphael would have become a great painter, even if he had 
 been born without hands. In the same way surely Newton 
 and Lavoisier and Helmholtz would have been great scien- 
 tists, if they had been born without an organ for general con- 
 ceptions and for causal laws. The great naturalist has to 
 imagine the process of nature in new connections, has to 
 bring the temporally separated content of nature into such 
 relations that the one can be conceived by the identical con- 
 tinuation of the other. Whether this newly connected pair 
 exists once, or has shown similar connections a million times, 
 makes no decisive difference. The astronomical or the zoo- 
 logical or the pathological discovery is completed and may 
 be epoch-making when the connection through identical 
 continuity can be demonstrated in a single case, and it makes 
 no difference that this cosmical event of the astronomer may 
 never again repeat itself in our experience, while the biological 
 may come back sometimes and the clinical very often. Even 
 if the physicist formulates a general theory, he only demands 
 that it shall be demonstrated on the individual case. There is 
 the goal of all theoretical thought. We may go further, and 
 may even claim that the laws themselves mean more than 
 merely a general statement, but that they, too, get their true 
 meaning in silently reporting a piece of concrete reality in its 
 existence as part of our one unique world-experience. Chem- 
 ical laws concerning the acids or pathological laws concerning 
 sexual propagation would be valueless and entirely meaning- 
 less, if they did not intend to describe at the same time that 
 acids and sexual organisms really exist in this one world of 
 our experience.
 
 126 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 The usual confusion concerning the true task of the natural- 
 ist and the central importance of the general law becomes 
 worse through the conception of causality. What is involved 
 in this idea? The assertion of causality may on the one side 
 posit only the general fact that every process in the world has 
 a cause, but that is evidently not a naturalistic discovery. 
 It is a postulate which precedes all naturalistic thinking. We 
 are to look on nature in such a way that we consider every 
 process with reference to the preceding ones. The general 
 character of this postulate does not say anything as to the 
 general character of the causal connections which we find. 
 The fact of causal connection may hold absolutely without 
 exception, and yet no particular connection may be fit for 
 any generalization in our given world. The assertion of cau- 
 sality may mean, on the other hand, that the same causes 
 bring always the same effects, and that therefore whenever 
 the same conditions are given, the same connections must 
 arise. It seems as if this second postulate secures to every 
 possible naturalistic observation an absolute general character, 
 and that accordingly natural science indeed means the know- 
 ledge of the general only and not of the particular. 
 
 But if we inquire somewhat more carefully, we find that 
 the situation is very different. The only presupposition which 
 we have made there, namely that the same conditions are 
 given again, is evidently never to be fulfilled with theoretical 
 perfection. Who is to decide where the limits of the condi- 
 tions lie ? The little ball which I let fall to the ground can 
 never again in the world of experience fall down under exactly 
 the same totality of conditions. The conditions in my labora- 
 tory room may perhaps be repeated once more, but at first 
 I cannot know whether it is not decisive that the next time 
 the wind outside my room blows somewhat differently or that 
 the moon has changed its place. All the conditions of the 
 process can never return. Even if theoretically all the atoms 
 of the universe arranged themselves once more in exactly the
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 127 
 
 same position, the series of the preceding conditions would be 
 changed after all, inasmuch as the same world-process had 
 existed once before in the chain of preceding causes. Every 
 assertion that an observed or conceived connection will repeat 
 itself presupposes that the important and decisive conditions 
 are selected from the totality of the real processes before 
 a generalization becomes possible. The general character is 
 then theoretically removed. We observe a certain connection 
 and demand that it always repeat itself, but we can never 
 say with certainty whether the conditions for its repetition 
 are given or not. 
 
 Of course, for practical purposes, we may be able to limit 
 the conditions with sufficient probability, and thus may know 
 where we can expect the same effects from a similar situation. 
 Our daily life with its practical use of things is dependent on 
 that scheme, but in such a case it is indeed only a practical 
 generalization of that which we might expect, not a theoreti- 
 cal law without possible exception. The natural sciences cer- 
 tainly do habitually formulate the justified expectations on 
 the basis of frequent observations, and can state in such a way 
 the observed connections w^th a certain degree of confidence. 
 We contend only that such generalizations give us truths of a 
 special kind, laws which include the absoluteness of the valid- 
 ity, and that such absolute laws constitute the real content 
 of natural sciences. Such absolute laws are impossible because 
 the conditions of the observed processes are always varying. 
 What remain are practically rules for expectations which 
 facilitate our labor, and which theoretically point towards 
 the real single connections. The understanding of these single 
 connections in our given nature is the true task of science. 
 And the only thing which leads towards it is the finding of 
 identities. The mere law can never guarantee such an under- 
 standing. As soon as we have acknowledged a causal law as 
 valid and have understood a special case as exactly falling 
 under this law, the particular case is of course understood
 
 128 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 by the law, but only in the sense of logical pertinence. A real 
 understanding of the particular case would be given to us 
 only if the general law under which it falls should itself be 
 understood in its concrete connection. Yet just that is not in 
 question at all, for those laws are nothing but generalizations 
 of observed sequences of processes. 
 
 For some people, to be sure, the conception of causality 
 has a kind of mystical power to bring together the separated 
 facts in such a way that the connection itself becomes under- 
 stood. Some think of the immediate effect which our will 
 has on the organs of our body, others are satisfied with the 
 idea that the causality is a thought-form of our understand- 
 ing, without which we cannot apperceive at all the suc- 
 ceeding things, and which is therefore fundamental for every 
 possible experience. But such theories are based on illusions. 
 The will conceived as an object is in its effects exactly as 
 little understood as any other content of nature. On the other 
 hand, if the will is meant in its subjective reality, its internal 
 influence can be felt and understood, but has nothing to do 
 with the causal connection of things, and accordingly can 
 never be a model for the explanation of nature. Even the 
 reference to causality as thought-form of our understanding 
 cannot help us at all. If such a form were to be more than a 
 mere apperception of time succession, the form itself would 
 have to choose which effect belongs with which cause. Just 
 that, however, is possible to our understanding only in one 
 single case, namely, in the case when the second experience 
 can be conceived as identical conservation of the first. The 
 imagined thought-form of causality must therefore be re- 
 duced to the real thought-form of identity. 
 
 Now we stand before our goal. Causal laws which are 
 merely generalizations of observed regularities have not the 
 power to give an understanding of nature, and are in no way 
 end-points of natural science. They have their scientific im- 
 portance exclusively as preparation for the only real know-
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 129 
 
 ledge of nature, namely, the recognition of identities. Causal 
 laws are for the scientist what the rules of application are for 
 the layman, helpful formulations which quickly and simply 
 point to the essential factors. The real purpose is the apper- 
 ception of the world of things as self-asserting, as identical. 
 In the chaotic change of experiences we have to connect the 
 given with the identical in the new experience. The nearer 
 the so-called law approaches the holding of the identical, the 
 nearer it will approach the character of absoluteness. Where 
 mathematical physics formulates laws which are no longer 
 generalizations of observations at all, but simply expressions 
 of identities, there the causal laws become real means of ex- 
 planation. 
 
 The ideal of natural science is not a system of laws but a 
 system of things, the self-assertion of which throughout time 
 brings with it all the perceivable changes in the outer world. 
 Every given status of the world can then be completely ex- 
 plained, but is really explained only if all its differences from 
 the preceding status of the world can be imderstood through 
 the perseverance of all parts of the world. Everything which 
 brings us nearer to this ideal is scientifically true. To reach 
 this ideal it is of course necessary to substitute for the per- 
 ceived things others which are serviceable for the task. If 
 these substituted parts fulfil their purpose, they have scien- 
 tific reality. The original perception in that case has not shown 
 us the scientifically real things, and in the place of the mere 
 appearance we find the true object, which is perhaps accessi- 
 ble only to conceptions. 
 
 We easily see in what direction this remodelling must 
 move, a remodelling which from another point of view is 
 the discovery of the naturalistic reality. We recognized the 
 value of existence of things in the fact that the experienced 
 object can be conceived as object for every possible subject, 
 and we therefore demanded that the existing thing must be 
 detached from the chance standpoint of the individual. This
 
 130 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 intellectual movement must be carried through to its ulti- 
 mate point by the natural sciences, if the world is to be con- 
 ceived as identical with itself through every possible experi- 
 ence. Everything must be removed which belongs to the 
 space-time perspective of the chance personality, and every- 
 thing must be eliminated which presupposes a relation of the 
 thing to the individual organism and its senses; that ulti- 
 mately means nothing else but that all sense-features, all 
 qualities, must be excluded. Therefore the things have only 
 the quantitative relations of space, time, and masses. In this 
 quantitative determination the ideal is reached of absolutely 
 detaching the thing from the individual. It is thought en- 
 tirely in over-individual terms, as those quantities belong to 
 a system the relations of which can never be perceivable to 
 an individual ; it is an abstract construction made with refer- 
 ence to all the other subjects. The objective space-time form 
 is the absolutely over-personal field of relations for the things 
 in nature. As soon as things are expressed in measurable terms 
 in counting units of space, of time, and, deduced from them, 
 of mass, they are absolutely free from that individual deter- 
 mination in which they stand in experience. Without any 
 change, therefore, they can again enter into the calculation, 
 as they can now remain identical with themselves through 
 a limitless past and future. The history of science is indeed 
 an unending endeavor to eliminate all qualitative features 
 from nature and to replace them by quantities, until every 
 luminous, sounding, warming, and odorous thing is trans- 
 formed into the movements of smallest particles which can 
 be determined only conceptionally. 
 
 The efforts of description and explanation cooperate 
 towards this end. The description gives us the elements of 
 the thing, the explanation connects the thing with preceding 
 and following things. But the only connection which we seek 
 by principle is that of identity. Hence if we want to explain, 
 we must conceive the primary things in such a way that their
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 131 
 
 elements can enter identically into the final positions. The 
 elements which in this way are put at the service of explana- 
 tion in the place of the things are thus elements which the 
 description enumerates. If we describe water by saying that 
 it consists of hydrogen and oxygen, we mean by it that under 
 certain conditions water produces effects which can be un- 
 derstood only if we think those two elements put in the place 
 of the whole. Then alone we can understand the facts as the 
 perseverance of those substances which existed at the begin- 
 ning. All progress in the explanation of the world is there- 
 fore at the same time a progress in the description, and vice 
 versa. It is an illusion to believe that there can exist descrip- 
 tions which are independent from the seeking of explanation, 
 and that means from the understanding of the identities. 
 
 Accordingly natural science tries to replace the thing by 
 those elements which persevere in the succeeding experiences, 
 and to think these elements themselves ultimately as ob- 
 jects with qualities determinable strictly by over-individual 
 relations. Nevertheless, there still remain insuperable diffi- 
 culties when we try to understand the natural process by 
 mere identical perseverance of the smallest particles and 
 their movements. Science therefore goes still further and 
 tries to introduce the deviations from this conservation of 
 movement into the calculation. They are brought back to 
 conditions which can be conceived as identically persevering. 
 For this purpose natural science introduces the conception 
 of force, a quality which belongs to the thing only with 
 reference to other things, and which accelerates or retards 
 its movements. As by such forces everything can stand in 
 relation to an unlimited number of other things, it becomes 
 possible to deduce every movement or every rest from the 
 interplay of the forces, and yet to conceive all the old forces 
 as identically remaining in every change. The ideal task of 
 science is hereby characterized. It would be perfectly ful- 
 filled, if the totality of the processes of nature from the given
 
 132 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 present status of the world backward and forward could be 
 followed up and yet always conceived as an identical sys- 
 tem of things which persevered with their substances and 
 their energies. It would be a fulfilment of the ideal task of 
 natural sciences, and yet all that would not contain any 
 reference to laws. 
 
 The solution of this task is practically, of course, impos- 
 sible. The endless manifoldness of things makes it incon- 
 ceivable that the scientist can pursue every ether atom of the 
 universe in its identity through all the cosmical periods in 
 its curve. Probably all that science can do to come as near 
 as possible to the solution is to create tools by which with 
 the least effort every particular situation can be subordi- 
 nated to the point of view of identity. Ways and means must 
 be secured by which a given group of things can quickly and 
 simply be re-thought in such a way that they may be con- 
 ceived as identical with the preceding and succeeding expe- 
 riences. Rules for the abstract remodelling must be devel- 
 oped in which the whole previous observations of science are 
 condensed in order that every one may profit from the his- 
 torical knowledge. Here belong, first of all, the classifications 
 and general conceptions based on the similarities and dif- 
 ferences, here belong the descriptions of the elements, and 
 here also belong the causal laws. 
 
 The laws themselves usually do not express any identity, 
 but they connect two processes which are of decisive impor- 
 tance for the identity of two total situations. The causal law 
 selects from two groups of succeeding processes the cause and 
 the effect. That does not indicate that the relation of this 
 effect with that cause becomes intelligible. It means rather 
 that the whole group in which the cause occurs can be trans- 
 formed by identities into that other group in which the effect 
 occurs. The emphasis on cause and effect is therefore not in 
 itself an explanation of a connection, but only a practical 
 indication of two total situations, of which the one includes
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 133 
 
 the cause and the other includes the effect. The identity con- 
 nects the total situations. Just as in the economic life the 
 money in itself is without value for us and has significance 
 only as the means of exchange for market values, the natu- 
 ralistic law has in itself no connecting value. It is only a con- 
 venient means of exchange between different succeeding sit- 
 uations, which find their real connection not by cause and 
 effects, but by the identities. But as by a shifting of values 
 the money finally appears valuable and to the miser seems 
 a most glorious possession, in spite of the fact that he cannot 
 satisfy by it any one of his true needs, to the naturalist, too, 
 the causal law itself appears valuable in spite of the fact that 
 it does not satisfy any real need of explanation. The law al- 
 ways turns our attention to that which belongs together, and 
 without class conceptions and causal laws we should stand 
 hopeless before the overwhelming abundance of things. Yet 
 all causal laws of the world in themselves offer not the least 
 real explanation of a necessary connection. On the other 
 hand, as soon as two processes are connected in such a way 
 that the second is understood from the identical continuation 
 of the first, everything is completely understood without any 
 laws whatever. All the really great advances of natural sci- 
 ence have consisted in a new vision of perseverance. Each 
 such new insight into the identities has then demanded a re- 
 modelling of the elements of the things. 
 
 However far or near we may be to the ideal of such natu- 
 ralistic knowledge, everywhere an absolutely valid value is 
 reached where science succeeds in apprehending the changes 
 in the universe by the maintenance of the given. It cannot 
 be otherwise if the realization of a content in a new ex- 
 perience is really the only possible source of pure satisfaction. 
 The experienced objects seem to disappear and to be re- 
 placed by new ones. In our life the things pass by, appear 
 from nothing, disappear into nothing. Natural science opens 
 our eyes and shows us that if we only look into the depths
 
 134 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 of nature, the things which seem to disappear really remain 
 unchanged, and the things which seem to originate from 
 nothing really always existed beforehand. The candle burns 
 down, and yet the chemist shows us that no atom of it is lost. 
 That which we sought, the self-assertion of the first thing, 
 has then been found in the form of the second. Our will is 
 satisfied ; complete satisfaction comes to us. But the value 
 does not then belong to the first thing or to the second, but 
 exclusively to the fact that the first can be refound in the 
 second, and that accordingly a real connection exists between 
 the two. 
 
 We still have before us one theoretically important ques- 
 tion. If it is the task of all natural science to transform the 
 world of processes into identities, then where is the place of 
 psychology? It is a science which analyzes its objects, the 
 psychical contents, into elements, describes them, classifies 
 them, arranges them, and finally explains them, in its method 
 proceeding decidedly like the natural sciences. The presup- 
 positions and rights of psychology as science offer very diffi- 
 cult problems, which have recently come into the foreground 
 of theoretical discussion ; they had been too long neglected. 
 As we have the objects of psychology in our inner imme- 
 diately accessible experience, it seemed too long permissible 
 to consider the psychological work as an activity which needs 
 no presuppositions. Only slowly we had to learn that the 
 study of a psychological fact already involves a complex 
 transformation of the real experience and is full of presup- 
 positions. For our special circle of problems one of these 
 questions is of a special significance. The natural sciences 
 explain the connections by the identities. How is it possible 
 that psychical connections can be made explainable, inas- 
 much as the psychical as such can never return identical in 
 a second experience? Here indeed lies the nodal point of 
 the difficulties. We have seen that in our real experience the 
 objects have value of real existence only in so far as they are
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 135 
 
 common property, and that is what we call the physical ob- 
 jects. In so far as they belong to the individual only, for in- 
 stance, the objects of imagination have no real existence. The 
 psychical object is nothing but that which remains as residue 
 as soon as the whole reality is subtracted from the totality 
 of the experience. Thus the psychical object can never be 
 common object of various experiences and can never recur 
 identical. My perception, my memory idea, my imaginative 
 idea, my expectation, are my individual property; others 
 may agree with me, but then they have only corresponding 
 ideas, they cannot have my ideas themselves. We all have 
 the same physical moon, but each of us has his own psychical 
 perception of the moon. And even if I returned to the object 
 of my previous idea, I must create a new idea. The previous 
 idea has gone never to return. An immediate connection by 
 identity is thus by principle impossible for the psychical 
 contents. 
 
 How, then, is psychology possible at all ? How can it have 
 meaning to ask for the connection of objects which in an 
 absolute sense have no reality ? Those psychical objects are 
 given only in their relation to the will of the subject ; they 
 have no place in a naturalistic system. They would belong 
 only to a historical account where the subject has its real- 
 ity just as subject, and where the psychical objects represent 
 material to which the will of the subject refers. But it is 
 different as soon as the true subject of will is replaced by the 
 perceivable bodily individual. As soon as the other man is 
 for us an organism, his individual contents must somehow 
 be in his body, and as accompaniments of such bodily pro- 
 cesses the psychical objects get their own relative existence 
 in the real physical world. The imaginative ideas of my 
 friend, his air castles, have as objects of his personal attitude 
 their reality only in that will-world of which history speaks, 
 but not natural science. As objects of perception they cannot 
 claim any value of existence, as they are only imaginative
 
 136 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 objects and thus not perceivable for any one else. But as 
 soon as I consider my friend in his bodily existence, his indi- 
 vidual objects must somehow be contained in him. The psy- 
 chologist carries this introjection through in a systematic 
 way. The subject of will, the real personality, is replaced by 
 the individual organism, and this is done just under the pres- 
 sure of the demand to produce a connection between those 
 individual psychical objects. As soon as such introjection 
 into the body is brought about, there remains no difficulty 
 when we try to reduce the psychical series also to necessary 
 connections which are ultimately based on identities. We 
 cannot do it directly, but can at least indirectly succeed. If 
 the ideas are in definite dependence upon certain bodily pro- 
 cesses in the brain, the necessary connection of two brain 
 states at the same time becomes the necessary connection of 
 the accompanying conscious contents. Through this method 
 modern psychology with its psycho-physical parallelism has 
 become a true causal science. 
 
 But whether we explain psychical or physical stars or 
 dreams, the purpose is always to grasp the existing things 
 in our one universe as persevering, as absolutely self-asserting. 
 That involves that science must transform everything into 
 one single connected system. But as it anticipates its ideal 
 goal as the reality which ought to be discovered, science 
 treats its work as if it were merely the exploration of an ex- 
 isting system. The naturalist who feels the obligation of de- 
 ciding nothing by his own caprice, and who modestly submits 
 to nature and its eternal laws, may possibly ask how it would 
 be, if our postulate of perseverance could not be realized. 
 Could it not be that nature act quite differently, that the 
 things arise and disappear, and that a connection by self- 
 assertion really would not offer itself ? Have we naturalists not 
 to subordinate ourselves to it, then, and is not natural science 
 endlessly far from such a postulated goal ? Whoever argues 
 in such a way still overlooks the essential point. We as search-
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 137 
 
 ing individuals have to submit ourselves, but that to which 
 we submit is our own over-individual deed. The demand of 
 perseverance is of that kind. It does not originate from your 
 wishes or from mine, but from a fundamental deed without 
 which a reality would not be possible at all. Such a will is in- 
 deed stronger than the universe, and the universe must submit 
 to it, and the possibility of its complete fulfilment must be 
 presupposed as the ideal goal. It is of no fundamental im- 
 portance that the actual science which is composed of the 
 thought-work of individual scientists is still endlessly far from 
 its goal. The only decisive factor is that we count as progress 
 in science, as discovery, as new knowledge, only that which 
 brings us nearer to this goal. The experienced manifoldness 
 does not take any regard of our demands. Certainly not. In 
 our real experience the things continually disappear into no- 
 thing and continually arise from nothing, but that is not the 
 nature which we try to explore in our scientific knowledge. 
 That nature which has value of existence and connection 
 must be sought, and in seeking must be created, and this 
 seeking goes on everywhere where man tries to gain connec- 
 tion and explanation even in the most modest sense. The 
 soul of the child and of the savage seeks it tentatively. But 
 if science succeeds in remodelling the world of experienced 
 things in such a way that they can be detached from all in- 
 dividual experience, and that they can be maintained without 
 change as atoms and energies without qualities through new 
 experiences, then nature no longer can disappoint the investi- 
 gator. Only that which results from the perseverance of such 
 absolutely existing over-personal objects then belongs to the 
 real nature. On the other hand, if it were impossible to trans- 
 form the experienced things into such persevering ones, na- 
 ture would not disappoint us, but we should have no nature at 
 all. The world would be a dream and a personal experience 
 of ourselves in which no other subject would take part. It 
 would thus be meaningless and without value in the changing
 
 138 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 coming and going to ask about a valuable connection of the 
 world. 
 
 B. — HISTORY 
 
 If nature is the connection of things, history is the connec- 
 tion of persons. The problems which offer themselves are 
 fundamentally the same here and there, controlled by the 
 conception of connection. Yet every question must demand 
 new forms and new solutions on account of the difference of 
 the material. The world of history will have to interest us 
 in many ways, as it is a world in which value is joining value. 
 Especially the value which the development and the pro- 
 gress of historical mankind offers will bring us back to history 
 and its meaning. Here, exactly as in the system of nature, 
 we have to deal only with the one value which makes his- 
 tory the material of knowledge, the value of the connection 
 between the individual beings. History, too, becomes his- 
 tory only by a logical transformation; to secure a connec- 
 tion subjects must be remodelled in many ways. But here, 
 too, the system which is finally reached has to be considered 
 as the true reality, and all the means of presentation and 
 communication of this system then appear only as external 
 tools. It is valuable that no subject of will stands alone, 
 that every personality works in a connection, and that each 
 volition thus perseveres in the changing events of history. 
 This self-asserting continuity of the will is the true object of 
 the logical valuation in the science of history. To find this 
 identity of will means to discover the historical truth which 
 we value. We saw how in the field of natural science, in the 
 midst of the research, the necessary means appeared to the 
 student often more valuable than the solution of the true 
 problem. The general conception and laws seemed more im- 
 portant than the perseverance of the objects. In a similar 
 way, in the historical investigation, too, the means attract 
 the attention more than the ultimate aims for which they
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 139 
 
 exist, and the demand for identity of will may thus be sub- 
 dued in the consciousness of the individual historian. And 
 yet that which brings us nearer to this fundamental aim is 
 alone historically true. To discover connections means to 
 elaborate identities of will, and our fundamental satisfaction 
 in the seeking of the identities creates the value of the his- 
 torical process. 
 
 That sounds quite different from the usual account. How- 
 ever much the views about the meaning of history may vary, 
 they usually agree in the one thought that the material of 
 history belongs to the same world of causally connected 
 things of which the natural sciences speak. We even some- 
 times hear that the historian, if he wants to proceed scien- 
 tifically, has to accept the methods of the natural scientist, 
 and that his particular task is characterized only by the par- 
 ticular object. He has to select from all the possible parts of 
 nature only the human societies ; his task is the microscopical 
 and macroscopical description and explanation of this so- 
 ciety process with its political and economic and intellectual 
 products. If such a science is logically different from physics, 
 and if its laws are less general, it is claimed that that results 
 merely from the particularity of the material. 
 
 We must disagree there completely. We are not afraid 
 that the causally thinking science of natural objects would 
 necessarily be unable to proceed from the chemical structures 
 to the political ones. Whatever fills space and time in the 
 universe must be fit to be ranged into the causal connections 
 of nature; otherwise the presuppositions of natural science 
 would be given up. If we consider a nation as the sum of 
 psycho-physical organisms, nothing can arise in its midst 
 for which the postulate of complete natural explanation 
 would not remain applicable without exception. No hero 
 and no poet can live his life there for whom every deed and 
 every word does not necessarily result from the foregoing 
 causes, and it makes no difference that by the unlimited man-
 
 140 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 ifoldness of conditions the effect can never be predicted with 
 practical certainty. The wave in the midst of the ocean also 
 cannot be calculated, and yet we do not doubt that it is a 
 necessary product of the preceding conditions. We could 
 not take any step in human society without peril, if we could 
 not rely on a fair and practically satisfactory foresight of the 
 actions of others. There is also no objection in the fact that 
 the sociological naturalist usually calculates with the whole 
 human being as a unit. That does not contradict the spirit 
 of the natural sciences at all. In the same way the biologist 
 uses the cell, the astronomer the whole globe as a unit, and 
 yet they remain loyal to their naturalistic presuppositions 
 and purposes. It also has no fundamental importance that 
 the sociological science is still endlessly far from its goal, 
 and thus perhaps still unable to start any psycho-physical 
 calculation for the historical events. It may be easier to 
 calculate the next solar eclipse than the next important 
 novel, but in so far as the world is a causal system of objects, 
 the brain excitement which discharges itself in the writing 
 of a novel must by principle be accessible to naturalistic 
 science. The absolute value of connection in nature would 
 be destroyed, if at any place and at any time something should 
 go on in the world of objects without a cause, and unless 
 every growth and every apparently creative innovation could 
 be conceived as the identity of the elements of nature. And 
 yet any one whose mind is schooled by the masterpieces of 
 great historians will abhor the thought of considering such 
 astronomical causal calculation and deduction of human 
 events as the true task of history. 
 
 The fundamental mistake lies in the presupposition that 
 all knowledge has to deal with objects. The most essential 
 part of our pure experience is eliminated if we are to acknow- 
 ledge only things and not subjects which we meet, by the 
 suggestions of their attitudes. When we spoke of the exist- 
 ence of subjects, we fully discussed this fundamental differ-
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 141 
 
 ence. We now have to make use of it. Even if such a selec- 
 tion among the causal objects could offer us everything which 
 historical science needed, we would yet have to demand most 
 serioiisly that there must still exist some other kind of know- 
 ledge which deals with ourselves and with all other men really 
 as subjects in our will-reality, and which teaches us to un- 
 derstand our will-relations. But the truth is, that this alone 
 is the most productive way to make historical science possi- 
 ble at all. Only under this aspect the historical valuations 
 of man come to their true meaning and man in his respon- 
 sible and purposive character enters into history. 
 
 The subjects of will affect us in unlimited manifoldness. 
 We have seen that their suggestions are not only our expe- 
 riences, but that they have as subjects a real existence. But 
 if the manifoldness of those fellow-beings is really to mean 
 to us a world, then this ideal of their self-assertion and in- 
 dependence must be carried further, just as it was with the 
 things in the world of nature. The subjects must not only 
 have their real existence, but their attitude must persevere 
 in the will of others. It must remain identical with other at- 
 titudes in the true realm of beings, and so must make it possi- 
 ble to create the only true connection between subjects. Only 
 as far as we have such identity of will, we have connection 
 betv/een beings, and only as far as we can shape connections 
 of beings, we have history. The isolated existence of beings 
 never makes history, just as the isolated existence of things 
 never makes nature. The task of the historian is to under- 
 stand the subjects in such a way that a closer connection of 
 all beings by identity of will becomes possible. Whatever 
 serves this task has historical truth. Let us recognize first 
 that no other real connection between subjects of will can 
 exist at all. Every application of causality which connects 
 the things of the outer world including the psycho-physical 
 human beings is excluded for the subjects in their attitude 
 character. Neither the subjects with the things nor the
 
 142 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 subjects themselves can be yoked together by natural caus- 
 ality. If natural science had reached its ideal goal and had 
 explained causally all processes in the world, including the 
 contents of consciousness as functions of the organism, 
 nevertheless no subjective attitude of will as such would 
 have been touched by it. The impracticability of the con- 
 ception of causality for the subjects may be recognized even 
 from the fundamental fact that the reality of history does 
 not lie in that time in which the processes of nature go on. 
 
 At first that sounds strange. The tables of historical dates 
 are the familiar background of all historical reports for us. 
 Yet no easy-going concession must distort the boundary lines 
 here. We saw that the conception of the objective time to 
 which all physical measurements are referred has been de- 
 veloped from two different qualities of our experience. On 
 the one hand, the things have temporal qualities of form ; for 
 instance, different rhythm or different duration. On the other 
 hand, they lie for ourselves, for our will, in different direc- 
 tions ; they are past or present or future. Both are traits of 
 the immediate life-experience. We aim towards the connec- 
 tion of the things for the purpose of eliminating every per- 
 sonal aspect. We construct, therefore, a continuous time, in 
 which every possible point can be taken as a present with 
 reference to which there is a past and a future. All temporal 
 forms of the experienced world can now be represented ob- 
 jectively by reference to this one over-individual time. But 
 there can never be an opening by which the will itself can 
 find entrance into the objective time. The will posits the 
 time, but it does not itself fill it. From the start, the atti- 
 tude of the will towards the things gives to them the per- 
 sonal value of past, present, and future, and in the objective 
 time this relation is detached from the individual and is 
 elaborated into a system which is carried by the will-atti- 
 tudes of all thinkable personalities; but the attitude itself 
 always remains outside of time. Every fellow-being who can
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 143 
 
 be apperceived in life as a subject and not as a thing is for us 
 atemporal, and in such atemporal reality we experience also 
 our own will. 
 
 That is in no way in contradiction to the other fact that 
 everybody can yet be put into the temporal frame. Every 
 attitude refers to objects. The material of the will is given 
 with the will, and it must be described in order to understand 
 the will. If the attitude of the will determines the temporal 
 character of the objects, it seems natural and is without ob- 
 jection for the ordinary usage, if we conceive the will itself as 
 simultaneous with the present objects. Hence the will is later 
 than the past objects. Accordingly the will is simultaneous 
 with the sense-impressions of the body, and therefore lasting 
 from the birth to the death of the organism. It is the same 
 process of thought by which we give to the will also its place 
 in space somewhere in the brain. On this general foundation 
 the naturalistic psychology has to work, and it is not only the 
 right but also the duty of psychology to take this standpoint, 
 and to consider every mental experience as a phenomenon 
 in time ; the psychologist may measure it in his laboratory in 
 thousandths of a second. But history has not the right to do 
 the same, if the subjects are really to be maintained in their 
 subjectivity. The historian must resist there at the very be- 
 ginning, and must even refuse as logical transgressions the 
 popular projection of the real will into physical time. 
 
 If we speak of Napoleon, it is justifiable to refer his will to 
 certain gyri of his brain. It seems a matter of course that 
 Napoleon's will was enclosed in his skull, as it evidently was 
 nowhere else in space ; and yet we feel clearly that it is absurd 
 even to ask whether his will in the brain was three centimeters 
 long, or longer or shorter, or whether it had a triangular form 
 or any other space form. It is as absurd as if we were to ask 
 whether his will was green or red. We feel immediately that 
 all such questions can refer only to objects, and that the will 
 of Napoleon, if we want to understand it in its historical
 
 144 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 meaning, the will which conquered Europe, does not come 
 to us as an object. But if that is so, it has no more meaning 
 to ask how many units of time his will was long. His wars 
 lasted for years, his bodily movements lasted for seconds, 
 but his attitudes had no part in the physical time. The act 
 is completely grasped when it is understood in the meaning 
 of its attitude. If Napoleon's will is completely understood 
 in its meaning, there remains nothing to be understood by 
 other inquiries, and no question about its color, its odor, its 
 space-form, or its temporal duration would refer to its reality. 
 Its particular relation to the world is determined by the 
 particular selection of spatial temporal objects to which it 
 takes attitudes. Their particular perspective in space and time 
 gives to that special will a unique relation to the space-time 
 world, but the attitude itself works outside of the space-time 
 system. History deals with realities which stand in number- 
 less relations to the temporal things, but which themselves 
 are neither things nor temporal. 
 
 All this involves that the historical realities cannot also be 
 members of a causal chain. The cause must precede the 
 effect. We recognized that the last goal of explanation de- 
 mands that every causal connection shall ultimately be re- 
 duced to temporal perseverance. That which is outside of 
 time therefore cannot enter into causality, and the causal 
 connections of the things to which the will of the beings refers 
 are thus cleanly separated from the historical connections of 
 the beings themselves. One person may influence another, 
 but all persuading and convincing and stimulating signifies a 
 relation from will to will which is psychologized as soon as it 
 is interpreted in a causal way. In the life of experience the 
 influencing will is not cause, but is a part of the new will into 
 which it enters, and incomparable with any relation of things. 
 In ourselves, too, one attitude does not hang together with 
 another attitude by causal connection. Perhaps we feel our- 
 selves bound in one will-act by our own resolution, but in the
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 145 
 
 life of experience such binding never means that we feel the 
 one act as preceding cause of the other. The resolution itself 
 is still living and enters into the new will-action. In the same 
 way, the motive is for the experiencing will not cause, but a 
 goal towards which the will is directed. 
 
 From here only we can see in what sense the willing being 
 who enters into history is a free being. We often hear that 
 the historian and accordingly the practical life has to do with 
 free personalities. What does it mean? Some fancy that man 
 is a part of causal nature and usually determined by causes, 
 but that from time to time, perhaps when an important de- 
 cision is to be made, he can throw a few causes overboard and 
 annihilate their effect. Such thoughtlessness does not de- 
 serve consideration. As soon as the concession is made that 
 a single atom of nature can be diverted from its path without 
 causes, the possibility of nature is sacrificed by principle. 
 More careful thinkers would say that every human will is in- 
 deed causally determined, but the determining conditions are 
 so complex that a real predetermination cannot be in ques- 
 tion. In this vagueness and inaccessibility, then, lies the free- 
 dom. Still others argue that even such indeterminability 
 usually does not exist, inasmuch as we can foresee the 
 actions of most people more easily than rain and sunshine. 
 They add that nevertheless the action which is causally de- 
 termined has to be accepted as free when the causal motives 
 lie in the man himself and are not forced on him from with- 
 out. And finally we have the more correct argument that 
 after all the motives of the insane, or of the intoxicated, or of 
 the hypnotized also lie in the man himself, and yet that we 
 deny freedom to his actions. This freedom exists only when 
 the causal process goes on in an undisturbed psycho-physical 
 mechanism in which all previous excitements and trainings 
 cooperate in a normal way. The psychologica.1 naturalistic 
 problem of freedom is indeed sufficiently answered in such a 
 way. The causal chain is nowhere disrupted, and neverthe-
 
 146 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 less a clean and useful separation between free and not free 
 action is carried through. The demands of the psychologist 
 are in this way satisfied. 
 
 Yet, when the true historian speaks of free beings, if he un- 
 derstands himself, and if he has the power to remain inde- 
 pendent of naturalistic patterns, he means something funda- 
 mentally different. He does not ask at all whether the causes 
 for the attitude of the will were surveyable in the particular 
 case and whether the effect was thus determinable before- 
 hand. Nor does he ask whether the deciding causes were lying 
 in the acting man himself and whether they worked in normal 
 conjunction. He has no reason to ask anything of this, be- 
 cause the will and the deed did not point backward to any 
 causes, and every possible question is met by reference only 
 to the meaning, to the significance, to the purpose, and to the 
 inner relations of the will. As soon as the question of causes 
 arises, the historical interest has already been replaced by 
 the extra-historical one, by the naturalistic psychological 
 one. To be free in the sense of history means to belong to a 
 sphere in which there exist no causes, because the question 
 of causes of the will would be meaningless there. The insane 
 man, whose deed the fellow-man cannot understand, just 
 because his will does not come to him as a meaning, sug- 
 gests the causal naturalistic interest. But for that reason the 
 insane man cannot be subject of history. His mental life be- 
 comes an object. Of course such an object may be important 
 for history by the will of others who take attitude towards it, 
 but the paranoiac himself does not make history. 
 
 In this realm of true freedom, the historian now seeks the 
 connections of the real subjects and the system of connected 
 wills which he finally affirms is the world of history. In what 
 sense are such connections between two subjects possible 
 at all? Two friends stand in conversation. From personal 
 successes and failures, experiences and hopes, they turn to an 
 exciting political discussion. In every pulse-beat of their
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 147 
 
 talk each of the two is vividly touched by the real personal 
 existence of the other, and with full devotion he takes part 
 in the pleasure and displeasure of the neighbor. Sometimes 
 one agrees with the other, sometimes there is contradiction ; 
 now he gives a piece of advice, now he expresses a doubt. 
 Those two men have not for an instant considered each other 
 as objects. Neither of them was conscious that a series of 
 persevering contents of consciousness was proceeding in the 
 brain of the other. Their inner participation did not know 
 anything of the thing-like content of man, and reached out 
 immediately to the will-like human being. The understanding 
 and doubting, the questioning and answering, the admiring 
 and despising, the loving and hating, the sympathizing and en- 
 vying, each point in real life-experience directly from subject 
 to subject. Of course there exists no relation which might 
 not be explained in psychology, but those two friends who 
 quarrel about politics do not take the psychologist's stand- 
 point, and nevertheless they know each other completely. 
 They know each other without a remainder. Everything 
 which comes in question in their discussion at all has reality. 
 No psychologist could teach either of them anything about 
 the other man which could possibly deepen their mutual 
 understanding. The psychologist who would observe those 
 two would take a merely perceiving attitude, and he would 
 dissolve the psychical contents which he associates with the 
 perceivable organisms into sensations, that is, into psychical 
 elements, objects of awareness. Each of those two friends 
 during the talk also resolves the internal life of the other. The 
 pleasure, the anger, the joy, resolve themselves into a mass 
 of partial feelings ; the suggestions, the deeds, the decisions, 
 become disentangled into numberless partial will-acts; but 
 every part has again that subjective character which must 
 be interpreted, and which the objectifying psychologist can- 
 not know at all. Only the willing subject thus knows friends 
 and foes, leaders and imitators, comrades and opponents.
 
 148 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 Thus there is a possible relation between willing beings 
 which has nothing to do with the causal connection of things. 
 Of course that alone does not prove that the connection which 
 the historian seeks can be really understood. We find there 
 the same situation which existed in the case of the natural 
 sciences. The naturalist finds a mass of relations of objective 
 things which he does not doubt because they appear with 
 great regularity. Yet such electrical or thermal or optical 
 laws of things were not understood, and therefore offered no 
 real explanation until they could be transformed into rela- 
 tions of identities. In the same way the historian is sure that 
 in amity and enmity, in sympathy and opposition, in agree- 
 ment and disagreement, a real connection exists, as it is ac- 
 knowledged as such in immediate life. Yet a real understand- 
 ing of such relations is not reached thereby. The satisfaction 
 of ultimate understanding, and therefore an absolutely valid 
 value of connection, can here, too, be gained only under the 
 one condition which brings rest to all striving : the re-finding 
 of the identical in the new experience. Just as the manifold- 
 ness of the causal laws must be reduced to the perseverance 
 of the identical things, the manifoldness of will -relations must 
 be brought down to a perseverance of will, if absolutely valid 
 connections are to become possible for the historical sciences. 
 Only this absolutely valuable connection by identity is then 
 the real history, just as the mechanical connection is the real 
 nature. Certainly that in no way excludes the possibility that 
 the historian, for his presentation, may make use of the ordi- 
 nary relations of practical life, just as the naturalist speaks 
 of plants and animals without ever replacing them by an 
 enumeration of their ultimate atomistic elements. Yet in a 
 last theory we must understand that those practical relations 
 must be accessible to a transformation into identities if the 
 connections of history are to be acknowledged as objectively 
 valuable for thought, and that means as true. 
 
 The postulate for the identities of volitions leaves it un-
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 149 
 
 certain whether they can be found. If the demand could not 
 be fulfilled, we should have isolated subjects, but no historical 
 connections. But immediate life-experience shows the way 
 clearly, and no artificial force is needed to interpret the his- 
 torical facts by such identities. When I agree with my friend 
 in his affirmation or negation, or when I sympathize with his 
 inclination, or when I feel with his suffering or his hopes, in 
 short, whenever I understand him, his will must have really 
 become my will. To the naturalist who cannot emancipate 
 himself from the thing-view, this sounds like mysticism. If 
 the will of one being becomes the will of another, it appears 
 to him as if, by a telepathic mystery, the will which is enclosed 
 within one organism slips out from it to slip in at another 
 place at another time. But we know now that the other will 
 is not at another place and not at another time, because as 
 will it is outside of space and of time, and no wall is broken 
 down when the will becomes also the will of the other. In 
 every act of understanding just that is fulfilled. The other 
 will, however, does not simply become my own will. That 
 would mean that I myself would become another person. I 
 remain certain of myself when I understand the other. His 
 will remains for me the will of another, and yet it enters into 
 my own will-activity. His will does not lose anything by be- 
 coming my will, and my will does not lose its selfhood when 
 it receives the other. 
 
 Every metaphor which is borrowed from naturalistic 
 science falsifies the unique reality of understanding. Every- 
 body who reads and understands Plato wills when he under- 
 stands the single sentence just what Plato wills, and Plato's 
 will thus enters identically into his will. Every Platonic will- 
 act of affirmation lives undivided in its totality, identical in 
 the millions of his willing readers. This act of understanding 
 forms the fundamental relation of all personal connection. 
 Whether I pity the crying child or admire the national hero, 
 whether I follow the thinker and poet or despise the crimi-
 
 150 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 nal, my connection with any being is dependent upon my 
 understanding of his will, and that demands that his will 
 enter identical into mine. The relation may be complex. 
 If I feel ashamed of another, I understand his will, which again 
 itself includes an understanding of mine. Above all, this 
 identity is not lost when my own will is opposed to the will 
 of the other. If I deny what the other affirms on the basis 
 of my knowledge of his wrong judgment, his affirmation is 
 completely contained in my denial. If I am malicious, his 
 pain becomes my joy; if I am envious, his joy becomes my 
 pain. 
 
 The task is to reduce the historical connection to such 
 identities. For that purpose the willing man must be re- 
 solved into his partial volitions, and this resolution is not less 
 unlimited than the analysis of physical things into mole- 
 cules. The historically significant will of the individual di- 
 vides itself at once, perhaps, into his political, logical, econo- 
 mic, social, scientific, artistic, religious, and moral volitions; 
 and each one can be further resolved into similar will-par- 
 ticles. Every single group of volitions, then, leads to particular 
 identities. Whoever says that he is scientifically a Darwinist, 
 artistically a Wagnerian, economically a Marxist, and reli- 
 giously a Calvinist simplifies the identification by pointing 
 to historical personalities with whom he coalesces in taking 
 their will into his will. But whoever says impersonally that 
 he is politically a conservative, artistically a symbolist, phi- 
 losophically an idealist, and economically a socialist points 
 simply to undefined groups of subjects whose will he accepts. 
 The relation of historical identity is no less included in such 
 cases. Even to be citizen of a town, member of a group, 
 friend of a reform, opponent of a fashion, means historically 
 to receive certain volitions which can be found in certain 
 subjects identically in the own will. 
 
 In such a transformation, we must not forget that even 
 every new creation is only an original deviation, which as
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 151 
 
 deviation is at first partial imitation. Something absolutely 
 new cannot exist in the historical world any more than there 
 can be anything absolutely disconnected in the physical 
 world. Whoever wills something new wills something old, 
 only he wills it differently. He who overcomes an existing 
 scientific doctrine, or opens new political vistas, or deepens 
 the religious consciousness, or destroys social prejudices, 
 or gives to liberty new rights or to beauty new forms, every 
 time affirms the suggestions which he received from a thou- 
 sand sides, and the new factor is small compared with that 
 which was maintained from the tradition. The new scien- 
 tific doctrine, the new law, the new art, stand endlessly 
 nearer to the preceding form of civilization than to the 
 ideas, the laws, the art, of uncivilized tribes. The essentials 
 are taken over and included in the new deed, and the his- 
 torical analysis may even discover the new tone in the whole 
 chord as identical echo of a sound from other sides. The 
 new unity may be really new, but the contents resulted from 
 manifold suggestions in identical co-experience. The ideal 
 goal of historical inquiry accordingly is an apperception 
 through which every life-deed is transformed from its isola- 
 tion into a relation of identity to other volitions. Every- 
 body then includes the acts which he understands and which 
 have influence on his will, and he himself enters by his will 
 into those acts which he influences. 
 
 Of course the new will-acts contain more than mere iden- 
 tities. Even in the simple case of mere understanding, the 
 fellow-will is entirely received and yet the own will is inde- 
 pendently maintained. Otherwise it would be not an under- 
 standing, but a mere repetition. In every personal act, there- 
 fore, lies the identity which constitutes the connection and 
 something new which must be acknowledged as the expres- 
 sion of the personality. To ask where this new comes from 
 would at once drag the subjective again into the causal 
 world of objects. The question of the causes has no meaning
 
 152 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 here. The free existence of this new self in its actuality is 
 the ultimate fact from which the historical interest starts. 
 Just as it has no meaning in natural science to try to explain 
 why the ultimate ether atoms exist at all in the universe, 
 in historical science it has no meaning to ask why those new 
 acts exist. We only know that if there were nothing but this 
 new, nothing which could be refound identical, we should not 
 have historical connection at all. 
 
 The material is so endlessly complex that here, too, the 
 practical science must introduce abbreviations and artificial 
 perspectives, to allow a view of the whole field. As in the natu- 
 ral sciences the manifoldness of things demanded the elabo- 
 ration of general laws, the historian has to prepare the under- 
 standing of the whole field by the elaboration of controlling 
 will-relations. He separates the important and the unim- 
 portant, and accentuates as important those personal acts 
 which live on identically in a wide circle. As there exist 
 graded series of special and more general laws for the things, 
 there are also numberless steps between the influence of the 
 average man whose will is included only in the will of his 
 neighbors and the will of the religious leader, or the artistic 
 genius, or the hero whose will tunes the will of millions 
 and enters in pure identity into the minds of whole nations. 
 As nothing is entirely disconnected, nothing is absolutely 
 unimportant there, but only by this emphasizing of the im- 
 portant and decisive does the system of identities become 
 an organized whole in which the fate of peoples in their lead- 
 ing spirits and in their quiet masses can be understood. 
 
 In this historical world the objective things have not evap- 
 orated, but they come in question only in their original 
 reality, namely, as means and ends of will. If two children 
 quarrel about a cake, the cake is not the chemical substance 
 which the chemist knows, but the sweet object of desire. 
 And if two nations quarrel about Manchuria, it is not that 
 part of the globe which the geographer describes, but is a
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 153 
 
 means of economic and political expansion. The causal con- 
 nection of things does not enter into the historical world as 
 a physical process, but as an object of human interest, of 
 human knowledge, of human calculation. And if nature, 
 perhaps by an earthquake and flood, destroys civilization, 
 it is always only the historical will which the historian re- 
 ports. The flood is that which is feared or which inhibits 
 activity, but it is not a natural process as such. Of course 
 the presentation of the historian may often make use of the 
 conceptional system of the naturalist, if he wants to de- 
 scribe the means and ends of the willing man, but such a 
 naturalistic thing is after all raised to the sphere of history 
 only as soon as it is interpreted in its relation to the will. 
 The boat which carries Caesar may be described from the 
 standpoint of the technician, but its historical significance 
 lies only in its ability to satisfy his will to master the waves. 
 A conflict between natural science and history is never 
 possible, as both move in different dimensions. A naturalis- 
 tic reply can never be the reply on a really historical question. 
 The assertion of identities of things can never satisfy the 
 demand for the identities of volitions. On the surface it might 
 appear as if the one science gives reality to that to which the 
 other science denies it. Of course that in itself could not be 
 settled by any special science, as it is not the task of science 
 to remove the possible contradictions between the differ- 
 ent aspects of life. That belongs to the ultimate inquiries of 
 religion and philosophy. It is the same situation as in 
 the other fields of values. If something is perhaps morally 
 admirable but aesthetically ugly, or beautiful but morally 
 despicable, aesthetics and ethics themselves cannot settle 
 the controversy. On the other hand, if history and natural 
 science were really to weigh their comparative right for 
 acknowledgment, it could not be denied that they do not 
 stand entirely coordinated. Each of the two seeks know- 
 ledge ; each refers the facts to absolute values of existence and
 
 154 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 connection, and one absolute value cannot be less valuable 
 than another. Yet the one may stand in a certain depend- 
 ence upon the other. On the surface it appears as if there is 
 no difference. The naturalist may say: It is a physical uni- 
 verse which produces the historical man and also produces 
 the historian who grasps the historical connection. The 
 historian on his side may say : It is the historical interplay 
 of willing beings, which includes the soul of the physicist, 
 by which the world of objects is transformed into a natu- 
 ral connection. But we know now, since we understand the 
 meaning of history, that the relations are not quite so sim- 
 ple. The historian's claim is correct. The connections of the 
 system of nature indeed presuppose the willing man, and 
 even the existence of the natural things is dependent upon 
 their being given to every possible historical subject. But 
 we no longer have any right to say in the same sense that 
 the reality of the subjects depends upon the existence of the 
 physical natural objects. We know now that the objects 
 with reference to which the historical man lives his life and 
 to which all his attitudes are related are not at all those 
 neutral objects of which the natural scientists are speaking. 
 They are rather objects of will, means and tools of striving. 
 These objects of will do not enter as such into the system of 
 nature, but remain in the frame of history. Only when the 
 willing man decides to detach the things from his will and 
 to consider them as merely perceivable objects, then those 
 things begin to exist as parts of the system of nature. The 
 existence of the things in nature remains nevertheless ab- 
 solutely valuable, and hence is absolutely true because every 
 possible historical man must accept them and must think 
 them in such a way, if he seeks an independent world at all. 
 Thus there is no idea of an arbitrary character of the natural- 
 istic aspect. The naturalistic view of the world is indispen- 
 sable for the tasks of the historical man; it is not simply a 
 kind of construction which he invents like a game. He can-
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 155 
 
 not fulfil his life, if he does not reach the truth of natural 
 science, and the system of nature-thought in the consistent 
 spirit of natural science is the only possible world of objects 
 which can have truth. And yet the fact remains that this 
 system of nature really presupposes the willing being, while 
 the willing being for its reality does not presuppose the 
 neutral objects of nature. Hence it is the free man who in his 
 free deed, because he wills an independent world, conceives 
 the things as unfree nature, up to that height of science at 
 which even man himself is conceived as a determined mech- 
 anism. But this unfree causal nature is not needed to give 
 reality to free willing beings. Already from here we get a 
 vista of the mutual relations of values which have to be 
 brought to complete equilibrium by the metaphysical values. 
 To turn to them will be our last task, but we foresee that 
 the prerogative of the world-will can never be denied. The 
 world of history is logically prior to the world of nature. 
 
 c. — REASON 
 
 In the midst of life-reality we found three experiences for 
 which we demanded an independent self -asserting existence, 
 the things, the persons, and the valuations. They alone have 
 pure existence, and the acknowledgment of their independ- 
 ence is the foundation of our knowledge. The independently 
 existing must persevere. If we are to understand it as inde- 
 pendent, as part of the real world, we must try to find it again 
 in new experience. If we find it again, we have a connection 
 between the various experiences. As this recurrence of the 
 identical means a fulfilment of our will, it satisfies us. The 
 objective connection is therefore satisfactory for everybody 
 who wills a world, and therefore absolutely valuable. The 
 afl&rmation of this connection is truth. Such a connection for 
 the things meant the system of nature, and such a connection 
 for the persons gave us the system of history. Finally, we 
 have to consider the connection for the third manifoldness
 
 156 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 of existing realities, for the valuations. But just as in the 
 case of the existence of the valuations, here also, for the con- 
 nection of valuations, a detailed discussion is not necessary 
 because this whole volume is only an effort to make those 
 connections clear. Here we have only to characterize the 
 place which this particular kind of knowledge demands. 
 
 The connected system of valuations is reason. We know 
 now that as connections, ultimately only those relations can 
 be accredited which can be reduced to identities. Nature 
 was the connection of things under the point of view of iden- 
 tity, history was the connection of persons under the point 
 of view of identity ; accordingly reason will be the connection 
 of valuations under the point of view of identity. We shall 
 have to discriminate all together, four chief groups of such 
 valuations. We may call them logical, aesthetic, ethical, 
 and metaphysical. These labels are not very satisfactory, 
 but they at least point to certain chief characteristics of the 
 four fields. The system of reason must offer a connection of 
 identity in every one of these four fields. 
 
 First, we must make clear what such a demand involves. 
 All valuation is a will in us, but not a will which depends upon 
 subjective individual needs. The evaluating will was willed 
 with the consciousness that we should maintain it under all 
 changing circumstances, unless we were to abandon ourselves, 
 and unless the world were to lose its meaning and reality. 
 Hence the valuation is our own will, and yet superior toeverj'- 
 will from personal motive and therefore strictly over-personal. 
 On the other hand, this over-personal factor lies entirely in 
 our inner world in contrast to the things and the persons. 
 The sought connection of the valuations is thus a connection 
 of will-acts. Of course we find a connection of will-acts also 
 in history, but the difference is clear. Every historical being 
 lives his life in personal will-acts, and the personal is just 
 characterized by the fact that something new and free is 
 superadded to the identical recurring. The historian who
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 157 
 
 seeks connections, therefore, looks backward ; he cannot look 
 into the future because from one given personal act he can 
 never deduce the reality of an act which is not yet given. He 
 who moves from personal inclination may change the direc- 
 tion at any time, and is not bound to move along on the 
 same road. 
 
 But he who evaluates is bound. Of course he is bound only 
 as such an evaluating over-personal subject. As a historical 
 person, he may bring his individual will into conflict with his 
 over-individual demand. He can will the crime, while he 
 evaluates the moral deed. But as a subject of moral evalu- 
 ation, he must will everything which his moral evaluation 
 demands. A will which is conceived as independent of all 
 personal motives and desires can lead only to new and ever 
 new over-personal will-acts, as identity is the only connecting 
 principle. The whole connection of the valuations thus lies 
 outside of the historical sphere in a system of objective real- 
 ity. For the individual subject the connection of valuations 
 is accordingly a necessary one. In this respect reason corre- 
 sponds to nature in opposition to history. The natural things, 
 too, are over-personal, and therefore in their causal connection 
 independent of the individual experience. The permanence 
 of the things can lead to any calculation of future effects; 
 thus the naturalist can determine the future. Moreover the 
 determination of what is to be expected is most important 
 from his point of view, while the historian is entirely unable 
 to imitate him. For the valuations, of course, there exists 
 no future and no causality because they are not in time, but 
 the necessity of the connection and their remoteness from 
 individual wills is the same for the over-personal valuations 
 and the over-personal natural things. Every ideal construc- 
 tion of such a connection of evaluations finds its definite place 
 in the system of reason. 
 
 The fundamental task is the same in all four fields of log- 
 ical, aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical valuations. A will
 
 158 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 which posits values is given, and a new over-personal will 
 which is identical with the first is sought in the strife of life. 
 In our study of history, we recognized how will-deeds can 
 remain identical in new form, and how their untemporal per- 
 severance is different from the continuity of things. Yet 
 the situation is not the same as that in the field of history. 
 In the historical connection the will is maintained as be- 
 longing to an individual even if it is taken over by another 
 person. In the over-personal will-act the relation to an indi- 
 vidual is no longer in question. The identity is found when the 
 one valuation can be put in the place of the other valuation 
 in the system without changing the meaning of the will. Of 
 course a new will must have new relations and new traits, 
 just as the one side of an equation is different from the other, 
 or as the identical atoms of a quantity of water have new 
 traits if they are separated into hydrogen and oxygen. But 
 the will-attitude itself remains the same. The logical acknow- 
 ledgment is under the new conditions identical with that 
 under the old ones, the new act of aesthetic devotion covers 
 the preceding, the new ethical appreciation agrees with the 
 earlier, the one religious conviction binds the other. 
 
 Of course it is not necessary that attention be directed 
 towards the total transformation. The particular task usually 
 demands merely interest in some partial identities. If we 
 transform water by the galvanic current, we may be inter- 
 ested only in the oxygen and may ignore the hydrogen. If 
 we transform the affirming will, for instance, of a law, we may 
 not be interested in all the other included cases, and may 
 devote ourselves only to a particular one. But the will ex- 
 pressed in this particular decision still remains identical with 
 a part of the embracing will of the whole law. If in our rea- 
 son the logical acknowledgments, the aesthetic devotions, 
 the ethical appreciations, the religious convictions, really are 
 connected, we must presuppose that they are in this sense 
 ultimately identical with our fundamental will. The system-
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 159 
 
 atic understanding of all our values is thus an unveiling and 
 exploring of our deepest self. All those logical, aesthetic, 
 ethical, and religious values must then be understood as 
 partial identities of our fundamental will. We shall have to 
 return to this point of view in the discussion of the meta- 
 physical values. 
 
 We may interpret the process at least in that field which 
 we have crossed together, the field of the logical values. The 
 situation is more difficult here than in the ethical, aesthetic, 
 and religious fields, which we shall have to examine later. We 
 have discriminated two fundamental logical valuations, the 
 acknowledgment of the value of existence and the acknow- 
 ledgment of the value of connection. We must now demand 
 that all the connections of logical valuations be either iden- 
 tical affirmations of existence or identical affirmations of 
 connection. The transition from one affirmation to another 
 which is necessarily posited with it, we call a conclusion. 
 Every judgment, we claim, affirms or denies an existence or 
 a connection. The judgments which express the value of 
 existence say : There is or there is not. If I judge : This is an 
 oak tree, we may look on it as a case of subordination, but 
 we may look on it at the same time as an affirmation of ex- 
 istence. There is here present at this place something which 
 has the qualities of the oak, which I presuppose as concep- 
 tionally known. It seems as if we transcend such affirma- 
 tions of existence if we do not speak about a single or a few 
 objects, but if we speak in general about all ; for instance : All 
 oak trees have leaves. But that which we really aim to say 
 is after all only : There exist oak trees which have leaves, and 
 oak trees which have no leaves do not exist. The simple 
 form of such a judgment thus practically covers several 
 different affirmations or denials of existence. 
 
 But what makes us proceed from one affirmation — it may 
 be simple or complex — to the new form of the identical will? 
 In nature one position of things goes by perseverance of ener-
 
 160 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 gies over into a new position. In our reason does one affirma- 
 tion go over into a new affirmation also by perseverance of 
 the will? The natural reply of the logician would be : A second 
 affirmation must be added. The conclusion results from two 
 premises. But let us see clearly that the mere existence of 
 two affirmations never gives a third. I may know that all men 
 are mortal and that Peter is a man, and yet may have no 
 reason to form a judgment as to the mortality of Peter. On 
 the other hand, we have no right to claim that in the system 
 of nature it is sufficient to have only one position of the atoms 
 in order that the second may result from it. The second 
 comes through perseverance, but the conception of perse- 
 verance involves there more than identity of qualities ; it also 
 includes progress of the time-series. One position of things 
 emanates from the other because a new temporal factor is 
 added to the identical universe. This new temporal factor 
 demands a new aspect; it presents a new definite task with 
 the question : What is this identical world as soon as the new 
 temporal factor has entered? In the logical world that is the 
 role which the second premise has to play. All human beings 
 are mortal. We see in it the affirmation of existence ; namely, 
 there are mortal beings and there are not-immortal beings. 
 Now a new affirmation comes to that complex affirmation of 
 existence. That second judgment is : Peter is a man. In itself 
 this would not carry us on. But finally there arises in addi- 
 tion still a question which suggests the transformation of the 
 first judgment in a particular direction. The second judgment 
 really means : How is it with the man Peter? The answer is : 
 Peter thought with the qualities of a mortal being has exist- 
 ence, with the qualities of an immortal being has not existence. 
 If any one conceives him as immortal, I deny that this ima- 
 gined object has the value of objective existence. Of course 
 this affirmation of Peter as mortal is not identical with every- 
 thing which was affirmed in that general affirmation of ex- 
 istence, but our second premise had narrowed the question
 
 THE VALUES OF CONNECTION 161 
 
 to the one particular answer, and all affirmations which could 
 have been deduced as identical with that general statement 
 had to remain unnoticed. Every conclusion is in this way 
 the transformation of a judgment of existence or connection 
 into another identical one on the basis of a definite question 
 which introduces a new factor. 
 
 Every deduction and every induction is such a transforma- 
 tion of identities. The chemist can seek analytically the ele- 
 ments of a substance, or he can synthetically build up the 
 substance from the elements. In both cases the things are 
 conceived as continuous. In the same way in the induction 
 from the persevering particular valuations logic reaches a 
 general valuation, and in deduction from the complex af- 
 firmation a whole manifoldness of particular affirmations. 
 But some kind of special question must show a particular 
 task in order that the transformation to the identical may 
 find a definite direction and a definite goal. The same case 
 as for the logical valuation repeats itself in the ethical, 
 aesthetic, and religious fields. Every time the over-personal 
 will-attitude remains identical, but a new event and a new 
 life-situation, a new impression, a new suggestion, must 
 always present a new life-task to the will, a task in the ful- 
 filment of which the identical attitude can realize itself. 
 Only because the new attitude, the new appreciation, the 
 new conviction, is identical with the original, is the transition 
 satisfactory to the will and therefore absolutely valuable. 
 To enter into the special principles of these fields is super- 
 fluous here, as the following parts of this volume are devoted 
 to these aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical problems.
 
 PART III 
 
 THE .ESTHETIC VALUES
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 
 
 The values of existence and the values of connection which 
 have so far interested us are ultimately inseparable. Both 
 groups present the values of knowledge. The values of ex- 
 istence are posited in our naive life. The values of connection 
 demand a persistent elaboration which is performed by the 
 sciences, and which therefore belongs to the achievements of 
 civilization. Yet civilization only carries on what life de- 
 manded immediately. The connections in the realm of nature, 
 history, and reason allow us to secure new values of exist- 
 ence for new things, new persons, and new valuations. When 
 we asked for the ultimate meaning, both existence and con- 
 nection were only different expressions of the independent 
 self-assertion of the world beyond the personal subjective 
 experience. 
 
 In the same way the values of unity and the values of 
 beauty belong together. Here, too, the former are values 
 of naive life, the latter are decided by the conscious work of 
 civilization; they are the functions of art. Yet here, too, 
 those values of civilization are only continuations of the prin- 
 ciple of the values of life. If we are to hold together the 
 values of unity and the values of beauty, we might use the 
 expression " aesthetic values," and yet strictly it is as insuffi- 
 cient as the term "logical values" is in some respects for the 
 first two groups. But for a general survey such labels may per- 
 form their service. If we penetrate at once into the depths of 
 the problem, we find that just as all logical values express the 
 self -perseverance of the world, all the aesthetic values refer to 
 the self-agreement of the world. And both the self-persever-
 
 166 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 ance and the self-agreement are necessary forms of that self- 
 assertion of the world which we must demand, if our life is not 
 to be a chaotic dream. Both satisfy the will and are therefore 
 valuable; but they satisfy the will not because they adjust 
 themselves to the personal desires of the individual, but be- 
 cause the over-personal structure of the beautiful, as of the 
 true, must satisfy every possible subject. Every possible sub- 
 ject must be satisfied because there cannot be any subject 
 who does not will a world, and as the reality of the world 
 involves self-assertion, and as self-assertion expresses itself 
 in perseverance and inner agreement, the demand for beauty 
 and truth is absolute. They refer to the structural principle 
 of the only world which can mean for us a real world. Thus 
 the individual will finds both the beautiful and the true world 
 as an eternally given a-prioristically determined world. The 
 a-priori is not something which lies ready-made and com- 
 pleted before us, but is the character of our own will, which 
 demands the identity of the experience in order to have a 
 world at all. Every subject whom we can acknowledge as 
 a possible subject of a world must therefore be bound by 
 this a-priori in its logical and aesthetic experience. Truth 
 and beauty are not somewhere maintained from eternity in 
 a world and now to be discovered by man; they are tasks 
 of a world which we are building. But the world which we 
 have to build is the only possible world, the only one which 
 can have reality for our will, and which is therefore eternally 
 shaped by the conditions under which our will can find a 
 world. Whatever has not entered the structural forms which 
 our will demands cannot be a part at all of that world which 
 is for us the only possible real world. 
 
 We must now open the way for our approach to the aes- 
 thetic values. Of course there are many ways which lead to 
 aesthetics. Whoever hears us speaking about the self-asser- 
 tion of the world may possibly suspect that we choose of all 
 ways apparently the shortest but to-day most deserted and
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 167 
 
 most disreputable one, the metaphysical way. Yet nothing 
 lies further from us. The metaphysical method would de- 
 mand that we start from some super-reality and by concep- 
 tional deduction reach the assthetic facts, and that from the 
 height of the abstract we should step down to experience. 
 But we try to hold exactly the opposite direction. Here and 
 everywhere we want to start from the single real immedi- 
 ate experiences, and want to climb up slowly to the general 
 abstract ideas. Does that mean that our way must start 
 from psychology? Certainly not. The prejudices of our nat- 
 uralistic age favor such an antithesis. The aesthetics which 
 begins from above is metaphysical ; the aesthetics which be- 
 gins from below is psychological. But is that really more 
 than a prejudice? An entirely different way may start from 
 real experience far removed from all psychology. That is 
 the road of critical investigation. It must be ours. Whoever 
 seriously wills a critical method cannot even acknowledge 
 that the psychological method really starts from experience. 
 The critical method alone really begins at the beginning, and 
 only when the way has led up to a certain height, the path 
 divides itself and a by-path leads to the broad psychological 
 highway. 
 
 This must not be misunderstood. The empirical aesthetics 
 is fully within its rights when it works nowadays essentially 
 with the means of psychology. The psychological description 
 and explanation of aesthetic processes still finds numberless 
 problems, and their solution through quiet work is indispen- 
 sable for safe progress. The most important achievements 
 of modern aesthetics lie in this direction. The self -observing 
 mental analysis was supplemented most fortunately by the 
 experimental inquiries of the psychological laboratories, by 
 the genetic studies on children and lower races, and not least 
 by the physiological investigations of the processes of sen- 
 sation and movement. In the foreground stands the question 
 of which ideas, emotions, relations, and impulses are stirred
 
 168 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 up in the subject of aesthetic enjoyment, and near to it the 
 other problem of which mental processes lead to the aesthetic 
 creation of the artist. The work of art must be completely 
 determined by the mental forces which have produced it and 
 by the mental excitations in which it shows its effect. Such 
 psychological results can easily be transformed into useful 
 prescriptions, and aesthetics may thus arrive at laws just as 
 hygienic prescriptions are immediately developed from the 
 knowledge of the bodily processes. 
 
 All that is certainly important. But no one ought to say 
 that such psychological study really starts from the immedi- 
 ate experience and represents the first steps of aesthetics. 
 As soon as I have reached a point from which the whole 
 world presents itself as a sum of physical and psychical ex- 
 isting objects, there remains no other choice. The w^ater- 
 fall, the marble statue, the symphony, are then at first 
 physical objects. Of course no one would seek their beauty 
 in the mere physical thing which the physicist describes and 
 explains. If every drop of the waterfall is calculated in its 
 curve, every tone of the symphony determined in its number 
 of vibrations, and the statue decomposed into the molecules 
 of carbonate of lime, that which delights us is not found. 
 The consequence is that it must be found on the side of the 
 psychical things, inasmuch as the whole world is now made 
 up of physical and psychical contents only. The psychical 
 perception of the thing and the memory ideas and the emo- 
 tions then become the starting-point for aesthetics. 
 
 But we know now that this whole way of considering 
 the world is abstract and artificial. When we studied the 
 foundations of knowledge, we recognized that the contrast of 
 psychical and physical is not given in the original experience. 
 The only antithesis which we found there was that between 
 the personality which takes will-attitudes and the objects of 
 this will. These objects were neither perceptions in us as the 
 psychologist maintains them to be, nor the atomistic bodies
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 169 
 
 which the physicist measures. In the same way the will was 
 not a psychical object, as it was not material of inner percep- 
 tion. We will it, we live through it, we let it become effective, 
 we are certain of it, we refuse the counter -will, but we do not 
 find the will in us as a perceivable content. The only anti- 
 thesis which we find in the real subjective experience, that 
 between the willing subject and the object of will, contains 
 accordingly no reference to the antithesis of psychical and 
 physical. On the other hand, there in the immediate experi- 
 ence nothing is to be described, as every description presup- 
 poses an object which is independent of will and determined 
 in itself, and only between the describable objects exists that 
 connection which is expressed in scientific explanations. 
 There in the immediate experience we only had the right to 
 ask for the meaning, the significance, the value of our will 
 and of our object of will. It is the will towards objective de- 
 scription and explanation which explodes the immediate ex- 
 perience and creates that great antithesis of physical and 
 psychical. The subjective experience itself is in every fibre 
 only will and will-object. The will towards description is itself 
 a part of this lived -through reality which is not describable, 
 but only interpretable. We had to return once more to this 
 primary consideration of the theory of knowledge to see that 
 if we really want to begin from below, really from the im- 
 mediate life-experience, we certainly cannot start with the 
 explanation of psychical processes. When the waterfall or the 
 symphony moves the depths of my willing soul, it comes in 
 question neither as physical movements of water or vibrations 
 of air, nor as psychical ideas, impressions, and emotions. 
 The beauty belongs in my immediate subjective experience, 
 not to my optical impression or to my sound sensations, but 
 the sounding tones themselves delight me and the wonders 
 of the waterfall. If we are really to begin at the beginning 
 and not with thought-conceptions, however important, we 
 must examine first the aesthetically valuable objects them-
 
 170 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 selves, not as physical objects, but in their pre-physical real- 
 ity ; we must ask as to their meaning and their significance 
 for our will. 
 
 We may see the difference of method more clearly, if we 
 examine a few leading ideas which often return in the aesthetic 
 discussions. The modern psychological aesthetics has nowhere 
 worked with greater thoroughness than in the study of those 
 processes by which we introject our emotions into the things. 
 We feel ourselves into the beautiful objects and give life and 
 soul to them. The question which psychology has to raise is 
 very clear. Of course the physical marble block, or the canvas 
 covered with oil color, or the printed paper of the volume of 
 poetry, or the rocks of the mountain have no soul and no 
 feeling for the psychologist. Every subjective element must 
 therefore come from the consciousness of the spectator. The 
 psychologist now examines whether, for instance, special bod- 
 ily movements in us are necessary to awaken those feelings 
 of activity which we project into the things, or whether we 
 do it from memory pictures of earlier experiences. Does our 
 own activity fuse with the perception sufficiently so that we 
 entirely lose the consciousness of ourselves, or do we animate 
 the thing with the accompanying feeling that we ourselves 
 are moved by feelings ? How different, if we take the stand- 
 point of real subjective experience ! There we are really cer- 
 tain of the power and strength, of the striving and feeling, in 
 nature or in the statue itself. Not we animate the ocean and 
 the rocks, not we give joy and sadness to the tones, not we 
 make living the dead marble blocks ; their life, their soul, their 
 pain, their joy, speaks to us in the real experience; we are 
 trying to feel their feeling and willing and to understand it 
 with devoted soul. 
 
 We saw in our earlier discussion that we are certain of the 
 will of our fellow-beings without any conclusions of analogy 
 from merely physical objects. We experience the will of our 
 fellow-men as an immediate suggestion which reaches our
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 171 
 
 will. In the same way, now, the beautiful comes to us in the 
 real experience with the whole richness of its own striving 
 and feeling and willing. When we substitute for the beautiful 
 statue the dead molecules of the naturalist, we have killed 
 the life which we found and have annihilated the soul which 
 spoke to us. Afterwards, of course, there remained nothing to 
 do but to project our own feelings into the things for the pur- 
 pose of making at least the illusion of an inner life possible for 
 them. If we really start from experience, we must acknow- 
 ledge that the beautiful is never given to us as a naturalistic 
 object, but as a free expression of attitudes and will which we 
 as willing personalities can understand by feeling with them. 
 It is the aim of aesthetics to interpret these real assthetic 
 experiences, and in such fundamental aesthetics nothing can 
 be described and explained, and the objects are not objects 
 which are at all accessible to description or explanation. 
 They are values, but not things. The moon which fills the 
 valley of the poet with softly silver ray is not the dead body 
 whose craters the astronomer studies with his telescope. 
 
 In the spirit of pure aesthetics, this feeling of a will in the 
 beautiful which approaches us represents a fundamental re- 
 lation which needs no further explanation. If we did not 
 understand the will of the things, if they were really mere 
 physical bodies for us, we should not have any aesthetic ex- 
 periences at all. Of course it would also be a complete mis- 
 understanding if our claim were misinterpreted to mean that 
 it is the will of the creating artist which we add by our ideas 
 to the lifeless work of art. In a corresponding way we might 
 think that it is the will of God as creator which we supplement 
 in the aesthetic awareness of nature. No, it is the column 
 itself which lifts itself and stretches itself to carry the bur- 
 dening roof. We do not ask what the architect felt about it. 
 It is the marble statue itself which wins us by its charm and 
 its purity. We do not care for the feelings of the sculptor. 
 And it is the same when the flower and the brook confide
 
 172 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 their secrets to us. Only when we begin to psychologize, do 
 we reverse the order which we really experience. 
 
 Besides this doctrine of the introjection of feelings, it is 
 especially the conception of unity which nowadays controls 
 the discussion. Here, too, the antithesis of the methods is 
 evident. If we start from the physical and psychical things, 
 we are again certain that the aesthetic unity of the manifold 
 occurs only in the consciousness of the spectator and not in 
 the beautiful thing. Certainly, the physical object as such 
 has a certain unity of its parts. The tree is a unity for the 
 botanist, as the root cannot be destroyed without destroy- 
 ing the branches. The unity is there the causal interrelation 
 of the parts. And in a looser sense of the word, even the rock is 
 a imity. It may be split, but as long as it remains unchanged, 
 the shifting of one part in space demands also a shifting of 
 all other parts. The mutual space-relations of the parts re- 
 main unchanged. This kind of unity belongs, to be sure, also 
 to the work of art, if we conceive it naturalistically. But it 
 is evident that aesthetics does not mean such a unity. Even 
 the most absurd painting would have such physical unity. 
 The aesthetician means the unity which connects the tree in 
 the painting with the clouds and the sky and with the brook 
 in the meadow, which are connected in the unity of the beau- 
 tiful landscape, and which certainly have no unity from the 
 standpoint of the scientist. 
 
 In this case the psychologist says that we ourselves spin 
 the thread of relation by those feelings and desires which 
 the manifoldness of the impressions awakes in us. In our 
 soul the indifferent chaos of simultaneous things groups itself 
 into a harmonious combination of perceptions. Then w^e call 
 related that which awakens in us similar reactions. Such unity 
 pleases us because it lies in the nature of our soul to have 
 pleasure from the resounding of similar feelings as every ac- 
 tivity has a tendency to spread in our mind. Again this is all 
 quite coiTect psychologically, but it is a psychological con-
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 173 
 
 struction and not a rendering of the aesthetic experience. In 
 the real experience the beautiful unity exists for us in nature 
 itself or in the work of art, and it is our part to understand 
 and to feel, and not to create it. The lightning flashes, the 
 thunder rolls, the black clouds threaten, the rugged rocks 
 stretch upward in defiant power, the surging sea rages and 
 demands its victim. If we feel that with sympathizing soul, 
 we do not seek the unity of the excited nature in ourselves, 
 but in this raving of the elements. They are not only filled 
 with the will which we share, but their volitions belong to- 
 gether, support one another, reenf orce one another, and point 
 to one another. The rocks and the clouds and the waves all 
 really want the same thing, and we feel excited with their 
 common emotion. 
 
 It is not different when the unity of the work of art speaks 
 to us. The charming little rococo picture gossips of light 
 shepherds' play. The position of the figures betrays the gal- 
 lant tone ; the features, the eyes, the lips, frivolously say the 
 same ; the laughing landscape in the background agrees with 
 the flowers in the meadow, and the slender willow with the 
 fleecy little clouds and the glancing brooklet. Every ribbon 
 in the light gown flutters in tender play. In the soft colors 
 and the mildly curved lines all wills the same, all wills the 
 one, and their real unity must be felt if we want to under- 
 stand the picture. The unity of the beautiful is the agreement 
 of its real volitions, which we share only in our feelings. If 
 the object of the experience is transformed into physical and 
 psychical objects, this real unity has evaporated. 
 
 The illustrations of the projection of feeling and of unity 
 may be sufficient. They had to demonstrate why for us 
 the psychological method would be misleading, if we want 
 to examine without presuppositions the values in their 
 aesthetic significance for the real subjective experience. But 
 now since we know the right starting-point, we can proceed 
 straightway to our goal. And those conceptions which so far
 
 174 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 we have used only as illustrations, the projection of feelings and 
 the unity, may lead us on. Our thesis is that whenever in our 
 experience a manifoldness of wills approaches us, their agree- 
 ment, their volition of mutual support, is to us absolutely 
 valuable. The group of values which results in that way is 
 aesthetic, and among them we find art. But art is a value of 
 civilization ; we wanted to examine at first the immediate naive 
 aesthetic values. Thus at first we may exclude the values of 
 art. We had to speak of art and nature together as long as we 
 wanted to make sure of the fundamental method and starting- 
 point for all aesthetic treatment. From here we may separate 
 the further work. We shall speak later of art, but now we turn 
 to the naive life-experience and inquire into its aesthetic value. 
 Such immediate aesthetic value must be given to us where 
 the manifold will of nature agrees in itself, and where nature 
 expresses accordingly a unified will in a variety of mutually 
 supporting expressions. To separate this group of values 
 from those of art, we may call them the values of unity. And 
 now we have to seek their characteristics and to determine 
 their meaning and their sphere. We begin again with the 
 outer world, and shall later turn to the fellow-world and the 
 inner world. We start from the fact that in our life-ex- 
 perience nature approaches us with its will and suggestions, 
 and that we feel this will with nature. How that is possible, 
 we have recognized. We saw that we do not project the will 
 artificially into the things, but that, on the contrary, we arti- 
 ficially eliminate the will. On the other hand, we have seen 
 that the things of the outer world do not express a will for us 
 all the time. They are always objects for our will, but, as 
 we saw, usually they themselves are not subjects of will. In 
 the fellow-beings the will speaks to us as suggestion and 
 impulse all the time. With the things it is different. Perhaps 
 it is especially different because we all have gone into the 
 school of natural science and have learned to notice the ef- 
 fects of the things and to neglect their meaning.
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 175 
 
 The case where the thing, like the other man, brings its own 
 will to expression arises only under special conditions. To 
 experience a thing in its own will is natural to us only when 
 we have small practical interest in it. Otherwise we treat it 
 entirely as an object of our will. Often the impression itself 
 works as a strong stimulus to force the own will on the will 
 of the subject; often again the spectator himself may be 
 especially susceptible through his own mood for the will-sug- 
 gestion of certain things. It always remains essential that we 
 can understand this phase of the outer world only when our 
 practical desire which serves our personal interests is little 
 concerned. The purple sunset may transmit its own excite- 
 ment to our soul, but when the sun troubles us with its burn- 
 ing rays at noon-time, we try to protect ourselves from them, 
 and this effort inhibits every sympathizing feeling with the 
 own will of the sun which expresses itself in its fiery glow. 
 The more significant the will of nature, the more easily it 
 may overwhelm the petty personal will. The excited ocean 
 becomes a deed for us, while the little lake is nothing but water 
 fit for bathing, fishing, and sailing ; only an obedient means 
 for our will. And still even the pond may tell of its inner world 
 when it reflects the overhanging willows and the sky. On the 
 other hand, the excited sea becomes expressionless when it 
 brings us into danger. Whoever fights with the waves does 
 not feel them as angry fighters, but as a meaningless flood. As 
 soon as we come to art, we shall find it fundamental that 
 every work of art through its artificial isolation of the content 
 favors and reenforces this entering into the will of the object. 
 In the face of the world of art this feeling with the object is 
 the only natural way, while in the face of nature it is the ex- 
 ceptional state. If we want to use the tree as kindling-wood, 
 we do not look at it with the eyes of the painter, and do not 
 ask about the will of its knotty branches. 
 
 Is this will of the outer world real? For the one whose soul 
 understands and feels it, it has exactly the same immediate
 
 176 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 reality which the own life-experience may have ; but of course 
 that does not involve that it can claim that objective value 
 of existence which we studied under the logical values. More- 
 over, we know that the will of the thing certainly cannot have 
 this objective value of existence, as we ascribed to a will real 
 existence only when the same will could take attitude towards 
 every other possible thing. That alone gave real existence to 
 the will of our fellow-men. Yet that is out of the question for 
 the will of the waves and the clouds ; their will is exhausted 
 in the act of their expression. Yes, we can go still further ; 
 we can say that the aesthetically valuable thing, even as an ob- 
 ject, does not possess the objective value of existence. We saw 
 that the real existence of the outer world is based on the fact 
 that the object is experienceable for every possible subject. 
 The physicist demands that, but in our vision of the sunset 
 this thought-relation to other subjects is not involved. The 
 beautiful willing nature is in that sense only an impression 
 for us ; its objective reality as an existing thing comes in ques- 
 tion as little as the objective existence of its will. 
 
 But this fact must not be misinterpreted as if the lack of 
 objective existence in any way interferes with the aesthetic 
 reality. The aesthetic nature does not become by it a mere 
 illusion. It has the full immediate reality of life. If we attri- 
 bute to the life-experience the value of objective existence, 
 we have taken this part of immediate reality into a certain 
 system of will-relations. We have acknowledged that we can 
 value it at the same time as possible experience of every pos- 
 sible subject. It does not become more real than the immedi- 
 ate life-experience ; it has only become valuable in a certain 
 direction, in that direction which alone is in question for 
 truth and knowledge. The aesthetic nature and its will does 
 not offer any reason for this particular relation and evalu- 
 ation. Here the life-experience is brought into an entirely 
 different system of relations and evaluations, the values of 
 unity. This value of unity as such has not at the same time
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 177 
 
 the value of existence; the will of the aesthetic world has 
 therefore not psycho-physical character. Yet the state which 
 demands the one valuation is not less lifelike and not less 
 fundamental than the state which suggests the other value. 
 
 We know now that aesthetic values can be given in the 
 world of things only when the things have their own will. But 
 that does not mean at all that the understanding and parti- 
 cipation in this will sufficient for an aesthetic evaluation. 
 Such a view is widespread, but we must decline to accept it. 
 Many conditions of aesthetic attitude are fulfilled as soon as 
 such participating sympathy begins, especially if our selfish 
 will is really inhibited by that foreign will of nature, and yet 
 the most important factor is still lacking. An aesthetic value 
 is given to us only when a manifoldness of volitions approaches 
 us, and when those volitions point to one another and agree 
 with one another. This inner agreement is the deepest char- 
 acteristic of everything aesthetic. Beautiful nature must come 
 to us as will simply because agreement can reign only where 
 there is will. In the dead nature of science we find the 
 unity of causal interconnection, but the unity of agreement 
 can never exist between mere objects. Agreement demands 
 volitions of the same tendency, and therefore only a nature 
 which wills can come under the aesthetic point of view. Some- 
 thing which is absolutely simple can never be beautiful, as 
 there can be no agreement where there is no manifoldness. 
 
 But we must not seek manifoldness in the wrong direction. 
 It is not a physical multiplicity : a simple tone or a simple 
 light may excite us by its beauty, because aesthetically tone 
 or color also appears as a manifold. Of course the auxiliary 
 conceptions of physics have nothing to tell us there. The 
 tone is composed of many thousand vibrations of air, the 
 light of thousands of millions of ether vibrations, but we 
 know now that the light ray, in so far as it is beautiful, is not 
 at all that physical light process ; it becomes such only when 
 we elaborate its objective existence, and this results only from
 
 178 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 the relation to other subjects. The beautiful as such is only 
 an impression and not part of the objective universe of the 
 physicist, and therefore as object of beauty not composed of 
 ether vibrations. But in another sense these simple impres- 
 sions really have a manifoldness. The color tone has its own 
 excitement: red does not will what blue and yellow will. 
 Every simple color has its own intensity, which again ex- 
 presses an own will : the faint light does not express what the 
 strong says. Each color has its own saturation : the whitish 
 blue resists the saturated. The light has its space exten- 
 sion ; even the smallest surface may appear equal in its parts 
 or may flicker unequally. Every light has its own time-form : 
 the short flashing light wills something different from the 
 quiet lasting one. The light shines from the dark background, 
 the stillness of which supports the luminosity. In this way 
 color, intensity, saturation, form, time, background, and 
 many other factors express their own will in the simplest im- 
 pression, and only when they blend harmoniously together 
 in their striving do we experience the beauty of the colored 
 light. As soon as light really becomes only a point, or when 
 the time duration is really shortened to an instant, the 
 aesthetic value disappears. 
 
 If in this way the simple tone or light ray carries in itself a 
 manifoldness of agreeing volitions, how incomparable must 
 be the internal richness which the sunny spring landscape 
 with the flowers and the song of the birds offers to us, with 
 the fleecy clouds and the merry brook and the happy laughing 
 meadows. Like jubilant children who dance in a ring, one 
 takes part in the joy of the other, and their agreement of will 
 becomes a unity. But this agreement of will not only binds 
 them together ; at the same time it separates them from the 
 interplay of the rest of the world. In this way the beautiful 
 forms its own boundaries, which no intruder can cross. The 
 moon which gleams in beauty with silver light over the fields 
 has not the least connection with the sun from which its light
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 179 
 
 comes, in the view of the astronomer. The doctrine of science 
 must connect the given with the total universe, in order 
 to carry through the logical postulate. The apprehension 
 of beauty separates the one given thing from the rest of the 
 world, and finds the fulfilment of its demands in the agree- 
 ment of the internal manifoldness. 
 
 Now since we find the agreement in the centre of the aes- 
 thetic world, we can understand why a value is in question 
 there. We know that we have a value only where the identical 
 is maintained, that is, where the return of the starting-point in 
 a new experience fulfils and satisfies our demand for a world. 
 If we found only a single will in a piece of nature, we could not 
 understand why it would be valuable to understand and to 
 feel this will. How could it be valuable if I simply exchanged 
 my will for that will of the external thing and thus felt myself 
 into the meaning of nature? ^Estheticians too often seek the 
 real beauty here. But to throw myself down with the water- 
 fall or to stretch myself up to the clouds with the rocks, to 
 make serpent movements with the brook on the ground or to 
 go up and down with the waves, is no enjoyment even in the 
 imagination. It would be only a source of discomfort, and 
 there cannot be value where there is no satisfaction. That 
 changes at once if I seek the will in which nature approaches 
 me in a new experience and find it identical again in new 
 volitions of nature. That is fulfilment and satisfaction of 
 my desire. 
 
 This satisfaction, this fulfilment, this value, must be over- 
 personal. I do not feel with nature and do not maintain its 
 will for the purpose of gaining anything for myself or to pro- 
 tect myself. This finding of the agreement in nature has no 
 relation whatever to my personality. As soon as my personal 
 interests entered, nature would become a means for my own 
 will, and the will of the things would remain unnoticed. It 
 is not my caprice that the will of the one thing ought to be 
 found again in the other, but the aesthetic reality itself de-
 
 180 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 mands it from me. I cannot perceive the one will without 
 looking out and searching for an agreeing will, and without 
 being disturbed by an unlike disharmonious volition. And 
 yet this demand to find the agreeing will is after all only a 
 special expression of our fundamental will to apperceive the 
 world which we find in our life as an independent and self- 
 asserting one. It is a necessary will for every one whom we 
 are to acknowledge at all as a subject that the world is more 
 than our mere immediate experience, that it is a world, and 
 that therefore it expresses its selfhood by the agreement of 
 its parts. It is accordingly an absolutely over-personal de- 
 mand that the world show its world character by the inner 
 harmony of its volitions, and the fulfilment of this demand 
 must be valuable in an absolute and necessary way. 
 
 From here we can see clearly the antithesis of the aesthetic 
 and the logical values. The values of unity and beauty on the 
 one side, the values of existence and connection on the other 
 side, are equally fulfilments of the over-personal demand for 
 the self-assertion of our experienced world. In both cases we 
 are satisfied, because we find that which we experience iden- 
 tical again in new experience, and in both cases we seek it 
 again, because only this identical occurrence means to us the 
 selfhood and independence of the world. But the direction 
 in which this independence expresses itself is fundamentally 
 different. As far as the w^orld of things is concerned, we can 
 say the logical valuation demands that the thing remain 
 identical as an object, the aesthetic valuation demands that 
 the will of the things remain the same. In the first case we 
 must postulate the perseverance of the perceivable parts 
 through all time, in the second case we must postulate the 
 eternal agreement of those volitions which we feel in the 
 things. The object remains identical when it perseveres, the 
 will remains identical when it is willed in agreement. 
 
 From this difference many consequences result. From the 
 first we can understand that the logical value must link the
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 181 
 
 present experience with the total world-series of all thinkable 
 experiences. If the things are to continue, they must find 
 their identical existence in the furthest past and future. The 
 task is to connect the given with all which is not yet given 
 or no longer given, and to elaborate the causal connection 
 through this perseverance. Science connects every single 
 piece with the totality, every grain of sand with the whole 
 universe. The aesthetic aspect, on the other hand, isolates. 
 The agreeing volitions in the experience together form a unity 
 and exclude everything foreign. Nothing points beyond the 
 harmonious life-experience, nothing connects with the past 
 or the future. The value of beauty is perfect, if the given 
 harmonizes in its own will-manifoldness. And it is clear too 
 that this mutual agreement means at the same time mutual 
 fulfilment; one will can be satisfied by another will in no 
 other way than by being realized once more, and thus by 
 being willed again. A will which wants to remain a will can- 
 not seek from the other will anjrthing but agreement, support, 
 and accord. Truth connects and beauty isolates. Only ap- 
 parently and externally is that contradicted by another fact 
 which really stands in the closest connection with it. The 
 truth ultimately seeks simple elements, while beauty always 
 demands a manifoldness. Indeed, if in science everything 
 depends upon the continuation of the objects, this persever- 
 ing single thing is independent of the existence of other things. 
 The possibility of understanding the interplay of things from 
 the perseverance of partial things will be the greater the sim- 
 pler we think the lasting objects themselves. Therefore we 
 need the atoms. Beauty, on the other hand, demands agree- 
 ment, and therefore presupposes manifoldness. Beauty thus 
 always leads to the vision of many parts. But that atomistic 
 real object is, as we saw, connected with all past and future 
 positions of the universe, while this manifold beautiful is 
 entirely detached from the remainder of the world. 
 Knowledge offers us the ways and means for action, as the
 
 182 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 insight into perseverance teaches us to determine beforehand 
 from the given that which is not given, that which is to be 
 expected, that which is important for action. Beauty does not 
 lead beyond itself, is therefore useless for practical action, 
 but beauty teaches us to understand the inner meaning of the 
 world. As knowledge determines the means of our action and 
 decides about its success, we subordinate ourselves to truth, 
 and by this subordination we master the world. It is by de- 
 votion that we serve beauty, but in this devotion we over- 
 come the world and liberate ourselves from our needs. The 
 devotion to the beautiful demands that we feel the will of 
 nature and bring to silence the chance will of our individ- 
 uality. By our subordination to truth we grasp the world as 
 an independent self-persevering thing; by our devotion to 
 beauty we grasp the world as an independent self-agreeing 
 will. 
 
 So far we have sketched only the antithesis for the outer 
 world, but we know that the same postulates must also hold 
 for the subjects of the fellow-world and the acts of the inner 
 world. Their perseverance, and that means their logical val- 
 ues, we found in the field of history and reason. There, too, 
 we had to seek the simple elements and to connect them with 
 the totality of the real. The fellow-subjects and the inner 
 acts present to us, like the things for our knowledge, an 
 unlimited system which has objective value. It is therefore 
 natural to ask whether or not, here too, the aesthetic aspect 
 may be possible and may give us fundamental values. For 
 the subjects and inner acts also can we not seek the internal 
 agreement, and through the inner agreement their isolation? 
 Thus our question is — and at first this question arises far 
 from cultural values of art : Are there immediate life- values 
 in which the will-agreement of the fellow-subjects or the 
 will-agreement of the inner world comes to an independent 
 value? And without hesitation we must give an affirmative 
 reply. It is arbitrary to confine the aesthetic values of agree-
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 183 
 
 ment to the things alone. The postulates which we find ful- 
 filled in the outer world repeat themselves in the fellow-world 
 and the inner world. Subjects of the fellow- world reach this 
 agreement of will in friendship and love and peace ; the ex- 
 citements of the inner world find unity in happiness. We 
 may perhaps call attention to the most essential point if we 
 name this agreement of subjects "love" and the agreement 
 of the things "harmony." We then have as values of unity 
 in the outer world harmony, in the fellow-world love, in the 
 inner world happiness, and we may turn to them with a few 
 further meditations. 
 
 A. — HARMONY 
 
 We have developed the conception of the value of unity 
 essentially with reference to the harmony of things, and given 
 hardly any attention to the unity of subjects and the unity of 
 the inner world. All the essential points as to harmony are 
 therefore clear before our minds, and we have only to add 
 some particular features. For instance, we have not consid- 
 ered so far the difference between the aesthetic valuation and 
 the sensuous enjoyment which nature may offer us. The small- 
 est and the largest, the drop of dew which glistens on the bud 
 of a rose, the starry sky on a clear winter night, may be spec- 
 tacles which we evaluate. But the fresh wind which cools us, 
 the sun which warms us, the fruit which tastes well, the lips 
 which tempt us, promise and give a personal gratification 
 with a pleasure-tone which by principle stands in contrast to 
 the over-personal valuation. The desire which is gratified by 
 the sensuous delight is my individual desire for a special per- 
 sonal experience. I maintain the idea of the juicy taste of the 
 fruit until it is realized in the experience of my senses. The 
 will which is directed towards my own states determines at 
 first my maintaining such an idea and later my satisfaction 
 by its identical realization. The idea itself was accompanied 
 by pleasure, and the pleasure started the organic process
 
 184 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 which led to the fulfilment. In the aesthetic valuation, on the 
 other hand, it is not our will ; it is the thing itself, the will of 
 which seeks its realization in an identical will of the surround- 
 ing nature. We are aesthetically satisfied when we feel that 
 agreement of the volitions in the things. We feel with the 
 things and try to seek for the will which we feel in nature, a 
 sympathizing will in other parts ; the finding of the same 
 tendencies rewards our search. We seek the harmonious will 
 — harmonious not with us, but with the will of the things — 
 because we want to understand the independent selfhood of 
 nature. Nature is no self as long as nature appears in con- 
 tradiction w^ith itself and does not express any inner agree- 
 ment. In the practical pleasure in nature, nature is a means 
 for the satisfaction of our own individual will : in the aesthetic 
 valuation of nature, we are satisfied because the will of nature 
 is in harmony with itself. 
 
 Such a fundamental antithesis does not exclude the possi- 
 bility that both feelings may combine. When, heated from a 
 sunny road, we enter the shady woods where the cool water 
 of the spring relieves our thirst and berries in the moss re- 
 fresh us, our intense delight and sensuous comfort may fuse 
 with the impersonal devotion to the peace of nature. Usually, 
 of course, it holds true that the thing which we use or which 
 we avoid from personal reasons is for us only an object, and 
 not an expression of an own will. But there are certain cases 
 possible in which the own desire for the thing is still increased 
 as soon as we feel intensely the sympathetic or antipathetic 
 will of nature itself. Yet the fact remains that even in such 
 a case the beautiful nature is valuable not because the will 
 which we feel in it belongs to a thing which can gratify our 
 desire for pleasure, but exclusively because that will which 
 we feel in it harmonizes with other wills in the manifoldness 
 of nature. It is therefore quite possible that nature may re- 
 main aesthetically valuable for us where parts of it, or perhaps 
 even the whole, may be objects of our personal rejection.
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 185 
 
 The landscape may be awesome, the ravine and the wild tor- 
 rent uncanny, the rocky path painful, the stormy wind icy; 
 and yet, in spite of our intense discomfort, the mountains and 
 the stream and the wind come to us with life. We feel their 
 threatening will, and the unity of their will overwhelms us 
 with insistent beauty. Nature is aesthetically free from values 
 if we do not feel its will at all. But it is aesthetically anti- 
 valuable only when the will of nature is felt as in inner dis- 
 agreement, not when it is simply an object of personal resist- 
 ance. Perhaps the beauty of the sublime always contains a 
 factor of personal displeasure, since its will overwhelms and 
 suppresses us. In a corresponding way the beauty of the 
 charming may always contain a separate element of personal 
 pleasure. Only in pure beauty everything which enters into 
 the harmony of volitions is given as an aesthetic harmony in 
 itself beyond pleasure and displeasure. In the landscape of 
 pure beauty grow only beautiful flowers, and every flower 
 has beautiful colors. 
 
 What is the meaning and significance of this will in the 
 things of nature? On the dark pond the swan softly glides ; 
 every line of the swan-form, every light in its white feathers 
 and in its mirror-image, every movement of the wings, and 
 even the quiet ripple among the water-lilies, all sound together 
 in the pure harmony of the beautiful impression. What is the 
 will of nature which comes to such unity of expression there, 
 and which would be confused and destroyed if the neck of the 
 swan were short, or the lights colored, or the movements 
 violent, or the water dirty ? It certainly is not an abstract 
 moral which is proclaimed to us there, not : Be like a swan. 
 The swan has nothing at all to say which concerns us person- 
 ally. Even the immediate suggestion : Take part in this peace 
 of nature, cannot be the meaning of the will of nature there, 
 inasmuch as this landscape can be willing for us and can have 
 meaning only as far as our own feeling enters into it. What 
 we do not feel in our own life-experience remains dead. As
 
 186 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 soon as it becomes living, no advice is any longer needed to 
 enter into it with feeling. Still less can we find the meaning 
 of the scene in a conceptional communication. We do not 
 evaluate the image of the swan because it gives us a know- 
 ledge of that which is typical for the swan in a naturalistic 
 sense. Our aesthetic appreciation does not move at all in the 
 direction in which the zoologist or anatomist would have to 
 proceed if he wanted to grasp the characteristics of the 
 swan. The naturalistic conception of the animal is formed 
 with reference to causal connections which refer to the ex- 
 ternal relations of the bodily parts. The aesthetic apprehen- 
 sion has nothing to do with the bodily parts, but refers only 
 to the aims and excitements, the agreement of which would 
 not be disturbed by any physiological impossibility. 
 
 The beautiful in nature is thus neither advice nor natural- 
 istic information. Do we come nearer to the truth if we seek 
 its meaning in an idea which lies beyond the real? Does such 
 supra-real proclamation express itself through nature? No- 
 thing lies further from us here. If nature has its meaning in 
 its will, the aesthetic valuation does not connect at all this 
 will with any metaphysical beyond. The beautiful agreement 
 of nature is not suspended, but soars aloft on its own wings. 
 It wills nothing but itself. To be sure, our metaphysical con- 
 victions may influence our aesthetic appreciations, but the 
 effect is not different from that of our conceptional knowledge. 
 Our convictions and in a similar way our moral views can 
 reenforce or inhibit our feeling for the will of the things, but 
 the aesthetic harmony is not touched by it. But then, what is 
 expressed after all if it is neither doctrine, nor conception, 
 nor metaphysical idea? We can answer only : Nature's own 
 character is expressed, her own charm and her dignity, her 
 excitement and her rest, her stormy desire and her quiet 
 resignation, her serenity and her reverie. And yet every con- 
 ceptional word leads us astray. Nature makes no program- 
 matic music. What the swan has to say in its soft movement
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 187 
 
 through the lily-pond cannot be pronounced in any other 
 language. 
 
 In still another direction we must characterize the value 
 of unity in nature. A kind of agreement between the natural 
 things is found also by the naturalist who can recognize 
 everywhere the fitness of the natural objects. The interrela- 
 tions of the parts of nature show at every point a surprising 
 mutual adjustment, and that appears to be a new symptom 
 of the harmony of things. How wonderful, for instance, is the 
 mutual fitness of the blossoms and the insects. Yet we should 
 sacrifice the most essential factor of the aesthetic theory if 
 those two kinds of relations were acknowledged as parallel. 
 The mutual adjustment of the things belongs absolutely to 
 their external character, and has no reference to their mean- 
 ing, their expression, their own will. The traditional conjunc- 
 tion of natural beauty and natural fitness must be dissolved. 
 The over-personal value of agreement which we seek demands 
 that we find the will of the one in the will of the other. That 
 has nothing to do with the fact that the conservation of the 
 one is secured by the causal influences of the other. Such 
 external unity occurs in every physical system and has no 
 aesthetic value. 
 
 Only one kind of aesthetic valuation of nature may still be 
 mentioned because it is sometimes erroneously treated as the 
 only possible case. The man of civilization who has trained 
 his mental eye on the works of fine art and whose soul is filled 
 by the suggestions of lyric poetry may look into nature as if 
 nature were a painting in a frame and her mood a lyric poem. 
 If we take such an attitude, we certainly are not disloyal to 
 the spirit of natural beauty, and many an impulse towards 
 the aesthetic valuation of nature is enriched and developed 
 through this effect of art. But it is certainly not the primary 
 kind of aesthetic appreciation of nature. Nature which is 
 seen through the eyes of a possible work of art may then bring 
 its aesthetic values to clearest expression because the work of
 
 188 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 art may reenforce and elaborate them; but art only reen- 
 forces those values which exist for the naive life: art does 
 not create them. The aesthetic valuation of the experienced 
 nature with its agreeing volitions is absolutely the aesthetic 
 starting-point. The question of how far it is at the same time 
 the historic beginning belongs to an entirely different aspect. 
 We may appreciate those values with a new vividness by our 
 training in the enjoyment of art, but this is possible only be- 
 cause art seeks and maintains those values. The values them- 
 selves exist independent and self-asserting. The sociologist 
 may be right in claiming that civilization and art have 
 helped to awaken in us the sympathizing feeling for the self- 
 agreement of the will in nature, but our immediate experience 
 tells us that the spheres of harmony sound the purest when 
 we forget all civilization and art. 
 
 B. — LOVE 
 
 Can we, as in nature, find an absolute value in the world of 
 subjects? We studied that fellow-world in its value of exist- 
 ence and in its value of connection, and understood how men 
 as subjects of will enter into the life of history. Is the mutual 
 harmony of their will now an absolute value, too ? But it 
 would be impossible to deny it here. Again we have a mani- 
 foldness of will which we feel with the subjects, and again we 
 find such will in mutual agreement. All the conditions for a 
 pure valuation are therefore again fulfilled. If we call love 
 that harmony of souls which sounds through friendship and 
 passion and peace and human brotherhood, then love must be 
 an absolutely valid aesthetic value. It is the over-personal 
 beauty of the fellow-world, as the harmony of things was the 
 pure beauty of the outer world. 
 
 Of course man also stands in the midst of beautiful nature. 
 There he stands in the masquerade of his gay-colored cloak 
 of civilization as a picturesque thing among things; or he 
 stands there in noble nakedness, and every line expresses the
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 189 
 
 purity of nature. But in the realm of nature man in his beau- 
 tiful forms is found only like the flowers in the field. The value 
 of love brings his soul to expression. What the beautiful 
 female body as object of vision says by the play of its forms 
 and lights is independent of that which proceeds in the soul 
 of the woman. It is as with the swan in the pond, which ex- 
 presses a meaning of its beauty of which its bird-understand- 
 ing has no idea. Every new position, every new foreshorten- 
 ing, every new line of the hair, changes the will of the figure 
 and brings new unities of expression. The will of the inner 
 personality remains unchanged by it, and the outer figure 
 goes on to will its own meaning aesthetically when, perhaps 
 in sleep, the w\\\ of the personality has come to rest. 
 
 But now we want to seek the harmony of that inner will. 
 That can always have only the one meaning, that your will is 
 to become my will and my will your will. Only the forms of 
 this fusion are endless in their manifoldness. The unity may 
 be short or long : from the short meeting of will in the play 
 of children or in light social company to the union which is 
 loyal to itself beyond death. The unity may concern the 
 smallest part of the personality or the whole self ; from sym- 
 pathy with the pain of the sufferer whom we see in the street 
 to the life friendship from which nothing is hidden in the soul 
 of the other. The unity may arise in the nearest as in the 
 widest circle, from the love between man and wife which ex- 
 cludes everything but the loved one to the humanitarian love 
 for mankind which includes everything that has the features 
 of man. The unity may be joyous or may be tragic, from the 
 happy delight with which two young souls find each other to 
 the marts^rdom of the service which sacrifices itself. The unity 
 may be penetrated by selfish longing or may be absolutely un- 
 selfish, from the passion of the rapturous bliss of becoming 
 one, in which the sensuous self is triumphing, to the mother- 
 love which renounces herself that another self may be able to 
 will its own self.
 
 190 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 The usual way of looking on this unity of selves either 
 denies to them the absolute value, or shifts the value to an 
 entirely different group, to the moral values. The history of 
 philosophy has not seldom seen in it the fundamental and 
 decisive moral value. Schopenhauer's revival of the old 
 Indie doctrine of sympathy gave the classical expression to 
 such ethical teaching. He alone acts morally who is con- 
 trolled by the certainty that the fellow-man and the own self 
 are fundamentally one and the same, and he acts immorally 
 who counteracts the will of the fellow-being by his own will, 
 and who by affirming his own will denies the will of the 
 other. In the coalescence of all souls lies the beginning and 
 end of all goodness. To be sure, in Schopenhauer's world the 
 immediate life-experience finds only the inner world as a will, 
 while the fellow-world is at first merely an idea. To know the 
 will of the other man, we have to project our will into the 
 body of the other man. The volitions of the various individ- 
 uals thus remain in the spatial temporal separation of the 
 body, and can find each other only when all individuality is 
 eliminated and we sink from the world-experience into the 
 metaphysical unreality in which there cannot be any per- 
 sonal individualization. But we must object to such philo- 
 sophy from the start. We recognize too clearly that the im- 
 mediate contact between will and will does not demand a 
 metaphysical overcoming of experience, but that it is the im- 
 mediate effect of our relation to our fellow-beings, not less 
 immediate than the experience of things. We remain thor- 
 oughly in the pure life-experience when we become certain 
 that the will of our friend is our own will, that his joy is our 
 joy, that his suffering is our pain. We do not need the break- 
 ing down of the bodily limitations, as the will of the fellow- 
 man was from the start for us not a projection of our will 
 into the perceived body, but a special kind of reality which 
 W9 grasped in immediate life-experience. Thus it is for us 
 a question far from metaphysical speculations whether the
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 191 
 
 fusion of the will of two beings is valuable or not. The value 
 of such unity of will can in no case be found in the idea that 
 it subdues experience and leads us to an absolute trans- 
 experience. Just this unity of will is immediate life-experience 
 for us. When we artificially transform the immediate life into 
 perceptions and make out of the willing beings causally con- 
 nected things, then only do we create those walls over which 
 we have to fly later by a trans-natural mutual soul-contact. 
 If in such a way the metaphysical background disap- 
 pears, in what sense may we still have a right to look on the 
 coalescence of wills as a moral value ? Of course we cannot 
 really study here what we ultimately are to call moral. We 
 shall have to separate carefully the moral from the morally 
 indifferent, when we discuss the deeds and decisions of the 
 personalities. But it ought to be kept in view from the start 
 that we indeed have a right to speak of moral achievements 
 only in the realm of deed and decision. It is no deed, no de- 
 cision, no achievement, when in earthly or in heavenly love 
 we feel an expansion of the own self, or when the soul of the 
 parents resounds with the joy or the pain of their children. 
 How such feeling happened to arise in us we do not know 
 ourselves; we did not choose it, we could not do otherwise. 
 To feel with the others and to have sympathy is our being. 
 If we stamp our love, which is our happiness and our treasure, 
 as a special personal merit, we enter into a vagueness of 
 feeling by which the truly moral decision would have to lose 
 its characteristic value. It is a gift of life, endlessly valuable, 
 to find in our soul friendship and sympathy and love, but 
 with the merit of morality such emotional tendencies have as 
 little to do as musical talent or mathematical ability. If there 
 is no moral merit in having a devoted heart full of love, then 
 also it is surely no moral achievement which desen^es praise 
 when the sympathy expresses itself in a corresponding action. 
 When a mother acts for the protection of her child whom she 
 dearly loves, she does not think herself to deserve moral credit
 
 192 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 for it. Yet the principle is not different when the inner unity 
 of will goes beyond such narrowest circle. If we really love 
 cur neighbor as ourselves, then it is not an action which 
 moves in the direction of ethical merit when we make efforts 
 to help the neighbor. Such an action is not for that reason less 
 valuable than a moral deed, only it is not a moral deed. We 
 decline, therefore, to accept the unity of minds as a demand 
 of morality. Love is one thing and duty another. 
 
 Duty and morality are postulated as absolute values. Are 
 we therefore obliged to accept the conclusion that love does 
 not represent an absolute value ? The unity of wills would 
 then only be a personal joy and chance inclination, which 
 seeks individual gratification in friendship and love and hu- 
 man welfare, and which is not different by principle from the 
 inclination for sweet foods and sparkling wines. But that, 
 too, is entirely misleading. The devotion of the heart has no 
 moral value, and if we were to group all human actions under 
 the one point of view, that only the moral achievement is 
 valuable, we should indeed have to eliminate love as indiffer- 
 ent, perhaps even as weakness. The devotion of the soul 
 has nevertheless an unlimited value, a value as absolutely 
 valid as morality itself, the eternal value of perfect unity. 
 Therefore we had to bring love into line with the aesthetic 
 values. And we must not misinterpret the meaning of aes- 
 thetic value in the light sense of the term. The unity of souls 
 is not simply a charming spectacle which adorns our existence 
 and beautifies the seriousness of life with pleasant play. We 
 called the total values of unity aesthetic because all art and 
 beauty of nature belonged in the same circle, but what is 
 meant is a holy and serious value which grasps the deepest 
 powers of our personality. As the starry night in its eternal 
 beauty makes us feel the meaning of unity by its sublime 
 glory, the value of unity comes to us with no less unlimited 
 splendor when two souls have become one for better or for 
 worse in eternal loyalty.
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 193 
 
 But we must keep the essentials in mind. The value which 
 we try to grasp here must not be sought in the feeling of 
 the self-surrendering personality. If he who seeks the will 
 of the other man experiences at first in his own desire only 
 a personal excitement, then satisfaction of his will can have 
 only personal value. His personal pleasure in contact with the 
 loved one may stand higher than the joys of the table, but 
 it remains strictly individual, and unfit to lead up to the 
 height of the over-personal value. The real aesthetic value 
 belongs entirely to the unity of the will-manifoldness. It is 
 the same satisfaction as in every other field of values. The 
 one single part as such never has over-personal value; the 
 value always belongs only to the relation between the two 
 separated parts, which in a certain sense become identical. 
 Thus that which is valuable is something quite different from 
 the mere sum of the two personal individual enjoyments. 
 The logical value of an equation is also destroyed when the 
 symbol of identity is erased and only two groups of concep- 
 tions remain, each of which may have a certain logical signi- 
 ficance, but which have lost their relation of equality. The 
 enjoyment of the friend or of the loved one in the two single 
 souls is entirely different from the consciousness of the unity 
 between the two, a consciousness which may enter into the 
 mind of either. Of course there is no opposition between 
 the two possibilities. In the world of nature we saw that the 
 personal pleasure easily interferes with the aesthetic appre- 
 ciation of unity, because our personal desire took the thing as 
 an object and did not listen to the own will of the thing. In 
 the relation to the fellow-world, it must be different. The 
 will which is to be found in its agreement with other v/ills 
 must be most accessible to the subject who takes part in the 
 united group. The friendship which brings the two friends 
 into aesthetic unity cannot be felt by any one more vividly 
 than by each of the friends. Each of them knows his own 
 will from the deepest source, and finds his joy in feeling with
 
 194 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 the soul of his friend. Each of them feels the will of both, 
 and accordingly can have not only his own personal pleasure 
 in the sympathy of the friend, but at the same time the over- 
 personal aesthetic delight in the identity of the two will-atti- 
 tudes. His pleasure refers to his personal part ; his pure ap- 
 preciation refers to that mental totality in its aesthetic unity. 
 
 Only where two souls have become a unity do we find a re- 
 ality which is no longer a flickering haphazard experience, but 
 which has the significance of self-assertion. Only where two 
 souls have become a unity does there radiate into the world 
 of will an own self-dependent meaning. We seek such a self- 
 asserting meaning, and must seek it if we want to have a 
 world. We must apprehend one will, therefore, in such a way 
 that we maintain it with a desire to find it again identical. If 
 we find it, this demand is fulfilled, we are absolutely satisfied, 
 we have found a fraction of the self-asserting world. As this 
 demand is not impelled by a personal need, but by the over- 
 personal postulate for a reality, the satisfaction, too, must be 
 over-personal. The unity of souls is a pure absolute value; 
 it may be a fleeting word of pity which unites two indifferent 
 beings just one heart -beat long, or it may be the inexhaustible 
 word of the savior who brings love for the neighbor into 
 numberless souls and binds them into a unity. 
 
 It is evident that this value of unity through love must 
 have a certain contact with the value of connection in his- 
 tory, just as we saw that natural beauty has certain relations 
 to natural causal connection, and that aesthetic and logical 
 values anyhow have certain factors in common. In the con- 
 nection of history, as in the agreement of love, the value lies 
 in the finding of the identical will, and yet they are separated 
 as much as logical and aesthetic values must always be sepa- 
 rated. In the truth we seek self-assertion as conservation of a 
 given unit which we follow up through all the manifold experi- 
 ences. In beauty we seek the self-assertion as mutual agree- 
 ment of a closed manifold. The logician has found an abso-
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 195 
 
 lute value in the fellow-world when he can trace one will 
 as identical in the will of another, and by this demonstrate 
 the chaos of the fellow-world to be a cosmos of order. The 
 aesthetician of the fellow-world has found an absolute value 
 when he feels the intended unity of striving in a manifold of 
 will and demonstrates the love in the chaotic excitement 
 of the fellow-world. The historic connection of the will-in- 
 fluences and the sympathetic connection of the will-devo- 
 tions alike raise the fellow-world to an absolutely valuable 
 selfhood. 
 
 Only one point may be added. The unity in manifoldness 
 demands here as everywhere not only the unity but also the 
 manifoldness. The richness and the inner variety of the un- 
 equal personalities reenforce the aesthetic value of the human 
 harmony. The realm of love does not demand that individu- 
 alities be eliminated and the differences effaced. The beauty 
 of the stormy sea wills that each wave surge in foamy surf 
 in its own way, that no two be alike, and yet that all aim 
 towards the same inner agreement. There is no deeper unity 
 of soul than where the strength of the man joins the tender- 
 ness of the woman, where the maturity of the parents is united 
 with the innocence of the children. But the unlimited richness 
 of these values of unity does not belong only to the manifold- 
 ness of the personalities ; it results, too, from the manifoldness 
 of their relations. Everybody enters into an abundance of 
 human bonds. The larger the circle of those who are united 
 the smaller is the group of the volitions which enter into 
 unity. The harmony of peace which unites the peoples of the 
 earth is not the harmony of brothers who become one with 
 their whole soul. 
 
 C. — HAPPINESS 
 
 Whenever philosophers discuss the value of happiness one 
 question usually stands in the centre : Is happiness the high- 
 est goal of action? Ought we to raise happiness to the highest
 
 196 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 ideal of our human tasks, or is happiness only a morally in- 
 different by-product with which the duties of our life have no 
 concern? The Stoic and the Epicurean alike ultimately strive 
 to find happiness through the moral will. But the naive man 
 who seeks a deeper value for his life is unwilling to be satisfied 
 with the thought that every duty is only a careful calculation 
 of his own happiness. Morality is more than a weighing of 
 our own possible pleasures for the purpose of preferring the 
 lasting and unmixed to the fleeting pleasure which may be 
 followed by pain. Any happiness, he says, leaves our life cold 
 and empty when our work does not also serve the happiness 
 of the fellow-man. There are the goals of our really valuable 
 deed. The own happiness has no real value; the ideal task of 
 the moral man is to devote himself to the greatest happiness 
 of the greatest number. There finally starts the contradic- 
 tion of the idealist. The happiness of the others is after all, 
 he says, no higher goal than the own pleasure. Whether the 
 greatest number of men enjoy their existence, and whether in 
 this way the feeling of pleasure is multiplied, has nothing to 
 do with the highest duties of the will. That which is most 
 valuable, conscience, relaxes in the midst of happiness. All 
 such adorers of happiness and despisers of happiness have 
 only one presupposition in common, namely, that happiness 
 is pleasure, and therefore as such a merely personal value. If 
 happiness is to have an over-personal value, this must result 
 from the relations of happiness to the moral action. It is the 
 moral value of happiness which the utilitarian ethics preaches 
 and the conscience ethics denies. 
 
 We know that the problem of morality will be ours at a 
 much later stage of the discussion. But we can eliminate 
 it here entirely, and can confine ourselves to the examination 
 of happiness itself. We may begin with a complete conces- 
 sion. As far as happiness is pleasure it is the satisfaction of 
 a merely individual desire, and therefore without any over- 
 personal value. We have no right to acknowledge any differ-
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 197 
 
 ences by degrees there. The pleasure in absinthe, vaudeville, 
 and gambling and the pleasure in chamber quartettes, old 
 bronzes, and aesthetic talk with beautiful women may char- 
 acterize two incomparable human beings, but the gratifica- 
 tion of their desires remains equally free from over-personal 
 values. And in the same way without absolute value is the 
 satisfaction of all those single wishes which usually enter into 
 human happiness — wishes for success and fame and beauty 
 and wealth and power. We do not preach that they are with- 
 out value because they are fugitive, or that they are without 
 value because they are not rooted in the moral. Still less 
 have we a right to denounce them as opposed to true values. 
 Without value are such goods of our vanity because the 
 desire which is gratified by them is a strictly individual will. 
 Happiness as a feeling of pleasure, as satisfaction of personal 
 longings, has no place in the realm of pure values. But there 
 exists another happiness. If we do not use the word "hap- 
 piness" carelessly, we ought after all to speak of the emotion 
 of happiness only when it means more than a mere feeling of 
 pleasure, more than mere fulfilment of a desire for the things 
 of the outer world. The difference, to be sure, usually remains 
 below the threshold of consciousness. The true happiness is 
 not the satisfaction of a will, but the complete harmony and 
 inner agreement of all our volitions. This agreement is a 
 value, a pure aesthetic value. Every single volition in us may 
 be personal and therefore without value, but a state of the 
 soul in which all the volitions harmonize is a complete value. 
 This unity is over-personally valuable and absolutely valid, 
 like the unity of the beings in love and the unity of things in 
 the beauty of nature. 
 
 In the unity of happiness it is the inner world of a single 
 being in its own completeness which is in question. If we 
 meet a personality whose inner volitions are understood and 
 felt by us and are felt as entirely harmonious, his inner world 
 lies before us with the same pure value of unity which the
 
 198 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 outer world offered to us by a sunny spring landscape or 
 the fellow-world by a devoted friendship. And if we find all 
 that in ourselves, our own experience lies expanded before us 
 in a pure over-personal beauty. Our own self is then raised 
 from the level of mere personal desire to the height of com- 
 pleted unity in which our over-personal self finds absolute 
 satisfaction. We must not forget that the purity of the 
 over-personal value has nothing to do with the significance 
 of the content. Even the most trivial judgment is logically 
 absolutely valuable, provided it is true. In this way the 
 aesthetic value may be given in perfect purity, even when 
 the happy soul shows unity of volitions of which each is trivial 
 and insignificant. We must only demand as in every case of 
 unity that it is really a question of volitions. That already 
 indicates the difference from the mere satisfaction of personal 
 desire. Our personal longing becomes annihilated in its satis- 
 faction by the things of the world. It is no longer a striving 
 when it is fulfilled. If I am thirsty and long for water, my 
 thirst experience is without any inner agreement ; I imagine 
 my satisfaction and I experience my dissatisfjdng thirst. The 
 one tempts me and the other tortures me, and so my will is 
 without rest. On the other hand, when the drink relieves my 
 desire, this longing comes to an end, and if the will disappears 
 there cannot be any agreement. Hence the mere desire or the 
 mere gratification by things cannot offer any true happiness. 
 The will must not be extinguished in the happiness, but must 
 assert it. The mere absence of desires and absence of pain 
 do not even suggest the true meaning of happiness. He who 
 is merely gratified stands outside of happiness and unhappi- 
 ness. 
 
 Happiness demands continuous willing which is manifold 
 and yet united in itself. Certainly the outer world has to con- 
 tribute to it, but its part will be the greater the more the 
 experience of things, instead of annihilating the will, satisfies 
 it in stimulating new and ever new volitions. Within a cer-
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 199 
 
 tain limit, that may pertain to the sensuous pleasures. The 
 pleasure annihilates the original desire, but after all it stim- 
 ulates at the same time the new desire for the continuation 
 of the enjoyment and is therefore again a source of will. That 
 is the reason that the sensuous pleasure, too, may contribute 
 to true happiness. But the happiness must flow in endlessly 
 richer stream from those sources in which the external stim- 
 ulus has its whole meaning in the suggestion of new will. 
 When the fate of the world intends well toward us, it does not 
 carry us upward to the goal of our wishes on the wings of 
 fortunate chances, nor does it indifferently leave us in our 
 helplessness. Good fortune shows us the way towards the 
 height, and gives us a helping hand when obstacles are hin- 
 dering us, and when the way is too steep for us to advance by 
 our own efforts. To arrive at the goal is nothing but a thrill, 
 and to stand still without effort towards a new advance is 
 never true happiness, even if we stand still at the point which 
 was our goal of yesterday. That is the reason that all exter- 
 nal goods have only a relative value for happiness ; it is eter- 
 nally impossible to imagine a state which makes us absolutely 
 happy. But that also involves the pleasing thought that no 
 external state can make us absolutely unhappy. However 
 high the point which is reached, to maintain it without fur- 
 ther desire is no value of life, and however low the starting- 
 point, the smallest movement upward can be a perfect happi- 
 ness. Happiness is unity of the inner strivings ; that which 
 lies beyond our expectations cannot disturb it. The mind 
 which envies the bird for its wings and the fish for its fins can 
 never become happy, and he who does not desire the yellow 
 jacket of the Chinese dignitary is no less happy without it 
 even though millions adore it as the highest goal. Happiness 
 is always only unity of the inner world in its will-impulses ; 
 hence the deep influence of the personal temperament. It is 
 never the outer fate which forges the optimist or the pessimist. 
 The unhappy soul finds the disharmony of will even in the
 
 200 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 most comfortable situation of life, and the sunny personality 
 may remain harmonious in itself even when the storms are 
 raging without. There is no evil for him whose will does not 
 resist. 
 
 Happiness is will. Hence the inexhaustible content of 
 happiness in truth and beauty and morality. Every true 
 thought which we understand, every beautiful line which we 
 follow, every moral solution in which we participate, is a 
 suggestion for us to a new will which harmonizes with our 
 fundamental will. The situation there never annihilates our 
 will as in a mere enjoyment, but the more deeply our logical, 
 aesthetic, and ethical will is fulfilled the more vivid remains 
 the will itself. It develops itself in the experience to ever new 
 and ever richer volitions. We stand without wish for our- 
 selves in the face of the work of art or of the scholarly system, 
 but the less we wish for ourselves the more we wish and will 
 with the lines and forms, with the tones and words, with the 
 thoughts and fates which captivate us. Without wish we 
 follow the tragedy on the stage, and yet our soul is moved in 
 its depths with inexhaustible will; and all this willing is in 
 inner unity. As far as this will is projected into the drama 
 itself, its unity gives us the aesthetic value of the work of art ; 
 but in so far as we feel it as the inner movement of our inner 
 world, it makes us perfectly happy as long as we are really 
 surrendering ourselves to the beautiful spectacle and no outer 
 experience interferes with the harmony of our will. 
 
 This will-character makes work also an unfailing source of 
 happiness ; whether we influence mankind by our labor or cul- 
 tivate the field, nowhere does the will find its end by its action. 
 In every completion there lies a new beginning, and we do 
 not want anything else from the happiness of the work but 
 that the work may develop itself in fertility and may always 
 open new opportunities for labor. To live one's life in all the 
 fulness of its creating energies, to will from the deepest soul 
 in every experience with things and fellow-men, to feel the
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 201 
 
 suggestions of new wills which stream together with the fun- 
 damental will of the self — such a moving equilibrium of the 
 inner world is the highest happiness. Even when any counter- 
 will by disappointment and grief intrudes into the mind, the 
 happy soul may vanquish it. The overcoming of the hin- 
 drances of will strengthens the harmonious will and brings 
 every gain to more vivid validity. But to live one's life does 
 not mean only to bring to effectiveness its creating energies. 
 To be able to serve in loyalty and subordinate ourselves to 
 the greater task brings beautiful unity not less into the 
 abundance of the resulting volitions. And here belongs the 
 happiness of inner development, of learning and training and 
 growing, and above all of love. Happy the soul which loves, 
 as love indeed is a never-ending harmony of volitions which 
 spring from the own desire with volitions which share the 
 feelings of the loved one. But this unity of our volitions may 
 also be strengthened by the inhibition and elimination of all 
 inner movements which are opposing. Happy, therefore, are 
 the one-sided ones who are controlled by one will, and who 
 really experience only that which harmonizes with their own 
 volition. The thousand counter-excitements which might 
 disturb are brought to silence. Love has just this power. One 
 group of volitions dominates in the inner world and forgotten 
 is the chaos of our existence. Such is the influence of ambi- 
 tion and of fame and of the true joy of creation. The strength, 
 the manifoldness, the significance of the volitions must give 
 to the value of unity in happiness its particular aesthetic 
 position. As the symphony stands higher than the little song, 
 the symphony of a powerful, creative, rich, and influential 
 human life stands aesthetically higher than the happiness in 
 the corner and the joy in the hut. But the value itself is com- 
 plete even in its most modest form ; there is no greater logical 
 value in the truth that one hundred times one hundred is 
 ten thousand than in the truth that three times three is nine. 
 The inner world which in the experience of cuter world and
 
 202 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 fellow-world remains completely in unity with itself is abso- 
 lutely valuable. All the conditions which we demanded for the 
 value of unity are fulfilled. By that at last the absolute value 
 of happiness has come into its right. An idealistic philosophy 
 may have good reasons for separating the tasks of our actions 
 completely from all reference to happiness. The meaning of 
 duty and of moral good may be conceived so rigorously that 
 the moral worthlessness of happiness may appear evident. 
 But that ought never to be interpreted as if happiness cannot 
 be a true pure value, and as if it should be banished from the 
 noble community with truth and beauty and morality. Those 
 who see in happiness nothing but personal pleasure cannot 
 make any concessions, but only the rage of the iconoclast 
 wants to expel all happiness from the world of pure values to 
 prevent its being made a goal for our ethical actions. Hap- 
 piness is a pure independent value, but an aesthetic, not an 
 ethical one. The world in its over-personal meaning is ab- 
 solutely valuable by the fact that the glow of happiness 
 illuminates human souls. 
 
 The relation of happiness to our duties of life is not touched 
 by such meditations at all. I may acknowledge the absolute 
 value of happiness, and yet not acknowledge it at all as my 
 individual task to propagate happiness in the social world. 
 I may postulate that every one who understands the happy 
 soul is perfectly satisfied in its self-centred unity, and yet I 
 may live my life without any special interest in the question 
 whether this or that man, or the majority of men, or the 
 greatest possible number of men, experience such pure har- 
 mony of their inner world. It is the same as with the other 
 values. I may acknowledge also the absolute value of scien- 
 tific truth, and yet may not feel the slightest obligation to 
 discover new truths. I may acknowledge the pure value of 
 music, and yet not consider it my own duty to invent new 
 melodies. In this way I may appreciate the absolute aesthetic 
 value of happiness, and yet decline to contribute to the
 
 THE VALUES OF UNITY 203 
 
 spreading of happiness. It may be that life shows more 
 important tasks to me. It may be that the insight into the 
 dependence of happiness upon will convinces me that no 
 external action is really fit artificially to create the happiness 
 of others. It may be that I find so many factors influential 
 in happiness — health, love, talent, work, friendship, family, 
 success, patriotism, fame, beauty, liberty, wealth, knowledge, 
 art, religion — that happiness may appear to me most uni- 
 formly distributed if all those factors are shuffled together 
 in a haphazard way just as life always tries to do it. I may 
 therefore be unwilling to interfere artificially with the events 
 of life. Such a chance distribution may seem to me to secure 
 happiness more uniformly than if we intentionally eliminate 
 the inequality for a few special factors, as for instance for the 
 factor of wealth which some accentuate one-sidedly in its 
 importance for happiness. It may even be that ultimately 
 the opposition between the aesthetic and the ethical values 
 may disappear to my view. We cannot proceed to our last 
 goal here. The question of happiness will still come back to 
 us often.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 
 
 The values of beauty were for us developments of the values 
 of unity. The values of unity are immediately given by 
 nature and life ; the values of beauty are systematically elab- 
 orated by the work of art in the history of civilization. It is 
 the antithesis which we are to meet in every one of the four 
 large fields of values, and which after all is not an antithesis 
 but only a further development of that which is given to 
 naive life by the means of culture. The discussion of what 
 is beautiful and what art aims at does not begin here for us. 
 We have pointed to the essentials before. Everything which 
 we found about the unity in the manifoldness and its absolute 
 value is valid for the work of art also. The self-agreement of 
 the world in our life-experience gave us the value of harmony 
 for the outer world, of love for the fellow-world, of happiness 
 for the inner world. If art is called systematically to bring 
 the self-agreement of the world to its expression in the history 
 of civilization, fine art is fulfilling this task for the outer 
 world, literature for the fellow-world, and music for the inner 
 world. 
 
 What must be added to the value of unity that the values 
 of beauty may arise? The aesthetic value of self-agreement 
 of the given was completed for us in every case when the 
 experience was felt in its own will-manifold ness, when these 
 wills supported one another, and when they separated them- 
 selves as a closed unity from the remainder of the world. Each 
 of these factors was necessary. The given must be felt in its 
 own will. A thing which is only object for us can never have
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 205 
 
 aesthetic significance. This will must be really felt by us in 
 living through it. The fellow-will can never be aesthetically in 
 question for us if we take attitude towards it only from the 
 standpoint of our own will, and if we do not sink into the 
 other will. The mutual support of the wills must be complete ; 
 any inner discord can never bring to a pure expression the 
 meaning of a self -asserting world. Finally, there must be per- 
 fect separation of a closed unity from every other experience ; 
 the given manifold can never be aesthetic if we are interested 
 in its connections and relations to the remainder of the uni- 
 verse. If now civilization endeavors to work out the inner 
 agreement of the world with conscious purpose, the task must 
 be to shape the chance experience artificially and intentionally 
 in every one of these directions. An ideal solution of this task 
 is possible only by pure art, which does not aim merely in 
 one or another of these directions, but which by its particular 
 methods necessarily progresses in all of them. 
 
 As long as not all of these conditions of inner agreement 
 are fulfilled, but only the one or the other, the chance world 
 is not wholly transformed into beauty. We are then halfway 
 to high art. The side arts and the applied arts arise here. 
 The landscape architect, for instance, beautifies the given 
 nature purposively. He reenforces the manifoldness of the 
 impressions by planting a variety of trees and bushes, by 
 introducing artificial hills and bridges and ponds and roads. 
 If ever possible, he may frame the landscape and limit it for 
 the view from a special standpoint, and above all he will take 
 care to arrange the parts of such a manifold in an harmonious 
 way. Yet whatever the landscape artist may spread before 
 us it remains far from the ideal of a beauty which is isolated 
 in itself and detached from our attitudes. The way may wind 
 gracefully, but it leads far away to a distance which we do 
 not perceive, and beyond those hills there live other men. 
 The trees promise fruit which we hope to harvest in autumn, 
 the meadows demand the mower, and the bench there invites
 
 206 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 us to take a rest. Each part connects itself with other parts 
 of experience which are not present. Each part links itself 
 with causes and effects, with hopes and expectations ; our own 
 will takes attitude, and the more our will interferes the more 
 everything becomes merely an object and we forget that the 
 things themselves wish to say their own say, and that their 
 own will seeks the inner agreement. In a similar way the art 
 of dancing brings the forms of the body to a manifold and 
 yet unified expression by the rhythm of the changing move- 
 ments. Nevertheless, no beauty of the dance can make us 
 forget that these human beings of flesh and blood have only 
 for a short while thrown off the burden of the hours, that 
 they do not move dancing through life. 
 
 All that holds true even for the applied arts, for the arts 
 and crafts, for the stone-work of the architect and the word- 
 work of the author. When the gown is embroidered in rich 
 colors and lines, when the roof of the castle is supported by 
 massive columns and adorned with towers, when the historical 
 account of a great period is heightened by an imaginative and 
 intuitive language, we are far from the aesthetically indifferent 
 chance activity. Practical life needs the gown only to cover 
 the body, the hall to protect us against the weather, and the 
 chronicle to furnish information about facts. The beautiful 
 cloak and house and historical work always lead far beyond 
 the immediate needs of life. They aim to reenforce the mani- 
 foldness of the content, and to bring together this manifold- 
 ness again in a unity of expression ; they aim to strengthen its 
 own will, and to suggest to us to feel that will for ourselves. 
 In these embroidered lines the gown submits itself to the 
 form of the body, in these towers the will of the palace uplifts 
 itself and rests on the columns, in the rich movements of the 
 historical style the will of the reported deeds expresses itself 
 with a vividness which no dry chronicle could reach. And yet 
 in every case such work remains in a world of relations and 
 connections. If works of applied art are to be loyal to them-
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 207 
 
 selves and sincere, they cannot suppress the question whether 
 the gown fits the body, whether the house serves the practical 
 interests of life, whether the historical report is reliable. But 
 by that the personal attitude is at once demanded, and a con- 
 nection with that which is not given must be noticed. Even 
 the most wonderful cathedral and the ideal temple would not 
 satisfy us if they did not suggest that it is the right place for 
 worship. A complete devotion to the meaning and will of the 
 given manifold, a devotion which forgets everything which 
 is not present, thus becomes impossible. 
 
 To reach this highest point of detachment, one thing is ne- 
 cessary. The suggested experience must remain v/ithout the 
 value of existence. Only that which is unreal eliminates every 
 relation and every practical attitude becomes meaningless. In 
 the landscape painting there are no people behind the moun- 
 tains, and the road never leads beyond the frame. The marble 
 lion will not spring on us, the dying heroine on the stage does 
 not expect us to come to her help, the figures in the novel 
 will never enter into our daily life. Art brings to us unreal 
 experiences, and at once all those demands for agreement can 
 be fulfilled ; whether they practically are fulfilled depends only 
 upon the question whether we have a perfect work of art 
 before us. What is the meaning of this unreality, and where 
 does its significance lie? Certainly the work of the artist is 
 not in every sense without reality. The bronze statue fills a 
 real space exactly like a real man, the Hamlet on the stage 
 even is a real living man, and as a matter of course our im- 
 pressions from the work of art are real experiences like the 
 impressions from the world in which we are acting. It is also 
 not sufficient to seek the unreality in the fact that the paint- 
 ing is not the real landscape itself, but only represents it, and 
 that the novel is not the real love-affair itself, but only tells 
 about it. No, the fact that a work of art only represents 
 the happenings of the world is not that which characterizes 
 its aesthetic unreality. The naturalistic illustration and the
 
 208 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 court report are in the same way only representations, and 
 yet they do not come into consideration at all as unreal. 
 
 What is meant lies rather in the following. The value of 
 existence which completes itself in the value of connection 
 demands, as we saw, the recurrence of the identical in new ex- 
 periences. We studied how this identity constitutes the con- 
 servation of the things and beings and their causal connection 
 and their historical influence. As a matter of course, the paint- 
 ing and the statue and the paper on which the words are writ- 
 ten remain identical too. As the canvas with oil color, as 
 marble, and as paper they are indeed really existing things. 
 But we do not perceive the statue as a marble block : it is a 
 hero to us, the canvas is an ocean landscape, the verses are the 
 expression of an emotional soul. If we considered the contents 
 of the works of art as real heroes, as real surf, and as real 
 despair, they would awaken in us the expectation that they 
 might enter into new connections. The real hero, the waves, 
 the emotions, cannot go on without expressing themselves 
 in new deeds and processes. The full apprehension of the pre- 
 sented would then have to awaken the wish for new and ever 
 new forms. If we have real waves before us, their rolling 
 must go on, and the present form must be transformed into 
 ever new ones. Even if I see unyielding rocks before me in- 
 stead of the fluctuating ocean, those rocks are real to me only 
 if I may expect changes from them by their continuation. 
 Their outlines must cross each other in new lines when I 
 come nearer to them, and they must offer me a new spec- 
 tacle if I climb up on them. The man who is to be real for 
 me must speak and act and make gestures. 
 
 To be unreal in the aesthetic sense means, therefore, not 
 to stir up these expectations. The waves of the painting ought 
 not to move, the hero of the statue should not speak ; they 
 ought not to be anything but just what the presentation 
 offers. They have no past and future, no connection and in- 
 fluence ; all which they have to show is contained in the offer-
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 209 
 
 ing. We cannot even say that the work of art points beyond 
 itself. The painting is the landscape itself, but it is a landscape 
 which does not connect itself with any other experience, and 
 which therefore has no value of existence. The marble is the 
 hero himself in his unreality. Photography and the news- 
 paper account represent something real which awakens ex- 
 pectations ; the painting and the novel do not represent any- 
 thing. Their content is everything in itself, and only those 
 expectations are inhibited which refer to conservation and 
 connection ; that alone makes the content unreal. The means 
 by which the artist suppresses in us the expectations are 
 manifold. The painter gives us nature in the whole richness of 
 its colors, but deprives nature of the three dimensions. The 
 two-dimensional picture is still the whole landscape with all 
 its sentiments and motives ; the landscape still contains every 
 suggestion which would come to us if we were to look through 
 a window into the distance, but the elimination of the depth 
 inhibits all expectancy. The wanderer on the way in the 
 meadow will never move on in the painting. The expectation 
 that the wanderer may proceed is not destroyed because the 
 painter was unable to reproduce the landscape in its plastic 
 form. On the contrary, the painter transposed the landscape 
 into the flat plane just for the purpose of completely destroy- 
 ing the expectation that the wanderer might advance. The 
 sculptor keeps the three dimensions. Hence he must have 
 other means of excluding expectations. He gives up the color. 
 The colored wax figure which almost deceives us and almost 
 suggests the expectation of movements stands therefore far 
 below the level of art. The true artist can give to the plastic 
 work only a soft unsaturated color-tone, or if he wants to use 
 natural colors, he must transpose the figure into small di- 
 mensions to exclude every possibility of a deception. 
 
 The poet makes use of the measured rhythm and of the 
 rhyme so that no one can misinterpret his verses as a mere 
 report of happenings and feelings in the service of life. His
 
 210 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 epic and lyrical forms must exclude from the start the ex- 
 pectation of personal complications. The drama which is 
 played in the darkened theatre in the frame of the strongly 
 illumined stage inhibits by this separation every possible 
 expectation that these people with their heroism and their 
 intrigues will enter into the practical life. In this artificial 
 suppression of all felt relations lies the true unreality of the 
 life which art offers to us. All the essential sensations which 
 the things and beings might stimulate in us must be con- 
 tained in the work of art, but that alone does not give them 
 any reality. Reality in the sense of existence always means 
 a transcending of the immediate impression and the ex- 
 pectation of a recurrence in new experiences. The present 
 offering may therefore show itself in its whole inner richness 
 of the valued manifoldness, and yet may remain entirely 
 unreal because it does not aim to be anything but the present 
 experience. The unreal does not become by that a mere illu- 
 sion or an appearance, as such words would indicate that 
 the work of art tries to come to us as a reality, but does not 
 succeed. Moreover, in such words lies the implication that 
 the unreal is something of a lower order, something which is 
 less valuable than the real. But the unreal offering of art 
 should never deceive us by the suggestion of reality, and 
 certainly does not stand on a lower level. The unreal is only 
 something absolutely different, which is not on that account 
 of a smaller value. 
 
 The preponderance of practical life-interests may tempt us 
 to conceive the relation as if the real alone is positive and the 
 unreal negative. Then it seems as if something essential were 
 missing in the unreal, and as if it would become more valuable 
 if it could still secure for itself also the reality. But with the 
 same logical right we might turn around this whole relation. 
 The unreal is that which offers itself completely in its presen- 
 tation ; it is that which is a whole, which does not point to 
 anything outside of itself. On the other hand, the real has its
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 211 
 
 meaning in the expectation which it awakens and in the con- 
 nections which it postulates. In the given experience it is 
 therefore something incomplete, imperfect, unfulfilled. Now 
 the real has become negative, and that which lives in art has 
 become the positive, the higher. The real must now in its 
 incompletion strive to reach by its connections that self-per- 
 fection which belongs to the work of the genius in every in- 
 stant. From the standpoint of science, art gives us merely an 
 illusion instead of the more valuable reality : from the stand- 
 point of art, science speaks merely of that which is iiicomplete 
 instead of the more valuable perfect. It would be more correct 
 to acknowledge that the reality of nature and the unreality 
 of art are two coordinated entirely different experiences, 
 which have no reason for mutual jealousy. The unreality 
 that is the self-perfection which eliminates every question 
 as to changes and connections is no humiliation, but is power 
 and strength in art. It is the one-sidedness of our usual view 
 of the world that we silently presuppose that the value of 
 reality alone has fundamental importance, and that the value 
 of agreement has only an accidental secondary character. 
 Both stand at first entirely coordinated. With the same un- 
 justifiable exaggeration we might consider that which agrees 
 in itself, that which is perfect, the beautiful, as the true valu- 
 able world. Then it would be an accidental side issue that 
 there also occur in the world experiences which cannot boast 
 of the value of agreement, but which awaken the expectation 
 of connections and hence which have reality. 
 
 Thus there is nothing of a conscious self-deception with 
 reference to the reality in the spectator, and all theories which 
 seek in such self-deception the significance of beauty are mis- 
 leading. All that which we seek in the work of art is really 
 present without any deception. The traits of reality, on 
 the other hand, we do not seek in it. We can even say that 
 art does not seek to show us things and beings at all, as our 
 study of the logical values indicates that the mere conception
 
 212 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 of things and of beings posits relations beyond the immediate 
 impression. Things and beings belong to the world of truth 
 and not to the realm of beauty. "Thing" is fundamentally 
 a naturalistic conception and "being" an historical one. That 
 which the painter shows us should not ask any expectations, 
 and therefore can never really be a thing. It is a stimulation, 
 a suggestion, a demand. It does not say : " I am such a thing " ; 
 it rather says: "Understand me; take part in my will." And 
 just as the naturalistic thing does not enter into the fine arts, 
 the historical being has no place in the realm of poetry. The 
 poetic figures are for us experiences of their volitions, which 
 do not belong to any being in the sense of reality. We recog- 
 nized that the historical conception of being involves a con- 
 nection of the given will with not-given wills. The persons 
 of fiction do not enter into such a connection. The lover 
 whose emotions we willingly feel with his lyric poem is not a 
 conceivable subject for other attitudes. The question with 
 what sentiments he takes attitudes towards politics or chem- 
 istry is not a question which we might disregard during the 
 enjoyment of the poem, but a question which is absolutely 
 meaningless. That love-song does not come from a being who 
 after the fashion of historical men remains identical with him- 
 self in every situation, but is a completed expression of the 
 love-feeling itself without any thinkable connection with 
 other experiences. 
 
 The artist is therefore free from the laws of nature and the 
 connections of history. He can and must eliminate parts 
 which would be indispensable in reality, and yet nobody 
 misses them if he has the necessary maturity for aesthetic 
 appreciation. The bust is cut off at the chest and no one con- 
 nects it with the other parts of the body which anatomically 
 belong with the head. The marble head demands the legs as 
 little as the color of the skin. Whoever asks to what harbor 
 the ship in the ocean picture is sailing, and where the woman 
 is living who is addressed in the sonnets, has left the stand-
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 213 
 
 point of art. The ship has never to reach the harbor, and the 
 loved one has never to become visible for human eyes. On 
 the other side, the artist is free to introduce connections which 
 would contradict all naturalistic and historical expectations. 
 The female body may end in the tail of a fish, the shoulders 
 of a child may bear wings, and the trees and the stones may 
 be able to speak in the fairy-tale. Nothing in the realm of art 
 has to make any concession to those expectations which are 
 connected only with the real. 
 
 If the artist has to exclude those attitudes which refer to 
 reality, we must inquire what art can offer in place of it. How 
 far is the elimination of reality a necessary help for the per- 
 ception of that unity which we demand? One interrelation is 
 evident. That which offers itself as unreal excludes every 
 expectation of practical effects. Hence the effect on ourselves 
 and our own surroundings is excluded, and that annihilates 
 by principle our interest in entering with an own action and 
 in taking attitudes. There is no point of contact between the 
 work of art and our practical personality. We cannot enter 
 into the painted landscape, we cannot embrace the Venus, 
 we cannot join the conversation of the comedy scene. We 
 cannot do it because the statue does not stand in our physical 
 space at all, and the scene does not play in our physical time. 
 The one space-form and the one time-form resulted, as we 
 saw, from the mutual relation of things. That which is abso- 
 lutely detached cannot take part in them, but must remain 
 in its own space-time atmosphere. Thus we stand without 
 wishes in the face of the unreal. We do not want to change 
 it, we do not want to make use of it, nor do we want to pro- 
 tect ourselves against it. In this way our own personality is 
 brought to inner silence as we are certain of ourselves through 
 our will. Our self with its attitudes is perfectly eliminated in 
 view of the content of the work of art. Of course we stand as 
 subjects of will before the framed painting. We are willing 
 in so far as we desire perhaps to own the painting, or as we
 
 214 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 want to praise the painter of it ; but that refers to the thing, 
 to the piece of canvas which as such enters into the connec- 
 tions of causes and effects. We do not stand as willing beings 
 in front of the persons in the painting. No space, no time, no 
 causality, connects them with us, and a subject without will, 
 not our personality, apperceives the group of persons in the 
 painting. We sit as willing, judging beings in the theatre 
 before the stage, but we do not interfere with the secrecy 
 of Romeo and Juliet's dialogue; we cannot disturb them, 
 we cannot warn them. Without individual personality and 
 without space and time connection with them, we witness 
 their love. 
 
 But for these very reasons the own will of the apperceived 
 experiences can now come to its fullest strength in us. We 
 are eliminated; now the rocks and the clouds can speak. 
 We do not want anything for ourselves ; now the hero of the 
 tragedy can will in us. We ourselves have become the will of 
 the landscape and of the heroes. In ourselves those experi- 
 ences can will their own intentions with uninhibited purity. 
 The artificial creation of unreality thus becomes the condition 
 for the richest will-development of the experience, and only 
 through this penetration of experience with will is the condi- 
 tion given for the apprehension of its inner unity. Only will 
 can be in agreement, and the more objects of the artistic 
 experience can express their own will the more they may show 
 us their inner harmony of intention. The content will be the 
 richer in its own will the more significant it is. Even if the 
 unreality of the content excludes the practical will-attitude 
 of our own self, yet the trivial and indifferent remains unable 
 to plant its will in our mind. 
 
 If the content is significant enough to let us feel with its 
 own will, the artistic value must depend upon the unity of 
 this will. What are the conditions which favor it ? The first 
 is evidently that we must have before us something which 
 represents a totality. As soon as the experience contains a will
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 215 
 
 which can express itself only in cooperation with the will of 
 that which is not given, we have no artistic unity. The sculp- 
 tor may give us a bust without the trunk, but he cannot give 
 us the nose alone, and the dramatist cannot give us a fraction 
 of a conversation which we do not understand. The copy of 
 the nose may nevertheless interest the anatomist, and the 
 conversation the historian, but artistically they are impos- 
 sible. On the other hand, neither natural science nor history 
 can decide from their own conceptions what should be acknow- 
 ledged as a unity. It is the agreement of will, that means the 
 identity of purpose, not the causal connectedness which we 
 demand. The landscape is therefore just as much such a unity 
 as a single tree, and the closedness of the landscape is in no 
 way disturbed even if perhaps the frame cuts off the open sea 
 or the foliage of the tree. The novel is a completed unity even 
 if the minor characters may offer us no life-story, but exist only 
 in accidental occurrences. All which mutually supports itself 
 in its will belongs together there as unity ; all which is neces- 
 sary for the expression of this unified will is indispensable 
 for the work of art ; all which has nothing to do with the com- 
 mon purpose is superfluous; all which counteracts the com- 
 mon end is disturbing if it does not support it indirectly by 
 coming in for the purpose of being defeated. As the artist is 
 free in introducing into the unreal world and in eliminating 
 from it whatever he wishes, he will be able to secure an inner 
 agreement which is superior to any reality. 
 
 But his liberty goes still further. He can connect in his 
 unreality, as in inner agreement, that which in reality would 
 leave a complete discord. The painter can paint a most 
 beautiful picture of a dirty, ugly street, the poet can fill a 
 most harmonious tragedy with the destiiictive disharmony 
 of human fates. It is again the unreality which expands the 
 aesthetic field in this way. In life the single man stands in 
 relation to his surroundings. The dispute of two persons can 
 therefore awaken only unaesthetic feelings in our daily life.
 
 216 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 Either we consider the dispute as a whole : then it stands in 
 disturbing conflict with the harmonious form of the society 
 to which that disputing group belongs. Or we consider the 
 individual man : then we find him in conflict with his oppo- 
 nent. Life can resolve this unrest only from the standpoint 
 of society in settling the dispute by justice, or from the stand- 
 point of the individual by transforming the hatred into love. 
 For the artist or the poet the situation is quite different. 
 Now the question is no longer what the dispute means for the 
 other parts of mankind, as all the threads which connected 
 them are cut off by the unreality. The occurrences on the 
 stage or in the novel, as they are unreal, must be absolutely 
 ends in themselves. Disturbing disharmony with the sur- 
 roundings is thus excluded in the world of art. That which 
 is offered to us is a piece of world -totality in itself, and every 
 individual man now becomes only a part of this new whole. 
 Now the dispute and the discord is the real meaning and 
 purpose of this group, and the drama is harmonious if every 
 figure adjusts itself harmoniously into this controlling pur- 
 pose. The more vivid the fight, the more unified and the more 
 perfect stands every single person on this background in this 
 own little world. Now our will is no longer torn in different 
 directions by the discord and the tragedy. However much 
 the individuals there desire to destroy one other, we will 
 with all of them, as only then are we able to bring the final 
 meeting, the destructive fight, to an expression which shows 
 agreement in all its parts. The same repeats itself in all other 
 arts. That which is ugly in nature can everywhere be trans- 
 posed into beautiful art, and we never have to take refuge in 
 the anti-artistic thought that we enjoy there only the over- 
 coming of technical difficulties in the rendering, or that we 
 have the artistic joy in recognizing outer reality. Here, too, 
 the evaluation rests entirely on the inner agreement, which 
 takes new form because in that unreal world a manifold 
 may offer us a completed whole, while the same manifold in
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 217 
 
 reality could be considered only in its relation to not-given 
 factors. 
 
 But finally we come to the most important element. The 
 unreal, which as such is without relation to the forms of our 
 own space, of our own time, of our own nature, and of our 
 own history, must create for itself its own forms. The men 
 of the painter stand there firm on their own feet in a two- 
 dimensional space without depth, the personalities of the 
 sculptor live there in a world without color, the heroes of the 
 tragedy speak there in rhythm of verses, the lyrical feelings 
 resound there in rhymes. Everything which is disturbing 
 and superfluous is simply annihilated, and the beginning and 
 end, the frame and the setting of the stage, close the whole 
 so totally that nothing can leak through the new form. 
 This new own form of the unreal which art has created, and 
 without which reality is never eliminated, stands entirely in 
 the service of the unified task. The form itself is an expression 
 of the will, and favors, yes, makes possible, the inner agree- 
 ment of the offered experience. The lyrical mood has not only 
 its content, but its own new world-form. It is not only mean- 
 ing but shape, is not only joy or pain but rhythm and stanza 
 and rhyme; and each must contribute to the unified will. 
 We have to follow up for the special arts how content and 
 shape cooperate there harmoniously. 
 
 The essential thing for us is that the manifoldness of these 
 conditions of art does not represent a haphazard combination. 
 The manifold content must be significant, it must be unreal, it 
 must express a will ; this will must be felt by us, our own will 
 must be eliminated. If the relation to surrounding, to nature, 
 to history, must be cut off, the whole must be completely 
 isolated, it must have its own form, and this form must be 
 harmonious with the content. But all these factors belong 
 together; they are not combined by chance, they are con- 
 trolled by one single fundamental demand. All this is neces- 
 sary, if the inner agreement of the offering is to come to ex-
 
 218 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 pression. Only because we seek inner agreement must we 
 apprehend it as will, and only because we want to under- 
 stand it as will must it be significant in itself and must our 
 own true personal will be eliminated. Only because we want 
 to eliminate our personal will must the offering be unreal, and 
 must therefore be detached and must have its own form. 
 Only under these conditions, therefore, can it be a work of 
 beauty. On the other hand, we understand that this inner 
 agreement of will must be for us an absolutely valid value. 
 It must bring us into a situation which is independent of all 
 personal desires and pleasures. Only in so far as the experi- 
 ence agrees in itself has it an own meaning which transcends 
 the chance flash-like impression. If we seek a world we must 
 maintain the single experience with the demand for an identi- 
 cal recurring of this will in the tissue of the experienced mani- 
 fold, and only when the identical is felt are we satisfied. In 
 nature and life we could never hope for that perfect agree- 
 ment, because every particular part stood in a thousandfold 
 relation to the universe and to history, and thus influenced 
 our own hopes and fears and demanded our own desires and 
 impulses. Thus a complete sinking into the will of the world 
 was never possible. The inner agreement, and through it the 
 value of unity, can become complete only when all those 
 relations are united and the experience has found its own 
 detached form by eliminating the expectations of reality. 
 All that can be given to us through art alone : by the fine arts 
 for the will of the outer world, by literature for the will of 
 the fellow-world, by music for the will of the inner world. 
 
 A. — FINE ARTS 
 
 The fine arts are to express the inner will -agreement of 
 the content of the outer world when it is raised to its unre- 
 ality. As we have discussed so far the value of unity espe- 
 cially with reference to the outer world and its natural 
 harmony, and the value of beauty especially with reference
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 219 
 
 to painting and sculpture, we see the field, on the whole, 
 clearly before us. There are only a few further considerations 
 needed as supplement. Above all, it may be desirable to 
 inquire somewhat more carefully how, in the case of the fine 
 arts, content and form belong together, and how they serve 
 their common task. 
 
 Every picture in a frame has to communicate to us a con- 
 tent. It may be a saint or a genre scene, still life or landscape. 
 We have carefully studied why this content must stimulate 
 in us a manifoldness, must be significant, and must be closed 
 in itself, containing all which is necessary for the expression 
 of its intentions and excluding everything which points be- 
 yond this work of art. We have seen also that the value of 
 this content for the purpose of beauty is independent of the 
 question whether the same content would still be beautiful 
 in the world of reality. Pulled down into the real course of 
 nature, the beauty of many a painted content would be lost. 
 We should not enjoy in life the anatomists who stand around 
 the opened corpse, or the drunken comrades in the smoky inn. 
 Compared with the reality, the content of the picture is fur- 
 ther favored by the fact that it is disburdened of everything 
 which does not serve the unified will. The real outer world 
 is everywhere stuffed with partial contents which are not 
 significant for our experience. Even where the perceptions 
 of our senses come to an end, we still have to acknowledge 
 many things as real which we discover by our artificial means. 
 The artist is free from all this; for him there is no content 
 beyond the perceived one. If we should look at the painted 
 flower with a magnifying-glass, we should not find as we do in 
 reality more and more detail of the plant-tissues ; the plant- 
 tissue would disappear, and we should see the pigment and 
 grain of the oil color. The content of the work of art must be 
 taken as it offers itself, and we can ignore everything which 
 does not want to show itself ; we have no right to go into fur- 
 ther details. It may be that in the portrait painting face and
 
 220 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 hand alone are really visible, every other part of the figure 
 is eliminated ; and yet that is all which has artistic existence 
 there. Perhaps one single light reflex must stand in place 
 of a thing : nothing else was worthy to enter into the content 
 of the painting. 
 
 Of course knowledge and science too perform a selection 
 from the chaos of experience. What we call the existing real- 
 ity is certainly sifted and much is eliminated. We have stud- 
 ied that carefully. Only that which can maintain itself and 
 which in its self-conservation can enter into the connection is 
 acknowledged as scientifically true. But this scientific elimi- 
 nation makes the manifoldness of the world grow far beyond 
 the experience. That which we experience finds the limits 
 of our senses, but that which we scientifically understand is 
 unlimited, like the system of our numbers, which can endlessly 
 add new numbers and can divide them without limit. All 
 that we experience is only an infinitesimally small fraction of 
 what knowledge conceptionally recognizes. Science simplifies 
 our experience by ordering it, but multiplies the content of 
 our possible experience. Where the eye sees the single drop 
 of dew, our physical knowledge finds trillions of atoms. The 
 inner significance of the atom is of course no longer compar- 
 able with the drop which moistens the flower and which re- 
 flects the sun. The meaning of the particulars thus becomes 
 empty while their number increases ; and when natural science 
 speaks the last word, the number of the parts becomes end- 
 lessly large, but all are of the same kind and entirely insigni- 
 ficant in their individuality. The simplification of art goes 
 exactly the opposite way. Art reduces the number of things, 
 but reenforces their significance. All which is not immediately 
 given does not lie in art's world at all. Science looks with its 
 conceptions beyond the furthest stars which the telescope 
 may discover ; art never looks beyond the frame of the paint- 
 ing. But even in the frame the artistic simplification can 
 never increase the details. Science may resolve the drop of
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 221 
 
 water into millions of elements; the painter posits for the 
 millions of drops one single radiant stroke of white to express 
 the foam of the surf. And yet the daring power of this one 
 white line may express the meaning of that wave which 
 storms against the rock more vividly than any accumulation 
 of details would have succeeded in doing. 
 
 We may say in general that art diminishes the details in 
 their number, but reenforces their inner energy. The swan on 
 the pond becomes for the anatomist a long series of organs, 
 and every organ becomes a series of tissues and finally of cells, 
 and each of the cells is necessary to make the connections 
 clear which explain the organic functions of the swan. But 
 those millions of cells which are reached in such a way are 
 entirely indifferent for apperceiving the swan as it appears 
 to us there on the pond. The painter, on the other hand, does 
 not even give us those few parts which we really see in the 
 swan. Even there he still selects, and perhaps only a few 
 white blotches signify the body, but one noble line from the 
 head to the wings brings us the whole proud tranquillity and 
 soft purity. By the confinement to a fundamental line the 
 whole being of the bird has become condensed into one im- 
 pression. Of course this suppression of the insignificant con- 
 tributes again to the feeling of unreality which was so import- 
 ant to us for all evaluation of beauty. The suppression of all 
 sensations from other senses helps in a similar way. The 
 painted wave does not bring us the coolness and the salt air, 
 and yet this lack is thoroughly a strength and a reenforce- 
 ment, as it inhibits the expectations of reality. The content 
 of the painting is thus offered to us by those features which 
 are most significant for the expression of its meaning. 
 
 However, we must not overlook that the offering of the 
 content is by no means the most important factor of the 
 painting. We have seen in what way the value grows with 
 the significance of the content, but it deserves attention that 
 the value does not grow at all with the novelty of the mate-
 
 222 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 rial, and even decreases with the increasing ramification and 
 unusualness of the content. Even the most dramatic court 
 trial, which seems to be the climax of a novel, is in a painting 
 aesthetically by far less impressive and interesting than perhaps 
 the picture of an old peasant woman, and the most surprising 
 exotic landscape is indifferent to us at the side of a picture of 
 an intimate little nook among the familiar trees. Everything 
 which is complicated and strange at first leads us away from 
 the given. It posits for our imagination something real in the 
 place of the unreal, and that destroys art. That court scene 
 does not have its meaning clearly in itself ; it is a middle piece, 
 for which we add beginning and end in our minds, and enter 
 into connections which are not completely contained in the 
 appearance itself, but are simply attached. The exotic land- 
 scape almost awakens even naturalistic interest. But still 
 more important is the other circumstance that in all such 
 cases the content pushes itself into the foreground and wants 
 to be the only factor in the combination of content and form. 
 That which is new or strange or instructive becomes content 
 alone, and by that pure art is destroyed. If the content is to 
 be really significant and important and deep, and yet is not 
 to win a preponderance in the whole which disturbs the 
 equilibrium, it must be a content which is entirely familiar 
 to us or which has a general character. This makes the incom- 
 parable value of the religious subjects. In Madonna pictures, 
 for instance, the overwhelming content in its depth of emo- 
 tion can be grasped and yet the mental equilibrium can be 
 kept because the material is so well known. And such general 
 meaning belongs to the landscape which is nowhere, to the 
 female body which is nobody's, to the imaginative scene which 
 is at no time ; there art can reach its most harmonious effects. 
 If the content is not general, the picture too easily serves nat- 
 uralistic or historical information and instruction ; the poetry 
 becomes part of the biography, the landscape becomes part 
 of the tourist's report. True art needs unity of content
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 223 
 
 and form, and the content therefore must have a self- 
 dependent but only coordinated significance. That can be 
 only if the form itself becomes expression of a meaning and 
 of a will. 
 
 Of course for us here the form is not only the spatial form 
 but the whole garment in which the content presents itself. 
 There belongs the color with all its differences of intensity 
 and saturation; there belongs the line with its curves and 
 angles, \vith its distances and shapes. All those form-parts 
 are made use of also where art is not in question. The illus- 
 tration in natural history and even the photograph in the 
 rogues' gallery can fixate the content only by lights and lines. 
 But in the work of art alone the demand arises that these 
 means of form themselves contain the value of unity. This 
 is indeed a demand which represents something entirely new 
 in the vision of the outer world. In the harmony of nature 
 we appreciated the perfect forms, but they were forms and 
 colors of things. In the picture the thing becomes, from the 
 standpoint of form, something accidental, inasmuch as that 
 which is to be filled beautifully is no longer a group of things 
 but the space of the picture. And this space, as we recognized, 
 is not a part of the one space of the outer world, and the light 
 which floods through this picture space is not the sunlight 
 which falls through the window of our room on the painted 
 canvas. The frame enclosed a space and an illumination both 
 of which are entirely independent of the rest of the world. 
 The annihilation of all connections and the introduction of 
 this new self-dependent own world-form gives to the lights 
 and the lines an independent will and a significant meaning, 
 provided that the content does not push itself into the fore- 
 ground. That is not simply the consequence of the limitation 
 by the frame or of the confinement to two dimensions. If, 
 perhaps, we observe a large framed map of America, we see 
 plenty of lines and colors. Every river and every mountain 
 gives lines and forms and every state has its own color-tone.
 
 224 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 Yet it would be difficult to feel an independent life in these 
 colors and lines. Whether those rivers form an harmonious 
 combination of lines does not interest us because those black 
 lines on the map do not seek to express any will as lines, and 
 hence they are neither in agreement nor in disagreement. 
 They have only one significance for us, to represent relations 
 of the real geographical world, and this connection with the 
 directions of the real streams constitutes their whole import- 
 ance. 
 
 On the other hand, the lines and colors of the Sistine Ma- 
 donna do not have to represent anything but themselves. 
 They are not, like the forms on the map, representations of 
 something real, nor are they, like the forms of the outer world, 
 suggestions for a practical action. Entirely detached from 
 everything else, they are determined in themselves as expres- 
 sion of the one framed space. Accordingly each fold in the 
 gown, each line in the rhythms of the child's body, the out- 
 lines of the wings of the angels and the sharp lines of the 
 side figures, the lines of the curtains and the heavenly form 
 of the Virgin, each becomes a will which expresses its inten- 
 tions and seeks most intimate connections with the agreeing 
 will of the other lines. This will has no other purpose but 
 itself. Its own demand is agreement with the lines of the 
 whole, and no other language but this picture language 
 would be able to express the meaning of these folds and 
 forms. The endless harmony of this will reenforces the will 
 itself to more and more vivid activity. And without effort 
 we might submit ourselves and sink into the soul-breathing 
 gracious lines and their harmonious interplay until the paint- 
 ing became for us a beautiful swaying of melodious lines. But 
 that all holds true even for the simplest forms. Here in the 
 landscape picture the steep ascent and the soft curve, the 
 mild wave-form and the acute angle, the broad foundation 
 and the slender height, all come to us in the pure detached 
 picture with their own demand, and every confused mixture
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 225 
 
 or disorder in such volitions destroys the unity. Every part 
 submits itself to the whole. The one side aims not to tumble 
 over but to be balanced by the other side; the loose play 
 of the upper part demands that the lower part have solid 
 bases ; the division into a larger and smaller segment postu- 
 lates that the one does not suppress the other, and that each 
 may express its own being with independent clearness. And 
 from such simplest harmonious counterplay leads the straight 
 way to the most wonderful symphony of lines like Rem- 
 brandt's Nightwatch. 
 
 The same holds for the lights. Their will is not movement 
 like that of the lines. Their will is excitement, but the endless 
 manifoldness of these excitements enters in the same way 
 into a mutual interplay. Each color-tone has its own way of 
 exciting, and quickly changes it with the saturation and with 
 the expansion. With cutting severity the saturated color 
 turns itself against the softly-toned unsaturated colors, and 
 with antipathy the pure color stands beside the impure, the 
 warm beside the cold. The little blotches of one color which 
 are scattered over the painting charmingly send their saluta- 
 tions over to the broad colored surface of equal tone, and the 
 light color radiates exuberantly between the agreeing dark 
 ones. But one step more. The lights aim not only to be in 
 agreement with each other, but also with the lines. The excite- 
 ments and the movements must enter into one harmony. The 
 mild excitement cannot tolerate the forcible movement of the 
 lines, and the great pathetic swing of the lines does not will 
 the faint color-tone. And finally the last and the greatest: 
 the excitements of the lights and the movements of the lines 
 want to be in perfect agreement with the meaning of the 
 content. The enjoying spectator of the picture is rarely con- 
 scious with what infinite certainty the genius of the great 
 painter secures this highest unity, and how much of the 
 beauty depends on this all-embracing harmony. In itself it 
 would be entirely possible that the sweetest Madonna should
 
 226 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 be clothed in a gown the folds of which are angular and the 
 colors of which are loud, and that the side figures should be 
 given in hard sharp outlines. Such colors and forms might 
 in themselves harmonize completely, and might in full agree- 
 ment characterize a wild loud struggle. But these acute angles 
 and excited colors would agree with the content only if the 
 subject were perhaps an exciting battle. In the same way 
 the horrible story of the battle with all its disasters might be 
 reported with the softest colors and with mild curved lines 
 in charming forms. The little white clouds might adorn the 
 sky, and the trees might frame it in gracious curves. The 
 content itself would not have to suffer at all by such mild 
 whispering line-forms, and yet the unity of the picture would 
 again be destroyed. The ragged stormy clouds in the sky, the 
 knotty branches of the trees, the sharp pointed stones at the 
 bottom, should all take part in the turmoil of the battle and 
 express their wild excitement. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to extend these reflections to other 
 fields of the fine arts. The character of the beautiful agree- 
 ment of all parts remains the same everywhere. Nothing is 
 changed if, for instance, in the beautiful ornament color and 
 form alone without a content carry through their play of in- 
 tentions, or if in the drawing the color is absent. The sculptor 
 simplifies the material still more; still more, therefore, he 
 reenforces the significant. He must reduce the manifoldness 
 of the content because the important elements must stand 
 out from whatever point his work is seen, and from nowhere 
 must one part be allowed to cover the other parts sufficiently 
 to destroy their significance. But while he gives fewer parts 
 than the painter, he can now take the inexhaustible rich- 
 ness of the dimension of depth into his work of beauty. And 
 what an abundance of will expresses itself in the play of 
 lights on the plastic surface is indicated by the difference 
 between the lifeless plaster of paris and the living surface of 
 the marble.
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 227 
 
 B. — LITERATURE 
 
 In the form of language literature gives us an understand- 
 ing of the human will. Not the outer world but the fellow- 
 world approaches us there with the pure immediacy of its 
 suggestions and intentions, which are not to be perceived but 
 felt. The mathematical and astronomical, the physical and 
 chemical, the biological, and even the psychological books 
 do not belong to literature. They do not deal with the will 
 in its purposive aspect, as even the psychologist, when he 
 speaks of the will, treats it as a meaningless psychical content. 
 They all deal with the world as nature, and when such works 
 are nevertheless considered as literature it indicates that we 
 do not reflect in that case on the content of the book, but on 
 the writer, and that we take the books, therefore, as expression 
 of will and realization of the personality of individual schol- 
 ars. Their content stands outside of literature. On the other 
 hand, the works of historians and philosophers belong to the 
 literature of the world if they are loyal to their highest task. 
 The historian indeed speaks of the personal volitions of sub- 
 jects and the philosopher of the over-personal volitions. In 
 both great departments nothing is ultimately to be described 
 and to be explained, but attitudes are to be interpreted, and 
 to be understood, and to be brought into a will-connection. 
 But history and philosophy are sciences ; they aim towards 
 knowledge. Their value is the value of connection. We want 
 to speak now of that literature which aims to be art. The 
 given material is the volitions. The historian and philosopher 
 follow up those volitions in their influence, their consequence, 
 their return; the poet grasps a manifoldness of wills, and 
 apprehends their inner agreement, their unity, their har- 
 monious closedness. In this way history and philosophy are 
 led from the particular will to the world-connection of the 
 will-totality, and yet steadily maintain the particular. The 
 poet can never begin with that which is entirely simple. He
 
 228 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 has to start with the manifold, but his manifold by its own 
 unity detaches itself completely from the remainder of the 
 world, and leads nowhere over to another will. 
 
 It is the task of literature to find the inner unity in 
 the manifold of the wills of the fellow-world. History and 
 philosophy posit the will in the system of its connections, 
 literature in the unity of its agreements. There the self- 
 assertion of the world-will shows itself by the fact that nothing 
 flashes up by chance ; that every volition persists and main- 
 tains itself in new and ever new form. Here the self-assertion 
 of the world-will shows itself by the fact that every volition 
 is in inner agreement with other volitions and is thus expres- 
 sion of an independent meaning. Where this unity is felt, it 
 must offer absolute satisfaction. The life of our real fellow- 
 world shows this unity seldom, just as the real outer world 
 seldom offers real natural beauty. We clearly recognized 
 why the connection of realities works on the whole against 
 the perfect detachment and inner agreement. There the work 
 of civilization has to set in. Literature is to open to us 
 the meaning of the fellow-world just as fine arts opened the 
 meaning of the outer world. 
 
 Thus literature deals with the will of the fellow-world, 
 not with the outer world. If belles-lettres deal with nature, 
 they never move in the track of natural science, and do not 
 even want to offer that which the painter offers. For the fine 
 arts, nature itself is willing; for the poet, not the will of 
 nature but the influence of this willing nature on the willing 
 man is in question. When the novelist sketches the landscape 
 background or the lyric poet forms a piece of nature as con- 
 tent of his verses, nature as such is never the real content. 
 The content is the feeling human soul in which nature reflects 
 itself and in which nature becomes living with such intentions. 
 When in the painting the moonbeam reflects its glimmer in 
 the sea, we, the enjoyers, are to understand this magical will 
 of nature. When the poet shows us such a picture in his
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 229 
 
 rhymes, we are only to understand and to feel with the human 
 soul which proclaims what the beauty of nature has brought 
 to it. Nowhere in the wide field of literature is there any- 
 thing under-human or over-human which in itself can be poet- 
 ical content. Nature and God exist in poetry only for man's 
 sake. His life must be interpreted and must be understood 
 in the agreement of its inner abundance. Whatever does 
 not belong to the human will sinks to the bottom through 
 the meshes of poetry. And even if a Shelley makes the cloud 
 speak, it is not the real cloud which speaks to us as it would 
 do from the canvas of the painter, but it is an imaginative 
 fellow-mind in the cloud, which has learned by far too much 
 from natural science. 
 
 If the meaning of life is to be interpreted, it must be really 
 life itself which the word of the poet brings to us. But how 
 can we combine that with the fact that he speaks of some- 
 thing unreal which has its origin in his own imagination? 
 Nevertheless, there is no contradiction at all. We saw how 
 the same apparent antithesis disappears for the fine arts as 
 soon as we grasp the conception of reality in its deeper mean- 
 ing. Reality is a certain value of conservation. If we say that 
 an experienced will which we understand is real, we accredit 
 to the will a certain value which is lacking for the unreal. 
 But at the same time we are bound by it to accept obligations 
 which do not bind us in the face of the unreal. To be valued 
 as real meant to us to be maintained through the total con- 
 nections of the world and to be linked with the unlimited 
 series of phenomena. To be understood as unreal means, 
 in the first place, that it is to be interpreted and to be unified 
 out of its own content without any reference to the other 
 processes in the world ; that it is independent in itself, com- 
 plete and free. This freedom cannot be deprived of its value 
 by our adding with condescension that it is after all only the 
 invention of the poet. No, that which the poet has created 
 is not that unreal will which we understand and feel as speak-
 
 230 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 ing in the poem. What he has created is the tissue of words. 
 Creating always means a certain connection which as such 
 can exist only between realities. The word, the sentence, the 
 story, can be created because of course they are realities. 
 The real poet creates the real poem. The unreal will -content 
 of the poem cannot enter into any real connections, not even 
 into connections with the creating poet, because it is unreal 
 in itself. Just as the artist has not planted the imaginative 
 landscape which he paints, so the poet has not produced the 
 will to which he loans his words. The will which we under- 
 stand in the story or in the drama is an experience for us 
 which nowhere points back to its inventor, and therefore 
 which never can be lowered in its value by such reference to 
 the author. As soon as we understand the will of the tragic 
 hero in the drama, the experience is for us an immediate life- 
 fact, exactly as much as if the historian reported such a will 
 to us, or as if we heard about the intentions of a fellow-man 
 from his own lips. The single deed which we experience there 
 loses nothing whatever by its unreality. The only thing which 
 is eliminated is its relation to other experiences. Whatever 
 goes on outside of the work of literature is repressed, but that 
 one deed which the poet proclaims stands before us as the 
 true original experience, full of the warmth of life. 
 
 The will of the character in the work of literature, there- 
 fore, cannot gain anything for its living selfhood by being 
 an imitation of a real historical person. The characters of 
 "As You Like It" demand our true participation with the 
 same right as those of "Julius Cassar." The historical reality 
 of the political model has for hearer or reader only the one 
 significance that his historical knowledge elaborates and 
 enriches the offered impressions, but this knowledge should 
 never lead beyond the boundaries of the given work of art. 
 The relations which we know from history are sharply cut off 
 by the limits of the drama as far as they tend to bring about 
 connections with that which is not given in the drama itself.
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 231 
 
 They remain effective only as far as they give a more signi- 
 ficant content to the characters. But that holds true after 
 all for every conception which the author uses. Our know- 
 ledge enriches our apperception of every word, and as we must 
 understand the language of the poet to be able to follow him 
 at all, in the same way all naturalistic or historical knowledge 
 may penetrate the content of the verses. The localities, the 
 political and religious institutions, the historical events which 
 are mentioned in the piece of literature, therefore mean more 
 to the well-informed man, perhaps even more to the read- 
 ers than to the poet himself, but only in such a way have we 
 a right to support the apprehension of the historical char- 
 acters in literature by our historical knowledge. Their reality 
 value, which is the most important thing for the writer of 
 history, is in belles-lettres entirely excluded. The Macbeth 
 of the drama is not more real than the witches. They are all 
 equally unreal, and they are all equally true experiences as 
 soon as their will is really apperceived by us as will. 
 
 That is indeed the indispensable condition. We must really 
 understand the will which expresses itself in those words and . 
 must feel and live with it. If it is not a will, that which we 
 hear remains only a description of things. Then there is no 
 life in it, and the task of interpreting the meaning of that life ] 
 cannot be fulfilled. If we heard there about beings who are 
 delighted over pain and who are depressed by the fulfilment 
 of their wishes, beings who know only the future and cannot 
 remember the past, beings who have other senses than we 
 have and who think with another logic, we should be unable ; 
 to understand them. They would be objects for us, but not \ 
 subjects with whom we could feel. The character, even in the 
 fairy-tale, must have the fundamental type of willing in com- 
 mon with the real beings. But as soon as we come in contact 
 there with beings whom we can understand, it is just their 
 unreality which offers the most favorable condition for our 
 complete feeling with them, a feeling upon which the con-
 
 232 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 sciousness of inner unity is dependent. As soon as we deal 
 with real persons, all the connections are given. We are 
 dragged in with our own desires and inclinations, with our 
 partisanship and our hopes. Only the unreal can speak to us 
 and appeal to us and demand our sympathy, and yet keep 
 us in quietude without own wishes. In the face of the real 
 being, we take attitude ourselves. We will to favor or sup- 
 press his influence, to reward or punish him. We want to 
 fight and to assert ourselves. In the face of the unreal will, we 
 are not conscious of any own will. The feeling of our own 
 personality is inhibited, and impersonally we sink into the 
 will which is suggested by the words ; we sink into the will of 
 the hero. We are without wishes in the midst of the poem 
 because the unreality has lifted us beyond the realm of ac- 
 tion, but the will of the intruding word forces us with its own 
 demands the more intensely. Without any own wishes and 
 without resistance v/e will the will which is suggested by the 
 characters of the poem. It is true the historian, too, may 
 appeal not seldom to our artistic sense. Then also we enter 
 without personal attitude into the spell of those life-energies 
 of others. But the typical attitude in every historical reading 
 is that we are also interested in the report of historical oc- 
 currences on account of the influences and consequences of 
 those volitions. The world in which we do our daily work 
 stands in question there, and we want to understand its 
 products of civilization by turning back to those whose will 
 has prepared it. In the work of literature the will is an 
 end in itself. It becomes for us a last purpose to understand 
 those wills in their fulfilment and in their disappointment. 
 And all subordinates itself to the one ideal of finding in this 
 abundance of will the inner unity, and that ultimately means 
 of finding a meaning in life. 
 
 If the poet leads us away from reality he does not promise 
 us satisfaction by showing us another and more beautiful, a 
 better and fantastic life. On the contrary, that would have no
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 233 
 
 value whatever, as there cannot be any values outside of the 
 world of experience. The poet gives us exactly that life which 
 we know and that experience the meaning and inner agree- 
 ment of which we desire to understand. When he repudiates 
 the reality and leads us to the unreal, he must do so because 
 only then can he bring us, without any wishes on our part, 
 before a human will. Only then our own fear and hope, liking 
 and disliking, have disappeared, only then those endless dis- 
 turbances from the attached side-things and after-things are 
 cut off, only then the will of life can be grasped in its original 
 purity, and can be felt in its vividness, and can be appreciated 
 in its inner agreement. Whoever steps down to reality has 
 already lost the deepest meaning of the fellow- world. 
 
 Literature brings us before the will of man. Now we know 
 that every human life expands itself in three forms of ex- 
 perience: outer world, fellow-world, and inner world. Every 
 personality may awaken in us, therefore, the threefold ques- 
 tion of how its will finds its way in the outer world, how it 
 relates itself to the fellow-world, and how it shows itself in the 
 inner world. It would be artificial to over-emphasize this 
 difference, which is certainly not fundamental in the way in 
 which the various attitudes of the different values are. Yet 
 to a certain degree this separation may perhaps indicate the 
 fundamental character of the three types of literature. The 
 epos narrates what the hero experiences in the outer world, 
 the drama presents how the hero stands in the fellow-world, 
 and lyrics express the way in which the own will in the inner 
 world comes in contact with experience. On the surface such 
 a separation seems denied by the fact that as a matter of 
 course in the epos, too, the hero has dealings with the fellow- 
 world. And when we see with what ease good novels can be 
 cut into effective plays, we may become doubtful whether 
 there exists at all a difference of content between epos 
 and drama. The form alone seems to decide. Yet a certain 
 difference in the treatment of the content cannot be over-
 
 234 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 looked. The dramatic poem finds its significance in a dis- 
 tinct antithesis of purposive personalities. The whole drama 
 works toward that opposition of characters, and through it 
 we have the rise to the climax and the solution. That does 
 not hold for the epos. We follow the hero in his pilgrimage 
 through the world and observe his development and his fate, 
 and it makes no difference whether the waves or the men 
 threaten him. The men whom the epic hero or the heroic pair 
 find on the way are embedded in the outer world so that 
 they fuse with the background into a unity and do not reach 
 the freedom of dramatic figures. The other men he finds 
 are much more stimuli, or means, or resistances, or dangers 
 for the hero, like the temptations and hindrances of the 
 outer nature. In the drama the counterplayers are inter- 
 nally coordinated to the hero, they are self-willing, while 
 the epos makes their selfhood fainter. And finally in lyrics, 
 nature and fellow-world have become inner experience, and 
 their will has been transformed into the mood of the soul. 
 One factor, however, is common to all three contents of 
 literature, the manifoldness of the volitions is held together 
 as a unity. As a matter of course that does not signify that 
 literature reports only loving, harmonious, human beings. On 
 the contrary, we emphasized that at least for the drama the 
 sharp antithesis of opposing wills belongs to its deepest mean- 
 ing, and yet Hebbel has justly said that the true drama does 
 not leave any dissonance. We know it in our experience of 
 trembling enjoyment when in the highest tension we give our 
 attention to the stage, where the human passions crash against 
 one another until the hero breaks down with death in his 
 heart. We know that our own participating will demanded 
 it, move by move and word by word, just as it proceeded. 
 We feel how this hateful attack was thrown out at just the 
 right instant, we hear with delight how the destructive 
 counteraction was conducted, and the wilder the raging of 
 the battle the more vividly we feel that every syllable from
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 235 
 
 every lip brings just the desired, the welcomed, the longed-for 
 word. In our deepest soul we will with the one who gives the 
 death-blow, and yet at the same time with the greater one 
 who is still victorious in his death. It ought not to happen 
 otherwise; every side movement, every escape, would have 
 hurt us in our solemn excitement. From the first scene to the 
 last fall of the curtain, we ourselves demanded the horrible 
 just as it developed itself. 
 
 The aesthetician must follow up how through fear and pity 
 this great participating will works itself out and reaches its 
 goal. We are interested here only in that objective power of 
 the play which is able to reach such an effect, the power 
 which holds us, who have no wish and no personal part in the 
 affairs, in the spell of participation and sympathy, and forces 
 us to will with all the parties, with the Caesar and the Brutus 
 together. But again that is possible only if the drama as a 
 whole forms one will-unity. There in that closed will-mani- 
 fold which the poet has detached from the world and in which 
 there exists no expansion beyond the limits, but only self- 
 expression, it has no meaning that the hero will unless his 
 enemy opposes him. Ultimately the will of the one demands 
 the counter-will of the other. What the poet will give us is 
 not the single man in his singleness. Nothing completely 
 single can ever have aesthetic value. The poet leads us to an 
 isolated manifold. Every particular element stands in all its 
 connections in this isolated limited world. As once Antigone, 
 always again the heroes of the poem have violated the laws 
 of the state to remain loyal to the higher law, and always 
 again the will of the man of the state and the counter-will 
 of the man of conscience sound together into a pure har- 
 mony. The hero who upholds his inner voice must perish ; 
 his individual will must be defeated by the stronger force. 
 And yet he himself wills that these earthly powers work and 
 fight ; he wills that his body be destroyed so that his soul may 
 be saved. This inevitable conflict is just what is unrolled
 
 236 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 before us, and both conflicting sides enter without dissonance 
 into the whole. If we want the whole at all, we must will each 
 of the two fighting parties. The more severe their suffer- 
 ing and the deeper their downfall, the more vividly we shall 
 feel with the fate of the heroes. Yet we will it in our own 
 wishless and disinterested interest, because we feel that in 
 this combination of will, the hero must will his outer defeat 
 to bring his personality to the purest expression. 
 
 In poor melodramas the torturing pains of the hero torture 
 us, and thus by the artistic barbarism eliminate our freedom 
 from responsibility. We cannot will there with the villain 
 who brings suffering to the innocent, because this group is not 
 held together at all by one unified will. But the tragic hero 
 whose great will is limited by the other will sacrifices himself 
 to save in us the belief in his will, and yet to maintain in us 
 the right of those who brought him to downfall. It is the 
 deepest unity of the life-energies which manifests itself in 
 such tragical conflict. And at its side stands the conflict of 
 comedy in which the will at first poses as great, but as soon 
 as it has to confine itself under the pressure of the counter- 
 will is just as well satisfied with the smallest bit of fulfilment. 
 The agreement exists there, too, but it shows itself in such a 
 way that the great will is recognized as really a small one for 
 which a true opposition never existed. If the inner agreement 
 can be found even in the conflict of the tragedy, it needs 
 hardly any further emphasis that such unity exists where the 
 epos and the story speak about the conflicts of the human 
 life with the surroundings. The epic hero, too, must fight. He 
 may struggle with his enemy, with his love, with his God, 
 and may go down in suffering, but he must develop himself, 
 must remain loyal to himself, and must even win death for 
 himself. Such a life which the poet makes us feel with the 
 hero demands that the enemies attack him; they may be 
 human beings or they may be lightnings. The whole sur- 
 roundings, nature and man, become alive, but their will, too.
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 237 
 
 wills not what the hero wills, but what this human life wills. 
 For that reason only the novel keeps us in breathless tension. 
 Hindrances may heap up for the loving couple, but we will 
 these dangers, we will these cabals, inasmuch as we are en- 
 tirely under the will of this isolated life-totality, and we feel 
 that just this counter-will harmonizes with the will of this 
 self-agreeing manifold. 
 
 So far we have spoken only about the content of the literary 
 work. We must not forget that in literature the form is the 
 greatest. We demand from the poet, too, that his material 
 shall not push itself into the foreground, and he is most wel- 
 come when he sings once more the old song of the spring 
 and of love, because nothing else matters but how he is able 
 to sing it. Of course in literature it may often be difficult to 
 decide what belongs to content, and what belongs to form. 
 In the drama, for instance, the language may be both. The 
 language is certainly a part of the offered content as far as the 
 choice of words and the positions of words is to characterize 
 the speaking person, while the language is form as far as 
 through it the poet is speaking. The language of the poem 
 should be counted mostly as form. Dialect speech might be 
 considered essentially as content. In regard to space and 
 time, too, we ought to make a clean separation between what 
 is content and what is form. For instance, the dramatic rule 
 which demands from the drama unity of time refers only to 
 the content of the drama and not to its form, or rather to the 
 form of the content and not to the form of the drama. The 
 content of the play may demand that its action occur in one 
 day, and the form of the drama may demand that the play 
 maybe given in three hours. The dramatic time-form may be 
 short and terse, and the time of the content may yet embrace 
 many years. The manifoldness of form is certainly still 
 richer in literature than in the fine arts. We have the rhythm 
 of the line and its melody ; the rhyme and the choice of the 
 words, their picturesqueness, their strength ; the organization
 
 238 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 in the stanzas and scenes, in chapters and acts. This organi- 
 zation might be taken together with the rhythm as a temporal 
 form. The rhyme, on the other hand, belongs together with 
 the melody as sound of the words. We should then have 
 three factors, the time-form, the sound of the words, and the 
 meaning of the words, and this separation corresponds to the 
 space-form, the color, and the light-intensity in the fine arts. 
 The temporal rhythm and organization would correspond to 
 the shape which the play of lines gives to the visible arts. 
 The musical tone and consonance of the words would cor- 
 respond to the colored manifoldness, and the strength and 
 the character of the words would correspond to the strength 
 of the lights. But just here the picture shows the gradation 
 only in the one direction, while the language has in the mean- 
 ing of the words an unlimited manifoldness of directions, of 
 kinds, of gradations. Finally we must postulate here, as in 
 the fine arts, that the form not only offers a complete unity 
 in itself, but also fuses with the content in an harmonious 
 agreement. 
 
 The meaning of the words has the leading role there. The 
 artistic effect which emanates from the meaning of words 
 inspires and ennobles the poetry. We do not mean that the 
 word awakens a beautiful vision. No, in the word itself lies 
 the beauty, in its intensity, in its suggestiveness, in its 
 self-dependent will. When in the song word joins word, 
 as the pearls with glimmering lustre join each other in the 
 gleam of the chain, the chance memory images which may 
 be stirred up by the single word are almost insignificant for 
 the soft beauty of the poem. The purer the effect the freer 
 it will remain from such indifferent fringes of consciousness, 
 and the more intimately the beauty will lean on the signi- 
 ficant word itself and its poetic meaning. How strange the 
 effect of an old-fashioned word in which the original mean- 
 ing still faintly echoes, or a picturesque word that points to 
 hidden relations, or a rare word which resounds long for the
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 239 
 
 feeling. But what is true in this way for the single word holds 
 still more for the complex phrase, for the whole sentence, and 
 finally for the total style. Certainly rhythm and sound enter 
 as important parts, but the mutual relation of the word- 
 energies themselves is after all decisive. All this is ulti- 
 mately felt as an unending moving of actual forces, of im- 
 pulses, of volitions. To appreciate a style, each word must be 
 for us not a sound and not an image, but an irradiation of 
 intentions. Just for that reason it becomes possible to seek 
 an inner agreement. The wills of those words must not 
 interfere with each other, they must support each other in 
 their purpose, must mutually reenforce their fullest meaning 
 in order to devote themselves to the expression of the uni- 
 fied will of the whole sentence. 
 
 The rhythm of the words is will, too, and again it is the 
 inner agreement of the volitions which satisfies us. This will 
 of the formal side expresses itself of course most strongly in 
 verse. There comes perhaps a trochaic rhythm. The claim 
 which its up and down suggests is already expressed in the first 
 rising and sinking syllables. Every syllable demands for itself 
 alone that attention be given to it, and yet this demand be- 
 comes effective only if the sound contrasts with less accented 
 syllables. When after the first accented the first unaccented 
 syllable follows, we feel how this first sound secures for itself 
 the right of the chief accent and suppresses the second. We 
 understand there the will that the first sound is to domi- 
 nate in the foot, a will which demands agreement from its 
 surroundings. Other trochees are following with the same 
 demand. But an unlimited continuation would make it a 
 colorless indifference. We seek unity, but it must be unity in 
 a manifold, and we have a manifold only if every single part 
 still brings its unity to effectiveness. This individual import- 
 ance would be lost if one should uniformly follow the other 
 without interruption. Accordingly a small survej'able group 
 organizes itself into a unity of its own with an own chief ac-
 
 240 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 cent in a single line, perhaps separated by a final rhyme from 
 the next group with a similar demand. In the same way 
 verses join each other in the stanza, the stanzas each with 
 the same uniform will in the poem. They cannot be com- 
 bined with iambics. The iambics will that in their sphere in 
 every foot the dominating role shall belong to the concluding 
 syllable ; the first sound is to serve the second, is to lead over 
 to it so that the hearer may linger on it. Each iambic has its 
 own will which is welcomed by the next, and yet each has its 
 own phase. The sound and the meaning and the shape of the 
 word may easily bring about the result that in a natural read- 
 ing of a page not two pairs of syllables show exactly the same 
 distribution of accents. Everywhere we feel the same funda- 
 mental will, and yet each word preserves its own freedom. It 
 is an unlimited movement, picturesque like the play of the 
 waves in the ocean. This quiet harmony of rhythms controls 
 no less the higher style of prose, and the organization of the 
 smaller groups repeats itself with an imposing movement in 
 the building-up of chapters and scenes and acts. 
 
 Finally the tone and the melody of the words represents an 
 own will also. The dark sounds and the light, the broad and 
 the sharp ones, the soft and the hard and the hissing ones, the 
 words with fading sound and those which break off sharply, 
 the word-melodies which ascend and those which descend, all 
 have their own intentions which seek agreement. When at 
 the end of the verse a sound penetrates the soul with an 
 especial emphasis and energy, it seeks a tone which wills the 
 same, and satisfaction arises when at the same place again a 
 rhyme with equal feeling salutes it. The pure form thus be- 
 comes a moving to and fro of will-intentions in the manifold- 
 ness, a will-satisfaction through the agreement. But all these 
 volitions of the form parts again must sound together in 
 harmony with the will of the content. " Fiillest wieder Busch 
 und Tal Still mit Nebelglanz" — who will say what relieves 
 our soul so magically there, the quiet landscape in the soft
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 241 
 
 moonlight which lies spread before us as the content in the 
 verses, or the mild wave of the line rising and sinking, the 
 melody of the tones in which the first words of the first two 
 lines harmonize like a hidden suggestion of a rhyme, the pure 
 imaginative energy of the words themselves which starts so 
 magically in the first word ? Every sound, every tone, every 
 syllable, every meaning there in devoted harmony wills the 
 same as the content of Goethe's stanza. 
 
 C. — MUSIC 
 
 What pure happiness brings to us in practical life is brought 
 to us in the purposive work of civilization by the art of music : 
 that internal unity in which the unrest and conflict in us is 
 brought to harmonious agreement. In our naive attitude we 
 found happiness as the immediate unity of the wills in the 
 inner world as against the harmony in the will of the outer 
 world and the love in the will of the fellow- world. In the 
 realm of art in which those naive life-values are raised to in- 
 tentional values of civilization, the will of the outer world 
 found its unity in fine arts, the will of the fellow-world in liter- 
 ature, and now we demand that in the same way the will of 
 the inner world find unity in the art of tones. 
 
 For the field of music of course it is as true as for the field of 
 poetry and painting and sculpture, that the most familiar way 
 of approaching it is the physico-psychological one. When 
 we spoke of fine arts, we might have discussed every single 
 problem in a psychologizing spirit. We should have studied 
 the visual perceptions, the associations, and reactions which 
 result, and from the simplest harmony of color to the richest 
 painting, the whole effect of our enjoyment might have been 
 described and explained as an organic psycho-physical pro- 
 cess. In the same way we might have analyzed and explained 
 the effects of the poem and of the drama. Then those con- 
 flicts would have turned into organic interfering waves ; brain-
 
 242 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 processes and peripheral changes would have given account 
 of the manifoldness of effects. Yet we know that we had to 
 avoid this convenient way of science. At the threshold of our 
 aesthetic discussion, we recognized the fundamental difference 
 between such studies in the psychology of art, which are cer- 
 tainly important and which are prominent in the work of our 
 psychological laboratories, and on the other hand the true 
 aesthetic inquiry which had to be ours. In the world of music 
 the temptation is especially strong to avoid the difficult aes- 
 thetic study and to stick to that aspect of the sounds and 
 rhythms, of the melodies and harmonies, which seems so 
 much more concrete, the aspect of natural science and psy- 
 chology. As soon as science has elaborated the physico- 
 psychological system in the service of causal understanding, 
 every tone-experience can be brought to expression in such 
 language of causes and effects. The manifold of sounds now 
 becomes describable and explainable, and with it the m-ani- 
 fold of the psychical processes in the mind which enjoys the 
 music. There is no melody and no chord in the symphony 
 which cannot be completely described by the change of air 
 movements and the combination of vibrations. Here start 
 the important investigations of modern tone psychology. 
 The task is to explain the pleasant effects of the combination 
 of certain tones, their relation to the absence of beats, to the 
 coincidence of over-tones, to the difference-tones, to the fusion 
 of the fundamental tones, or to explain the agreeable results of 
 rhythms by their relations to the tensions and relaxations 
 of the body, to the attention and expectation and emotion. 
 And if we turn to the melody and finally to the whole of the 
 musical work of art, we shall reach more and more complex 
 problems of explanation. But by principle the understanding 
 of the psychological effect of the symphony works with the 
 same conceptional scheme by which the explanation of the 
 simplest pleasure in the octave is secured. The problems and 
 their solutions are controlled by the one-sided interest in the
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 243 
 
 causal connection of objects which the abstractions of an 
 objectifying science have posited. 
 
 But here, too, we have to seek our way before the experi- 
 ence of music has been conceptionally transformed into a 
 series of causes and effects. The tone is still sounding there 
 and not composed of vibrations, and we who apperceive the 
 tone still understand the tone itself in its excitement, in its 
 intention, in its will. It is not our psychological mechanism 
 which produces those impulses as our psychical reply to the 
 tone-impression ; in our experience we do not know anything 
 of such a process, and the question of explanation is not ours. 
 We feel the excitement as energy of the tone itself, and we 
 take part in the strength of the tone, feeling with it and not 
 creating it. Even the particular sound nuance of the voices 
 and instruments is still a characteristic unity; it has not 
 been resolved into different combinations of over-tones as 
 it has to be in psychology. The more we set ourselves free 
 from the naturalistic thought-forms of physics and psychology 
 the more we can reach the pure musical experience in our 
 immediate feelings. It is an experience which has lost its soul 
 as soon as it abandons itself to the dissecting thought-act of 
 explanation. 
 
 We may start from the rhythms and sounds. We recog- 
 nized the meaning of the rhythm in true experience when we 
 meditated about poetry. The temporal values and energy- 
 values are combined there. But we must not think of the 
 objective time and its fractions. Just as from an aesthetic 
 point of view the marble statue does not stand in our space, 
 but brings its own space-atmosphere with it, the times of the 
 musical work cannot be measured with our watches. It is 
 an own time, which arises in the sounding itself. And the 
 temporal equality of the bars is an equality which after all 
 only the physicist refers to the objective time, just as the 
 psychologist may refer it to the organic movement of the 
 body. For the listener, at first we have only the forming of
 
 244 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 groups in which each single group as a bar expresses a certain 
 equality of value in the internal relation of its energies. An 
 identical will controls it. The accent at the beginning of the 
 bar dominates the will-combination of the group. The single 
 tones in the bar are not short or long in an objective time, 
 but they are fugitive, light, and hasty, are quiet, heavy, and 
 sustained, and only from these characteristics results their 
 claim that the flying movement of many light tones does not 
 count more than the dignified procession of a few sounds or 
 the restful sounding of one imposing chord. Small groups of 
 equal values join each other and form larger groups with their 
 own distribution of chief energies and side powers. But every 
 rhythmic unity serves the work of art only by repeating it- 
 self, and as its own meaning is for us a characteristic distri- 
 bution of energies, the repetition means that the special claim 
 of forces is acknowledged in the next group. It finds agree- 
 ment there, and the same plan of distributing the energies 
 becomes a new deed. 
 
 This mutual willingness offers just those presuppositions 
 which we found everywhere as a necessary condition for 
 value, agreement of will. We apprehend the one group in 
 which a characteristic will manifests itself and seek in the 
 same given manifold the expression of the same will. Then 
 only the planless chaos transforms itself into a unified, organ- 
 ized, self-asserting whole. We seek the will which springs 
 from the same source, and when we meet it our over-personal 
 demand is satisfied: an absolutely valid value is grasped. 
 But uniformity of the bars does not inhibit the inner variety. 
 As in the poem no one iambic has exactly the same distribu- 
 tion of energies as any other, no bar in music is stamped 
 by a pattern. New and ever new combinations and separa- 
 tions play into the uniform order ; the second move of the bar 
 prepares for the expression of energy in the next bar, and 
 links itself in this way with the new group. The energies may 
 stir about in freedom, and yet they never lose their ready and
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 245 
 
 willing inner agreement. All that repeats itself in the broader 
 groups, and perhaps even through the whole tissue of a sonata 
 this inner harmony of the rhythmic partial volitions can be 
 vividly felt. 
 
 The harmony of the tones and sounds joins that of the 
 rhythms as the harmony of the colors agreed with the unity 
 of the space-forms in the picture. Usually the differences of 
 tone-pitch are compared with the differences of colors, but 
 perhaps it would be more helpful to give up such a tradition, 
 and instead to compare the color of the picture with the 
 nuance of the sounds, that is, its instrumental character, and 
 on the other hand the differences of pitch with the distances 
 in space. Then only should we overcome the curious experi- 
 ence of having only six colors, red, green, yellow, blue, white, 
 and black, but more than ten thousand musical tones. There 
 are indeed numberless tones, just as there are numberless 
 points in space, and there are only a few colors, just as there 
 are only a few nuances of sound. If we see a single light, we 
 say it is blue or bluish green ; if we hear a tone, we say it is 
 violin or whistle or trumpet or human voice. But the only 
 essential thing for us here is that tone-distances and sound 
 nuances and rhythms are as necessary for the upbuilding of 
 the musical form as the space-distance and colors and shapes 
 are for the form of the painting and sculpture. What the sound 
 nuance has to say to us surely must not be deduced from 
 memories which refer to the instrument. The sound of the 
 organ does not say that it is the organ and that its place is 
 under the arch of the church. The complete fulfilment which 
 lies in the organ sound moves the soul immediately in a way 
 which is incomparable with the daring dash of the trumpet 
 fanfare. Each sound has its own power of energy, just as the 
 landscape appears unequally excited when it is seen through 
 glasses of different colors. But the energy really lies in the 
 sound itself. It would be explanatory psychology if we were 
 to say that all refers to feelings of energy in us which result
 
 246 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 from a special distribution of over-tones. And these exciting 
 energies tend to remain in mutual agreement, they reenforce 
 each other, from the duet in the chamber music to the un- 
 limited multi-coloredness of the modern orchestra. 
 
 This demand for inner agreement comes to us most vividly 
 in the harmony of the sounds and in the resolved harmony of 
 the melody. If we avoid the psycho-physical formulation 
 of the question, all the fusions and over-tones and mathe- 
 matical relations of vibrations do not contribute anything to 
 our understanding of the real problem of harmony. It is in 
 a certain sense an ultimate fact that we experience perhaps 
 in the chord of the major scale a manifold in which each tone 
 seeks the others and favors them. The lowest of the tones 
 dominates in it ; we feel its controlling force, and yet at the 
 same time its willingness to welcome the highest tone, the 
 similar finer and frailer octave. And both together hold and 
 support the third and the fifth, which want to express their 
 own meaning, and yet which in their whole intention refer 
 to the fundamental and its octave. It is like one uniform 
 structure in which all parts support one another, in which 
 each submits itself to the whole, and yet in which each is 
 allowed to be more than it could be for itself alone. And 
 always it is a moving equilibrium ; it is a complete last ful- 
 filment in the unity and yet an endless swaying of the inner 
 movement. The octave might be compared there with the 
 closedness and yet never ending movement of the circle, the 
 fifth and third and fourth with various ellipses, the intervals 
 of more characteristic manifoldness with richer figures, each 
 of which is closed in itself. The inner agreement remains 
 even in the most excited consonance. 
 
 In the living work of music the chord is of course by far 
 richer than in such isolation. There in music it is beginning 
 or mediation or procession or conclusion, and its value of 
 unity is so strongly influenced by that which leads to it and 
 by that to which it leads that even the dissonance, the inner
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 247 
 
 disagreement of the tones, may become part of sounding 
 beauty. The disagreement enters just so far that its over- 
 coming in the following tones brings the more vividly the 
 real inner agreement. Only in the succession of tones can 
 the incomparable meaning of the subtle sounds express it- 
 self; only in the mystery of melody can the tone reach the 
 full happiness of the pure fulfilment of its will. It is a seeking 
 and finding, a half -allowing and hindering and a fulfilment, 
 which comes to us in the play and counterplay of the sounds. 
 From the unlimited possibilities of tones oiir scale has se- 
 lected just such distances as bring the differences clearly to 
 expression, and yet which indicate distinctly how they are 
 related to each other. The whole richness of those mutual 
 relations lives in every musical manifestation. Even in the 
 smallest melodic movement, if we really understand it, every 
 progress of tones points to this background of the relations 
 in the scale. The tone from which the movement starts does 
 not disappear. The new tone is conscious of its dependence 
 from the first, and when it proceeds and presses forward, it 
 does not seek without plan a mere sounding. Bound by the 
 inner law which is proclaimed by the first tones, every com- 
 ing tone is already prepared, and in latent demand for har- 
 mony in the whole tone manifold it has found its place 
 beforehand. The clearest case offers itself at the end of the 
 whole. If a melodious tone-movement has reached the tone 
 before the last, even the unmusical person feels that just this 
 must be the last tone. He does not will it ; the tones them- 
 selves will it. He feels how the whole tone-movement has 
 pointed toward this one tone and has demanded its entering 
 as the conclusion. Perhaps nowhere does the self-will of the 
 tone come to us more impressively, and if the music is 
 suddenly broken off, the tones remain and wait for their 
 salvation by the one tone which they demand, for the return 
 to the tonica. 
 
 Of course it would be fiat and trivial music if the hearer
 
 248 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 could always say with the same certainty beforehand what 
 solution is to follow. And yet even in the freest and most 
 original creation of music, that very tone when it comes is 
 welcomed by the totality as the one expected. The tones 
 which we have heard will the following, they eagerly de- 
 mand them in themselves, and the more richly the flights 
 and runs of tone deviate and escape, and the more frequently 
 the side-intentions try to intrude, the more vividly remains 
 in the totality the fundamental desire for the return and the 
 postulate of overcoming that which separates the desire for 
 unity. And those side-intentions and that counterplay all 
 come in just as the whole demands it to express its own will. 
 Every single tone finds its ready-made little place, where it 
 slips in as if all the other tones had prepared for its coming. 
 All this, too, can be explained in the language of psychology. 
 For the psychologist the tones themselves do not will any- 
 thing. Their selection is determined by the instruments, by 
 the resonance of the rooms, and by many other historical 
 conditions, since by the hearing of such music our psycho- 
 physical systems become trained in certain settings of the 
 reaction apparatus. We have acquired a latent disposition to 
 reply on hearing certain tone series with expectant psycho- 
 physical attitudes which are determined by intervals of the 
 scala. All these feelings of expectation fuse with the percep- 
 tion of the sound, and hence arises the illusion that the tones 
 themselves have a desire and expect beforehand the joining 
 tone. But the matter-of-course fact that such transforma- 
 tions into the causal language of physics are possible does not 
 change the understanding of the original experience. If we 
 enjoy musical beauty, we may not know anything of this 
 psycho-physical scale knowledge ; and yet we may not lack 
 in the least a full understanding of the chamber quartette or 
 of the symphony. We understand the glistening tones well, 
 and we should not understand them better if we substituted 
 for the tones the air vibrations and posited their will in our
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 249 
 
 own psycho-physical attention and its reflex apparatus. The 
 tones will each other as in the poem the rhyme seeks the 
 rhyme. That is the most certain immediate experience. But 
 with that everything is posited which is necessary for the 
 over-personal satisfaction. The tones are now not impressions 
 but will, and we hold and keep the will which speaks to us and 
 seek a sympathetic will in the given manifold ; and tone after 
 tone comes and fulfils this demand for agreement of will. 
 There a value is completed. Rh3rthm, sound, harmony, and 
 melody thus equally represent will-relations which in the 
 beautiful work of music are in inner agreement. But it hardly 
 needs any emphasis that these four kinds of agreement must 
 combine themselves again to common deed. As in the paint- 
 ing forms and colors and in the poem the rhythm and the 
 rhyme and the strength of the word must harmonize, in 
 music too the rhythm cannot be separated from the melody, 
 nor the sound from the rhythm. The change of the one de- 
 mands the change of the other. The slow succession of tones 
 played in a hasty tempo has lost its value of melody. An 
 unlimited multiplicity of will must be interwoven in this 
 way, and yet must support and mutually favor itself in all 
 its parts. 
 
 But does that really completely express the meaning of 
 musical beauty? Has the music really only this fountain 
 beauty and this arabesque value ? Are the formalists right 
 who deny to the work of music all further meaning and con- 
 tent ? Surely, then, we cannot compare it with a painting 
 in which the lines, forms, and colors may delight us, and yet 
 which besides form and light offers a self-dependent content. 
 Nor can we compare it with the poem which also has the 
 beauty of the sound and rhythm and the strength of the 
 words, and yet which besides all that moves our heart by 
 the meaning of its content. But is it really true that in music 
 the beauty of those moving tone-forms does not allow also an 
 harmonious content? Of course those are surely in the right
 
 250 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 who do not consider it the purpose of music to describe the 
 things of the outer world. Such meaning and content really 
 do not belong to the tones. Where the programmatic music 
 begins to describe the things, the programme usually has to 
 help out to show the way for the imagination. Even when 
 the things are imitated by their accompanying noises, when 
 the rolling of the thunder or the trampling of the horses 
 proceeds through the orchestra, it remains external, acciden- 
 tal, and ultimately unmusical. Only when the mediation is 
 brought about by accompanying feelings, music enters into 
 its own right. But then the awakening feeling is in question 
 and not the impression of things, and that touches an entirely 
 different ground. 
 
 But can we even say that music presents feelings? Whose 
 feelings are meant? The piece of music may tell us something 
 of the feeling-life of the composer and also something of the 
 player, and yet surely this individual manifestation of soul- 
 life cannot be the meaning of the music. When we see a 
 drama on the stage, we also have a strong impression of the 
 internal life of the writer, and independent from it an impres- 
 sion of the mental life of the actor. And yet neither is the 
 inner content of the play for us. The composer has no right 
 to be dreamy when he composes reveries, and the virtuoso 
 who plays them still less. If a dreamy feeling expresses itself 
 in the tones, it must be detached from the composer and the 
 musician as such, as the feeling-content of the poem is sepa- 
 rated from the reader and the poet. But others believe that 
 music itself has to render feelings ; and there cannot be any 
 doubt that composers have sometimes consciously tried to 
 do so. Yet the artistic effect hardly transcended an external 
 imitation. That cannot be the deepest life-nerve of music. 
 Such a description of the feelings of other men remains inde- 
 finite and accidental. Again we are ultimately dependent on 
 the title and the printed programme. The lyric poem gives 
 us such expression of the feelings of the other man. In music
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 251 
 
 we cannot link the feeling with any definite fellow-being. 
 The verses speak to us as a neighbor speaks, but the tones do 
 not refer to any definite place, and do not start from any 
 definite person, even if we see with our own eyes the artist 
 who draws the bow over the strings of the violin. Painting 
 speaks with the language of the outer world, verses speak 
 with the language of the fellow-world, but tones do not come 
 from without and as strangers: in ourselves live all their 
 movements. It does not belong to their meaning that the 
 tones start there without from the instruments and are 
 mechanically produced by human beings. The melody is not 
 changed if it comes from right or left, from above or below. 
 As soon as we apperceive it, it has become spaceless, and its 
 whole existence develops itself in our own inner life. That 
 is not meant in a psychological sense ; that would be indiffer- 
 ent and insignificant. Psychologically, the painting and the 
 drama, too, must become my own idea to interest me at all. 
 Here we stand far from any psychology, at a point from 
 which we see the outer world and the fellow-world in contrast 
 to the inner world of the self. The fine arts and poetry thus 
 refer to the not-self, but from such a standpoint of immediate 
 experience the tone-movement appears in the own I. The 
 sounds of the symphony aire not our contents of consciousness. 
 As such they would not play a particular role. The paintings 
 and poems would be such, too. But those sounds are our own 
 life-experiences, their intention is our intention, their will is 
 our will, their fulfilment is our perfect rest. 
 
 In this sense we say that just as the fine arts manifest the 
 outer world and literature the fellow-world, music expresses 
 our inner world. Nothing definite, nothing conceptionally 
 determined, is communicated by the tones. They awake the 
 own self, and only what there is in ourselves can get life 
 through the tones. The same tones may awaken in one the 
 image of the spring landscape and in another the picture of 
 beautiful beings, may awaken here love and there joy or en- 
 
 1
 
 252 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 thusiasm, but the truth is that they do not present anything 
 and do not describe anything, but liberate the own willing 
 self to its free life in the moving tones. The work of music 
 forms our own inner world to a unified tissue of volitions, and 
 thus brings meaning into the wilderness of our feelings. The 
 will which music brings to us is thus not a metaphysical world 
 of will which comes to description. No, it is our personal life- 
 v/ill, and our personal feelings develop themselves in it. 
 
 Moreover, those volitions and emotions and feelings are un- 
 real, just as the landscape of the painting and the hero of the 
 poet are unreal. They, too, do not demand connections which 
 lead beyond the aesthetic experience itself. They do not de- 
 mand any action, they do not intrude into the practical exist- 
 ence; they are perfect in the experience itself, and never- 
 theless they remain true immediate experiences with the full 
 warmth of life. The painter who shows us the outer world as- 
 sures us of the unreality by presenting to us a mere two-dimen- 
 sional extension and avoiding the depth ; the poet who brings 
 the fellow- world to us emphasizes the unreality by speaking in 
 verses or from the framed stage. The composer who shows us 
 the volitions of our inner world brings out the unreality of 
 this will by intertwining it with the spaceless fugitive tones 
 which have no model in the world of things and beings, and 
 which therefore offer no hold for our actions. But as soon as 
 we are conscious that our will is not a real will, and that 
 means that it is no will which demands actions and which 
 enters into the world of connections, then it can without in- 
 hibition live itself into the will of the tones, and can feel itself 
 in the abundance of their will. 
 
 The other arts touch us with the things and the beings ; 
 the tones lead us back to ourselves. We will with them as 
 they have their own reality in us and do not want to be any- 
 thing but our own self. Our own will thus becomes that fun- 
 damental will from which the tonal movement starts. The 
 dominating will of the tonica is felt as our own I, and the play
 
 THE VALUES OF BEAUTY 253 
 
 of the melody enters into this will of ours just as the outer 
 world of experience penetrates into the inner world ; and as 
 we remain continually conscious of ourselves also in finding 
 the outer world, every tone in the melody is felt in relation to 
 the fundamental tone. In the manifoldness of the harmony, 
 it is as if the whole multiplicity of our own inner world comes 
 to consciousness, and yet here, too, every intention remains 
 related to the self. It is not the outer world itself which we 
 find in the melody, not the fellow-world itself in the harmony, 
 but only outer world and fellow- world as experiences and in- 
 clusions of our inner world. Everything remains related to 
 the striving and counter-striving of the feeling and willing of 
 the self and returns to it in the imity of the I. Life with its 
 connecting reality can bring us this perfect inner agreement 
 of our will only in the instant of purest happiness : in beauti- 
 ful music it comes to us lastingly. The tones which realize 
 their will and hold what they have aimed at from the begin- 
 ning, through all the hindrances and deviations, become to 
 us expression of our own will, which asserts itself in its inner 
 world through all its outer experiences. And this inner agree- 
 ment of our desires finally gives to our own life its perfect 
 meaning. Music does not picture this will: the tones have 
 become music only when they have become our inner world 
 and its will. Then only can our inner life form itself in such 
 a unity through their manifoldness that it becomes pure 
 beauty itself in its rhythm, in its harmony, in its life-melody. 
 But the tones to which our life thus gives meaning and con- 
 tent in the perfect form express a will which asserts itself, and 
 this maintaining of the identity of the will completes the 
 eternal validity of the absolute value.
 
 PART IV 
 
 THE ETHICAL VALUES
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Everything which we have considered so far was lying be- 
 fore us finished and completed when we evaluated it. It was 
 something entirely given, which was valuable in its existence, 
 in its connection, in its unity, in its beauty. But that which is 
 to be valuable for its development's sake gains the value just 
 in its transition from the given to the not-given. It is not 
 being, but becoming. Experience alone is not sufficient there ; 
 the deed is needed. As soon as the deed is performed, the 
 development completed, we have again only something which 
 is finished, and as such it can again claim only the value of 
 connection, no longer the special value of development. Such 
 becoming may go on in the outer world, in the fellow-world, 
 and in the inner world, and the inner forming may be abso- 
 lutely valuable even where the deed is done without any con- 
 scious evaluation. On the other hand, the valuable deed may 
 subordinate itself to a conscious purpose ; it then becomes an 
 achievement. Such purposive intentional realization of values 
 meant to us civilization. Hence the values of achievement 
 are values of civilization; the values of development are 
 immediate values of life. Both belong intimately together. 
 Civilization carries on in the values of achievement what is 
 enclosed in the values of development in naive experience. 
 Thus they are related to each other like the values of existence 
 and of connection, or the values of unity and of beauty. 
 The values of achievement which civilization upbuilds are 
 those of industry, of law, and of morality. We must study 
 them carefully later, but our next step must be to inquire into 
 those life- values : when is the becoming which does not aim
 
 258 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 to be a real achievement yet absolutely valuable? We shall 
 have to separate as before the outer world, the fellow-world, 
 and the inner world; and correspondingly we ask for the 
 development in nature, in society, and in personality. In 
 nature we call it growth, in society progress, and in the per- 
 sonality self-development. 
 
 So far we have considered facts which were given and there- 
 fore withdrawn from any free decision. The system of nature 
 or of history or of reason is given to us and binds us by its 
 objective fact-character, and so does art and love and happi- 
 ness. In development and achievement, on the other hand, 
 our evaluation depends upon the freedom. The value itself 
 does not yet exist, and does not necessarily result from that 
 which is given. Of course much depends upon the standpoint. 
 The drama and the symphony also pass by, and when I see 
 the first scene or hear the first bars, the remainder has to un- 
 veil itself slowly. Nevertheless, I consider the work of art as 
 something completed ; I value it in its completion. The same 
 holds true as to the succession of natural connections or of 
 the acts of reason which science reports. The solar eclipses of 
 the next thousand years do not yet exist as experiences, and 
 still they belong as parts to the universe which I can calculate 
 from the given facts. No deed of freedom can change their 
 being. Unnoticed factors may interfere with my calculation, 
 but whatever may come is completely determined by that 
 which is given, and it comes in consideration only as an 
 entirely necessary connection. Whatever stands in such a 
 causal relation does not allow a deed and in this sense no free 
 becoming. Everything is closed beforehand. That also holds 
 true for the connections of reason. Whatever the mathe- 
 matician may find, of course his seeking and finding is a free 
 deed and an achievement, but his mathematical magnitudes 
 do not show a becoming. Their unlimited system is necessary 
 and in its structure completed. For the connections of history 
 this evidently does not hold. The historian cannot calculate
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 259 
 
 the artistic or political history of the future as we calculate 
 a solar eclipse. History is really deed, liberty, development. 
 Historical science therefore can deal only with that which has 
 become a given fact, that is, with the history of the past. 
 
 Of course there cannot be anything in the world which 
 cannot be made a possible object of knowledge. Everything 
 can be brought into scientific connections. If yet free develop- 
 ment is to be possible, it cannot mean that there are parts of 
 the world which are inaccessible to the explanation of science. 
 That which characterizes the difference must be rather a 
 different standpoint. That which is from one point of view 
 a series of given facts, the completed connection of which 
 science has logically evaluated, is from another standpoint a 
 development which we value as the free deed of the becoming. 
 Just as the completed connection is accessible to science even 
 when the end is not reached but only calculated beforehand, 
 on the other hand, the evaluation of the free deed and develop- 
 ment may very well be possible even when the goal is already 
 reached. We have only to put ourselves in our thought into 
 that instant in which the decision and development are start- 
 ing. The solar eclipse of the future is treated by science as 
 if it were already a settled fact. Correspondingly, if perhaps 
 we want to evaluate the achievement of Mucius Scaevola, we 
 have to think ourselves into that moment in which he stood 
 still free before the decision whether he should thrust his hand 
 into the flames. In the same way development and achieve- 
 ment stand in contrast to unity and beauty. Here, too, it is 
 a fundamentally different standpoint. The inner agreement 
 which is material for the aesthetic valuation belongs again 
 only to that which is completed and finished, while that 
 which we are to value as achievement and development must 
 be incompleted and unfinished. That which is to be beauti- 
 ful must have performed its decision; that which we are 
 to appreciate as achievement must show itself to us at first 
 before its decision.
 
 260 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 When are the conditions given for this special kind of 
 valuation? We said the world must come in question in its 
 becoming. The experience which comes to us must accord- 
 ingly be the starting-point for the transition to something 
 else. It must extinguish itself to let a new experience take 
 its place. But the mere otherness can never be valuable in 
 itself, as we saw that every satisfaction rests in the grasping 
 of the identical. This transition can be valuable, therefore, 
 only under the one condition, that the other which comes is 
 a realization of the first which has gone and is thus identical 
 with the first purpose. If we apprehend a given in such a 
 way that it wills to be another, the transition into that other 
 is a realization which satisfies us. It is this transition which 
 we call development. If such a will to a particular otherness 
 is a will in which everybody must participate, the satisfaction 
 in the transition is over-personal, and the value of the de- 
 velopment is accordingly absolute. The value of a develop- 
 ment or of an achievement is thus dependent upon the fact 
 that an experience comes to us with the will to be something 
 else. The seed which wants to be a sunflower may develop 
 itself. If it does not grow, if the sprout withers, this value of 
 development does not become fulfilled. And if a rosebush 
 grows up where we expected the sunflower, again there is no 
 development. In that particular life-situation in which we 
 deposit the seed-corn in the ground, we apperceive it as a seed 
 which wants to become a flower. Its will-purpose is the true 
 experience for us, and in the change of things the full flower 
 alone can satisfy our desire for the identical content. In this 
 way the change becomes valuable. We see clearly the con- 
 trast to knowledge here. For the physicist the seed also has 
 its will, but only the will to remain itself. For the purpose of 
 explaining the changes which later come when the seed lies 
 in the moist soil, the naturalist must apperceive that seed- 
 corn as the combination of innumerable particles of which 
 each remains conserved. If the flower grows out of the soil,
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 261 
 
 the naturalist does not consider it as a change in the con- 
 tent of the seed. For him it is now the material of the seed 
 together with the water and the chemical substances of the 
 soil and the air, which all in common build up the flower, but 
 which all remain unchanged in this upbuilding. For the nat- 
 uralist, the flower is therefore in causal connection with the 
 whole sum of originally separated substances among which 
 the seed was an essential but small fraction. The connection 
 is logically valuable because the flower is identical with that 
 mass made up of seed and soil and water and air, and can be 
 understood by the mere conservation of those substantial 
 particles. On the other hand, if we value development, the 
 flower is identical with that which the seed-corn willed, and 
 all those substances of its surroundings were only means 
 which it utilized to realize its goal in becoming the other. 
 
 In the midst of a given definite manifold a will which is 
 directed towards a not-given can never find its satisfaction. 
 In the world which is given we cannot find value unless every 
 demand is completely satisfied in the given itself. Every 
 logical and aesthetic valuation is directed towards such a 
 given manifold. Thus the will to the otherness can never have 
 a place in the true or in the beautiful . In the logical values the 
 given will conserves itself in the given totality; in the aes- 
 thetic values the single will agrees with the other wills in the 
 given manifold. Only in the values of development and 
 achievement the single will gives up the given and by its 
 deed goes over into a not-given. The appreciation of this 
 transition is therefore never knowledge and never aesthetic 
 estimation; and yet the valuation which expresses this en- 
 tirely different attitude has a completely coordinated inde- 
 pendent claim. In one of these three forms every possible 
 valuation of the world-experience must express itself. Every 
 evaluation had to be based on identity. The experience may 
 come to us as completely determined. In that case we may 
 either follow up the single experience in its identity, or we
 
 262 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 may perceive the identity of the many experiences in the 
 manifold. But if the experience is not yet determined and 
 still dependent upon a free deed, there is only the one possi- 
 bility of finding an identity ; the final end which is reached 
 must show itself identical with the intention. Any other, any 
 fourth relation of identity, cannot be possible in the midst of 
 the experiences. It was the independent self -conservation 
 of the world which constituted that logical value ; it was the 
 independent self-agreement of the world which constituted 
 that aesthetic value ; and the fact that now the will to the not- 
 given leads to an identity between intention and fulfilment 
 brings us the independent self-realization of the world. We 
 might call it the ethical value. By it alone the self-asserting 
 world expresses its deepest meaning. Of course we still must 
 examine whether the world really has this deepest meaning of 
 the ethical value. It depends upon the question whether we 
 really find an absolutely valid will to otherness and its realiza- 
 tion. It would be possible that every will in the experiences 
 is directed only towards self-conservation and agreement, 
 and that every other will has only individual character. In 
 that case we should have truth and happiness and beauty in 
 the world, but no deed which as such can claim absolute value. 
 Then there would be no development, no progress, no achieve- 
 ment in its purest meaning, and while the actions and pro- 
 cesses and new formations might secure personal satisfaction, 
 they would not offer a basis for an absolutely valid valuation. 
 This new group of values is similar to those which we 
 considered before in the circumstance, that the evaluation 
 always refers to a relation and not to the contents which 
 enter into the relation. We saw every time that the single as 
 such never has a value. The value belongs only to the relation 
 between that which we grasp and which seeks its identical 
 counterpart and the new experience in which the identical 
 content is found. Not the impression has logical value, but 
 its return in new form secures the value of existence. Not
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 263 
 
 the single parts of the manifold have aesthetic value, but 
 their relation of inner agreement. The same holds true for 
 the value of development, and just that is too easily over- 
 looked. The final end of a development is in itself not more 
 valuable than the starting-point. It is the transition from 
 one to the other which is valuable. The becoming is valuable, 
 not that which has become. Only if we keep this fundamental 
 principle of the doctrine of values firmly in mind shall we 
 be able to avoid later a distortion of the deepest meaning of 
 the values of achievement. The values of industry and law 
 and morality depend upon the clear recognition that it is the 
 deed and not the result which constitutes their value. The 
 development is valuable, but we have no right to say that 
 the reality to which it leads is better than the reality from 
 which the development started. We separate again the con- 
 sideration for the outer world, the fellow-world, and the 
 inner world, and thus begin with the growth in nature. 
 
 A. — GROWTH 
 
 The natural science of our day is proud to be a science of 
 development. The rigid being of things has been moulded into 
 an insistent becoming, and only through the knowledge of 
 developments have "the riddles of the universe" been trans- 
 formed in our time into such convenient matter-of-course 
 solutions. We know how world-bodies develop themselves 
 new and ever new from rotating nebular masses, how the 
 earth developed itself from the sun, how the surface of the 
 earth developed itself by cooling off, how " fourteen hundred 
 million years ago" the first little living lump developed itself 
 from inorganic substances, and how the lowest protists de- 
 veloped themselves from it, and later the other invertebrates, 
 and then the fish and reptiles and birds and mammals, and 
 finally the men. And yet the theory of knowledge must stick 
 to it that in the nature of the naturalist by principle no 
 development exists.
 
 264 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 Development, we claimed, cannot be asserted without 
 valuation. We did not demand that the goal of the develop- 
 ment itself be more valuable than the starting-point, but the 
 development is a transition and a change which is valuable. 
 It would be meaningless to speak of development without 
 this reference to a value. But just this valuation is entirely 
 opposed to the deepest meaning of natural science. We 
 recognized that by principle the things which enter into the 
 causal connection of nature cannot have any other will than 
 the will to conserve themselves. The only value which the 
 naturalist can acknowledge is the value of connection, which 
 is completed as soon as the changing appearances are reduced 
 to the perseverance of the parts. The direction of the change 
 cannot itself again be valuable without our completely leav- 
 ing the circle of naturalistic conceptions. The will to be 
 something else can never enter into the connection of nature 
 in so far as nature is to be object of knowledge. All purpos- 
 iveness is thus excluded from natural science, and it is pur- 
 posiveness which gives meaning to the value of development. 
 This does not in any way exclude the use of teleological as- 
 pects for the work of the naturalist. The purposive considera- 
 tion is there only an instrument towards the causal knowledge. 
 Science starts there from the end-point of a series of changes, 
 but its aim in looking backward is to find the causes which 
 led to this end-point. The will towards the end does not be- 
 come for that reason itself an effective cause. In this sense 
 even the physicist and astronomer may group their facts 
 under teleological points of view. They may speak of move- 
 ments which aim towards the smallest possible loss of energy, 
 or of an exchange of energies which leads to the greatest 
 possible energy that can be transformed into labor. 
 
 Such teleological treatment is still more natural in biology. 
 The whole modern Darwinism is in this justified sense con- 
 trolled by the reference to goals. Everything is related to the 
 aim of nature to produce completely adjusted organic beings.
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 265 
 
 Everything there seems subordinated to the goal; and yet 
 the meaning and the success of this modern biological view 
 lies just in the fact that no will which aims towards this goal 
 is put into the calculation itself. Everything is deduced from 
 causes which are effective without aim and purpose ; every- 
 thing becomes finally explained by the conservation of things 
 and energies. Whether the investigator examines the facts 
 with reference to the effect, or starts with the causes, is then 
 fundamentally indifferent for the character of the final solu- 
 tion of the problem. If he starts from the effect for which he 
 seeks the causes, he may hold that end before his eyes as a 
 goal. Even in the final presentation he may group the causes 
 in such a way that they seem to be directed towards a goal, 
 but among those causes he does not acknowledge an energy 
 which as such is intentionally directed towards a goal. In the 
 system of nature no teleological energy has brought about the 
 change from the protists to the other animals, and no teleo- 
 logical energy makes the acorn grow into the oak tree. The 
 vitalism which would like to coordinate such teleological 
 energies to the physical chemical energies in explaining the 
 life-processes is untenable and logically reckless. Such vital- 
 ism may be welcomed if it seeks only to be the reaction against 
 the superficiality with which certain naturalists try to give 
 the impression that science to-day can already mechanically 
 explain all processes. There it is perhaps quite useful that 
 such a reaction points to those many occurrences in nature 
 which still resist the mechanical interpretation. But vitalism 
 is then only a collective name for the problems which are 
 still unsolved to-day. Vitalism itself does not offer the smallest 
 handle for their explanation. The mere acknowledgment of 
 a teleological energy cannot contribute in the least to our 
 understanding of nature as nature. 
 
 The relation is only apparently changed where a mental 
 consciousness of purposes really enters into the question of 
 the natural phenomena. In the realm of the natural mechan-
 
 266 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 ism, even the psychical thought of a goal is only an ideational 
 content which is coordinated to the other causes of the event. 
 By principle the method of explanation is not changed by it. 
 The psychical process of thinking a purpose is only a part 
 of the psycho-physical process which works causally like 
 any other cause. From the standpoint of subject-reality, and 
 therefore from the standpoint of the historian, every aiming 
 and positing of purposes means a transcending into that 
 which is distant. But that is an aspect of the will in which 
 the attitude is felt and participated in and willed in its 
 subjectivity, and which is entirely different from everything 
 objective, perceivable, and causal. From the standpoint of 
 natural explanation the intention itself becomes a content 
 of consciousness which cannot be more or less effective than 
 other contents of the world. It is a partial cause of the follow- 
 ing events. The finding of plans and purposes in the organic 
 beings ought never to push natural science away from its 
 causal track. Even the inventor who constructs the machine, 
 with all his anticipating thoughts, is for the explaining natural- 
 ist only a part of a causal system, and his inventive thoughts 
 and impulses are only a part of the causes which cooperate in 
 the construction of the machine. His deed, which for the his- 
 torian of civilization is important just by being apperceived 
 in its purposiveness, becomes for the naturalist and psycho- 
 logist a content of consciousness which causally produces 
 certain bodily movements. From the standpoint of the natur- 
 alist, therefore, nothing is simplified even when the hypothesis 
 of a purposive intelligence of God is posited at the beginning 
 of things. God's mind itself then becomes a complex psycho- 
 logical problem ; God's thought-purpose itself then demands 
 an explanation through causes and an explanation of its 
 effects, but it does not in itself explain anything. The religious 
 vitalism is in no better situation than the biological. The will 
 — it may be that of animal or of man or of God — no longer 
 wills anything as soon as it has entered the system of nature.
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 267 
 
 Accordingly it is settled for us : the real will towards other- 
 ness and its fulfilment do not represent a naturalistic con- 
 ception. They have nothing to do with knowledge. The 
 value of development which belongs to such fulfilment of a 
 real will in its will-purpose therefore leaves natural science 
 untouched. The will towards becoming and growing may 
 slumber in every grain of seed, and yet the naturalist would 
 and could never find it. But has natural science therefore the 
 right to proclaim that the relation which does not exist in its 
 world must not be acknowledged at all as valuable and as 
 valid ? Such a demand would evidently involve an arbitrary 
 and one-sided over-estimation of one single kind of valuation. 
 The reality of nature with its value of existence resulted from 
 the fact that we recognize in the experience the will to self- 
 assertion, to perseverance, to conservation. That certainly 
 does not exclude the acknowledgment of the will to changing 
 and to becoming. If we apperceive the experience of the outer 
 world under the point of view of the one demand, we build 
 up the world of nature ; if we apperceive the same outer world 
 under the point of view of the other demand, we build up the 
 world of deed, of progress, of achievement. The one does not 
 interfere with the other as long as they are not carelessly 
 mixed with each other. If the \vall to conservation is ful- 
 filled, we reach the value of connection ; if the will to altera- 
 tion is fulfilled, we reach the value of development. The 
 connection means to us a truth which we recognize; the 
 development means to us a deed which we estimate. Just 
 as we acknowledged that in the system of nature there can- 
 not be any progress, we certainly must also acknowledge that 
 in the system of the teleological self-realization of the world 
 there cannot be any truth. 
 
 We cannot take any other attitude towards the progress of 
 the world but that of estimation. We can welcome it with 
 enthusiasm, we can serve it unselfishly, but to make it a part 
 of our knowledge would be a self contradictory intention. If
 
 268 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 we seek the connection, we must find the persevering elements 
 so that we may give an explanation for the apparent change. 
 If we seek development, we must find the intentions so that 
 we may interpret the meaning of the apparent connection. 
 We may return to our earlier illustration. The botanist who 
 follows up the grain of wheat considers it as a combination 
 of numberless chemical atoms which never disappear in the 
 course of natural events and never in themselves can grow. 
 The grain is lying between soil material, which also perseveres, 
 and by the conservation of its given elements and energies 
 transpositions must result by which the soil loses material 
 and becomes assimilated by the seed. The blade thus rises by 
 the conservation of the total mass of substance, which trans- 
 forms itself in the position of the atoms, but remains the same 
 in its content. The sower, on the other hand, who confides 
 his grain to the field has no interest in this chemical equation 
 because his whole hope is turning to the un-equation between 
 the seed and the ripened wheat. Of course it is an un-equation 
 only as far as a connection is in question. The sower, too, 
 wants the relation of an equation. The wheat is finally to be 
 identical with that which the seed promises and intends. The 
 elements of the seed, therefore, do not interest him at all. 
 The seed as a whole is for him a unity which is turning 
 towards a goal, and only the meaning of this will towards a 
 goal, not the parts of the content, have a significance for the 
 development for which he hopes. Now the seed itself becomes 
 the wheat, but the relation between that which is sowed and 
 that which is harvested is valuable only as the securing of 
 the intended goal, — valuable by the fulfilment of nature's 
 purpose. 
 
 The independent right of an unnaturalistic valuation of 
 development thus seems beyond doubt. Whether the things 
 fulfil their intention must be decided without any reference 
 to the causal connections. Of course we need not inquire 
 whether in practical life the sower may not have learned
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 269 
 
 plant chemistry, and whether the botanist does not also 
 think of the hopes of the sower. The mutual relations of the 
 valuations will have to be discussed much later. Now at 
 first we have to follow up each value in its pure original char- 
 acteristics. Our next question, therefore, must be whether 
 there really exist purposes and intentions which belong to the 
 apperception of the outer world in such a necessary way that 
 the things cannot be thought without such intentions. If the 
 purposiveness of the things should be merely a personal 
 expectation of ours, the fulfilment also would bring merely 
 a personal satisfaction. Only if the things are filled with pur- 
 poses which are independent of every personal desire and 
 which are superior to every chance individual will, can the 
 satisfaction in their fulfilment represent an over-personal 
 value. Only the fulfilment of an absolutely valid will towards 
 otherness means a progress which has absolute value. Hence 
 our fundamental question must be : How far does the outer 
 world show a purposiveness which is independent of individ- 
 ual interpretation? 
 
 At the first glance it appears as if it must be simple to find 
 a convincing answer. If we want to explore the objective 
 intention in the becoming of nature, it only seems necessary 
 to search out what nature has really performed. The direction 
 in which it has changed must be an expressive sign of its 
 fundamental intentions, and even if the deeper meaning 
 remain a secret to us, we may presuppose that all will move 
 on in the same direction in which it has proceeded for un- 
 counted millions of centuries. If nature has a meaning at all, 
 it is impossible that the total way of transformations in the 
 past has denied it. If at the beginning of time the things had 
 an intention at all, that which has come about must have 
 brought them nearer to the goal, however far the goal itself 
 may be. In looking out for this fundamental direction, we are 
 certainly independent of every personal chance attitude, and 
 we can see nature, as it proceeds to its own great goals, uncon-
 
 270 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 cerned about the little human wishes. Man himself is then 
 only a small addition in the gigantic process of development, 
 and even his field, the earth, becomes a particle of dust in the 
 total process of the becoming worlds. 
 
 But as soon as we begin to inquire somewhat more care- 
 fully into the meaning of this spectacle and to recognize the 
 direction of this progress, this confidence evaporates. Num- 
 berless forms arise, and yet not one which does not in the 
 same spectacle disappear again. There is no life which is 
 not succeeded by death, no upbuilding which is not followed 
 by downfall, and however many world-bodies arise from the 
 nebulous masses, as many crash into each other and are de- 
 stroyed. If we expand the view over the totality, we see an 
 endless coming and going, growing and dying; an eternal 
 rhythm in which there can no longer exist one single direc- 
 tion. It is an insistent pendulum play without beginning, 
 without end, without aim. Returning and returning, the 
 worlds are built up and crumble; billions and trillions of 
 years there is always the same periodic coming and going — 
 no aim, no meaning, in endless movement. Who can say that 
 in this circle of movement the one direction means progress 
 and the other regress ? 
 
 How could it be otherwise ? About which nature are we 
 speaking here? Surely that is not the nature with which 
 our life is intertwined and which in our real life-experience 
 comes to us to be interpreted in its meaning. In our own 
 experience no new worlds have been built up and have died 
 away. For us the becoming worlds are glimmering little 
 points in the midnight sky. And the times through which the 
 world has passed are not reported by the memory of man- 
 kind in a trillionth part. The world which vibrates without 
 meaning is not a content of experience, but the result of the 
 calculations of the naturalist, calculated under that particular 
 point of view of science in order to fulfil the special demands 
 of causal explanation. We recognized beforehand that scien-
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 271 
 
 tific connection and a real development must contradict each 
 other in their presuppositions. The world which the astron- 
 omer constructs in cosmic endless times to satisfy the demand 
 for explanation must indeed ultimately transform every ap- 
 parent change into periodic rhythm and thus hold it at a 
 meaningless standstill. This is necessary because that which 
 science wants to recognize as true must be thought as that 
 which perseveres. The real fundamental becoming into an 
 otherness which would be indispensable for a real develop- 
 ment is therefore excluded by the presuppositions as soon as 
 the calculated world of the naturalist is substituted for the 
 world of immediate experience. The world which emanates 
 from nebulous masses is fundamentally unfit to express to us 
 the over-personal meaning of the outer world. The nature 
 which moves by mechanical laws and is not concerned about 
 man is not a nature about which man has to be concerned 
 on his part when he tries to grasp the piirposes of the world. 
 Thus it seems that we might take rather an anthropocentric 
 view. Development and progress is then everything which 
 leads towards man, regress everything which hinders the 
 origin and spread of mankind. Of course there also experience 
 may be transcended, perhaps endlessly. But the construction 
 of primitive mankind which led to the civilized man, of the 
 kingdom of animals which led to mankind, of the develop- 
 ment of the earth which led to living beings, is now all directed 
 toward one clearly distinguishable goal. Here is no pendulum 
 movement. How the world reached its great goal may be left 
 to the decision of the naturalist. He may find out whether 
 meteorites brought the germ of life from foreign worlds to 
 the earth, or whether moneres, which developed into mono- 
 cellular beings, formed themselves at the bottom of the sea, 
 or whether endlessly lower life-forms arose at first, which 
 through a long development grew into microscopically visible 
 substances. Even death in the realm of the multicellular 
 beings is then not a regress ; death itself becomes a necessary
 
 272 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 adjustment to secure the higher and higher abilities of the 
 organisms, and finally to lead to man. From here it can 
 be clearly recognized in which direction nature wants to 
 move. The progress must lead beyond man towards the 
 superman, in whom everything which characterizes man be- 
 yond the animal is still reenforced and concentrated. 
 
 Yet we must absolutely refuse this view, too. This inter- 
 pretation of the meaning of the world is also only an encroach- 
 ment of natural science. This whole train of thought belongs 
 to the causal scientific aspect, and if it is true that scientific 
 connection and progressive development exclude each other, 
 this belief in development towards man cannot be accepted, 
 as it is really only masked natural science. We call it " nat- 
 ural science" first because in the experience of mankind there 
 does not exist, and cannot exist, anything which makes man 
 the product of lower forms of nature. In the experience of 
 man there could of course never arise a man where there were 
 no men. The whole connection with the lower forms thus 
 again belongs entirely to the constructed world of the nat- 
 uralist, which by principle is without intention and develop- 
 ment. From the standpoint of natural science, it is arbitrary 
 to detach the one short phase which leads from the cooling- 
 off of the earth to the spread of the civilized man and to 
 separate it from the cosmic movement in its unending 
 rhythm, growth, and destruction of stars. All that paleonto- 
 logy teaches us can always be used only to increase our know- 
 ledge of the outer world, but such phylogenetic natural sci- 
 ence can never help us to understand the development which 
 we estimate as a progress. Experience itself, not the con- 
 structed truth, must show us that world of which we want to 
 understand the intentions and aims. But this whole view is 
 a naturalistic one for a still more important reason. The man 
 who is the product of the phylogenetic development is not 
 at all the man who finds nature in his outer world of experi- 
 ence and who seeks the value of the outer world. This seeking
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 273 
 
 subject of attitudes is the historical being; it is man in his 
 will-subjectivity, who as such does not at all belong to the 
 causal process which has led from the cooling-off of the earth's 
 surface to the causal production of the human race. That 
 being who posits goals and estimates nature cannot possibly 
 be the goal of nature, because he is not included in the natural 
 course of objects, but belongs to the entirely different connec- 
 tion of subjects. The naturalist cannot know any other man 
 than the speaking mammal ; but however richly he may equip 
 this being with psycho-physical functions, it remains a mis- 
 understanding to consider him at the same time as a subject 
 which takes attitudes towards the real experiences of the 
 world. Nature has as little the intention of letting man and 
 superman grow as it is nature's goal to let nebulous rings roll 
 and to condense them into world-bodies. Biology can inter- 
 pret the meaning of our natural surroundings as little as 
 cosmology. 
 
 There remains, then, only one way to come to the meaning 
 of nature. We must consider that nature which we find as 
 object of our real practical will-attitudes. What this world 
 of things was caused by and what it was millions of years ago 
 now has no interest for us. There is only one thing which must 
 necessarily be demanded from the outer world, in order that it 
 may be able to come into action at all : nature must be object 
 for the will of the historical man. This alone can be the task 
 and the goal of the outer world. It is to be material for the 
 deed of the willing subject. The purpose of nature is not that 
 the causally determined man be produced by it, but that the 
 free man may stand on it. Nature wants to be his domicile 
 and his tool. If this relation to human will did not exist, it 
 would have no significance for man to speak of a value in the 
 becoming of the outer world and thus of development or of 
 regress. 
 
 Such a task of course does not exist as a psychical pur- 
 posive thought of the seed buried in the soil of the field,
 
 274 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 and no conscious will moves the wind and the waves ; but for 
 us subjects of attitude, nature can be active only if its task of 
 entering into the life of man is recognized. Only in this rela- 
 tion to the striving man can nature be object of estimation, 
 just as only in relation to the law of causality which takes no 
 concern of man can it become object of knowledge. To be 
 sure, nothing remains there of the proud trillions of years. 
 That nature which alone has meaning and goal in itself does 
 not lead to endless distances either in space or in time. It is 
 the nature with which we strive daily and which daily serves 
 us. Not by personal demand, but necessarily, we apperceive 
 it with the task of being for us. With reference to this goal we 
 measure the value of its changes and of its becoming another. 
 Such nature alone, therefore, has development. The fruit 
 which grows for us, the ground which offers its metals to our 
 labor, forest and stream, fresh air and water and sunlight, 
 fulfil in this way a purpose which stands independent of the 
 chance wishes of individual beings. To be material of human 
 deed is the absolutely necessary purpose without which we 
 cannot think that nature which we find in our real life. Only 
 in being means and help for our human purposes can nature 
 have significance for us. Only in fulfilling this purpose can 
 nature show its deepest meaning and its purest value. Not 
 every blossom becomes a fruit, not every wave is willing to 
 carry us. As everywhere, here too that which is valuable, 
 that which is free from values, and that which interferes with 
 values are near together. We find the same situation in the 
 circle of the logical values. Not every world-impression has 
 the value of existence. Only by following up the persever- 
 ing impressions can we gain that which really exists and in 
 this way work out from the chaos of experience that which 
 is naturalistically real. And in the same way not every ex- 
 perienced manifold was harmonious. We had to raise the 
 beautiful from the mass of the indifferent and ugly. In the 
 same way now not every change in the world is a progress,
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 275 
 
 a development, a valuable growth. Only in following up that 
 which is directed towards its goal can we hold fast the living, 
 meaningful nature in its pure value. 
 
 Our idea, accordingly, is not to posit man in the centre 
 of the causal nature as anthropocentric science of past days 
 tried to do. We stand entirely outside of every possible causal 
 science. In the nature of knowledge all mankind is but a 
 microbe on the surface of the earth, and the earth itself only a 
 little speck of the universe. But in the nature which we meet 
 and estimate in life, man with his thought of an unlimited 
 causal world stands there as the one unique being for whom 
 nature exerts itself in order that he may live out his life in 
 freedom. He could not take a step, he could not perform a 
 deed, he could not realize a plan, if nature were not to help 
 and to serve; and even where nature seems reluctant and 
 demands hard labor, it offers resistance only to the chance 
 individual, but remains in its meaning the tool and the soiirce 
 of energy for historical mankind. It is the right and even the 
 duty of the naturalist to presuppose that nature will ulti- 
 mately prove itself a complete causal connection, however far 
 science may be to-day from such an end. He therefore pre- 
 supposes that nature really is such a connection. In the same 
 way it is the right and the duty of the striving subject of 
 historical life to presuppose that nature is ultimately con- 
 trolled by the purpose of serving the rational being, however 
 many life-plans of the individual may be interfered with by 
 nature. The intention of nature remains, then, the effort 
 steadily to approach this goal. For the striving man the nature 
 of the astronomical distances and of the trillions of years is 
 exactly as unreal as for the naturalist the nature which is 
 guided by intentions. How both forms of valuation ultimately 
 may be combined we cannot yet consider here. It is evident 
 that they must touch each other because in seeking know- 
 ledge the naturalist too becomes a striving subject and the 
 world which he tries to know enters into the human will ; on
 
 276 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 the other hand, the striving subject becomes a knower when 
 he selects nature as a tool for a particular will-purpose. 
 
 Of course the development of nature is not valuable because 
 it helps us as individuals. That could make the result of de- 
 velopment useful and agreeable, but it could never give to 
 development itself an absolutely valid value. The value lies 
 exclusively in the fact that nature in its development realizes 
 itself, is loyal to its own purpose, fulfils its owti intention. 
 This goal of nature, to be sure, is to serve mankind, but that 
 which raises the becoming of nature to the level of an ab- 
 solute value is not the fact that the goal is the service for 
 man, but that this intended goal is really reached by nature 
 through its own energies. If there were any other goal w^hich 
 we should have to recognize absolutely as the aim of nature, 
 however strange or dangerous to man, it would nevertheless 
 remain a pure value if nature fulfilled its purpose. But there 
 is not and cannot be any other goal for nature. Nature must 
 be conceived as filled with this aim because in our experience 
 we mean by nature only the object of man's will and thus 
 the tool and means of mankind. Our fundamental will from 
 which all valuation arose was the one \vill that the experience 
 was to be more than mere experience and that it should hold 
 and assert its own selfhood in itself. The will to be tool of 
 man, material of his deed, must be conceived, therefore, as 
 the objective character of nature if nature is to assert itself 
 independently at all. Whether nature can reach this self- 
 hood can be recognized only when nature really turns to 
 this goal and proves that it is in unity with itself. Every 
 becoming by which it devotes itself to this service and trans- 
 forms the seed into fruit demonstrates that it fulfils the 
 fundamental demand to be a self-asserting world. Wherever 
 nature really serves, its deed fulfils the absolutely necessary 
 demand for its self-identity, and its performance is there- 
 fore absolutely valuable.
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 277 
 
 B. — PROGRESS 
 
 We saw how eversrthing which is historical refers to willing 
 beings, and how an historical connection can be understood 
 only from the continuation of identical attitudes. We reached 
 in this way a system of history which had the same reality as 
 the system of nature, and which equally demands our ac- 
 knowledgment and our submission. But in an equal way 
 such treatment must then find its limitations. We saw that 
 the naturalist can speak only of changes and transpositions, 
 which are ultimately perseverances, but that he does not 
 know anything of improvement, growth, and development. 
 The historian must be in the same situation. We saw that 
 he has to separate the important from the unimportant, 
 the influential from the uninfluential, when he elaborates the 
 real connections in history. But his historical interest is not 
 in touch with the question whether it turns to the better or 
 to the worse, whether the change leads upward or down- 
 ward. The connection which constitutes the decay of class- 
 ical antiquity is for the truth-seeking historian not less a 
 goal of scientific inquiry than the other connection which 
 constitutes the upbuilding of ancient civilization. As the 
 biologist must explain equally health and disease, life and 
 death, the historian too has to give the same interest to the 
 interpretation of the times of inspiration and to the times of 
 horror in the history of mankind. He has only to make us 
 understand how ever3i:hing happened to occur. 
 
 To be sure, there is this difference between the material of 
 the historian and the material of the naturalist, that the stuff 
 of the historian is itself will or related to the will, and such 
 will in itself can have reference to values. Yet the historical 
 connection must impartially interpret the just and the unjust, 
 the truth-seeker and the teacher of errors, the martyr and the 
 criminal. He has to examine how far their will influenced 
 the will of others and ultimately the will of our fellow-world.
 
 278 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 The purpose of the historian is not to estimate and to ap- 
 preciate them. That which grows in freedom has become for 
 him an unchanging series of existing facts on which he looks 
 retrospectively to understand the connection. He does not 
 have to decide whether it had an absolute value that there 
 were heroes and traitors, thinkers and fools ; that the nations 
 blossomed and died. Yet the question as to the value of the 
 historical process cannot be disregarded. The historian may 
 with a cool heart look on the crawling and swarming of the 
 nations, but somewhere outside of the historical research 
 a standpoint must exist from which it can be clearly seen 
 what in such an historical movement was really progress and 
 development. It might be called philosophy of history. But 
 somewhere it must be asked whether the changes in mankind 
 are a coming and going without meaning and goal, and 
 whether history has not purpose and ideals as well as 
 connection. And where absolutely valid purposes are to be 
 fulfilled and ideals to be reached there exist values. 
 
 He who enters practically into historical life to build up or 
 to break down, to reform or to teach or to revolutionize, does 
 not want to know how it came about, but he wants to bring 
 to power that which in his conviction is valuable. He unself- 
 ishly puts his energy and perhaps his life into the work 
 because he is convinced in his deepest soul that this human 
 history is no indifferent purposeless natural process, but that 
 every hour has its solemn task. The opposite parties may 
 quarrel over which change would represent real progress and 
 development, but that the right change has an absolute value 
 is their common presupposition, and they assert this convic- 
 tion in unselfishly serving it. And this belief in the absolutely 
 valid value of the right ways of mankind cannot possibly be 
 confined to the narrow little practical sphere of our personal 
 activity. In the hurry of the daily work the reference to the 
 totality may disappear to our eye. Yet this daily fight itself 
 gains meaning and significance only when it subordinates
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 279 
 
 itself to the movement of mankind and acknowledges in that 
 totality the unlimited values. We saw that nature shows its 
 development only when it is detached from the thought-forms 
 of natural science. History, too, can show the progress of 
 mankind only when it is separated from the thought-forms 
 of the historian. 
 
 Development in the changes of mankind can be found only 
 if we reach a standpoint for a general evaluation. Historical 
 research as such cannot help us there, even indirectly. Em- 
 pires are built up and crumble. What remains of the proud 
 life of Babylonia? Five thousand years hence what will test- 
 ify to our existence? The masses migrate and migrate, fight 
 with each other, subjugate each other, mix with each other ; 
 now here, now there, inner movements arise, spread out, and 
 disappear again : without plan and without purpose the stream 
 rolls on through the thousands of years. The historian has 
 no right to contradict such a view. Others again may say that 
 nothing depends upon the conservation of that which arose, 
 but that the happiness of those who live is essential. In their 
 view the history of the world may have been a great regress 
 of mankind. In the beginning there was happiness; the hap- 
 piness of the narrow carelessness which served the senses and 
 did not ask for the morrow. That golden age of laziness which 
 was not obliged to make any sacrifices for what was distant 
 is destroyed by civilization, and every day expands the re- 
 sponsibility and by it the unrest of the community. Every 
 pulse-beat of culture thus means less happiness, and no arti- 
 ficial return to nature to-day can hinder the downfall of man- 
 kind. Again, the historian has no right to contradict such an 
 interpretation. Others, to be sure, may claim with the same 
 right that civilization is just what has opened the inexhaust- 
 ible sources of joy and has broken the intolerable chains of 
 earlier days, and that pleasure has therefore been steadily 
 increasing. Again, others may convince us that the human 
 feeling of pleasure always oscillates about a middle position,
 
 280 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 and therefore that there must be on high and on low levels 
 always the same quantity of pleasure and of pain. The his- 
 torian as such never has any reason to object to any of these 
 interpretations. 
 
 The historic connections remain the same, independent of 
 the question whether the whole is understood as an ascent or 
 as a descent, or as an indifferent remaining on the same level 
 of enjoyment. Moreover, the historian has not the least reason 
 to object if still others are opposed to all those three views 
 and claim that progress or regress has nothing whatever to 
 do with the feeling of pleasure. History as such has indeed 
 no reason to consider the greatest possible number of happy 
 human beings as the goal of development. It might with the 
 same right acknowledge as such a goal the greatest possible 
 number of healthy human beings or of musical human beings. 
 But it would not be less arbitrary if the historian were to 
 use as standard for the past simply the state of our civiliza- 
 tion to-day. In that case he would have to praise everything 
 which led to our present situation and condemn everything 
 which hindered the movement towards our modern life. The 
 fact is that our own time is full of movements which interfere 
 with one another, and combines many kinds of civilization 
 which are to a high degree unequal. Above all, the mere fact 
 that our situation is as j^-et the latest cannot give to it an 
 overweight of value. If we were simply to say that our 
 present state is the most valuable because it is the latest, we 
 should already have accepted the presupposition that history 
 is a development which goes on exactly in temporal succession 
 without any regress. But if we were to presuppose that, then 
 we might just as well leave our hands idle and not make any 
 effort, and let things go as they please ; whatever to-morrow 
 may bring, it must be more valuable because it is the later. 
 Partisanship in favor of our time in contrast to the past is 
 thus just as unfit to offer us general aspects of valuation as 
 partisanship for our nation, or for our profession, or for our 
 church, or for our politics.
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 281 
 
 Of course there has never been a lack of efforts which 
 tried to force on history such narrow and arbitrary pseudo- 
 valuations, but they do not contain a scintilla of theoretical 
 necessity. Yet the situation is not better if, instead of a 
 chance party creed, so-called objective characteristics be- 
 come emphasized. The fundamental question always remains 
 open : Why is the valuation to be anchored just at this point ? 
 Most deceiving and therefore most dangerous are all those 
 presuppositions which get their apparent objectivity from 
 the field of natural science. The silent presupposition there 
 is that the direction in which the changes in nature move on 
 must also determine the goal for the free human deed. But 
 the fallacy of such an idea is evident. Two cases are possible. 
 Either we call nature the total organic process including all 
 human history: then the question of any ideals and duties 
 is meaningless. Whatever may occur is then equally prede- 
 stined by nature, and no human move and no human reform 
 can ever produce anjrthing which does not carry the stamp 
 of nature. The good and the bad are then equally the outcome 
 of the natural processes, and no line of change can claim to be 
 more in harmony with nature than any other. Or the other 
 case : we call nature only that which lies below human activity 
 and which is material for the human deed. In that case the 
 will is entirely free in its decision whether it wants to take the 
 changes in nature as its model, and whether civilization is to 
 imitate nature or not. Progress in the social development may 
 then perhaps consist just in deviating from the ways of un- 
 feeling nature and in seeking new paths which may lie in an 
 opposite direction. In short, if we silently presuppose that 
 culture goes with nature, we have a right to do so only if we 
 consider civilization itself as a part of nature. In this case 
 the presupposition is a matter of course which does not affirm 
 and does not deny any particular mode of action. On the 
 other hand, if we separate civilization and nature, we have no 
 right whatever silently to presuppose that culture has to shape
 
 282 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 itself after the model of nature. Of course there is no doubt 
 that every life can be conceived from the point of view of 
 natural science. But if the transition of the living beings 
 from the monocellular organism to the man of civilization 
 is really apperceived as a natural process, nothing from 
 the naturalist's point of view shows an improvement or a 
 development. The man of the twentieth century runs by rail- 
 ways, he swims by steamers, he perceives through his news- 
 papers, he speaks by cables, he remembers by libraries, he 
 strikes by cannons ; and yet he is in no way better adjusted 
 to his external conditions of life than the tiniest infusor is 
 adjusted to its conditions in the drop of water. We have only 
 an increase in the differentiation, an increase in the mani- 
 foldness of the parts, an increase in the complexity of the 
 reactions. But who has the right to claim that the complex 
 is better than the simple, and that the differentiated is more 
 valuable than the undifferentiated ? 
 
 In such a naturalistic view of the social organism nothing 
 can claim to be more in accordance with nature than any- 
 thing else ; however fate may turn, everything remains a ne- 
 cessary natural process. If in our industrial life to-day the 
 employers and the laborers oppose each other, it remains in 
 the midst of such a naturalistic spectacle a fight equally 
 natural if the power of capital presses down the life of the 
 laborer to the lowest limit, or if the laborers, strong by their 
 union, force their will selfishly on the owners, or if the state 
 forces the compliance of both parties and thus secures an 
 equilibrium. The strong may force the weak, or the weak 
 in their combination may dominate the strong, or the coun- 
 teracting forces may be inhibited by external pressure. Each 
 of those three possibilities can be found a thousand times in 
 nature. Nature does not have to suggest anything there, and 
 whatever results must be equally accepted as development 
 simply because it happened to result. 
 
 But let us consider the other case. Instead of considering
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 283 
 
 mankind as part of the necessary process, we may posit man 
 in his freedom as against and over nature, and now we speak 
 of development when he goes on in his freedom in the paths 
 of nature. For instance, in the spirit of Darwinism, the pro- 
 gress of nature must be referred to the selection of those indi- 
 viduals who are best adjusted to the surroundings. Thus it 
 seems logical to say that mankind will move on in a progress- 
 ive line only if care is taken that the badly adjusted individ- 
 uals are eliminated, and that mankind will sink down if those 
 are artificially maintained who are not sufficiently adjusted 
 to the surroundings. That sounds almost self-evident, and 
 yet it is a fallacy. It veils the decisive fact that the anti- 
 thesis of good and bad adjustment already includes the whole 
 problem of valuation. Only by independent decisions con- 
 cerning the values are we able to say what ought to be called 
 well adjusted in the structure of civilization. In our cultural 
 sphere, for instance, is only the strong, muscular, strenuous 
 body the well adapted, and the weak, nervous organism badly 
 adjusted in spite of the fact that the brain-cells of the latter 
 perhaps force the movements of mankind into new paths? 
 It may have been rightly said that the world of antiquity 
 collapsed just because the best part became eliminated by the 
 partisan fights, by persecutions, by death punishments, and 
 by asceticism. But the question who were the best can be 
 decided only if we already see a line of development towards 
 certain goals of civilization. From the standpoint of mere 
 nature those victorious persecutors would have to be counted 
 the better adjusted ones on account of their victory. 
 
 We have no safer ground when the naturalists of society 
 insist that their historical goal is the purity of the race, a 
 doctrine which has recently pushed itself into the foreground. 
 It is not essential that such a race theory lacks every safe 
 foundation, and that the conception of the pure race is en- 
 tirely arbitrary. The results of linguistics, of anatomy, and 
 of social psychology undermine all such speculations. The
 
 284 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 decisive fact is rather that goals are here prescribed, the 
 evaluation of which can never be found by real naturalistic 
 considerations. The result is reached merely by superficial 
 comparisons with the processes in breeding. The pure race 
 is a possible naturalistic conception. The conception of an ex- 
 cellent race already points to human purposes and transcends 
 the conceptions of natural science. But the chief question, 
 whether we are to evaluate as excellent in history those traits 
 which are decisive for the conservation of the pure races, can 
 be affirmed or denied only by entirely independent consid- 
 erations. We have no right to decide beforehand that ex- 
 cellence coincides with purity. At first we must know what 
 excellence from a human point of view means. Only then can 
 we examine whether purity of race or mixture of races offers 
 the more favorable condition for the development of such 
 excellent nations. A philosophy of history which, uncon- 
 sciously influenced by practical prejudices, claims that the 
 cultural purity of society which we call excellence demands 
 that natural purity of the race which means freedom from 
 mixture, is merely based on a confusion. With the same log- 
 ical right it might be maintained that a morally pure painting 
 could be painted only with chemically pure colors. But 
 whether the purity of the race or any other naturalistic con- 
 ception is posited as the standard of social development, it 
 always remains a mixing of explanation and estimation. 
 Fundamentally, no problem of explanation can at all touch 
 the problem of evaluation. Hence it also remains indifferent 
 for the estimation of progress and regress which factors were 
 most influential for the historical occurrences. The discussion 
 whether the masses or the leaders are more responsible for 
 the changes of the historical world, whether the surroundings 
 of the nations or their inherited disposition is most influen- 
 tial, whether the economic conditions are fundamental for 
 the political and cultural events — all these problems may 
 be decided in the one or the other direction to-day: they
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 285 
 
 cannot contribute anything as to what is to be estimated as 
 an upward or a downward movement. Wherever evaluation 
 intrudes into the objective historical account, it is by prin- 
 ciple no better than the theories of the old astronomers that 
 the stars moved in a circle because a circle aesthetically is the 
 noblest line. 
 
 Instead of all this, our question must be whether in the 
 social historical life any one goal must be necessarily con- 
 ceived as belonging to the reality of mankind. Only if our 
 demand for a self-asserting world involves the postulate of a 
 certain will in mankind must every fulfilment of such a will 
 be acknowledged as valuable. Here again it is not a question 
 of a psychological discovery. The community has not the will 
 to a certain goal as a conscious idea in itself, nor may we in 
 apperceiving the community have such an aim in clear con- 
 sciousness. The question is only: What must we logically 
 will and maintain as the purpose of the community, if we are 
 to raise the experience of a fellow-world at all to a reality 
 with independent meaning? We may approach an answer 
 to this question by the following considerations. The human 
 beings do not interest us here with reference to their individ- 
 ual inner world, but as parts of a fellow-world, that is, as be- 
 ings who have relation to each other. The fellow-world can 
 have meaning only in so far as the members are related to 
 each other. We have to abstract, therefore, from the indi- 
 viduals in so far as they express their own desires. Only their 
 mutual relations and their common purposes enter into the 
 community as such. Now we demand that such a community 
 shall have its own purpose by which it asserts itself as self- 
 dependent. That can mean only that the members of the 
 community are to reach a common will by which the com- 
 munity as such is upheld and asserted. This is secured the 
 more fully the more every single member in his will repre- 
 sents the standpoint of the whole group. 
 The inner life of the individual remains untouched by that.
 
 286 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 In the community every individual expresses his belonging 
 to the group the more clearly the more he detaches his will 
 from his individual desire and emphasizes in himself the com- 
 mon will. Such a group may be a pair, or a family, or a city, 
 or a profession, or a church, or a nation, or a concert of na- 
 tions, or all the men of to-day, or the whole history of man- 
 kind. That does not indicate at all that every one in the 
 circle has to fulfil an equal task. We do not speak of lack of 
 discrimination. If we play a game of chess, I may take care 
 of the black men and my opponent of the white, but the rules 
 of the game must be willed by us in common, and the proced- 
 ure of the game in accordance with the rules must be equally 
 important to both of us. If I protect my king and attack his 
 king, my opponent wills with me and I do not by it one- 
 sidedly attack the standpoint of our whole little group. My 
 opponent and I will the same. If instead I were to will that 
 I win at any price, even if I am the worse player, I contradict 
 the will of the group. The group willed that the better player 
 win. Thus the manifoldness of the individual will-act in no 
 way suffers by subordinating the individual will to the larger 
 will-structure of the group. The community has found its 
 ideal form only when each one considers his particular task 
 from a standpoint which is equally given for every other 
 member of the community. Not only many heads but many 
 tasks compose the life of a nation, but the national standpoint 
 can and ought to be the same for every one in his task. With- 
 out such a postulate the particular group has lost its self- 
 dependent meaning. 
 
 Even from here we can see the values of development. We 
 claim that we cannot think a group otherwise than as filled by 
 the desire that each member give up for his will the merely 
 individual standpoint and take the standpoint of the group. 
 Every transition to the fuller realization of this demand must 
 therefore be a pure value. We say every transition, not the 
 final end of it. Value always belongs only to the fulfilment of
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 287 
 
 the will. The group which wills such a transformation of its 
 members produces a value in satisf3nng this will for becoming 
 a true group. But as soon as the satisfaction is reached, the 
 will fulfilled, the development perfected, then simply a certain 
 state of society is given in which there is no longer anything 
 to be fulfilled and to be developed, and where therefore no 
 value is to be estimated. The movement towards the goal is 
 the only valuable factor. The goal itself may be entirely in- 
 different. We must never forget that an absolute value may 
 always belong to something which in another direction may 
 be unimportant and trivial and indifferent. The silly judg- 
 ment that two times two is not three hundred is as true 
 as the most valid mathematical discovery. In this way the 
 development of a group may be valuable as a development 
 even if that which is finally developed is only a superfluous 
 association, or a dangerous party, or a selfish nation. If we 
 consider that particular community at all as a self-dependent 
 group, we must necessarily conceive for it the goal that every 
 member is to take the over-personal group standpoint, and 
 every change in the direction towards this goal then must be 
 a satisfaction of our objective sympathizing will. 
 
 Nevertheless, we can at once go beyond this point. We do 
 not give any interest to the unlimited number of silly and 
 unfertile judgments which at any time can be asserted with 
 full logical value of truth ; we maintain only those which may 
 enter with a certain significance into wider connections of 
 thought. In the same way we subordinate the many possible 
 values of development to larger and wider connections of 
 progress. That does not mean that the narrower group ought 
 to disappear in the wider one, perhaps the townships in the 
 states or the states in a colorless mankind. On the contrary, 
 every development demands manifoldness. But we cannot 
 really hold in our own participating will the goal of a group if 
 a more important will in us is directed against it. In itself we 
 can grasp the community goal of a gang of thieves as well as
 
 288 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 that of an academy of philosophers. Yet if we cannot really 
 will with them, the transition towards that goal cannot be felt 
 as a fulfilment of an over-personal will, and the character of a 
 pure value is then lost. In this way every social development 
 must refer to a more fundamental purpose and ultimately 
 to a last goal. This ultimate end is evidently the pure abso- 
 lutely over-personal standpoint, which does not belong to the 
 individual as member of a particular group, but which belongs 
 to every thinkable subject as such. Each individual is to aim 
 towards a standpoint at which he shares the pure over- 
 personal will, as this will only characterizes every subject as 
 belonging to the community of those who will a world at all. 
 The ultimate controlling goal of the human community is 
 thus a transition towards a standpoint at which every indi- 
 vidual wills in accordance with the over-personal will, that is, 
 with the pure valuation. Whatever moves towards this goal 
 is pure progress; whatever moves away from this goal is 
 regress. 
 
 In this way alone every single formation of groups and 
 development of communities receives its own definite place 
 in the valuable totality. The community which has reached 
 its own goal now has no longer simply reached an indifferent 
 state of society, but its own completeness becomes a step in 
 the development towards the absolute aim of the human 
 totality. A higher goal cannot exist, nor yet a coordinated 
 one. It is the one goal which is unattainable, but which is 
 fundamentally necessary. Without it we cannot think the 
 fellow-world in its totality. Every individual as member of 
 the fellow-world ought to become a subject of pure valuation. 
 Such valuations are many. Some of them, the values of 
 knowledge and of unity and of beauty, we have discussed, 
 others, such as the values of law and industry and of morality 
 and of religion, will interest us later. In every one of these 
 directions a true development can go on. We have a real 
 progress which is absolutely valuable in itself wherever the
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 289 
 
 understanding of things is carried forward to its truth, where 
 the perception is raised to its beauty, where unity and love 
 and harmony are propagated, where nature is remodelled to 
 economic values of industry, where human instincts are 
 ordered by law, where morality is victorious in the inner world, 
 where belief grows towards true religion. On the other hand, 
 wherever beauty is torn down to the level of mere enjoyment, 
 where the understanding of things is ruined by cutting off 
 the connections with the totality, where discord and misery 
 are spread, where the common tasks are ruled from a selfish 
 standpoint, where economy becomes a short-sighted utiliza- 
 tion and political life becomes a one-sided misuse of power, 
 where morality becomes cunning and religion becomes selfish 
 superstition, there mankind sinks down, even when it boasts 
 of the shining means of daring civilization. 
 
 Consequently we have no right to seek a definite order 
 of stages, perhaps from uncivilization to half-civilization and 
 from half-civilization to civilization, or, as positivism liked 
 to formulate it, from a theological thinking to a metaphysical 
 thinking and finally to a positivistic thinking. In the same 
 way all those interpretations which refer the progress of 
 mankind to a goal which lies beyond possible experience are 
 excluded for us. In the midst of a religion there may arise 
 the reference of mankind to a holy last judgment, but this 
 religion itself first has to demonstrate itself as a valuable part 
 of human development. The examination of a social value of 
 progress must not lead beyond our world of possible experi- 
 ence. On the other hand, we must acknowledge such pro- 
 gress wherever in the midst of experience the transition 
 leads towards the standpoint of pure valuation. Progress is 
 therefore possible even on the lowest level of society, and 
 even the richest and most complex society may move back- 
 ward. Moreover, the manifoldness of possible valuations may 
 bring it about that at the same time in the same social 
 organism progress, standstill^ and regress may exist. The
 
 290 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 religious consciousness of a nation may raise itself in a glori- 
 ous development to a standpoint of pure valuation, and yet 
 its scientific recognition of truth may be of the lowest order. 
 The valuation of beauty may be lifted up to splendid heights, 
 and yet the moral valuation may be declining. Nobody 
 would take the philosophy of India, the art of China, the 
 religion of Palestine, the literature of Greece, the law of 
 Rome, as standards for judging the total development of those 
 nations. 
 
 It would have to be examined whether it is possible any- 
 how for every kind of pure valuation to find its full develop- 
 ment simultaneously with every other. It may be that the 
 one inhibits the other, and that therefore an historical division 
 of labor may be necessary. In the primeval forest there may 
 be a progress in a certain direction which far surpasses the 
 moral depravity in many electrically illuminated metropolitan 
 streets. And all that repeats itself in narrower and narrower 
 circles. In the midst of a single nation or a single community 
 or a single group, the progress in one direction may go on at 
 one place while the progress in other directions may find its 
 best energies somewhere else. It can hardly be expected, for 
 instance, that religiousness and morality find their strongest 
 development in those spheres of the state which are devoted 
 most eagerly to the raising of the economic or of the artistic 
 life. Progress in the endless manifoldness of life does not 
 know simply a general yes or no. Everywhere there is an 
 unlimited play of movements upward and downward. And 
 yet of course it remains true that in the history of all mankind 
 the civilized nations represent a higher stage of development 
 than the uncivilized, and that between these extreme con- 
 trasts many intermediate stages of half-civilization can be 
 discriminated. It may be left doubtful whether every people 
 can climb up from step to step by its own energy, whether the 
 so-called half-civilizations can be transformed at all into full 
 civilizations, or whether the world of history has to make
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 291 
 
 new and ever new independent starts to lead to the richest 
 developments. The decisive factor remains that in the sphere 
 of civilization, we find raised to the height of over-personal 
 pure valuation that which in the uncivilized circle results 
 still essentially from a mere personal individual standpoint. 
 
 That is not contradicted by the fact that, just on the low 
 level, life goes on in such pattern-like way that every one ap- 
 pears like his neighbor, while only in the sunlight of highest 
 culture the finest flower of individuality comes to develop- 
 ment. To be pattern-like does not mean to be over-personal, 
 but rather under-personal, and to show the flavor of person- 
 ality in the life-functions does not mean to be selfish. That 
 which really characterizes the antithesis is rather the instinct- 
 ive, the accidental, the desultory, the immediate element in 
 the life of the savages in contrast to civilization. There pas- 
 sion is dominant, here discretion ; there the instinctive reac- 
 tion and here the careful planning of the deed ; and all this 
 evidently lies on the way from the haphazard personal will 
 to the over-personal group- will, and finally to the absolutely 
 valid valuation. It is this transition which leads slowly 
 from the mere sensuous perception of the things among the 
 lower races to a conceptional apprehension, and ultimately to 
 a firmly formed science which is valid for everybody. In the 
 same way the original naive haphazard life which does not 
 take care for the next day is slowly transformed into the 
 serious responsible maturity of society which demands sacri- 
 fice in the service of a coming generation. In the same way 
 the unsteady activity which is moved by every external 
 impulse goes over into the steady work of the nation which is 
 anchored in the traditions of the past and in the consciousness 
 of ideal goals. In the same way the selfish laziness changes 
 into respect for labor and for creative work. Everywhere it is 
 the ascent from the personal to that which has common 
 validity, from the individual will to the pure valuation. 
 
 Of course the movement itself must be influenced by the
 
 292 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 particular dispositions, means, starting-points, and inclina- 
 tions. It is meaningless to discuss whether to-day perhaps 
 one or another civilized nation stands higher. There are dif- 
 ferent foundations and different chief accents. Inclination to 
 mathematics and natural science may not go together with 
 inclination for history, nor talent for fine arts with talent for 
 music. Especially significant differences may show them- 
 selves in the will to action. The will may realize itself more 
 with reference to the outer world, or more with reference to 
 the fellow-world, or more with reference to the inner world. 
 In this way there must result three fundamental types which 
 may come together even in the narrowest circle. But those 
 three types determine in the same way the large parties and 
 divisions in the land, and finally whole nations and groups of 
 nations. Even in the most primitive societies these three con- 
 trasts must exist, and therefore do not at all represent dif- 
 ferent stages of civilization, but coordinated traits. Each 
 of the three may be maintained from personal savagery up 
 to the highest level of over-personal fully civilized valuation. 
 These three groups are those of the laborers who shape the 
 outer world, the warriors who deal with the fellow-world, and 
 the thinkers, poets, and priests who give expression to the 
 inner world. The first group is controlled by attention, the 
 second by will, the last by understanding and feeling. Trad- 
 ing, fighting, and religious tribes have existed at all times, 
 just as there exist in every state unpolitical groups, con- 
 servative groups, and liberal groups. The first must put 
 chief emphasis on effort, the second on loyalty, the third 
 on justice. The first aims towards an increasing mastery 
 over nature, the second strives for the power of the nation, 
 the third for its moral and cultural development. In this way 
 we also still find to-day civilized nations which work towards 
 the highest possible achievement, others which see their aim 
 in the most perfect development of their state organization, 
 and others which recognize their task in the freest possible
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 293 
 
 initiative of every individual. One does not stand higher than 
 another, and each moves on the path of pure development 
 as far as in its particular kind of will it approaches the stand- 
 point of the over-personal subject. On the other hand, each 
 of the three types can also enter into regress. The power may 
 be misused and dragged down to personal spheres, and in- 
 dustry and energy and liberty may be put into the service of 
 selfish arbitrariness and mere enjoyment. 
 
 It is nevertheless not by chance that in this endless play of 
 numberless forward and backward movements the conviction 
 stands firm that the general movement is an insistent pro- 
 gress, and that every regress is overcome by a reenforced 
 development. If that were not so, the growth and disappear- 
 ance of the cultural values of mankind would be simply like 
 the grow1:h and disappearance of the flowers in the field. 
 Instead of an education of humanity to a higher and higher 
 aim, we should see only a planless up and down. Every in- 
 dividual life would then ultimately be meaningless, and it 
 would be meaningless to serve a party, a profession, a nation, 
 and mankind, inasmuch as we serve them in order to fulfil 
 their meaning. But that cannot be, because, as we saw, pro- 
 gress always leads from the personal to the over-personal, 
 regress from the over-personal to the personal. The over- 
 personal, just because it does not refer to one or another 
 chance individual, figures as an incomparably greater power 
 of self-conservation and impressiveness. The personal has 
 a haphazard character; it is carried only by the single will, it 
 has no strength to propagate itself and to suggest itself to the 
 neighbor and to the fellow-world. All progress therefore leads 
 to something which in itself has the strength to hold its own, 
 all regress leads to something which must soon disappear 
 again because it has no strength of propagation as it is a 
 merely individual affair. The outcome of the whole interplay 
 of progressive and regressive movements must therefore be 
 after all increase in the power of progress. The regress is
 
 294 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 ultimately always only an individual personal desertion from 
 values. Progi'ess, on the other hand, creates new values 
 which propagate beyond the creator, and which are gained 
 for the community, never to be lost. If a new truth is dis- 
 covered, others may come who leave it unnoticed and go 
 backward, but the discovery itself is gained, and will touch 
 other souls which can rise to the understanding of that value. 
 If high art has found the perfect expression of unity for a 
 piece of the world, its beauty may become for a declining time 
 a mere low enjoyment of the senses, but others will come who 
 will be overwhelmed by the power of this unity and who will 
 rise to the apprehension of this over-personal value. The 
 same holds in a similar way for law and morality, for economy 
 and state, for religion and philosophy. The regress there 
 always has something chance-like and can be eliminated : the 
 progress always has an element of indestructibility because 
 all progress creates values which as such hold for every one 
 at any place and at any time. The sand of the deserts may 
 cover old civilizations, but their inmost spirit must always be 
 left to the great forward movement of history. Only the 
 externals crumbled when their time had passed. This pro- 
 gress can never reach an end. Every new value opens new 
 tasks which at first appeal to the personal will, and only in 
 the struggles of history can be led towards an over-personal 
 solution. Every pure value is complete in itself, and yet in 
 the evaluating subject every new value posits a new situation 
 of will which demands a new equilibrium and which therefore 
 leads beyond itself. In this way not only the ultimate goal 
 of the progress of mankind is an endlessly unattainable ideal, 
 but each partial development, too, carries in itself infinite 
 opportunities. 
 
 C. — SELF-DEVELOPMENT 
 
 The inner world, too, knows its otherness and the disap- 
 pearance of that which is given. We have discussed the log-
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 295 
 
 ically valuable self -conservation of the inner world ; it gave us 
 the connections of reason. We further considered the given 
 experiences of the inner world with reference to their unity ; 
 there we found the aesthetic value of happiness. Now we 
 stand before the self which is to shape its experiences : when is 
 the change in the inner world and its becoming absolutely 
 valuable and accordingly a true development? But we must 
 emphasize at once one point which will be of decisive import- 
 ance for us later. The valuable self-realization is at first not 
 at all morally valuable. The conception of morality must be 
 held back for that cultural value in which the valuable self- 
 realization becomes a conscious goal, and in which accord- 
 ingly the deed becomes a real achievement. At first the self- 
 development is a pure value of naive life and no purposive 
 deed of civilization. It develops itself with reference to pur- 
 posive tasks, but however manifold the goals may be, the pur- 
 posive raising of the own self to become a value is at first not 
 itself one of the goals. As soon as we proceed to the value of 
 morality, we shall recognize the opposite. The valuable self- 
 realization then becomes the conscious purpose. 
 
 The way to the acknowledgment of the naive life-value of 
 self -development lies clear before us. All shaping of our inner 
 world must be a transition from that which is given to that 
 which is not yet given. This transition must be valuable if 
 it fulfils a will which is necessarily involved in that which is 
 given. If our conscious inner experience is of such a kind that 
 we cannot conceive it at all otherwise than with a certain 
 will which we acknowledge without reference to our individ- 
 ual desires, the fulfilment must satisfy us in an over-personal 
 way and yield us an absolute value. But we know already the 
 will which necessarily belongs to every inner world which is to 
 be acknowledged as such. It is the one will which we recog- 
 nized as the fundamental will of our personality, the will that 
 our inner experience is not only a dream, but has its self- 
 asserting reality and thus belongs to a real world. Our own
 
 296 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 or any other self, which as an " I" stands as against a " thou," 
 is to be more than a haphazard piece of mere experience, 
 and is to have an independent significance and meaning. The 
 true question is then : If the self is to have an own meaning, 
 what is the not-given towards which the given self-experi- 
 ence necessarily aims — aims as the blossom in nature aims 
 towards the fruit, as uncivilization in mankind aims towards 
 civilization? 
 
 But we must keep clearly in mind what that I really is 
 whose possible progress and regress comes in question. That 
 I is certainly not the whole content of consciousness in a 
 psychological sense. The idea of the outer world and the de- 
 mand of the fellow-world are enclosed in that psychological 
 mental experience just as much as the perception of the self. 
 The I of which we are speaking can be only that will by which 
 we take attitudes. The aim for the transitions of this I can 
 always be only again a new will. The given will may be di- 
 rected towards a content which is not yet given, but the real- 
 ization of that content and the arising of pleasure do not 
 change the I and do not bring it forward or backward. By 
 the fulfilment of a will which is directed towards a content, 
 the I becomes neither expanded nor reenforced. That which 
 the self must will in order to affirm by the fulfilment of this 
 will its own meaning must therefore necessarily refer to its 
 own willing. That means the self wills to develop its own will- 
 ing, wills to unfold and strengthen its own volitions, and 
 yet always remain in unity with itself. 
 
 This is indeed the only possible change in the I which can be 
 valuable, because it is the fulfilment of the only possible plan 
 by which the I can get self-dependent meaning. If it does not 
 will to remain in unity with itself, if it wills that its own voli- 
 tions are no unfoldings and reenforcements of the experienced 
 own will, it ceases to be a self and becomes a meaningless 
 series. If the I is to be conceived with reference to its own 
 valuable changes, the unfolding of the will which remains
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 297 
 
 loyal to itself is the only possible goal for it, and only a transi- 
 tion in this direction can have the value of development. We 
 must again separate the different stages as we did in the social 
 development. The first demand will be that the single voli- 
 tions which compose the work of our day shall not be in con- 
 tradiction to each other. The self develops itself in every new 
 deed to new volitions which are in harmony with the given 
 ones, and manifests the purpose of the given I by new ex- 
 pressions. If we were to classify the millionfold will-efforts, 
 we should say that here belongs everything which results 
 from patience and assiduity and eagerness, from self-mod- 
 eration and courage. Everywhere the old will becomes un- 
 folded and carried out in new volitions which have the same 
 tendencies and direction. In another way the same end is 
 reached by modesty, by contentment, by humbleness of 
 mind. They can make the will remain in unity with itself be- 
 cause from the start they do not allow the will to turn to the 
 unattainable. But we emphasized that, in all this, no virtue, 
 no duty, no conscience, no obligation, no morality, is in 
 question, but only a choice according to free inclination. To 
 be contented and assiduous and brave and industrious are 
 qualities which the individual develops in his inner world in 
 accordance with his disposition. They are given not other- 
 wise than artistic talent or mathematical faculties, a gay 
 mood or a loving heart. He who is industrious by nature 
 does not constantly have to fight against his laziness by a 
 moral achievement; he who is frugal does not struggle in 
 moral strife with avarice; the courageous man goes bravely 
 on his way without being at all tempted by cowardice. 
 
 The same holds true for all the inclinations and tendencies 
 in which the new will remains not only in unity with the orig- 
 inal, but unfolds it with reenforced energy. The desire for 
 higher culture, for solid achievement, for creative deeds be- 
 longs here. The whole personality comes to richer expression, 
 and yet it always remains only a joj^ul self-realization which
 
 298 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 cannot expect any special estimation of such achievement. 
 But the new must always really lie in the plan of the old if we 
 are to recognize the development as such at all. If rich know- 
 ledge should sink into our mind as in a dream, so that we 
 could suddenly and without mediation take attitude towards 
 the whole world, or if a sublime artistic work could be created 
 by us without any previous inclination on our part to such 
 artistic rendering, the transition would have no value of 
 development. It would not be a becoming, not a progress, 
 but a sudden disappearance of one state in favor of an un- 
 prepared other state. We ourselves are growing in our edu- 
 cation and culture because the expanded mental horizon 
 grew before our eyes, and the new attitude is felt by us as 
 a development of the preceding tentative apprehension. The 
 artistic deed is ours not because we know and could explain 
 how we have performed it, but because it is an expression of 
 our leaning and of our intentions. Self -conservation, self- 
 realization, self-reenforcement, must set in, in order that 
 transition from the given to the new volition may become a 
 true progress for the inner world. Every counter-movement, 
 then, signifies regress. If the will is lost because we are lazy 
 or cowardly or without patience, if the power is wasted and 
 the interest wanders fugitively from one thing to the other, 
 if the faculties are unused, and if high plans are crumbling 
 and the self stands before the world without task, then the 
 value of self-development is sacrificed. 
 
 Yet this practical realization of the intended volition repre- 
 sents after all only the first step of the valuable self-develop- 
 ment. A contemptible inclination and even a criminal voli- 
 tion may also grow in us and the superficial conditions of a 
 valuable development then seem fulfilled too. But it is quite 
 different. The growth and change were really valuable for us 
 only when they were the fulfilment of an intention which we 
 willed and felt as necessary when we apperceived the self. 
 The criminal volition may grow, but we cannot apperceive
 
 THE VALUES OF DEVELOPMENT 299 
 
 a self in such a way that the growth of the destroying will 
 itself becomes aim of the volition. We cannot apperceive 
 it in this way because such an intention would be inhibited 
 by that reasonable fundamental will which we recognized 
 in the deepest layer of every human soul, inasmuch as it 
 made the man a man. We cannot conceive a self otherwise 
 than as having the will for a self -asserting world at its deepest 
 bottom, and that means that it really wills that which is 
 absolutely valuable. That involves that if the subject should 
 be able to unfold himself fully, he could not have satisfaction 
 in the error, in the ugly, in the discord, in the misery, in the 
 regress, in the crime, in the sin, and his satisfaction would 
 be transformed into disgust. We cannot conceive a subject 
 without this fundamental will to the absolute values, because 
 we saw that this affirmation of the absolute values was no- 
 thing else but the affirmation of a world which asserts itself, 
 and we cannot acknowledge any subject as subject at all who 
 does not will to share with us a world. He becomes a subject 
 for us only by aflEirming the world, and that means by de- 
 manding ultimately absolute values. 
 
 The inner life which is controlled by criminal and sinful 
 will may thus appear on the surface as if it expressed the 
 meaning of its personality even by reenforcing the anti- 
 valuable volitions. But the fact that we must necessarily 
 demand from every subject who does not become for us an 
 irresponsible insane person or a beast the fundamental affirma- 
 tion of the values makes such a surface view impossible. The 
 will to the negation of the values may be felt and found at 
 any time as the particular state or trait of an individual, but 
 can never be understood as his deepest meaning, and its 
 fulfilment and reenforcement can therefore never express the 
 self-development of the personality. The question of what 
 in the individual person has to be conserved and to be re- 
 enforced in order that his personal aim may gain the pure 
 value of real self -development thus ultimately depends upon
 
 300 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 that general will of reason without which we cannot acknow- 
 ledge any subject as a self. Man therefore finds his true value 
 of self-development only when the particular will which 
 grows in him is in harmony with the ideals of his reason, that 
 is, with his demand for the self-assertion of the world. And 
 this demand includes the totality of the logical, aesthetic, 
 ethical, and metaphysical values. To be the bearer of these 
 values is the noblest meaning of life. Life alone gives the 
 possibility of this self-expression, this self-unfolding, this 
 self-reenforcement through the self-directing will. To think 
 low of life, to play with life, or to throw it away therefore 
 means negation of the absolutely valid value of self-develop- 
 ment. It is characteristic of a low state of society and of low 
 character in the personality. On the other hand, to estimate 
 the life merely for its pleasures' sake means to draw it down 
 from the height of the over-personal to the chance life, which 
 is nothing but just experience. Only as bearer of the develop- 
 ment towards the pure valuation, life's content becomes more 
 than a personal experience and enjoyment, becomes itself 
 independent, self-asserting, a value. Life and the develop- 
 ment of its energies to the highest purposes are therefore ab- 
 solutely valuable. And nothing is taken away from this pure 
 value if we must yet insist that the mere ascent of life is not 
 a value of achievement, and that its endlessly valuable self- 
 realization still remains outside of the morally good and the 
 morally bad.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 The values of existence completed themselves in the scientific 
 values of connections, the values of unity demanded their 
 elaboration in the values of artistic beauty : in the same way 
 the values of development must lead on to the values of 
 achievement. In each case the first were given immediately 
 in naive life, the others were created in a conscious purposive 
 effort of civilization. Outer world, fellow-world, and inner 
 world are filled with the tendencies which lead them to the 
 goals of development, but only that intentional purposive 
 elaboration of values which we call civilization secures the 
 achievements of industry, of law, of morality. 
 
 Development, too, as we saw, exists only where a becoming 
 begins through a free deed. The world, seen from the point of 
 view of causal connection, knows changes but no develop- 
 ment ; effects result, but they are not better than the causes. 
 Transpositions as such cannot be ennobling. We often hear 
 the careless opprobrium that the great historians recognized 
 the "ideas" in the development of the nations, but that they 
 did not sufficiently demonstrate what the causes of those 
 ideas were and which effects came from them. But that is a 
 confusion. When the world, the social or the natural one, is 
 considered causally, it is not controlled by ideas ; and when it 
 is conceived as animated by ideas, then we have chosen a 
 standpoint from which the question of causes and effects is as 
 meaningless as the question of its fifth dimension. Develop- 
 ment in the world is possible only where there is inner free- 
 dom for the unfolding deed. In the causal system that which
 
 302 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 arises anew is conceived as already completely determined in 
 the totality of the given, and thus ultimately nothing new. 
 Only from the standpoint of development does the becoming 
 lead to something new which is inaugurated by a free deed, 
 and which exists in the given only as a goal and a purpose. 
 In this realm of freedom we saw the uncausal outer world 
 move towards its goal, and we recognized that its goal is its 
 suitability and efficiency for the purposes of man. In the same 
 way we saw the fellow-world moving towards its goal and 
 recognized that its only possible goal was the over-personal 
 generality of its will. And finally we saw the individual in its 
 inner world move towards its goal, and the goal was the unfold- 
 ing of its real will. All these goals were necessary ones. We 
 recognized that they must be conceived as belonging to the 
 will of those worlds, if outer world, fellow-world, and inner 
 world are to have a meaning at all. But because these aims 
 had to be conceived as necessarily posited with the inde- 
 pendent apperception of the world, therefore the fulfilment 
 of those purposes must be absolutely valuable. This value is 
 absolute because it must hold for every one who is to think 
 a world as such at all. On the other hand, no one can be 
 acknowledged as a subject who does not agree in this demand 
 for a self-asserting world, but who is satisfied with experi- 
 encing it as a dream and a chaos. It is therefore absolutely 
 valuable that the seed becomes the nourishing fruit, that the 
 tribe becomes a responsible nation, that the pupil becomes 
 a mature man. And yet this transition, however valuable, is 
 never consciously aimed at on account of its value. 
 
 We cannot think the immature without recognizing the 
 aim towards maturity as its meaning. But the boy who 
 grows through that valuable development and becomes a 
 unified personaHty is not himself moved by the will to become 
 mature and to pass through an absolutely valuable develop- 
 ment. He simply has the desire to unfold himself. And it is 
 the same with the fellow-world. Not the development itself
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 303 
 
 is intended, but the task of the day. The development comes 
 in this sense by itself and unintended. Only he who evaluates 
 the transition compares the meaning of the beginning with 
 the final end, and recognizes in the fruit the purpose of the 
 seed and in the empire the aim of the warrior tribe. The own 
 value is nowhere at first felt as a real task. He who creates 
 evaluates only his work, but not the creation of his work. 
 Development is objectively valuable, but for the subject who 
 develops himself, his own state is not in question as a 
 value. 
 
 Here begins the new group of cultural achievements. The 
 task of the development can be secured and reenforced by 
 intentional purposive effort. The natural progress of outer 
 world, fellow-world, and inner world can be protected against 
 inhibition and reenforced against obstacles by the artificial 
 work which we call civilization. The social group which ap- 
 proaches its goal with the own intention to upbuild values, 
 the individual who consciously works towards the realization 
 of his ideal plan of self-development, are no longer chance 
 bearers of values. They really perform an action in order that 
 the value may become realized. Then only we have an 
 achievement, then only estimation and appreciation are de- 
 manded, then only the self-realization of the world reaches its 
 highest goal. The situations in the three large fields of outer 
 world, fellow-world, and inner world are here so different that 
 it may be more useful to divide the consideration from the 
 start and to follow up this purposive development for the 
 three fields separately. But in spite of this separation, the 
 fundamental uniformity of all these values of achievement 
 ought to appear. Yes, just here it may become evident how 
 only the systematic deduction of the values allows us to 
 recognize their mutual relations. For instance, the law of 
 the fellow-world and the morality of the inner world offer 
 a similarity which is too easily hidden. At first we have to 
 ask for the purposive achievement of nature.
 
 304 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 A. — INDUSTRY 
 
 In the philosophical household, economy has always been 
 the Cinderella. When her more fortunate sisters, richly 
 adorned, drove to the dance, she was scolded and had to sit 
 at home in the kitchen. And yet if the young prince ever could 
 see her — It is curious indeed, and yet on the other hand 
 easily understood how little idealistic philosophy has taken 
 care of economy and industry. Truth and beauty, morality 
 and law and religion, are eternal values which uplift strug- 
 gling mankind, but commerce and trade, manufacturing and 
 consumption, are low functions which pull down the human 
 soul. Without value in themselves, they are tolerated only 
 to satisfy the needs of man. The god in man creates the moral 
 and the true and the beautiful, but the hungry and freezing 
 animal in man creates economy, from the harvest and the 
 chase of the savage to the mills and the stock exchange of a 
 tamer generation. To create pure values means to lift one's self 
 above the mere economic labor, and the philosopher whose 
 eye turns to the ideals of world-development has no reason 
 to waste his interest trading and marketing and egotistic 
 earning. All that has seemed such a matter of course that 
 it hardly needed a special argument. It seemed sufficient 
 simply to banish the industrial life from the realm of philo- 
 sophy. 
 
 This scornful attitude, of course, did not exclude the 
 philosopher of history from always giving serious attention 
 to the economic side of social existence. Often even especial 
 emphasis was put on the economic foundations of the histor- 
 ical development. The materialistic view of history finally 
 saw in the industrial life not only an important part, but the 
 decisive basis of all social forms and changes. But whether 
 the economic conditions have determined the historical 
 development, or whether the political, the intellectual, the 
 moral interests, had an equally strong influence, the ideal
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 305 
 
 worthlessness of the economic factor is not changed by that 
 in any case. The realistic historian of civilization may con- 
 sider the economic factors as the essential ones, and may yet 
 estimate their intrinsic value no higher than the idealist. It 
 remains for him, too, merely the material metabolism of the 
 social body which lies at the bottom of the really valuable 
 mental life. The philosopher and the historian may disagree 
 as to whether the mental goods have only relative historical 
 character, or whether they have, as we demand, an absolute 
 value which unfolds itself in the historical world. But they 
 are accustomed to agree that the technical industry is not at 
 all valuable in itself, and has only indirect value by its relation 
 to the social, political, intellectual, legal, and moral goods. 
 Ultimately it all refers to the fact that the impulse of the 
 market is the own selfish interest. Such greediness of gain 
 represents almost a mental antithesis to the unselfish devo- 
 tion to the eternal goods. Everything w^hich enters into in- 
 dustry and economy thus becomes almost a pure anti-value. 
 The inferiority of the economic life has also been recently 
 demonstrated with emphasis without reference to those 
 mental motives, but rather with reference to the character 
 of the product. It has been claimed that the value of human 
 creations must be graded in accordance with the influence 
 which they exert. The highest value belongs to that which 
 has the strongest and widest and most lasting importance for 
 the development of mankind. But every human work has the 
 more prospect of exerting influence beyond the space and 
 time of its origin, the more easily it can be detached from the 
 conditions of its becoming, and that means after all, the more 
 spiritual it is. Religion and philosophy therefore represent 
 the highest values, and science and art and morality come 
 very near to them. Finally, state and law and social order are 
 found at a considerable distance because they are much less 
 fit to be carried over to other conditions, and as the last in the 
 series there comes the economic life. It belongs to the soil in
 
 306 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 which it grew; it has in a way low earthy character. The 
 peoples themselves may be graded thus in their value for 
 civilization. A nation stands the higher the more it has 
 created for the spiritual goods, and the lower the more its 
 work has been directed towards the economic life only. 
 
 But can this really be the last word? It may be doubtful 
 anyhow whether the possibility of becoming detached from 
 its surroundings is really decisive for the lasting influence of a 
 cultural achievement. But in any case we should have to ask 
 this question only for the inner meaning and content of the 
 work, not for the work in its external characteristics. Tem- 
 ples and palaces are certainly not detachable from the soil on 
 which a people has erected them, but the style of architecture 
 which characterized such works of stone may become detached 
 and propagated over the globe. The Greek temples could not 
 be moved, but the order of their columns has wandered 
 further and has lasted longer than the religion for the worship 
 of which those temples had been built. Might it not also hold 
 of industry that its material content may be bound to the 
 soil, but its meaning and spirit may be movable, detachable, 
 and may exert influence at a far distance? It would then even 
 externally fulfil the conditions which are claimed for true 
 culture. Is not the spirit in which the economic life is con- 
 ducted as different from tribe to tribe, from nation to nation, 
 from age to age, as the spirit in which temples are built and 
 scientific systems are created? Chinese and Japanese art 
 stand much nearer to each other than Japanese and Chinese 
 business ideas and economic views. Romanic and Anglo- 
 Saxon economic life are filled with an entirely different mean- 
 ing. If we really want to examine the possibility of propaga- 
 tion, we certainly must ask how far this characteristic spirit 
 can become detached and can realize itself in new spheres. 
 
 But with this we have already touched the point the neg- 
 lect of which has led to such one-sidedness in the valuation 
 of the economic life. Not only the economic form but the
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 307 
 
 inner spirit of the economic life can be as different as the dif- 
 ferent stages of morality and law, of science and art. Indus- 
 try, too, can be brought under an ideal aspect, while the only 
 view of economic life which has so far always formed the 
 background of the evaluating history of civilization has been 
 a low, almost a hostile one. How would it have been if the 
 philosophy of values had always been treated only in a puri- 
 tanical community, in which the fine arts and worldly music 
 were perhaps counted as sins against the demands of the 
 church, and in the best case as mere sensual enjoyment of 
 the eyes and as a low feast of the ears ? Such a community 
 would then take it as self-evident that art only serves ego- 
 tistic desires and has no position in the circle of the absolute 
 values. Art might then perhaps be placed even below eco- 
 nomy, as the selfish desires for the satisfaction of economic 
 needs are at least posited by nature itself, while the longing 
 for mere tickling of the nerves by art is a superfluous aber- 
 ration. And yet that would be the same art which by its 
 over-personal value of beauty forms the inexhaustible enjoy- 
 ment of unpuritanical mankind. 
 
 May not the work of industry and economy to an equal 
 degree allow of different interpretations ? It may be looked on 
 with the narrowness of those who recognize there only the 
 satisfaction of low instincts, and it may be considered with 
 the wide view of those who recognize there too a highest 
 absolute value. The philosophy of values has no right simply 
 to accept that low confused view in which the pure valuation 
 has not found its historical unfolding, but has to see the value 
 with the eyes of those who have the vision of its over-personal 
 content. It is entirely natural that in philosophy the narrow- 
 hearted aspect of economic life has prevailed. The standard 
 of the values was chosen by philosophical thinkers, and yet 
 at all times the spirit of scholarly research finds its best energy 
 in a certain opposition to the impulses which control the life 
 of the market. Let the world all around pursue the earthly
 
 308 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 treasures ; the thinker follows the ideals of knowledge unin- 
 fluenced by gold, and he almost instinctively arms himself 
 for his calling by a condescending aspect towards lucrative 
 labor. He may devote indefatigable care to the investigation 
 of economic facts, and yet while his special calling is the in- 
 quiry into economic life, he may couple the highest estimation 
 of his calling with the lowest estimation of its material. How- 
 ever important industry may appear to him, he may yet con- 
 sider it as a low function of life. 
 
 But if we want to understand art, we must see it with the 
 eyes of the true artist. If we want to understand the economic 
 life, we must look on it from the point of view of the captain 
 of industry and with the spirit of those who have opened new 
 paths to the economic life of the nations. If we observe the 
 economic factors, wherever the commercial and industrial 
 life find their proudest development in the various ages, we 
 must feel that egotistic greediness has been on the whole only 
 the small coin in the market, but that all great transitions 
 and developments demanded very different impulses. To 
 create, and to create with the whole soul for that wonderful 
 work of the economic development is the desire and the am- 
 bition of the true worker. The gain is estimated because it 
 indicates that the problem is solved, that the conquest is com- 
 pleted, and that which is earned is used again for a new pro- 
 gress. To take part in the work, to toil for the enterprise, is the 
 joy of life. In pioneer days it comes to its most enthusiastic 
 expression. Young and old, poor and rich, are joined by the 
 one feeling that it is a gigantic work which they are to build 
 up together. To open a land, to make the desert fertile, to dig 
 out the treasures of the soil and to send the works of industry 
 over the globe, to awaken in the millions new and ever new 
 demands, to satisfy them in a million ways — that is an 
 inspiration and an ideal which stands, in the feeling of the 
 worker, not lower than justice and freedom and truth and 
 morality. Where one blade grew and two are now growing.
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 309 
 
 where one railroad track went through the valley and now 
 two are built, where one chimney smoked and now a thousand 
 testify to useful labor, there an absolutely valid progress has 
 been secured by which the world has become more valuable. 
 And such a noble view of economic life is detachable from 
 the soil as well as art and philosophy ; it can spread and has 
 always spread at the periods of the golden ages of industry. 
 As soon as the economic life is penetrated by such enthusiastic 
 feeling, it is not difficult to recognize in it that which con- 
 stitutes the true value which is common to all industrial 
 activity. But then it becomes indifferent whether such an 
 absolutely valuable process connects itself in the practical 
 world with low or with high motives, just as the eternal value 
 of truth is not touched by the question whether the individual 
 misuses knowledge for selfish ends or perhaps even for con- 
 temptible purposes. That which stands for decision is only 
 the problem whether the economic progress is in itself a pure 
 value independent of the question of how far the conscious 
 appreciation of this value has unfolded itself in the historical 
 development of society. But all this connects the considera- 
 tion of industry with our study of the values of develop- 
 ment. 
 
 In discussing the development of nature, we recognized 
 clearly that the nature of the naturalist, the nature of mathe- 
 matical physics, does not know any progress, and that its 
 transformations are without value. But that did not exclude 
 the fact, as we saw that the true outer world has its purposes, 
 its aims, its values. We saw that the outer world, in which 
 and with which we live, at first had not entered into the 
 thought-forms of causal science. In the life-contact with the 
 willing man the outer world is only means and obstacle and 
 material for our purposes. A real own meaning of nature only 
 shows when it adjusts itself to the human purposes, when it 
 helps the purposive will of man, and only the change towards 
 this goal appeared to us as a true growth and development.
 
 310 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 As soon as we have liberated ourselves from the one-sidedness 
 of the causal sciences, — of course without in the least touch- 
 ing by it the unlimited right of the natural sciences in their 
 own circle, — nothing can hinder us from proceeding in 
 exactly the same direction towards new values. 
 
 The true no-remodelled nature wills to serve man — not 
 man in the petty personal selfish meaning, but in the abso- 
 lutely valid rational sense. The outer world remains without 
 significance when this deepest relation to mankind is not 
 conceived with it, and if instead of it the world of indifferent 
 atoms is substituted for the world of natural experience. As 
 soon as this direction of the outer world is recognized, we see 
 the necessary goal of the work of civilization. A conscious 
 effort must be made to help nature in the fulfilment of its 
 intention, to secure, to reenforce, and to strengthen without 
 limit the progress towards this ideal. That is the meaning of 
 industry and economy. Just as the conscious labor of the 
 arts alone can complete that aim of the outer world towards 
 inner unity which manifests itself in the beauty of nature, 
 in the same way the desire for development in nature com- 
 pletes itself only in the industrial life. 
 
 The outer world aims to serve the purposes of man. Every 
 step forward must therefore necessarily be determined both 
 by the given world and by the ever new human purposes. 
 Both must remain in steady correlation. Economy is always 
 a system of natural goods serving the human community. 
 We do not say, as it has been said, that economy is a human 
 community served by a system of natural goods. The differ- 
 ence seems small and yet it is fundamental for us. As soon 
 as only the social community, with its wishes and needs and 
 satisfactions, is in question, everything moves in the circle 
 of the merely historical : there are no absolute values. But if 
 the goods themselves, if nature in its purposive adjustment 
 is conceived as the real content of economy, the way is open 
 to estimate economy also as pure value. The community
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 311 
 
 which satisfies its hunger and protects itself against the cli- 
 mate, or which, many stages higher, gathers together the 
 treasures of the globe by steamers and railroads to enjoy life, 
 fulfils only personal purposes. But the nature which nour- 
 ishes and protects man, and in endless transformation distrib- 
 utes itself everywhere in order to fulfil the human purposes, 
 really offers an over-personal value. For those who can see 
 the outer world only through the spectacles of the naturalist, 
 this difference falls away. If nature is meaningless and dead, 
 nature cannot have any task and purpose, and only the man 
 who uses nature can interest us. If we start from man, we 
 can have only personal valuations. But if we start from 
 nature, we reach the over-personal value because everything 
 is now based on the fact that nature fulfils its only thinkable 
 task. This fulfilment must satisfy every one who recognizes 
 the meaning of nature at all, and we saw that every one who 
 wills a world must sympathize with and apprehend this 
 intention of nature. As it is the will shared by every one 
 whom we can acknowledge as a subject at all, its fulfilment 
 has over-personal value. 
 
 It is the same difference as that between the merely agree- 
 able and the truly beautiful. If it were merely the satisfaction 
 of the human needs seen from the point of view of the will 
 of man, every economic change would be only an effort for 
 the personal satisfaction of ourselves and of our neighbors. 
 But the mere comfort cannot be a source of pure values, and 
 it makes no difference whether, after the fashion of the sav- 
 ages, the comfort is secured by a few cocoanuts picked from 
 the next tree, or whether a hundred thousand hands are 
 necessary to bring the pleasures of a life of luxury to the mod- 
 ern city man. And where there is no valid ideal, enthusiasm 
 has no point. Economic labor then remains on that low level 
 which is controlled by pleasure and pain. But everything 
 is changed at once when the demand of nature itself is in 
 question. Now it becomes a task to awaken the slumbering
 
 312 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 desire in the outer world, to lead nature's faint will by helpful 
 human work to fuller and fuller success, and finally to bring 
 to fulfilment that which must be accomplished as the neces- 
 sary general task of nature. Now the real meaning is no 
 longer related to pleasure and displeasure. Of course it may 
 also belong to the tasks of nature to spread pleasure and to 
 eliminate pain, but the real purpose of the economic develop- 
 ment is then not this pleasure but the fulfilment of this mis- 
 sion'of nature. By that truly an ideal is posited, and to serve 
 it in devotion becomes a pure goal of the work of civilization. 
 Then it is a dignified duty for noblest enthusiasm to help in 
 order that slumbering nature may awake and perfect itself 
 just as the seed develops into the fruit. Whoever contributes 
 to the economic life of his time in such a spirit reaches an 
 idealistic achievement even if he only tills the field or steers 
 the ship, sells his wares or hammers the iron. In truth and 
 beauty and morality, too, he who serves faithfully is but sel- 
 dom called to perform the great and decisive deed. The task 
 of the hour may be small, but its idealistic content is not 
 diminished by that. The world is too easily inclined to con- 
 fuse the contrast between materialistic and idealistic feeling 
 at work with the contrast between material and not-material 
 means of work. As the business man has to deal with material 
 things, every idealistic value is disclaimed for his labor, while 
 the intellectual work is easily recognized as idealistic. But 
 that is misleading. The work with not-material stuff can 
 have very selfish materialistic motives. Even in science and 
 art and law and religion, many a man without ideals serves 
 professionally from materialistic motives, and on the other 
 hand the purest idealism may control the simplest economic 
 deed. The only decisive question is whether the act was per- 
 formed from self-seeking motives or from a devoted belief 
 in the absolute value of that which is to be done. Whoever 
 recognizes or at least dimly feels that in industry, too, a great 
 unlimited world task is performed will cooperate in this
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 313 
 
 gigantic work with unselfish devotion just as the true artist 
 or scholar or judge or minister may work in his place. 
 
 This pure valuation of the economic progress must not be 
 mixed up with that pride with which the man of civilization 
 gladly looks on his growing technical mastery over the ener- 
 gies of nature. The one has nothing to do with the other. 
 This triumph of applied physics and chemistry is admired 
 there entirely as scientific achievement. Not the progress of 
 nature, but the overcoming of nature, satisfies such ambition. 
 The labor which overcomes all hindrances is in question there 
 not as an economic but as a scientific value. When the bridge 
 is built and the tunnel pierced and the wireless message sent 
 over the ocean, this proud feeling of progress of the positivist 
 turns directly to the thinker whose calculations were so 
 splendidly confirmed. Not nature made the progress, but 
 society with its deeds of thought. It is a philistine pride of 
 the ages of enlightenment. Nature is still without rights, 
 without will, without purpose, in slavery. 
 
 But as soon as the chains of slavery are broken, in order 
 that nature may be estimated in its own will and that human 
 effort may be understood as a cooperation with nature, then 
 technical science itself enters into a new relation. The free 
 will of nature remains dominant. Without it the outer world 
 and all industry and economy would be without own mean- 
 ing and value, but where nature is turning towards a goal 
 which is important for man, the cooperation becomes possi- 
 ble only when the transition from the given to the desired can 
 be completely understood. And only this transition awakes 
 the human interest, which slowly grows into the theories of 
 science. Thus economy does not find the one mechanical 
 nature of the physicist in which the atoms have been moving 
 for trillions of years without purpose in accordance with 
 causal laws in the universe. Economy rather finds a nature 
 which works with us and the meaning of which lies in its 
 intention to fulfil the purposes of the willing men. Only in the
 
 314 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 interest of this cooperation does the causal interpretation 
 produce the conceptional vision of the useless world mech- 
 anism. Economy is thus not included in physics, but physics, 
 as far as it becomes technical, is a part of economics. Nature 
 in a way accepts the physical form as soon as it is willing to 
 enter into cooperation with man, because only in this form 
 can it be determined beforehand and therefore can combine 
 its activity with the purposes of the thinking men. 
 
 As soon as this unity between nature and man has been 
 reached, the activity of man himself becomes a part of the 
 nature which unfolds itself with reference to its purpose. The 
 things of the outer world are then filled with the energy of 
 the laboring men. Nature in a way absorbs there the muscle 
 work of the human being. Whether the hand works or the 
 electrical machine, whether the arm or the steam engine lifts 
 the weight, whether the feet or the electric wire carry the 
 message, makes by principle no difference for the economic 
 success. Everything is determined in this way by the will of 
 man, but the outer world aims towards the common purpose 
 by its own energy in its natural development, and, absorbing 
 the forces of man, nature pushes forward to the highest cul- 
 tural achievements of industry. At every point of the human 
 development nature stands ready to make its goods a unity 
 with the will of man and so to produce economic goods. From 
 the fruit on the next tree and the fish in the next brook which 
 satisfy the primitive man, the way leads forward to our world 
 of economy in which the tea-plant of China and the sugar-cane 
 of Cuba and the silver-mines of Nevada and the porcelain of 
 Germany and the flax of Ireland and hundreds of other gifts 
 of nature must be developed and detached until our tea-table 
 tempts us. The fire flashed up and helped the human purpose, 
 the clay formed itself in the pottery, and corn and grain grew 
 in the scratched earth ; the stones, later the bronze, and soon 
 the iron moulded themselves into weapons and tools, and 
 every progress created unlimited new satisfactions and new
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 315 
 
 demands. Larger and larger became the masses of goods 
 which streamed together in order to serve man, more and 
 more varied their transformation, their elaboration, and 
 above all their mutual adjustment. The hollow tree which 
 satisfied the barbaric seafarer became the gigantic steamer 
 which carries thousands over the ocean, the sling of the 
 savage became the cannon, his hut of clay grew into the 
 cathedral with its dome and into the skyscraper, his signs 
 on the bark of a tree became the newspaper which carries to 
 millions the cabled news of the whole globe, the fire in his 
 cave became the electric arc-light which drains its energy 
 from the waterfall miles distant, his garment of skins became 
 the costume in which the cotton of America and the wool 
 of Europe and the silk of Asia and the diamonds of Africa 
 were brought together; but simple or endlessly complex, 
 everything is a part of that nature which helps to fulfil the 
 purpose of mankind. 
 
 Of course the modelling of nature into useful tools and the 
 fusing of the goods does not alone reach the goal of nature. 
 That which the mines and the fields and the mills may pro- 
 duce must be distributed, and must flow through millions 
 of channels to get where it reaches the human will which it 
 aims to satisfy. Here begins the exchange and the market, 
 the buying and selling near and far. It is a meaningful spread- 
 ing and exchanging of places between the things of nature, 
 entirely different from the meaningless movements of the 
 natural atoms. The money is only one among these flowing 
 natural things, but for nearly five thousand years the domin- 
 ant one. By its neutral exchange- value and its possibility of 
 being conserved, the money can reenforce the service of na- 
 ture for the human will in an unlimited way. But even when 
 in the midst of a developed financial system the check of the 
 millionaire can be exchanged for goods with which whole 
 tribes might satisfy their needs, it remains after all a piece of 
 nature. In an almost magical way, it has absorbed into itself
 
 316 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 the effective powers of an endless manifoldness of natural 
 energies, but it still remains nature which serves mankind. 
 This economic artificial growth of nature demands such mani- 
 foldness of energies that it can never be sufficient for it to 
 fuse with the energy of a single human being. Division of 
 labor is necessary in order that nature may fulfil the task 
 of liberating its material, of moulding it, of elaborating it, 
 and of distributing it, from the lowest stage to the modern 
 swarming in the mills and the markets. 
 
 It is not essential for us to remind ourselves once more 
 of the well-known wonders of our world of economy, but only 
 to emphasize the absolutely valuable meaning of this move- 
 ment and its difference from the naked personal interest. 
 In every stage, in every form, the economic content is not 
 the society with its needs and its pleasures and pains, but the 
 content is nature with its absolutely valid purposes, the fulfil- 
 ment of which must be an absolute value. Yet it must be 
 especially emphasized that the value is never bound up with a 
 particular result of this economic development of nature. We 
 know that a single thing can never represent a pure value, 
 but that the valid value always refers to a relation between 
 two identical points. Whatever economy may reach as some- 
 thing completed and given, has no value at all, measured 
 by the absolute standard. It may satisfy demands, but then 
 it is only agreeable and useful, not absolutely valuable. Ab- 
 solutely valuable only is the development itself in which na- 
 ture fulfils its tasks, and in which, therefore, nature brings 
 about the identity between the goal which must be necessarily 
 conceived as belonging to it and the real fulfilment. Only this 
 relation of identity, this transition, this progress, is a true 
 value in economy. The lazy, careless will of the bushman 
 becomes satisfied by the fruits and beasts just as well as our 
 will is satisfied by the world of industry of the twentieth 
 century. Measured by mere personal satisfaction, the one is 
 no better than the other, and as source of such personal
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 317 
 
 comfort, neither one nor the other is valuable. But it is valu- 
 able that nature offers its gifts to such richer and richer will, 
 and remoulds its treasures with clear purpose into goods 
 which satisfy the ever new will and lead it to more and more 
 complex volitions. That is a deed comparable only to the 
 always new unfolding of science and art. Nature fulfils in 
 the light of consciousness its own task. That is the meaning 
 of industry and economy. And not the result but the free 
 deed of this fulfilment is an incomparable pure value, the self- 
 realization of the outer world. 
 
 B. — LAW 
 
 We saw that values arise whenever nature, community, 
 and self unfold themselves and fulfil the task which must be 
 necessarily conceived as their own. We called such free transi- 
 tion from intention to realization an absolutely valuable 
 development. We then asked as to the achievement of civil- 
 ization which secures and reenforces such development with 
 conscious purpose. For nature we found such achievement 
 in the economic work of industry. The next turn of the road 
 must therefore lead to the question whether the develop- 
 ment of the community, too, can be made a conscious pur- 
 pose. In the case of the community it may be difficult to 
 characterize by one single conception such an achievement 
 of civilization. Of course there are many possibilities to se- 
 cure and to reenforce the upward development of society. 
 And these possibilities are so manifold and so different that 
 it might appear artificial to render them in a simple formula. 
 It is evident, for instance, that education belongs there, that 
 every political reform has its place there, as well as many 
 other purposive acts which serve the true development of 
 the fellow- world. And yet one factor is fundamental and 
 central : it is law. Law, and the state as far as it serves the 
 law, offer the achievement sought in the safest and purest 
 way.
 
 318 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 We assert, then, that we find in law a new absolute value ; 
 but we do not forget that such a claim of absoluteness is for 
 the value of law perhaps more threatened by misunderstand- 
 ings than in any other field of values. The historic relativity 
 of the ideas of law appears as a matter of course. The ar- 
 bitrary legislative intrusion into the formation of law seems 
 a daily occurrence. Above all, the old-fashioned ideas of a 
 natural, eternal, higher, divine law seem so entirely abolished 
 that it appears almost reckless still to speak to-day of an ab- 
 solutely valid value of law. Yet we must look more carefully. 
 Is there really any possibility, in spite of the changing laws 
 of the Assyrians and the Romans, the Icelanders and the 
 Japanese, of proceeding to the one immutable eternal law? 
 Various ways seem to stand open. The legal statutes of 
 the nations are as manifold as their languages, but just be- 
 cause mankind proceeds in a continuous striving from a 
 lower to a higher legal life, we are sometimes assured that 
 every historic law can be taken only as the uncertain tenta- 
 tive effort to express the one eternal law of mankind which is 
 written in the stars. As the scientific theories of the ages 
 change, and yet beyond those striving imperfect theories the 
 one perfect truth remains immutable, in the same way the 
 absolutely valuable law is far superior to the law tablets of 
 Hammurabi or the penal code which a modern parliament 
 has laid down. Only pure reason can grasp this unwritten 
 eternal law. At all times a Platonizing idealism has postu- 
 lated such an over-historical, absolutely valuable law. 
 
 All this cannot tempt us. We now know surely that the 
 values which our critical philosophy is seeking are not hidden 
 in an over-reality which is inaccessible to our experience. 
 Truth, too, was for us not a ready-made completed ideal 
 structure beyond experience, but in our real true judgments 
 was lying the whole value of truth. And the necessity which 
 dominates beforehand our true judgments lies not in an 
 absolute beyond experience, but lies in the fundamental char-
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 319 
 
 acter of our ovvn will which necessarily seeks the identities. 
 The same holds true for every value : its only possible place 
 is in this world of life-experience. The form of every pos- 
 sible value is predetermined and independent of any arbi- 
 trariness, and therefore absolute; but it is predetermined 
 only by our own will, which constitutes our character as sub- 
 jects who have a world. It remains meaningless to seek the 
 absoluteness of the value in any relation of it to a metaphys- 
 ical beyondness. The outer world, the fellow-world, the inner 
 world, can satisfy our will or can violate it ; to seek absolute 
 values means to examine when this satisfaction has over- 
 personal meaning. But it is always satisfaction in this ex- 
 perienced world, and anything which holds for worlds 
 beyond experience must not throw even a faint glimmer 
 of light on our way ; that can only mislead us. With better 
 right even than the naturalist, we could assert that we do not 
 know another world than the world of experience, and every 
 reference to a super-world would not have given the firmness 
 of an absolute meaning to the values which we find, but by 
 principle would have destroyed them. All this cannot be dif- 
 ferent for the value of law. If there is anything absolutely 
 valuable at all in the sphere of law, it must be demonstrated 
 in the historical legal life. Even the ideal as far as it has not 
 been reached must take its whole meaning from the possible 
 formations of the given social community. 
 
 Those who in this way turn to the historical life of the 
 nations may perhaps seem tempted to seek the absolutely 
 valuable by sifting it from that which is accidental in the 
 historical forms. That which changes from nation to nation 
 must be perishable. But if we could find laws which return 
 everywhere, or if at least we could find certain lasting norms 
 of law, even if they are expressed in unequal formulations, 
 then we should after all have a certain stock of law com- 
 mon to all which might claim such superior value. Ethno- 
 logists, to be sure, would be skeptical about it from the be-
 
 320 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 ginning. The statutes show themselves everywhere so entirely 
 determined by the particular forms of society that at various 
 places and times not only different rules have been upheld, 
 but even practically opposite rules. But let us grant that 
 there exists some kind of law which can be uniformly found 
 wherever men separate right and wTong. The nearest ap- 
 proach to it would perhaps be: "Thou shalt not kill." Of 
 course every community has its exceptions. There is a wide- 
 spread right to kill the weak or the old members of the tribe, 
 and with us it is a right to kill enemies in a war or to kill the 
 degenerates as punishment for their crimes. But even if it 
 should hold without exception that the killing of man is 
 an absolute wrong, we should have to discriminate carefully 
 two aspects. On the one side it means that slaying is de- 
 tested, and on the other it means that this existing abhor- 
 rence is forced on the members of the community with com- 
 mon coercive measures. The question is whether it is this 
 forcing or that detesting which is to represent the value. 
 But it seems evident that the mere abhorrence for the mur- 
 derous deed does not at all represent law. Such an aver- 
 sion does not differ from other feelings which developed 
 themselves in the social community. Of course it may be 
 valuable that a disinclination for killing has developed in the 
 social life, but as such an emotion it remains only a value 
 of social development. The abhorrence for killing thus 
 stands at first on the same level with other inclinations and 
 disinclinations which are legally quite indifferent. The slay- 
 ing is detested just as the consumption of rotten food is de- 
 tested. It is an instinct which may protect the community, 
 but which has in itself no meaning of a legal value. There 
 may be superadded a moral value. It may be a matter of 
 conscience for the individual not to kill under any circum- 
 stances. But the moral value of this domination over an 
 impulse is of course again something different from the 
 value of law. The real value of law finds place only in that
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 321 
 
 second factor which had to be added to the mere abhor- 
 rence for killing to make out of it a legal prohibition of kill- 
 ing, namely, the order which forces that social dislike on 
 every single member of the social group. 
 
 But if it is really true that the legal value belongs to the 
 social order which forces the volitions of the community on 
 the individual members, then the prohibition of slaying loses 
 its exceptional position. We turned to this particular inter- 
 diction only because it returns so frequently and thus belongs 
 to the stock of prescriptions which are general. But if the 
 legal value does not lie at all in the content of the interdiction, 
 but only in the superadded order of coercive measures, then 
 of course it is quite indifferent for the question of values 
 whether we consider a law which returns frequently or an 
 accidental and isolated law. The order of coercion is anyhow 
 common to all laws even if their content is quite different. 
 The absolutely valid value of law thus never lies in the fact 
 that certain contents of law return everywhere ; such an idea 
 moves by principle in a wrong direction. The content of the 
 laws may represent a value of social development, and may 
 be combined with moral values, but the value of law must be 
 entirely independent of the content. 
 
 Also that possible but not at all necessary connection with 
 the moral conscience can never constitute the legal value as 
 such. There exists no legal instinct as an inner voice. For 
 a moral decision we ask our conscience, and no one else can 
 be substituted for ourselves there. In a legal doubt we ask 
 the lawyer, and it is only a chance if we ourselves know what 
 to do. Morality is always an affair of the inner world, the 
 law an affair of the fellow-world. The social life of ideally 
 moral personalities would surely lead to results which would 
 be in many respects similar to the ideal legal life of internally 
 unmoral persons. But in the first case, there would be no 
 law, just as in the second case there would be no morality. 
 Morality and law are perfectly parallel, but just for that
 
 322 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 reason they can never touch each other. Morality must al- 
 ways remain in the field of the personality and law always 
 in the field of the community. The inner world of the per- 
 sonality, conscious of its moral duties, is never simply a frac- 
 tion of the community, and the community, conscious of its 
 legal duties, is never simply a combination of moral person- 
 alities. We shall soon recognize that between those two 
 parallels, while they never touch each other, there exist 
 many lines of connection. For the understanding of law in 
 its necessary values we must hold to the law itself and can- 
 not get any help from the moral conscience. 
 
 After these negative considerations we may now turn to 
 the positive factors. We insisted that the content of every 
 prescription or restriction expresses at first merely the sat- 
 isfaction or dissatisfaction with certain deeds; as such an 
 expression of the common will it is not a legal value, but a 
 value of development. We have carefully studied this social 
 development. We saw that we had to accredit the will of the 
 individual to the community only in so far as it really referred 
 to the common work, and that all progress demanded the 
 transition from the selfish will to the social will, and finally 
 from the social will to the absolutely general evaluating will- 
 standpoint. In this way the family and the community and 
 the tribe and the nation grow in pure life-development, just 
 as the seed grows in the field. Far from right and law the 
 community must thus develop a common will and desire. 
 The individual wills more and more that which every other 
 member of the community would will in the same way. In- 
 stead of the selfish splitting-off there arises the unity of the 
 manifold, in which every single member takes attitude in 
 the sense of the whole group. Only where such transitions 
 arise can we recognize progress and development. 
 
 Now we are seeking that work of civilization which secures 
 and reenforces intentionally such a development. We said 
 beforehand that there must be many means to secure it. If,
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 323 
 
 for instance, the community has developed a certain over- 
 personal way of looking on the world or a common way of 
 interpreting or feeling, then civilization will have to take 
 care that artistic education or scientific instruction of the 
 youth forces on the individual just this mood of feeling and 
 thinking. But there are evidently certain volitions which are 
 superior in importance for the development of the community 
 as such, namely, those volitions which themselves constitute 
 the social life. It is clear that those will-acts by which the 
 mutual relations of the members of the community are 
 formed at all must remain the foundation of all social exist- 
 ence. If the development of the group is to continue, and if 
 the progress is not to be lost again by counter-movements, 
 then the community must take care that those volitions 
 which refer to those mutual social relations are really willed 
 and realized by every single member. If it is the purpose of 
 civilization to secure by an intentional effort the natural 
 development of the social group, then the community must 
 force on its members in the first place those actions which the 
 community wills as means of binding the social group to- 
 gether. The community must oblige the individual members 
 to will with the social group, whatever will may have devel- 
 oped in it. Society must take care with coercive measures 
 that in its midst all which society as a whole wills in order 
 to remain a society at all be really done. 
 
 The character of these mutual relations necessarily shows 
 far-reaching differences. It is conditioned by the different 
 heights of development which are reached, and especially 
 by the unequal conditions of life. If the community is to 
 form a social unity and is to unfold itself in mutual adaptation 
 of its members, a trading people, for instance, must develop 
 entirely different estimations and disinclinations from a 
 warfaring people and again different from a religious people. 
 The economic situations, the political forms, the geographic 
 conditions, the climate, the natural racial disposition, the
 
 324 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 common traditions, unite to bring about very unlike inclina- 
 tions and disinclinations for mutual human relations. The 
 admiration for faithfulness and obedience fits the one com- 
 munity better, the admiration for self-dependence and in- 
 dustry fits the other better. The one community, to protect its 
 own social existence, may consider life as holy, while the 
 other, under its entirely different life-conditions, may be able 
 to protect itself only if it permits the killing of the weak and 
 the old members of the group. With the one perhaps the 
 deepest abhorrences will turn against economic fraud, with 
 the other against cowardice, and again with others against 
 irreligiousness. On the other hand, it seems no less necessary 
 that in certain fundamental directions satisfaction and dis- 
 satisfaction concerning mutual treatment must have some- 
 thing uniform in all communities. The fact that stealing, 
 robbing, and murdering is on the whole almost everywhere 
 detested only indicates that the development of a society 
 demands everywhere this feeling-tone because without it the 
 social life as such would be undermined under any condi- 
 tions. Just as the food is different from country to country 
 and the nourishment of the Eskimo would be unfit for the 
 African Negro, and yet certain fundamental relations of 
 nourishing material are the same for the whole globe and 
 must be the same from physiological reasons, in the same 
 way in social life a certain minimum of appreciation of deeds 
 must develop itself uniformly everywhere. The economic, 
 political, religious, and climatic factors work towards the 
 difference of those valuations of actions. On the other hand, 
 that which is common results from the fact that everywhere 
 only women bear children, everywhere men are stronger for 
 fight, everywhere the personal talent for various achievements 
 is different, everywhere industry and laziness, far-sightedness 
 and stupidity, strength and weakness, stand opposed to each 
 other, and everywhere agreement gives greater strength than 
 discord. The decisive fact for us is only that a richly devel-
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 825 
 
 oped valuation of mutual treatment unfolds itself in every 
 community, while this common will in itself does not hold any 
 element of law. The fact that stealing and murdering is 
 detested by every single member of the group belongs to the 
 progress which lies outside of law. 
 
 But this is sure: the advance from the mere satisfac- 
 tion of selfish instincts to the detesting of the injury to 
 others is really a progress from personal desires to over- 
 personal attitudes. It is a step forward on the way to an 
 absolutely valid valuation. And when we discussed develop- 
 ment of the fellow-world we saw that this transition alone 
 characterizes every possible social development. To hold 
 this development firmly and to make sure that it is not lost 
 by a slipping backward of individual members must be the 
 work of civilization, which aims to secure and to continue 
 this value of natural development. If the progress is not to 
 be lost by chance counter-movements, the community must 
 find means to make it impossible for the individual member 
 to strike against those will-tendencies which hold the group 
 together as a unity. Such coercive measures already exist 
 in the customs of the group. With the customs begins the 
 securing of the common will, and this power of the customs 
 goes on partly supporting and especially supplementing the 
 less important volitions at a time when more energetic 
 means of force have been already established. In the same 
 way the religious support secures this common will ; the rules 
 and prescriptions of the gods protect it. Yet the protection 
 becomes a real conscious deed of the community only through 
 the legal order. 
 
 Hence law is for us the order by which the realization of 
 the common will in the mutual treatment of the members 
 of the community is intentionally secured and guaranteed by 
 coercive measures. This order, this guarantee, this certainty 
 for the realization of the common will, forms the only abso- 
 lutely valid value of law. The content of that common will,
 
 326 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 on the other hand, has nothing to do with the value of the 
 law as such. Whether the group-will is highly developed or 
 still stands on a low stage, whether it contains an important 
 content or an indifferent one, a content which is conditioned 
 by accidental circumstances or a content which agrees with 
 the deepest demands of morality, all has no influence on the 
 value of law. The only important question is whether that 
 which the community really wills is intentionally guaranteed 
 by coercive measures. The value of law can therefore come 
 to a rich development where the content of the law still 
 manifests a low stage in the development of the common 
 will; and on the other hand, the estimation and detesting 
 of human actions may have reached a high level and yet the 
 value of law may still be poorly developed. 
 
 Hence what is absolutely valuable in law is not the con- 
 tent of the law, but the order of law by which the realization 
 of that which is willed in common is forced on every member 
 of the community. But it is clear that this order of law must 
 represent an extremely complex structure, which contains 
 much more than the mere written laws. If we look to the 
 most highly developed forms of the modern civilized states, 
 we must recognize as legal order the whole organization by 
 which the will of the nation transforms itself into coercive 
 measures for the individual. There belongs the constitution 
 of the state which gives power to the legislatures, to the 
 head of the state, and to the representatives of the people ; 
 there belong the laws which are proclaimed ; there belong the 
 public attorneys, the courts, the judges, the lawyers ; there 
 belong the means of punishment, the jails, and many other 
 factors. The state itself with its essential functions is thus 
 a part of the legal order. 
 
 If that is the situation, we know also what must be anta- 
 gonistic to the values of law. It is not the legal wrong, the 
 crime, which is anti-valuable, but the lawlessness. All the 
 ways are anti-valuable by which the will of the community
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 327 
 
 is falsified, by which perhaps the legislative bodies do not 
 represent through the mode of election the real common will, 
 or by which legislators themselves do not formulate with 
 their best conscience the common will in the laws. Laws 
 which contradict the common will and state attorneys who 
 submit to the prejudices of single groups are anti-valuable; 
 unfair judges or useless penalties or arbitrary methods of 
 procedure are anti-valuable. A law which faithfully renders 
 the will of the community and is carried through without 
 partisanship maybe absurd, because that particular commun- 
 ity may have absurd ideas on that special point, but the law 
 can never lose by that anything in its valid legal value. Of 
 course the essence of this coercive measure can be already 
 given where such manifold division of labor does not j'^et 
 exist. There may be no written laws and no legislators, but 
 only judges who decide the quarrel by their own opinion and 
 who punish the guilty. But that does not change the funda- 
 mental principle. Such a judge or such a head of the tribe 
 can perform this function only because he is sustained by 
 the will of the community, and his personal opinion is thus 
 accepted beforehand as the expression of the common will. 
 Even where an apparently autocratic will is super-ordinated 
 on the community, its power remains the result of the com- 
 mon will, and by the living creation of right through his 
 irresponsible volition the community gives to itself a legal 
 order which secures the development of its own will. 
 
 That which holds true for the order of the state repeats 
 itself in the same way in every group which controls itself or 
 which acknowledges traditional rights. It may be a small 
 club, the statutes of which bind the members ; it may be the 
 concert of the civilized nations, which by international agree- 
 ment force the common will on every particular nation. The 
 most different groups may penetrate each other. The church 
 community may develop its own law beside the state law, 
 and always the conceptionally formulated law will be only a
 
 328 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 section of the whole valuable legal order. The state remains 
 superior to all other gi'oups from the start because the club 
 or the party or the community or the denomination ultimately 
 derives its order from the coercive measures of the state. 
 
 If in this way the value belongs to the legal order, that is, 
 to the objective law, and there again not to the content of 
 the law but to the coercive guaranteeing of the common will, 
 then the personal legality of the individual actions does not 
 represent an absolute legal value at all, and the illegality is 
 not destruction of a value. The subjective legality may be 
 morally valuable : that does not interest us here. Correspond- 
 ingly the crime of the individual would be morally anti-valu- 
 able. But actions which deny the value of law can thus be 
 performed only by the community and not by the individual. 
 Under this aspect the individual legislator and the individual 
 judge of course must be considered as representatives of 
 the community. The individual criminal may oppose the 
 absolute values by his immorality, but not by his illegality. 
 If he does not will to fulfil the law, but prefers to suffer the 
 penalty, or rather if he is willing to run the risk of a penalty, 
 it is his individual practical decision which belongs in the 
 sphere of personal experiences of pleasure and displeasure, 
 besides the relation to the question of morality. The criminal 
 deed of stealing or killing or deceiving or committing adultery 
 is no negation of the absolute value of law ; but selfish legis- 
 lation, perversion of the law by the judge, unfair penalty, 
 arbitrariness of prosecution, antiquated laws which no longer 
 express the common will, in short, uncertainty of the law and 
 lawlessness, alone can interfere with the absolute value of law. 
 
 And after all, have we a right to call this value absolute? 
 Could this whole task not be understood as a relative func- 
 tion? But here no wrong concession ought to confuse the 
 situation. The absolute value of the legal order stands be- 
 yond every relativism and skepticism. We demanded from 
 the absolutely valid values the identity of experience so that
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 329 
 
 the will to self-assertion which is recognized in the first ex- 
 perience became satisfied by the identical realization in the 
 new experience. If the community is to maintain its own self, 
 the only indispensable demand must be that its deeds be 
 identical with its intentions. If the common will is turned 
 aside before it realizes itself, the total meaning of the common 
 life is destroyed. The transition from the common will to 
 the identical action of the community is therefore the satis- 
 faction of an over-personal demand, and that means a pure 
 absolute value. Where the community has reached a stage 
 of development in which the slaying is detested, in that 
 group no slaying must be allowed if the social will is not to 
 negate itself. The guaranteeing of a common life without 
 murder by the threat of punishment for the murderer and 
 by just prosecution, jurisdiction, and punishment is there- 
 fore an achievement of the community by which its own 
 fundamental will is realized. The community would become 
 an accidental nothing-but-experience without own meaning, 
 without own goal, and without own value, if the demand for 
 the identity between its will and its action should disappear. 
 It is the one demand which gives to it the meaning of an in- 
 dependent self-asserting significance. Therefore its fulfilment 
 by the legal order remains eternally valuable. The jurist has 
 a right to say that justice must be done even if the world is 
 to perish. It means that the legal order remains eternally 
 valuable, while the world of the merely personal individual 
 demands may break down. 
 
 C. — MORALITY 
 
 The problems which the moral life forces on the philosophic 
 thought are abundant. While men within wide limits always 
 agreed as to the ways in which they ought to act as moral 
 personalities, in our times as in former times they have dis- 
 agreed with reference to the meaning and significance of mor- 
 ality. We have to detach our particular question from this
 
 330 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 large background of ethical problems, and we shall be able 
 to answer our special problem the more directly, the more 
 we focus our attention on this one question and leave all 
 others untouched. But while it is in no way our aim to wander 
 through the whole field of ethics, we cannot help recognizing 
 that our particular question carries us to the centre of the 
 field to a point where practically all ways meet. This one 
 question is of course : is there in our moral life anything ab- 
 solutely valuable? If we have to acknowledge any absolute 
 value of morality, we must further examine whether we are 
 justified in locating it just at this place in the system of values. 
 We know where we stand. We have found in industry the 
 conscious purposive development of the outer world and in 
 law the conscious purposive development of the fellow-world. 
 That which remains must be the conscious purposive devel- 
 opment of the inner world. If morality is to fill this place in 
 the system of values, it will mean that morality is that 
 achievement by which the self-development of the personal- 
 ity, its self-realization, becomes a conscious deliberate task. 
 Is that really the value of morality, and does not the value 
 perhaps belong rather to the result which is to be reached 
 by the moral deed? 
 
 But the situation has already been cleared for us, inasmuch 
 as it is ultimately the same that we find in the case of the 
 value of law. The relations of law and the relations of moral- 
 ity correspond to each other with surprising exactitude, and 
 every solution which we found there fits in here also. That 
 does not mean in the least that morality leans on the law. 
 On the contrary, even if we were to conceive the principle of 
 law in its widest sense, including perhaps all the social coerc- 
 ive measures, even the customs and the church influences, 
 nevertheless morality would remain independent of it. In 
 a corresponding way we emphasized that the law is entirely 
 independent of morality. We said that law is never an en- 
 forced morality, as morality belongs in the sphere of the
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 831 
 
 individual will. The law is the achievement of the commun- 
 ity, and that means of the community as a unity, not as 
 a bundle of isolated personalities. It has nothing to do with 
 the law-value that the demands of law may conform to the 
 moral will. And it is also no law- value that it is moral to sub- 
 ordinate one's self to the law. The law with its own values 
 would be unchanged if no morality existed. The community 
 would be able to secure the realization of its own will by 
 coercive measures even if no individual should feel bound 
 by moral obligations. In the same way morality is free from 
 law and any other social coercion. Custom and law, church 
 and state, may press on the conscience with all their powers, 
 but the moral deed itself begins where those influences stop. 
 The moral is entirely an action of the inner world. 
 
 In the moral field, too, we can start at first from the or- 
 dinary daily experiences to find out what constitutes the 
 pure value. A thing in the possession of another man tempts 
 us, but we detest the stealing, and finally overcome our de- 
 sire in accordance with the voice of our conscience. It may 
 be that such an example of stealing still too much suggests 
 law and right. We may therefore just as well substitute 
 actions which no judge punishes. Let us say that we can 
 protect ourselves against damage by a lie, but we despise 
 the lying and again we follow our conscience ; we suffer the 
 damage in order to stick to the truth. Or to point not only 
 to the suppression of actions which the conscience condemns, 
 but to the performing of actions which the conscience de- 
 mands : we see a stranger in a burning house, we are afraid 
 of the danger into which we come, yet we feel that the saving 
 deed is our duty, and without hesitation we rush into the 
 flaming house as conscience orders. 
 
 In the sphere of law we always separated the will-content 
 of the law from the legal order. Here, too, in the same way 
 we may sharply separate the content with its feeling-tone 
 from the enforcement by conscience. The content is the
 
 332 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 detested theft, or the despised lie, or the estimated life- 
 saving. Exactly as in the case of the law, we must now ask 
 again : After all what is valuable, the fact that these contents 
 are despised or are estimated, or the other fact that the 
 realization of these feelings is enforced by conscience? The 
 first possibility would be the most convenient solution of 
 the problem. The dislike of the theft is so strong, we might 
 say, that it overcomes the pleasure in the possession. The 
 pleasure in the life-saving deed is so vivid that it suppresses 
 the displeasure of danger. The absolute value accordingly 
 lies in the fact that this overwhelming pleasure is attached 
 to the valuable saving of fellow-men, or that this superior dis- 
 pleasure is attached to the violation of the other man's pro- 
 perty. The value of the moral deed could thus be deduced 
 from the pleasure and displeasure in certain effects. It is 
 morally valuable to prefer the fellow-life, the fellow-happi- 
 ness, and the fellow-welfare. 
 
 It is indifferent for us which special nuances are given to 
 such effect-morality. It may be the most trivial utilitarian- 
 ism which gives value to the production of pleasure, it may 
 be the more serious doctrine of ethical culture which evalu- 
 ates the wholesome development and efficiency. The doc- 
 trine may perhaps even sink down to naked egotism, which 
 demands the pleasure of the neighbor only because it ulti- 
 mately guarantees the own comfort. Or it may raise itself 
 to the highest point and demand a deed because the general 
 imitation of it would correspond best to the life-conditions 
 of the whole community. We do not ask why pleasure of the 
 neighbor is to be preferred to our own pleasure. We do not 
 even ask why the securing of happiness or of common wel- 
 fare by moral actions is to be more valuable than the pro- 
 duction of the same effect by accidental processes. Indeed 
 very often this mere happiness goal can be reached more 
 quickly by rather immoral actions. We leave all these ques- 
 tions untouched, as they would lead us away from our goal.
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 383 
 
 For us everything depends only upon the one point : Have 
 we really a right to seek moral value in the fact that man 
 prefers certain ways of action and detests certain others? 
 
 But we have answered this question beforehand. When we 
 discussed the self-development, we recognized that this 
 affective value of certain modes of action belongs entirely 
 to the valuable development of the self and represents the 
 progress from the selfish instinct to the pure evaluating will. 
 We found the individual abhorrence of the lie and the theft 
 and the cowardice in the sphere of the values of development 
 before there was any question of special merit, and before the 
 action took the character of morality. All which exists before 
 morality is in question may become a condition for the moral 
 life, but cannot constitute its real meaning and value. This 
 is indeed the situation. The evaluation of the happiness 
 of the neighbor and of his welfare and of the life of the com- 
 munity is one of the conditions for morality, but this evalua- 
 tion itself still entirely lacks the value of morality, just as 
 we saw that the mere detesting of slaying and robbing does 
 not at all constitute a value of law. Every ethics which deals 
 with results and effects necessarily remains at the standpoint 
 of the pre-moral. He who does not take any evaluating 
 attitude at all towards lying and stealing and life-saving is 
 unable to act morally; but he is not immoral, he is a moral. 
 The conditions are lacking for the possibility of amoral 
 process. But this moral factor is after all something new 
 which has to be superadded to that evaluating attitude. 
 
 We saw that if the inner life is to be a development, it 
 necessarily leads from the short-sighted selfish longing up- 
 ward to a pure evaluating apperception of the world. We 
 saw how the inner world can realize itself only when every 
 volition comes more and more into agreement and harmony 
 with the total will-structure of the self. And we saw how 
 this practical inner unity of will finally leads to an ideal of 
 higher unity in which all volitions are controlled by an inner
 
 334 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 fundamental will. This controlling ultimate will demanded 
 that the world be no dream, no chaos, no mere flash-experi- 
 ence, but have its own meaning, its self-dependent significance, 
 its self-asserting reality. Just that involved the postulate 
 for pure values. We saw that therefore in the natural 
 development the self which wills to unfold itself approaches 
 more and more the standpoint of pure valuation. It is not 
 a question of an external force, and not a regard for the social 
 community, it is simply the development of the inner world, 
 a free self-unfolding which leads from the selfish desire up- 
 ward to the valuation of all that which gives the meaning 
 of self-assertion to the world and represents absolute value. 
 It depends in the first place upon the historical progress of 
 the community in which stage of this development the indi- 
 vidual may stand. Even the lowest citizen of a modern state 
 stands nearer to the pure evaluation of the world than the 
 most magnanimous member of a barbarian tribe. Again in 
 the midst of every community any individual can stand much 
 higher than other members of the same group. Yet we know 
 that the moral achievement and the moral feat does not de- 
 pend upon the height of this development. If we were sim.ply 
 to accept the value of development as a value of morality, 
 then responsibility and merit, conscience and duty, would 
 have lost their real meaning, and instead of reaching an obli- 
 gation we should remain in the sphere of inclination. Cer- 
 tainly he who wills pure values instead of desiring the mere 
 personal objects of desire is the higher kind of man. He who 
 seeks science instead of the mere sensuous enjoyment, who 
 seeks the happiness of mankind instead of the personal ad- 
 vantage, who seeks progress instead of decay, who seeks right 
 instead of arbitrariness, religion instead of superstition, in 
 short, who seeks a world of meaning instead of remaining 
 with a meaningless dream of life-experience, certainly stands 
 nearer to the goal of mankind. He is superior to his fellows, 
 and our admiration must do homage to his soul. But all joy
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 335 
 
 in such a pure evaluating soul is of the same kind as our 
 joy in a creative talent or in a far-reaching intelligence. It is 
 something high and beautiful which helps towards the noblest 
 purpose, but something which has grown and has developed 
 itself without personal merit. The pure will of his soul is in 
 no higher degree his own deed than an artistic talent or the 
 genius for statesmanship or an optimistic temperament. We 
 may and must value it as the development of such a great, 
 beautiful, pure soul in its ascent to the heights of mankind, 
 but it is not a moral admiration which we feel. Correspond- 
 ingly he who still stands undeveloped on a low state of valua- 
 tion may awaken our pity, but his low degree of development 
 alone cannot lead us to a moral contempt. An entirely differ- 
 ent kind of consideration must come in if we are to recognize 
 the real moral value. Any ethics which refers to the content 
 can never lead us to our goal. Such an ethics remains in 
 every form by principle at a pre-moral standpoint. 
 
 However, we must consider one point more before we reach 
 the decisive stage. The upbuilding and the destruction of val- 
 ues are influenced by our own doing. Of course we find values 
 and anti-values about us all the time which lie beyond our 
 own activity. But life continually brings us into situations 
 in which it depends upon ourselves whether a value is to be 
 realized or to be destroyed. In such a case our action itself 
 is a part of the forming of a value. In such a life-situation 
 we will our action not because it leads to a value, but because 
 it is itself a part of the value. Of course in itself an action is 
 indifferent. As muscle activity it has no value whatever; 
 but when it enters into a process of the outer world, or the 
 fellow-world, or the inner world, so that a value becomes 
 completed by it, the action itself becomes a part of the value. 
 It enters into the total situation like an harmonious color in 
 the picture, like a tone in the melody. If we will that value, 
 we must also will that particular way of acting, because this 
 kind of action itself raises that particular piece of the world
 
 336 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 to the height of a value. When the value is built up or de- 
 stroyed by our own action, the action is not an external means 
 which might be replaced by some other means, but is itself 
 an indispensable part of the value. Only by that particular 
 action the totality of the result becomes a value ; not the end 
 alone, but the action itself is willed. The saving and helping 
 actions themselves are desired, the lying and stealing actions 
 themselves are detested. As long as we do not evaluate but 
 only desire and selfishly demand the end, we do not care for 
 the action as such. From the standpoint of the mere impulse 
 we will nothing but the result ; it is indifferent to us by what 
 means it is reached. We desire the thing, but we do not desire 
 the action which gains the thing. For the selfish enjoyment 
 it is entirely indifferent w^hether by the action itself a meaning 
 and a will of absolute value are posited into the thing. Only 
 the life which builds up values demands those actions by 
 which we affirm the world as value. And yet we must say 
 again that we still have not touched on a moral relation. We 
 will the action as a part of our valuation. The valuation en- 
 closes and involves the will of the action, but it is really only 
 a willing of the action, not an obligation. It is a valuable 
 development that we have progressed to such a valuation 
 and therefore to such volition of certain actions, but this 
 volition is no duty and no moral value. The personality 
 which has reached a point at which it wills those actions 
 which build up values of course stands much higher on the 
 ladder of development than the other personality, which only 
 desired the result of actions. Nevertheless this w^hole devel- 
 opment remains outside of morality. We evaluate the ac- 
 tion as such because it builds up a value, but we perform it 
 simply because we will it. 
 
 Now we have only to take one step further. The self- 
 development, we say, has brought it about that in certain 
 situations of life we will certain actions without reference to 
 the effects which they have on us, but merely for their own
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 337 
 
 sake as acts which afRrm a value. If now the conscious effort 
 of culture aims to secure a guarantee of this value of de- 
 velopment, one thing alone is needed. Whenever the action 
 which we will as such comes in conflict with another action 
 which we do not v/ill as such, but which promises a result 
 desirable for us as individuals, the first action, the one which 
 constitutes the value, must be enforced. This can be done 
 by a perfectly new, perfectly unique valuation : we learn to 
 consider our selves as an absolutely valid value which realizes 
 itself through our own actions. As long as we merely want 
 things and effects while the action itself is indifferent to us, 
 we the acting subjects cannot be in question for our selves as 
 valuable or worthless. But as soon as we will our selves in 
 a particular activity, the fulfilment of such a will, that is the 
 realization of the valued activity, makes our selves valuable. 
 We will our selves as truth-speakers or as life-savers only on 
 account of the action itself, not on account of the desirable 
 results. When the self which is willed in such a way becomes 
 realized, a pure over-personal demand is fulfilled. Our life- 
 saving or truth-speaking personality now becomes a reality 
 which asserts itself. 
 
 If an external effect tempts us to the opposite action, w^e 
 might reach a desirable result, but our action no longer cor- 
 responds to our will to action. Our own deed makes us as 
 acting persons worthless. That which becomes realized in 
 our action is then no longer that self which we wanted in an 
 over-personal way, and our pure will does not become satisfied 
 by the action of our personality. If I look inactively on the 
 burning house instead of helping at the saving of men, I 
 secure my personal comfort which I had a right to will and to 
 desire. But besides my comfort I willed at the same time my 
 self as a life-saving person. My action has therefore really not 
 realized my own self. I have not asserted myself. I am no 
 longer identical with my self. I have become worthless. If 
 I lie or steal, I always reach my purpose, and the result was
 
 338 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 indeed desired, but the action itself was not desired. I did 
 not wish to he or to steal. I truly willed my own self as speak- 
 ing the truth or as respecting property. My lying and stealing 
 have fulfilled and reached what I wanted in one respect, 
 namely, the agreeable effect, but they have not realized the 
 opposite action which I demanded as a part of my own acting 
 self. My self as I apperceived it has not transformed itself 
 at all into a new experience, but has been lost. The lying or 
 the stealing has destroyed the value of my personality. 
 
 This identity between the will to that action which we 
 really will as action and the final action itself is the value of 
 morality. Not the action is valuable, but the personality 
 which in the performed deed realizes its will to action and 
 by it the own willed self. A man is immoral if he does not 
 perform the action which he wills as action, and therefore 
 does not realize himself, but prefers instead to perform an 
 action which is desired only in order to secure some desired 
 result. Morality is the realization of the action which we will 
 as such. Where a particular kind of action is not willed at all, 
 the personality can never lose its moral value by another 
 action. The criminal who steals must will the action which 
 respects property, as action. If he does not will it at all, his 
 theft may have legal importance but is morally indifferent. 
 The self-value of the personality, then, is not diminished, as 
 he did not deny his own will to action. He who does not 
 desire himself as speaking the truth may speak an objective 
 untruth, but he cannot lie. His untruth is morally as indif- 
 ferent as the babbling of the insane. 
 
 To look on ourselves as possible values must be learned. 
 It is a deed of self-realization. We must learn to separate the 
 self which we willed and the self which arises through our 
 actions, in order that we may apperceive the identity of both. 
 As long as we will only the effects of our actions and not the 
 actions themselves, such a separation is foreign to us. Our 
 action then comes in question only as means of an effect, and
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 339 
 
 not as realization of a self which we will. But as soon as this 
 new cultural apperception is learned and we know how to 
 compare the action itself before and after the deed, the ful- 
 filment of the willed action really represents an absolutely- 
 valid value. The self which willed its action now stands be- 
 fore us as an independent self-asserting reality. It is as if 
 from an over-personal point of view we participate in its will 
 and are satisfied in its realization. As soon as this standpoint 
 is reached, the valuable development of the personality is 
 indeed completely safeguarded. We recognized the develop- 
 ment of the personality in the fact that more and more the 
 evaluating standpoint is taken and not the selfish one, more 
 and more the world is acknowledged in its self-assertion and 
 not accepted only as a mere meaningless flash of experience. 
 If we now come into a situation in which the valuation would 
 lead to one action and the selfish desire to the opposite action, 
 the value is in danger at first. The impulse to the personal 
 enjoyment might be stronger than the will to that action 
 which builds up the over-personal value, but if we have 
 learned the new apperception, the whole situation has been 
 entirely changed. Now the choice is no longer between one 
 result which we selfishly demand and another result which 
 we unselfishly evaluate. No : we now find on the one side the 
 selfish demand, and on the other side the value of the own 
 personality. To follow the selfish desire now means to sacri- 
 fice the value of the self; to give up the promised personal 
 enjoyment means to gain the value of the self. 
 
 Moreover, the situation is not such that we have to make 
 the decision whether we want to evaluate the absolute value 
 of our self or not. As soon as we have become at all consci- 
 ous of our own absolute value, we cannot take any other atti- 
 tude towards it than that of evaluation. We always saw that 
 just that is characteristic of every pure value ; nobody can 
 apperceive it without participating in the evaluation. Just 
 as we cannot understand the logical conclusion without willing
 
 340 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 it, we also cannot apperceive ourselves in our moral self- 
 realization without necessarily willing ourselves in such an 
 act. Just as it may be that we do not understand the conclu- 
 sion, we also may not have reached the moral apperception 
 of ourselves, we may not have proceeded to that separation 
 between our will towards an action and its identical realiza- 
 tion; but as soon as such a standpoint has been reached, it 
 becomes impossible not to evaluate that identity between 
 the volition and the action. We cannot prefer a self which 
 remains not identical with itself to a self which asserts itself 
 and therefore becomes valuable. The new view which is 
 reached by civilization therefore gives a guarantee that the 
 evaluating standpoint has become protected against the de- 
 sire for pleasurable effects. In evaluating the acting personal- 
 ity as such we protect and guarantee those actions which 
 serve the values. 
 
 This guarantee is no complete one. The consciousness of 
 the endangered self- value may still be overcome by the desire 
 for an enjoyment. Then we have an immoral action in which 
 the self unfolds itself in opposition to the value in order to 
 satisfy a personal demand. But no external force would be 
 able to secure the maintaining of the stage of development 
 which has been reached so effectively as this apperceiving 
 of the own personality as an absolute value. Now we recog- 
 nize it as a matter of course that the true value of morality 
 must be independent of every determination of the content. 
 Which action we will is entirely indifferent. We are moral 
 as soon as we realize the action which we really will as action. 
 It has nothing to do with the moral value whether the action 
 which we will as part of our acting self represents a high or 
 a low stage of development. At all times endlessly much pure 
 morality has been achieved which as to the mere effect of the 
 action represents a low stage of development. 
 
 From the standpoint of the valuation of development, we 
 have not even the right to insist that the moral man stands
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 341 
 
 higher than the one who serves the values without the force 
 of this self- valuation. The noble soul whose will towards the 
 values is in itself strong enough to overcome all selfish im- 
 pulses without being forced by any regard for the moral self- 
 value may stand higher than many a man whose faint will 
 towards values can overcome the selfish will only by the feel- 
 ing of his own moral value. It would be over-rigorous to give 
 value only to the moral action. An action which without 
 effort, without struggle, and without reference to the abso- 
 lute value of the own personality results only from devotion 
 to values, may represent the highest personal value of devel- 
 opment. But such an action has no moral value. Such an 
 action does not become immoral, but it remains amoral, 
 without losing by that anything as manifestation of an abso- 
 lutely valuable personal development. In general, however, it 
 will hold that the moral will which is anchored in the abso- 
 lute self- value of the acting person also represents the higher 
 stage of the self-development. This is the more the situation 
 because then alone the action in the service of values, that 
 is the ideal purpose, is secured against all influences. Whether 
 the beautiful life-impulse really overwhelms by its own en- 
 ergies the selfish longings must always remain accidental. 
 Even the purest love for values may become ineffective when 
 perhaps a great personal grief can be eliminated or a fasci- 
 nating enjoyment can be gained by a worthless action. Only 
 the evaluation of the own self can raise the action which 
 serves the values beyond every possible action for pleasure, 
 and can lead the martyr to the stake for the sake of truth. 
 Only in the face of this self-value arises an obligation, a 
 duty, a conscience. We have fully convinced ourselves that 
 not every value involves an obligation, an ought. When we 
 studied the meaning of the values we recognized that we have 
 no right to refer our over-personal will to an obligation which 
 comes to us from beyond experience. An obligation exists 
 in the sphere of law when society threatens the individual
 
 342 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 with its coercive measures. An obligation exists in the same 
 way here in the field of morality when the consciousness of 
 our endangered self- value threatens our will. We stand be- 
 fore two possibilities of action : the one action we do not care 
 for as such, but it leads to the desired result ; the other action 
 we desire as action. There enters the threatening of the obli- 
 gation. If we do not act as we want to have our selves as 
 actors, we shall lose our selves. The voice of conscience cannot 
 say anything else to us. Thus there is only one fundamental 
 moral obligation : you ought to realize that action which you 
 really will for the action's sake. There exists no moral law: 
 you ought not to lie, and you ought not to steal, and you 
 ought not to kill, and you ought to help, and you ought to 
 save. Whether your helping and speaking the truth is that 
 kind of action which you really will as action of your person- 
 ality depends upon the height of your development. No one 
 can demand that from you as an obligation. But if you will 
 this action, then you ought to perform it, and you ought not 
 to be tempted by pleasure or displeasure to actions which 
 you do not at all will as actions. Realize the action which you 
 will on its own account. That is the only possible obligation. 
 It is true even this categorical imperative might be trans- 
 formed into a hypothetical one : realize the action which you 
 will yourself, if you do not will that your own self lose its 
 identity and by it its value. But this condition is absolutely 
 impossible. You can never really will that your self shall not 
 remain identical with itself. 
 
 Self-faithfulness, self-loyalty, is accordingly the only moral 
 obligation and the only moral value. Burglary and murder 
 are in themselves not opposed to morality, but only opposed 
 to the value of development. If my extra-moral development 
 had led me to the detesting of the action and yet I carried it 
 out, it would be antagonistic to morality. But then it is not 
 the burglary which is immoral, but the non-realization of that 
 acting self which I willed. Even the struggle between various
 
 THE VALUES OF ACHIEVEMENT 343 
 
 conflicting motives of value is not really a moral conflict, but 
 an extra-moral one. It is not a conflict between two moral 
 duties, but the only moral duty is to realize that action 
 which we really will. The inner struggle refers only to the 
 question which of two actions, both serving certain values, 
 is really willed by us. Only when this decision has been made 
 can the moral realization set in. Only if we know internally 
 what we really will can we be faithful to ourselves. 
 
 The far-reaching agreement between the moral value of 
 the personality and the legal value of the community is now 
 evident. Both have only the one meaning, to demand self- 
 faithfulness, and by it to guarantee the stage of valuable 
 development which has been reached. The mutual will- 
 relations between the members of a community have been 
 developed outside of law, and the volitions of the individuals 
 have unfolded themselves outside of morality. Whether the 
 communities and the personalities have really developed 
 themselves depends merely upon whether they have more 
 and more fulfilled that task which necessarily had to be con- 
 ceived as belonging to their self-asserting reality. This will 
 of the community and of the personality may have grown 
 to any stage of development, and now self-realization must 
 take care that it is protected against a sinking down to a 
 lower stage. It must be guaranteed in its valuable height, 
 and that can be done only by the force which law brings to 
 the community and the moral conscience brings to the per- 
 sonality. Both law and conscience demand that the com- 
 munity and the personality perform those actions which they 
 really will. The value of law is thus destroyed only by a law- 
 lessness in which the will of the community no longer becomes 
 action. The value of morality can be destroyed only by the 
 disloyalty to our selves by which we leave unrealized the ac- 
 tion which we really demand. That which is protected and 
 secured by law and conscience must change and may perish, 
 but eternally valuable remains the power by which that
 
 344 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 which is really willed in fellow-world and inner world is safely 
 protected. The community can secure the realization of its 
 own will only by law, and the personality can secure the real- 
 ization of its own will only by morality. But to realize itself, 
 to remain faithful to one's self in freedom, and in this way to 
 posit will and act as identical, means for community and per- 
 sonality alike that an independent reality must unfold itself 
 in them. By this self-identity they are no longer merely iso- 
 lated flashlike, dreamlike experiences, but really absolute 
 values.
 
 PART V 
 
 THE METAPHYSICAL VALUES
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 
 
 Once more we look backward. In the swarming of our ex- 
 periences we sought that which is valuable. We recognized 
 that anything single, anything which is nothing but a mere 
 impression, is in itself necessarily without value. We gain a 
 true satisfaction only when that which is experienced can be 
 maintained to be found once more in a new experience, and 
 in this way self-asserting in the midst of change. Satisfaction 
 demands tension and relaxation, demands starting-point and 
 goal. The realization of the agreeable and desired gives such 
 satisfaction, and may thus reflect on the experience the glim- 
 mer of value. But such are chance values which depend upon 
 the standpoint of the individual personality. Even if in a 
 social group such pleasure valuations of the individuals 
 agree, it remains merely an accumulation of personal satisfac- 
 tions as long as for every member the conservation of his 
 pleasure or removal of his pain is decisive. It remains the 
 confused practical interplay of enjoyments and advantages, 
 of comforts and vanities. 
 
 But we sought pure values which belong to the true mean- 
 ing of the world. We sought the values which satisfy abso- 
 lutely without reference to the states of the individual : the 
 over-personal values. Such pure values must glow wherever 
 things and impressions and expressions assert themselves 
 in the new experience and thus remain identical in spite of 
 the new forms which they take in the changes of life. There 
 we have a satisfaction which does not depend upon enjoy- 
 ment ; there we have a fulfilment which is not determined by 
 personal desire. The life-experiences rush by and are nothing
 
 348 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 but flashlike bits of experience, valueless and worldless, or 
 the experience asserts its ideality, manifests by it its self- 
 hood, and builds up an independent world. Such a world is 
 absolutely valuable because everything which enters into it 
 must necessarily satisfy every possible subject who demands 
 a self-asserting world. The things and the volitions enter into 
 that world at first in so far as they maintain themselves in 
 the return of the experiences. The valueless dream sensa- 
 tions then transform themselves into a valuable experience. 
 The meaningless single bits become an absolutely valuable 
 world which is object of knowledge. And this world of know- 
 ledge and truth is absolutely valuable without any reference 
 to the question whether our independent chance experience 
 takes hold of much or little in it. But further, the things and 
 the volitions also enter into this world of values in so far as 
 their manifoldness shows itself in inner agreement. When 
 the many are ultimately only one, when the separated parts 
 of the manifold harmonize in such a way that we become cer- 
 tain of the one through the other, the totality of such harmony 
 again must be absolutely valuable. Every single is here again 
 not only starting-point, but also fulfilment. The world of 
 love, of happiness, of beauty, arises before us in eternal purity. 
 Finally we recognize in that absolutely valuable world the de- 
 velopment and the deed. Whenever the single bears in itself 
 a richer, fuller, more effective end, consciousness must be ab- 
 solutely satisfied as soon as this end becomes realized in new 
 experience. The seed becomes harvest, and law, progress, and 
 morality realize themselves in a world which leaves every 
 mere personal desire far behind. And yet here, too, the value 
 lies entirely in the identity of will and realization. 
 
 We have followed up how each of these three groups of 
 values arises from immediate life-experience, and how each 
 can be elaborated and enriched by the conscious purposive 
 labor of civilization. We have further seen how each equally 
 refers to the outer world, to the fellow-world, and to the inner
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 349 
 
 world. Every step showed to us clearly how everything in 
 this world of values depends upon the self-assertion of the 
 experience. The equal had to be grasped as equal in new ex- 
 perience. The old must show itself in the new form as con- 
 servation, as fulfilment, as realization. Each such identi- 
 cal self-assertion must be again a starting-point for a new 
 volition. Everything which belongs to this sphere of self- 
 asserting experience must be eternally valuable, as it must 
 satisfy every one who wills a self-asserting world ; and nobody 
 can be acknowledged as a subject at all who does not will such 
 a world. To acknowledge a subject as such means to pre- 
 suppose that whatever life and world may bring, everything 
 which fulfils the conditions of self-assertion must be abso- 
 lutely valuable to him. It makes no difference v^^hether this 
 self-assertion shows itself as self-assertion in the logical val- 
 ues, or as .self -agreement in the aesthetic values, or as self- 
 realization in the ethical values. But in spite of all these 
 conformities of structure, after all we then have three inde- 
 pendent worlds. The world-formula which binds every one of 
 them in itself is ultimately the same ; the threefold realization 
 of the formula, however, leads to three world-realities which 
 are closed in themselves and independent of each other. The 
 logical values of the first are grasped by our knowledge, the 
 aesthetic values of the second are reached by our devotion, 
 the ethical values of the last demand our estimation. To 
 confound them with one another necessarily involves a de- 
 struction of all three kinds of values. 
 
 Of course an experience may enter into manifold relations 
 of values. A development, for instance, which represents a 
 valuable progress, and which is estimated as such, may be in 
 its completion an harmonious whole which fascinates us by its 
 natural beauty; and at the same time we may group each 
 phase of that development into a logical scientific connection. 
 In this way the same experience may be accessible to a three- 
 fold valuation. But that does not change the fact that it is
 
 350 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 something different in every one of those relations of value. 
 The chain of causes as such can be neither beautiful nor 
 morally inspiring; the moral achievement as such is not a 
 scientific connection; and the completed harmony as such 
 does not seek to be estimated as an achievement, but rather 
 excludes everything not completed from the aesthetic appre- 
 ciation. The valuations are not only independent of each 
 other ; they usually lead to different ways even when they are 
 externally parallel. A novel may reach the highest value of 
 beauty, and yet its characters may be historically, as objects 
 of logical truthful connection, without any value. They have 
 no value of existence in the world of our valuable knowledge, 
 and moreover the deed of the hero may be a moral crime. On 
 the other hand, an achievement may deserve the highest 
 possible ethical estimation, and yet may nowhere offer a hold 
 for aesthetic enjoyment. But the mere independence and 
 separation do not express the whole meaning of their rela- 
 tion. Life insistently shows us that the values directly clash 
 with each other. It is the sharp mutual opposition of the pure 
 values which pushes us forward to new desire and to new 
 deed. The world of the existing facts too often denies the 
 demands of morality and the desire for harmonious unity; 
 the world of beauty may hinder progress and may deny the 
 connection of things; the world of valuable realization and 
 development may destroy happiness. Our whole existence 
 is filled by the tension of these opposing forces. 
 
 In all this we have no right to super-ordinate on principle 
 one affirmation of our world-experience above the others. 
 Each of the three, entirely coordinated with the others, arose 
 from the same primary material of life-experience which itself 
 was still without value. In our daily thinking we are all 
 inclined to super-ordinate the logical group of values over 
 the other two. We have the feeling that the world which we 
 apperceive with the value of existence and connection is the 
 only standard world. The worlds of happiness and of morality
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 351 
 
 seem to vanish at its side. They almost become worlds of 
 illusion, while the world of existence is the world of reality. 
 Or they become side determinations to the one true world. 
 The world is then really the world which has existence and 
 connection, and the happiness and morality are only in a 
 secondary way attached to that world of true knowledge. Of 
 course we now know that such a preference is unjustified; 
 we know that to acknowledge the world as really existing does 
 not mean anything else than to evaluate the experiences with 
 reference to certain relations. The existence of the world, 
 its reality and its connection, means to us a certain evaluation 
 of life-experiences. If we emphasize the other relations and 
 in this way gain other values out of the life-material, they 
 arise with exactly the same right. The world which has ex- 
 istence because it maintains itself is not more important and 
 not more immediate and not more certain than the world 
 which has harmony because it agrees with itself, or the world 
 which is meritorious because it realizes itself. All three are 
 coordinated necessary structures equally held together by the 
 over-personal form of our consciousness, by our over-personal 
 demand for the self-assertion of experience, and the over- 
 personal satisfaction in the fulfilment of this demand. 
 
 The more clearly we recognize the coordination of these 
 various worlds the more we must become impressed by the 
 idea that the conflict cannot be eliminated by their own 
 means. Every compromise not only remains external, but 
 interferes with the meaning. When, for instance, the science of 
 past days made the values of beauty an argument of explana- 
 tion, deduced the movement of the stars from the beauty of 
 their curves or the central position of the sun from the noble 
 purity of its fire, the true purpose of explanation and know- 
 ledge was evidently sacrificed. It is not better when the sci- 
 ence of our time breaks the chain of causal processes in the 
 brain in order to secure an uncausal freedom for the will on 
 account of its moral value. In the same way the attitude of
 
 352 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 aesthetics is given up when scientific information or moral 
 achievement is demanded from the work of art. And the 
 moral deed becomes emasculated when not the ethical value 
 of the deed as such, but the assthetic value of the resulting 
 happiness is taken as standard. If we allow the boundaries 
 of the fields of values to become effaced, we cannot do justice 
 to any evaluation. To combine the values must mean much 
 more than carelessly to confound them. 
 
 But it is certain they must be combined somehow if the 
 world as a whole is not to become contradictory and by that 
 ultimately worthless. We have sufficiently recognized and 
 understood in its necessity the fundamental fact that only 
 that which in the changing experiences remains identical with 
 itself can be valuable. Only this identity brings satisfaction 
 to the seeking will. That which is absolutely new necessarily 
 remains illogical, unaesthetic, immoral. The totality of worlds 
 would therefore have to be anti-valuable if the achievements 
 of morality, the beauties of happiness, and the connections of 
 truth could not be ultimately apperceived as identical. The 
 world crumbles, life becomes meaningless, and by principle 
 must leave dissatisfaction if the transition from the one group 
 of values to the other is to be a transition to an entirely new 
 reality. Of course we must not think of truth and beauty and 
 progress in the light in which our philosophical investigation 
 has shown them, ultimately controlled by the same funda- 
 mental attitude of our consciousness. We have no right to 
 substitute here the insight of philosophy for the real life. The 
 individual personality which does not philosophize is not 
 conscious of the way in which the over-personal consciousness 
 works. Those over-personal transformations which constitute 
 the ethical, aesthetic, and logical experience are known to us 
 in ordinary life only by their final work, but not by the act. 
 To possess the ethical, aesthetic, and logical values, therefore, 
 does not mean to be conscious of the steps which lead to these 
 systems of absolutely valid satisfaction. In other words, we
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 353 
 
 may have the true and the beautiful and the good, as ab- 
 solutely valid values, and yet may not know anything as in- 
 dividuals of that philosophical unity which we slowly begin 
 to recognize by our critical examination. For the naive in- 
 dividual the natural process and happiness and morality are 
 simply separated spheres which we find as such and which we 
 must acknowledge. And yet in every act of our life we are in 
 contact with all those spheres. How could we act, how could 
 we merely step forward, if the separation should remain by 
 principle one of fundamental character? We aim to create 
 values in freedom, and yet we acknowledge the causal neces- 
 sity of the processes ; we seek the value in the creating deed, 
 and yet find happiness and beauty in the completeness which 
 no longer allows any transformation. Thus our life becomes 
 torn and without hold; our will is tending to and fro, and 
 when we hold the one world, the other remains for us some- 
 thing strange, incomparable, unreconcilable. 
 
 The meaning of our life depends upon the possibility of 
 apperceiving our world ultimately as one and the same. And 
 it is not only that the world then gives meaning to our life, 
 but under this condition the world as a whole becomes ab- 
 solutely valuable because it remains identical with itself and 
 asserts itself when we step from the truth to beauty or to 
 morality. We found this self-assertion in the midst of the 
 logical and in the midst of the aesthetic and in the midst of the 
 ethical ; we recognized that there cannot be any other kind of 
 self-assertion, and therefore no other kinds of values, in the 
 midst of our life-experience. The world as a whole must now 
 be valuable if this self-assertion can lead from one group of 
 values to the others ; that is, if the total world of connections 
 realizes itself again in the totality of the moral and of the 
 beautiful. As long as our thinking and feeling remain before 
 a world which falls into three pieces, the desire for identity 
 is not satisfied, the result not valuable. Therefore we know 
 beforehand that only a world which asserts itself in truth,
 
 354 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 morality, and beauty as identical can have an ultimate value 
 for us. This a-prioristic fact necessarily binds us in every 
 particular act of apperception. If the world as a whole is to 
 be valuable and not only an inner chaos, we must feel bound 
 by the conviction that the identity of the three worlds of 
 values itself has validity. As in all the other groups, we find 
 the affirmation of this value in immediate life-volitions, and 
 we elaborate it in the work of civilization. The life-value 
 which secures this unity of the various worlds of values is 
 religion. The conscious purposive work towards this end is 
 philosophy. 
 
 Thus we claim that religion and philosophy have the same 
 task. Both aim to apprehend the worlds of values as ulti- 
 mately identical with each other, and therefore the world- 
 totality as absolutely valuable. Both philosophy and religion 
 must transcend the life-experience for that end. They lead 
 us to a world which is enlarged and expanded in the spirit of 
 this over-personal postulate which overcomes the apparent 
 opposition of the values. But have we the right to consider 
 such an overworld which lies beyond experience still as real- 
 ity? It is true the real in the narrower sense of the word is 
 confined to that which is logically valuable, that which has 
 existence and connection. A religious or philosophical tran- 
 scending of experience is in this sense certainly unreal, or 
 better extra-real, or perhaps over-real. But we saw from the 
 start that realization can mean something more fundamental 
 than the mere entrance into the world of existence. We al- 
 ways found realization when the new experience became foot- 
 hold and starting-point for a planned action. The realization 
 is always completed and therefore a new reality reached as 
 soon as the new formation of the identical allows us a definite 
 basis for the intended activity. That might sometimes lead us 
 from the merely imagined to the world of physical existence, 
 but not less often both the expected and the realized may lie 
 in the same sphere of ideas or of thoughts. Our own will and
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 355 
 
 our own action must decide whether the change in our life- 
 experience is to be acknowledged as a realization. It is such 
 a realization when it supports our new deed. We recognized 
 this before, and we now only have to consider the result for 
 our particular case. Religion and philosophy demand a pro- 
 gression over the limits of the experienceable, and we hesi- 
 tated to subordinate this apparently over-real to the con- 
 ception of value, because every value demands that the given 
 be realized in an identical reality in a new form. But we now 
 can say that the world indeed realizes itself in such religious 
 and philosophical enlargement of experience. Such over- 
 experience can certainly never become a part of the experi- 
 enceable world of physical existence. It remains, therefore, 
 unreal in the narrower sense of the word. But it is a content 
 of our convictions, and as our conviction gives us the very 
 firmest hold for our actions, the final realization, in the wider 
 sense of the word, is here fulfilled in the highest degree. 
 
 The experienceable world, which is split into the logical, 
 ethical, and aesthetic special worlds, realizes itself in the all- 
 embracing, ultimate world, which is maintained by our relig- 
 ious and philosophical convictions and in which all opposi- 
 tion disappears. And as this ultimate world is identical with 
 the totality of the worlds of values and yet a complete real- 
 ization, the relation between the experienceable and theover- 
 experienceable again represents an absolute value. It is the 
 metaphysical value. But the supplementation of all possible 
 experience in religion and philosophy takes opposite direc- 
 tions. In both cases the conviction supports the new world- 
 totality, and in both cases the conviction gives us full reality 
 because the transcending world offers us a hold for action and 
 thus dominates our life. Yet the antithesis of the directions 
 is fundamental. To make it clear at once, we may say that 
 religion transcends experience, but that philosophy goes back 
 to the presuppositions of experience. Religion constructs a 
 superstructure which overarches the experienced world, phil-
 
 356 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 osophy builds a substructure which supports the experienced 
 world. For that purpose religion creates God, who gives the 
 value of holiness to the world ; philosophy seeks the ultimate 
 foundation in the eternal act, which gives to the world the 
 values of absoluteness. Both groups of values, the religious 
 values of holiness and the philosophical values of absolute- 
 ness, stand together as metaphysical values as against the 
 logical, aesthetic, and ethical values. 
 
 A sharp demarcation line between the metaphysics of the 
 religious feeling and the metaphysics of the philosophizing 
 reason is not in question for practical life. The religion of a 
 Plato, of a Spinoza, of a Fichte, certainly belongs by principle 
 to philosophy, and the historical world-religions are pene- 
 trated by philosophical elements. The philosophical way is 
 sought essentially when the last unity which gives meaning 
 to all the metaphysical values is to be reached by conscious 
 purposive efforts of thought. Religion in its way reaches the 
 same goal by following the feelings and emotions, and with- 
 out a conscious knowledge of the ultimate purpose. In this 
 sense — and as a matter of course only in this sense — we 
 group philosophy among the values of civilization, but religion 
 among the immediate values of life, inasmuch as we always 
 demanded that the values of civilization be expressions of 
 a purposive effort consciously directed towards the goal of up- 
 building a valuable world. 
 
 The immediate values of life interest us first ; they are the 
 values of the world of God, the values of holiness. In the sys- 
 tem of values the holy thus represents the last value, coor- 
 dinated with the true, the beautiful, and the good. But we 
 now understand that in another sense it is super-ordinated on 
 those other three values, inasmuch as the purpose of religion 
 had to be the unification of all the other values. The world 
 which is penetrated by the belief in God no longer knows the 
 opposition between the true connections, the beauty of happi- 
 ness and the moral realization. And this world of God is real
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 357 
 
 because our conviction, which in the sphere of rehgion we call 
 belief, realizes it. 
 
 Religion must fulfil this task even at a level where a de- 
 veloped idea of gods is not yet in question. At least, the 
 directions towards these ultimate values may be recognized 
 wherever a symbol reflects on the world in such a way that 
 for the excited emotion the disappointing contrasts in the 
 world disappear. The unity of nature, happiness, and deed 
 becomes effected in consciousness. The lowest tribe in Ceylon 
 indulges in wild nocturnal dances in the depths of the forest. 
 They dance around the large arrow with rhythmical shout- 
 ings. No spirit and no god is in the arrow for them, but the 
 arrow is the centre of their existence, the chief means of their 
 preservation. Their whole thinking turns around the arrow. 
 In all important events, in disease and need, the arrow is 
 worshipped. In these midnight dances the arrow irradiates 
 a power which transforms their whole world. The things of 
 nature which oppose man, his longing for happiness, and all 
 his willing for action are now held together. The arrow helps 
 and will help; the arrov/ triumphs over the hostile nature. 
 The world now exists to serve their will and desire ; all oppo- 
 sites are overcome. From the ecstasies of such savages who 
 have not even reached a real belief in the spirits up to the 
 solemn worship of a church community leads a continuous 
 way. The immediate opposites are overcome in purer and 
 purer form. The logical self-conservation, the aesthetic self- 
 agreement, the ethical self-realization, are more and more 
 clearly embraced by the thought of the metaphysical self- 
 perfection of the world in which everything which is valuable 
 is in harmony. 
 
 The intensity and vividness and depth of the religious con- 
 sciousness must decide how far religion succeeds in reaching 
 the pure value of a perfect harmony of our values. On the 
 other hand, independent of the strength of the religious con- 
 sciousness, the value must also be determined by the question
 
 358 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 of how far those various values which are to be organized 
 have reached a development in themselves. A religion which 
 combines undeveloped ideas of nature, barbaric desires for 
 happiness, and undisciplined demands for action may be just 
 as intensely religious as another which combines complex 
 science, refined feeling of agreement, and high moral con- 
 science. Such a religion as the former is not less religious, but 
 it stands on a lower level because it refers the pure meta- 
 physical value to impure material. The highest religion must 
 arise where the purest union of the purest values is given. 
 Still further conditions for religious differences must be given 
 by the fact that the different values may be developed in 
 a very unequal way ; moreover, they may be emphasized to a 
 varying degree. For instance, there are religions in which the 
 ethical values preponderate so fully that the logical and aes- 
 thetic values are merely embedded in the ethical, and their 
 identification is brought about by enclosing the one in the 
 other. In the same way there exist religions in which the 
 aesthetic or the intellectual factor preponderates. 
 
 The decisive principle, however, remains that this act of 
 identification constitutes the meaning of religion. Religion 
 is related to the single values as those single values are related 
 to the immediate life-experiences. Religion is accordingly also 
 a form of apprehension through the over-personal conscious- 
 ness, and it is in no other sense necessary than the logical, 
 aesthetic, and ethical values themselves. It is the form in 
 which this combined content must be thought in order to be- 
 come a common self-asserting world at all. But religion is the 
 form of forms ; it is the absolutely valid form for the connec- 
 tion of that which is itself found in various forms. Thus re- 
 ligion does not lead to firmer values, but to more embracing 
 ones. The certainty of truth, or the perfection of beauty, or 
 the dignity of morality must be each in itself complete — no 
 value has to wait for sanction by a belief in God. The power 
 of truth cannot arise from the fact that it harmonizes with
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 359 
 
 beauty or morality. But by this harmony only the world 
 attains its ultimate completion. Only in this accord of all 
 values the aim towards unity on the part of the over-personal 
 consciousness can reach its last goal, at least as far as a naive 
 life-work can reach a last goal at all. To reach the ultimate 
 end, to be sure, still more will be needed: the systematic, 
 conscious labor of civilization will become necessary. That 
 is the task of philosophy. 
 
 If the world of possible experiences is to be supplemented 
 by a trans-experience which combines all the values, this new 
 thought must again take a threefold expression. It must 
 refer, like all the values which we recognized, either to the 
 outer world, or to the fellow- world, or to the inner world, how- 
 ever much all these three developments may fuse with each 
 other. It is therefore certainly not a sharp separation, but 
 only an indication of fundamental tendencies, if we suggest 
 such a threefold division. In this sense we should say that 
 the religious value with reference to the outer world manifests 
 itself through the belief in the creation, with reference to the 
 fellow-world through the belief in the revelation, and with 
 reference to the inner world through the belief in the salva- 
 tion. We must follow that up still further. 
 
 A. — CREATION 
 
 The religious mind which looks up to God, the creator of 
 heaven and earth, is not concerned with an hypothesis of nat- 
 ural science. Belief in the religious sense has only the word 
 in common with that other belief which confines itself to be- 
 lieving because it lacks sufficient hold for a full knowledge. 
 The behef in God is not an uncertain tentative opinion which 
 is satisfied with an unsafe hypothesis because no sufficient 
 proof for full certainty is at our disposal. On the contrary, 
 the religious belief carries in itself a certainty which is supe- 
 rior to all logical power of demonstration. Above all, God the 
 creator is no naturahstic hypothesis, because that creator
 
 360 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 which would be meant only as cause of the natural process 
 in the sense of natural science would lack the essential qual- 
 ities for a god. 
 
 It may be doubtful whether the naturalistic contemplation 
 of things makes it at all necessary to transcend the world of 
 experience and to seek a creator of the world. The chief ar- 
 gument of past days was the adjustment and fitness of nature, 
 which seemed explainable only if a foreseeing intellect had 
 planned it from the beginning. But in our day such a view 
 has lost its chief meaning. The rise of forms which are adapted 
 to their surroundings and which maintain themselves under 
 changing conditions through adjustment nowadays no longer 
 appears to natural science as an unsolvable problem. On the 
 other hand, the sciences recognize to-day more sharply how 
 endlessly much in nature is not at all adjusted and adapted 
 to purposes. Above all, the hypothesis of a creator who stands 
 as against the world with forethought and planning purpose 
 would solve the problem from the standpoint of the natural 
 sciences only when the creator himself is conceived as a bodily- 
 mental structure. When we discussed the values of develop- 
 ment, we saw that the human inventor may be considered as 
 a sufficient cause for the origin of the machine, inasmuch as 
 physiology understands the inventor himself as a series of 
 causal processes which cooperate to produce the adjusted 
 parts of the machine. The inventor conceived as cause is not 
 in question in his purposive reality, but only as a psycho- 
 physical process, and his purposive thought is itself only 
 a piece of the psycho-physical natural process, a link in the 
 causal chain. But in the same way God, too, would then be 
 nothing but a gigantic psycho-physical apparatus. And that 
 means that he might be sufficient to explain the resulting 
 effects, namely, the world-experience, but that his own work- 
 ing would then offer exactly the same problems. God himself 
 would then have to be causally explained. In short, in this 
 way natural science would always only come back again to a
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 361 
 
 naturalistic object which as such would never give an ulti- 
 mate conclusion to the inquiry. 
 
 It is different w^hen at the beginning of the series a creator 
 is posited who is not psycho-physical mechanism, but is a sub- 
 ject in the way in which we ourselves are real subjects. We 
 always postulated that our own deed of will as part of the 
 historical reality must be understood in its freedom and with- 
 out reference to causes. Our deed is free because it would be 
 meaningless to ask for its causes. Its whole reality lies in its 
 purpose. It does not seek to be explained, but to be inter- 
 preted in its intentions. A creator who wills the world in such 
 a way is indeed beginning and end, and the world which he 
 plans is included in the totality of his deed. The causal chain 
 of the world would then be constituted by the creator's free 
 will, and the freedom of his will, which we can understand by 
 feeling our own will, would bring to rest every further inquiry. 
 Yet we should have to admit again that this whole creating 
 super-will has reference only to that which demands explana- 
 tion, the causal process of nature. Such a world creator, 
 therefore, cannot will anything but that blind swarming of 
 the unchanging elements of things. The creator's only pur- 
 pose would then be the purposeless movement of the atoms. 
 Such a creator certainly would no longer be a mere natural 
 thing which itself demands explanation; he would be the 
 creator and the lawgiver. He has posited the immutable 
 masses and the unchanging energies; and yet: can such a 
 creator who would be confined to this explanatory task ever 
 mean a God for us ? A will which wills nothing but the exist- 
 ence of the world-substance and the validity of the natural 
 causes would be an omnipotent spectre, which W'Ould not 
 awaken awe or confidence, hope or fear, thanks or love. No 
 religious feeling could respond to him, and the most essential 
 elements for a God would be lacking. Yes, we hardly even 
 have a right to speak of omnipotence if such a creating spirit 
 does not will anything but nature as nature ; he cannot will
 
 362 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 anything but the law, and is thus without power in the face 
 of a process according to law. For the thought of action de- 
 termined by goodness there would be no point of contact at 
 all. 
 
 If such a creating will is to become a God, something 
 fundamentally new must be added : the will must enter into 
 relation with the assthetic world of happiness, of unity, of 
 beauty, and with the ethical world of development, of achieve- 
 ment, of morality. Only this combination of the separated 
 worlds of values gives to the thought of God the power of life. 
 Whether the world over which God dominates is the infinite 
 universe of the modern natural science, or is a little section 
 of experience which the imagination of the savages has cut 
 off, in every case the true test of the god-character remains 
 the unification of a manifoldness of values. Whether God 
 stands above the things or lives in the things themselves, 
 whether there is one god or many, remains a separation of 
 secondary importance. Only one question is always funda- 
 mental, whether the same god who orders the things in their 
 natural connection at the same time forms our experiences 
 to beautiful inner agreement and realizes our ideals in the 
 development of the world. The religious feeling must be cer- 
 tain that the world in which the things move in accordance 
 with God's will is a world in which the connections are con- 
 trolled by natural law, in which everything unites itself in 
 inner harmony, and in which the good deed brings with it the 
 victory. The connection of knowledge may be still the most 
 superficial combination of experiences, the inner harmony may 
 be no more than the happiness of mere enjoyment, and the 
 victorious good may not represent more than the selfish wish 
 of the tribe. Thus the values may stand on the lowest level, 
 but the world which is dominated by God must serve all these 
 groups of values in common. To believe in God the creator 
 means to be convinced in the inmost mind that through the 
 agency of an over-experienceable power the opposition be-
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 363 
 
 tween natural order, happiness, and morality is removed 
 from the world. No explanation of the scientific kind has to 
 make this unification conceivable. Only he who is immedi- 
 ately and personally certain and convinced of this unity 
 through God has religion. 
 
 Such a creator stands at the central point of every great 
 historical religion. Sometimes the logical, sometimes the 
 aesthetic, sometimes the ethical postulate may have the over- 
 weight in accordance with the emotional dispositions of the 
 different peoples and ages. These emotional factors also 
 decide which personal attitude in the relation to God may 
 prevail. It may be gratitude and love, or the feeling of de- 
 pendence, humbleness, and even fear, or perhaps confidence 
 and courage, or finally self-sacrificing renunciation. But in 
 the unerring belief which gains its deepest life-feeling from 
 a beyond in which all values become a unity lies the religion 
 which lives in all changing religions. If we look to the fur- 
 thest Orient, we find in the Chinese a people which certainly 
 clings to the earthly life. Its cult of the dead cannot hide 
 the fact that it was fundamentally poor in religion until the 
 Buddhistic religion intruded from without. But from the be- 
 ginning the great teachers were certain that the supreme 
 master, who is at first the sky itself, regulates the natural 
 order of the things and at the same time the moral order of 
 man in perfect unity. The original Chinese consciousness 
 found its deepest emotional expression in Laotse, who pro- 
 claimed : " Man comes from the earth, and the earth from the 
 sky, and the sky from the Tao, and the Tao comes from itself. 
 The whole created nature with its products is only a mani- 
 festation of the Tao. While Tao is a spiritual and immaterial 
 being, it embraces every visible thing and in it are all beings. 
 A supreme spirit lives in it in an incomprehensible way. This 
 spirit is the highest and most perfect being, because in it 
 there is truth and belief and confidence. From eternity to 
 eternity his glory will not cease, because he combines in him-
 
 364 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 self the true and the good and the beautiful in the highest 
 degree of perfection." That is the fundamental tone which 
 sounds through the religions of all nations and all ages. The 
 order of nature, the pure happiness, and the moral striving 
 must somehow be combined in something which is beyond 
 experience, which we cannot understand, but in which we 
 must believe. 
 
 From China the way leads westward to India. The wonder- 
 ful people of India with their early flagging energy have 
 unfolded their best powers in their religion ; pondering and 
 dreaming, through four thousand years they have trans- 
 formed those fundamental thoughts always anew. From the 
 undeveloped symbols of the earliest times to the philosoph- 
 ical systems of religion of the later priests there remains a 
 certain mysterious feeling, while the content of the religion 
 hardly allows a unified formula. Nevertheless it might be 
 said that from earliest times a certain belief was slowly pre- 
 pared which later found incomparable expression. It was the 
 belief that the things are only an illusion, the suffering only 
 an appearance, the evil only a misinterpretation. All the true 
 being is spirit, and in devotion to the pure spirit all truth, 
 all happiness, and all morality necessarily flow together. The 
 elimination of the opposition of values is here gained by an 
 entirely new turn of thought. The opposition is overcome 
 by recognizing the world of opposition as an illusory world, 
 but the ultimate meaning is, after all, in the turn of the 
 Indian thought the same as in all other religions of world- 
 influence. Here, too, the belief has overcome the struggle 
 between natural knowledge and the desire for happiness and 
 the postulates of morality. It is evident that the desire 
 for happiness is in this case the moving power in the whole 
 system. In spite of all apparently moral energy of renuncia- 
 tion, it remains after all the aesthetic desire for the removal 
 of suffering which controls the totality of this world-view and 
 which subordinates nature and morality.
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 365 
 
 The true world of India is eternal and immutable. Every 
 becoming is only an illusion. In sharpest contrast to it we 
 find the belief of the Persians and the religion of Zoroaster. 
 The history of the world is a world-struggle which will end 
 with the triumph of the good and the defeat of the evil. After 
 a world-period of twelve thousand years the savior will come 
 and awaken the dead. The religious drama thus plays in this 
 temporal world of the senses, but the effective religious 
 power here, too, combines morality, happiness, and causality. 
 Those Persian peasants, surrounded by enemies, recognized 
 that the good and the beautiful and the causally necessary 
 were entirely separated in their suffering existence, and that 
 the powers which controlled their world allowed the victory 
 of the immoral. There began the mission of Zoroaster. The 
 true god, he proclaims, has nothing in common with those 
 gods of evil. In the true god are combined power and mor- 
 ality and the kindness which brings happiness. The true 
 god is the creator and conservator of the world, and especial 
 thanks are due to him for ordering nature in accordance with 
 laws; but at the same time he is the holy power which in 
 absolute purity effuses continuous godly energy and helps 
 the moral men powerfully to protect the world against the 
 impure and bad. This god, finally, is just, and guarantees for 
 the good word and the good deed wonderful reward at the 
 last day of judgment. The great accord of the triad of values 
 is thus completely fulfilled here too. 
 
 Marduc was considered the king of the gods from the 
 foundation of the Babylonian Empire under Hammurabi. At 
 the dawn of creation Marduc begins his control of the world. 
 He secures the victory of the light and overwhelms the dark 
 powers of evil. He guides the blessing streams, he gives the 
 harvest and all food for men, he heals sickness and liberates 
 the sufferer from pain, he awakens the dead. However much 
 there may be which is crude and entirely under dominance 
 of the naturalistic mj^hs, this connection between the power
 
 366 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 over nature and the happiness of men and the pure helpful 
 deed repeats itself in the whole Babylonian-Assyrian myth- 
 ology. The anger of the gods sends the great flood to punish 
 the evil deeds of men. They send pestilence and defeat in 
 war to those who do wrong, who break their pledges, who 
 destroy the harmony of the family. 
 
 We come to the Mediterranean. It would be in vain to try 
 to transform the Egyptian religions, with their numberless 
 gods, with their cult of animals and dead, and their long 
 changing history, into a closed system. But as soon as the 
 thought of a highest power has been formed, it again serves 
 at the same time the domination over nature, the help towards 
 happiness and success, and the enforcement of moral obliga- 
 tions. It is Amon-Ra, the supreme sun-god. " He gave order 
 and the gods arose ; he made the men and created the animals. 
 The men came out of his eyes and the gods out of his mouth." 
 — "The oppressed put their confidence in him, as he is the 
 helper of the poor who cannot be corrupted." The last hap- 
 piness in the paradise of Osiris is found only by him who in 
 the court of the dead can confess " that he has not done any 
 sin against men, and that he has not done anything which 
 the gods detest." In the domain of Ra there cannot be any 
 opposition between the process of nature and happiness and 
 moral realization. 
 
 If we see the Greek gods in the mirror of the Homeric 
 songs, we may be doubtful whether the Hellenic soul, too, 
 unified the values of the world by its religion. On the other 
 hand, if we see them in the image of the Platonic myths, we 
 know that the accord of the true and the good and the beau- 
 tiful was never purer and deeper. Yet even in the unphilo- 
 sophical heaven of gods in which so much low immoral long- 
 ing and so much unjust caprice were mingled, after all it was 
 Zeus who dominated, and, as the king of the gods and men, 
 was the protector of justice and the helper of the weak and 
 defenceless. And if the poet in his longing for beauty makes
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 367 
 
 the gay life of the gods appear devoid of morality, Athene 
 and Apollo manifest by their national influence that a deep 
 moral power emanated from these children of Zeus. The 
 incomparable beauty and power were thus after all joined 
 with a moral efficiency. 
 
 Jahwe, the god of the Israelites, was at first practically only 
 a naturalistic power, the god of the mountain and the thunder- 
 storm, but the spiritual, moral deepening of the Jahwe 
 thought is the history of the Jewish nation. If, at the break- 
 down of the Israelite state, the Jahwe religion did not disap- 
 pear, it was because through the words of the prophets the 
 god had been developed into a god of moral order superior 
 to the chance of natural experience. From the deepest moral 
 soul Elias had demanded that the people must choose by 
 principle between the true, holy, moral god and the unholy 
 natural gods. The god of Israel was a powerful god who 
 could divide the sea, and yet he was a benevolent god who 
 brought welfare and happiness to his people, and above all 
 he was a just god who would give up even his people if moral 
 justice demanded it. In this unity lie the meaning and the 
 strength of the belief. 
 
 For the Christian religion it holds true, more than for any 
 other, that the mere apprehension of the outer world and its 
 beyond is not sufficient to express the deepest meaning of the 
 religion. Only the apprehension of the self and the beyond of 
 the self, the confidence in salvation, express the life of those 
 who believe in the crucified one. Certainly the outer world, 
 too, must find its place in the totality of the Christian doctrine, 
 but the kingdom of God is in ourselves. Yet at first we only 
 have to ask as to the view of the outer world. But it is clear 
 already from the gospels and from the convictions of early 
 Christianity that this world of things is created in freedom 
 and set in order by the same god who has prepared it as the 
 realm of morality and who has blessed it with happiness. 
 Universal power, morality, and love are combined in the
 
 368 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 creator. The world, his creation, is from the beginning ar- 
 ranged so that the ordered process of nature, the happy Hfe, 
 and the victory of the good must lose their apparent contra- 
 diction for the soul of the believer. From the beginning 
 Christianity is the doctrine of the unification of nature, 
 happiness, and morality by the holy transcending power of 
 the spiritual creator. 
 
 Since the days of the first Christian communities all the 
 particular views have passed through incessant changes. 
 The order of nature is very unequally conceived if sometimes 
 every change in the world is understood as always a new 
 action of the creator and at other times there is a sure belief 
 that God has given to nature the laws for all time. Still more, 
 morality is very unequally conceived. Sometimes it is a pre- 
 supposition that every human soul has the free power to de- 
 cide between good and bad, at other times it has been a fixed 
 belief that God had decided beforehand who is to have the 
 power for good and who may victoriously carry through the 
 struggle. And not less different is the way in which happiness 
 has been conceived if it is sometimes promised for the resur- 
 rection at the last day and sometimes sought in the trustful 
 belief itself in the heart of the fighter in the hour of the fight. 
 But in the fundamental demand these contradictions do not 
 change anything. In every variety of religious doctrines, 
 whenever they were really supported by a living belief, the 
 chief fact has remained the same : the world of the creator 
 was destined for the unity of the different values. The moral 
 may lie in the decision of the individual, or may have been 
 performed by the predestination of God ; the happiness may 
 come after aeons, or may illumine our soul to-day. The rest- 
 less wavering between the true, the good, and the beautiful 
 in the world, for the true Christian of all periods, is brought to 
 rest by the belief in God the father. It is as Augustine said : 
 "Thou hast created us with an impulse towards thee; there- 
 fore our heart is restless until it finds rest in thee."
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 369 
 
 The Islam religion would not have found such power over 
 the people if the Koran, in spite of its fantastic exaggerations, 
 had not clearly taught that the world-totality which Allah 
 created serves at the same time the natural order, morality, 
 and human happiness. The seven fundamental qualities 
 officially accredited to God, it is true, do not include his mer- 
 ciful benevolence, but the Koran speaks of it at many places. 
 It contributes much towards the belief which seeks the living 
 unity of values in Allah and Mahomet. But it is still more 
 important that the Koran also leaves no doubt that in spite 
 of the predestination which results from God's omnipotence, 
 after all the individual man determines the moral value of 
 his action. After his death he will be examined, and at the 
 day of judgment he will find reward or punishment. If the 
 good overweighs the evil, he will pass the bridge of hell with- 
 out damage and will reach the paradise which prophets and 
 martjTs enter immediately after their death. 
 
 What expresses itself so clearly in the great historical re- 
 ligions is less clear and less perfectly suggested by the natural 
 religions and half-religions of the lower races. Indians and 
 Persians, Egyptians and Greeks, Israelites and Arabs, started 
 alike from crude symbols of nature and life. But, after all, 
 those gods of nature and of dead leaders and ancestors, even 
 in the clumsy form of earliest myths, contain from the begin- 
 ning the tendency to combine separated groups of values. 
 Just through this original disposition the low symbol of God 
 continuously grew with the development of the various values 
 which entered into it, and slowly and steadily, without a 
 sudden change, it absorbed in itself the power of highest belief. 
 What Jahweism became in Israel is hardly suggested in the 
 preceding Jahwe adoration among the Kenites. But that 
 local god of the mountain, who was in a higher sense morally 
 indifferent, after all combines the power over a natural region 
 with the will to strengthen the life-hopes of the tribe and to 
 bring to victory the over-personal will of that group. Even
 
 370 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 in the crudest form, the symbol must be more than mere 
 over-personal cause of nature in order to find religious sub- 
 mission at all. That all holds true for the thousandfold forms 
 in which animistic gods to-day still control the hopes and 
 fears of the uncivilized peoples. Whether the natural powers 
 become humanized there, or whether human leaders become 
 transformed into natural powers, whether conceptional words 
 become personal names — in every fetish there is already 
 given a creating energy which somehow controls the natural 
 connection of the things and at the same time enters into 
 relation with the common will and wishes of the tribe. The 
 most different volitions may stand in the foreground and 
 the forms may still be changing and fugitive, but even in the 
 most primitive shape the absolutely valid value of the unity 
 of values can be recognized. It is as the Buddhists say: 
 " Many ways lead from the most different starting-points up 
 to the top of the mountain, but the same moon shines down 
 on all of them." And after all the same moon also shines 
 over those many paths which only lead a short way up and 
 do not reach the top of the mountain. 
 
 B. — REVELATION 
 
 The power of God was to us the beyond of the outer world ; 
 the revelation is the beyond of the fellow- world. The revela- 
 tion supplements the historical connection of willing beings 
 just as the creation supplements the causal connection of 
 things. Through revelation the holy spirit pervades the whole 
 fabric of human society as religious doctrine, as cult, as church 
 and clergy, and gives to the life of the community its over- 
 personal value. If our valuations are to be without contra- 
 diction in themselves, it is not sufficient to believe that the 
 world of things is more than mere nature. We must also feel 
 certain that the claims of men which approach us as historical 
 reality are more than merely demands of historical men. Our 
 social life is not only filled with social strifes, but is the battle-
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 371 
 
 ground of opposing valuations. The consciousness of our 
 duties and of our rights, the dignity and power of the histor- 
 ical traditions, the over-personal hopes and appreciations, 
 may oppose one another. All these contrasts can and must 
 disappear only when we are certain that the historical con- 
 nection ultimately points back to God. We must feel that the 
 demand of men is ultimately sanctioned by God himself, in 
 whom all order and all morality and all bliss become a unity. 
 Only in so far as the historical willing flows immediately from 
 God's own will is the highest value of completion reached; 
 only then can it combine in itself in a scientifically inconceiv- 
 able way the values of historical order, of moral deed, and of 
 endless life-harmony. 
 
 The over-personal demand for complete unity of values 
 must trace the life of the community to a religious revelation. 
 God then becomes for the historical life too the spiritual 
 background in which the contradictions become reconciled. 
 God's influence means not at all merely a direct continuation 
 of the historical tradition in retracing history beyond its 
 origin. We saw that a god who does not will to be anything 
 but a cause of nature would not be a god, but merely 
 a psycho-physical mechanism which itself would belong in 
 natural science. In the same way a god whose revelation was 
 nothing but the beginning of the historical continuity would 
 not be a god, but merely a vague chapter of pre-history. The 
 over-human influence becomes a religious revelation only if it 
 includes, beside the historical value of connection, also the 
 aesthetic value of fulfilment and the ethical value of the ideal 
 goal. Revelation can therefore come in at any time anew, 
 inasmuch as the will of God may enter into the historical 
 process at any point to unite the valuations and to give to the 
 human community confidence and direction. 
 
 Every miracle is such a new revelation, and it is clear that 
 in this sense the miracle belongs to the most necessary mani- 
 festations of the evaluating consciousness. The miracle is no
 
 372 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 suspension or annulling of the natural laws, inasmuch as 
 the connection in which the miracle has a meaning is not the 
 order of nature, but is the connection of wills. That which 
 goes on in the miracle is without any relation to the question 
 whether those experiences can be apperceived also as physical 
 facts. As soon as they are brought under such a point of 
 view, of course they must be obedient to the natural laws, 
 and the apparent exception would simply constitute a pro- 
 blem which science was so far unable to solve. But such a 
 point of view of science is artificial and foreign to the real 
 life-experience of the miracle, in which everything depends 
 upon the manifestation of a will. We saw that it is always 
 artificial to bring the real historical life under the thought- 
 forms of the causal natural science. The world of freedom 
 demands rather its own forms of connection. Only in a world 
 of freedom the miracle takes place. A will manifests itself 
 there which we understand as the will of God. There is no 
 breaking of the chain of natural processes in question, be- 
 cause in that realm of freedom no natural order is involved. 
 The power of the miracle does not lie in its negative relation 
 to suspended causes, but in its positive relation to a superior 
 will, in the significance and uniqueness of its revelation. 
 
 The revelation, therefore, must always give to man much 
 more than merely the recognition that God exists. The whole 
 historical life finds its impulses and its uniting meaning there. 
 The orders of the state and the crowns of the monarchs are 
 divine. The law and the power of punishment are divine, 
 marriage and oaths are divine, every moral deed and every 
 ideal striving in the community are divine. The whole his- 
 torical life in its reference to the revelation becomes in this 
 way embedded in religion. It is therefore entirely wrong to 
 believe that there can exist a fundamental opposition between 
 religion and state, or between religion and science, or between 
 religion and art. Wherever such an opposition historically 
 arises, one of the two sides, or both, must have become dis-
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 373 
 
 loyal to their highest ideal task. The special values, as for 
 instance science or art or law or industry or love, may enter 
 into conflict with each other, but religion cannot be in dis- 
 agreement with any one of them by principle, as religion's 
 fundamental task is to unite the valuations by reference to 
 a beyond. A narrow-minded church, a selfish state, a petty 
 school-knowledge, a reckless art, a frozen morality, may not 
 come into harmony with one another. That is easily under- 
 stood. 
 
 Where there is community-life, there revelation is also 
 needed. The religion alone always brings that which diverges 
 again to convergence, inasmuch as the consciousness of his- 
 torical tradition and order, of moral duty, and of fullest hap- 
 piness can be combined only through such a transhistorical 
 relation. The mere progress of civilization would be unable 
 to conciliate all opposition of valuation. Certainly on the 
 lowest levels there is usually no definite tradition for such an 
 over-historical communication. The priests know that the 
 fetish and the idol have their magical powers, that the holy 
 animal must be adored by the whole clan, that the prescrip- 
 tions of the taboo must be observed, but there is not neces- 
 sarily a definite act of revelation by which this over-natural 
 information was gained. But everywhere, among the prim- 
 itive peoples of Africa and America and the South Seas and 
 among the Mongols, everywhere the beginnings of state order, 
 of moral duty, of legal obligation, of social harmony, and of 
 explanatory knowledge, have found their last connection and 
 their unity with hopes and wishes for the common happiness 
 through the revealed proclamation of the priests. 
 
 This belief finds its fullest elaboration in the great devel- 
 oped religions. When Zoroaster on the height of the moun- 
 tain experiences the contact with God and is lifted to the 
 heavenly throne and hears from God himself the divine truth, 
 the Persian belief finds in this over-historical starting-point 
 the essentials of religion. From there flows the energy with
 
 374 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 which the historical order, the hoped-for happiness, and the 
 moral conviction in the life of the Persians reenforced one 
 another. There before his throne God himself had made 
 Zoroaster his prophet. Every historical development had in 
 this over-fact its absolutely safe starting-point. 
 
 Buddha did not receive the revelation : his earthly life 
 itself was revelation. To become a savior for mankind he 
 decided to descend from heaven to earth. As his mother he 
 chose a pious queen, and as soon as he was born, he cried 
 with a loud voice : " I am the supreme and best in the world, 
 and shall make an end of all suffering." In the later belief 
 of the church, the historical Buddha even becomes only one 
 manifestation of the real Buddha. He remains the most im- 
 portant appearance, but before and after him Buddha mani- 
 fested himself also in other forms. 
 
 The always new revelation of divine will has perhaps no- 
 where more deeply entered into the national life than through 
 the Delphic oracles of the Greeks. Political alliances and 
 fundamental laws were made dependent upon the voices of 
 the Delphic Apollo, and through Apollo Zeus himself was 
 speaking. The question is not how far the calculation of 
 priests and how far the sincere belief in prophets influenced 
 the people. The decisive fact is that through the belief in the 
 words of the virginal Pythia a deep civilizing harmony of 
 political state movements, of social peace movements, and 
 of moral law movements was secured. The logically valuable 
 historical order, the aesthetically valuable harmony of love, 
 and the ethically valuable realization of the deepest will 
 through action could be melted together in the life of Greece 
 into a unity only by the power of the cult with its manifesta- 
 tions. The same holds true for the Assyrians and Babylonians 
 with their abundant talent for religion. Here even art and 
 science are apprehended as immediate divine revelations, 
 just as the throne of the kings is established by the gods. The 
 laws of Hammurabi's old Babylonian statutes are all to be
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 375 
 
 referred to divine revelation. The relief in the famous diorite 
 block shows how the sun god installs the king as judge. 
 
 The religious significance of Moses, too, lies in the fact that 
 God manifests himself to him as a living god who restores to 
 the people oppressed under the Egyptian might their belief 
 in their destiny. It was the divine revelation which through 
 Moses spoke to the discouraged people and started a new 
 development, in which all the ideals again became a unity. 
 But just as God manifested himself before to Abraham and 
 Isaac and Jacob, so the Jahwe of Moses has revealed himself 
 to many successors and has given to the historic development 
 of the believers the over-historical unity. In the belief in 
 revelation also lies the decisive power for the world-task of 
 historical Christianity. Certainly the meaning of the Christian 
 conviction is grasped most deeply when the revelation is 
 posited into the own heart and is sought in the change which 
 a true belief brings to the inner life. But the church, both the 
 Protestant and the Catholic, at first had good reason to main- 
 tain the revealed doctrine as revelation. The inspired sacred 
 writings as such were inexhaustible sources of the historical 
 influence. The life of Jesus with its miracles was a manifesta- 
 tion of the God of love. The Christian community found in 
 this manifestation, from the manger to the cross, the point of 
 transcending reference from which every valuable hope and 
 will and work attained inner unity. The miracle had this 
 world-moving influence not because it was supra-natural, 
 but because it was supra-historical. It had no relation what- 
 ever to nature as such, but it stood in decisive relation to 
 history. For the historical volition it was the inspiration 
 and transformation. For Islam, too, there can hardly be a 
 doubt that Mahomet himself really believed that he was 
 called to his mission by Allah, and that his prophetic mani- 
 festation would realize itself. Islam does not deny that God 
 has revealed himself to the world by angels and prophets and 
 saintly men from Adam and Noah to Jesus, but the Koran
 
 376 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 which contains the manifestation through Mahomet is alone 
 destined for all mankind. It is the true word of God, which 
 was decreed by God from eternal times, and which was sent 
 down by the angel in order that Mahomet might manifest it. 
 Again the believers had thus gained an historical beyond which 
 gave to the political, the aesthetic, and the ethical energies a 
 common unified direction. 
 
 Thus the community-life has secured at all times the unity 
 of its diverging valuations by the belief in an over-historical 
 starting-point in ever new forms and symbols. In the belief 
 itself this identification of the values became realized; no 
 perception and no science were needed for it. The mystic, to 
 be sure, at all times and at all places has found this relation 
 to a revealing god immediately in himself. When the re- 
 velation which he experienced irradiated to the fellow-world, 
 he became an historical religious power ; when that which his 
 vision saw determined only his own religious life, the histor- 
 ical life-connection was cut off. On the other hand, the belief 
 of the community must be deepened when the manifestation 
 w^hich the individual experiences in his own believing heart 
 harmonizes with the revelation of the church, and if the inner 
 world in this way testifies to that which the fellow-world 
 must demand in order to maintain the unity of the values. 
 
 C. — SALVATION 
 
 The inner world is filled with contradictions. Through our 
 own power this opposition and strife of our inner volitions 
 cannot be subdued. The soul seeks a beyond of the inner 
 experience in which this counterplay comes to silence. It may 
 be a heavenly predestination which takes care that just our 
 own self after all finally comes to a complete unity. Or it may 
 be the pious worship and a heavenly vision which raise our 
 self above all inner struggles. Or a life after death may unroll 
 itself before the believing eye, and may offer ever>i;hing which 
 life has denied. Or an atonement may purify us from our sins.
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 377 
 
 Infinite, indeed, are the forms in which the misery of mankind 
 externally and internally is overcome by belief, and a last 
 unity gained not for the natural process of the outer world, 
 not for the historical movement of the fellow-world, but for 
 the experience of the inner world. The longing for this abso- 
 lute value of unity in our inner world is the demand for salva- 
 tion. It arises wherever in the world mankind exists, because 
 the necessary, the moral, and the happy never have com- 
 pletely unified themselves in the life-experience of any one. 
 The thought of a life after death in a better place is not at 
 all necessarily in the foreground ; and on the other hand, just 
 this thought has been often developed without reference to 
 the idea of salvation. The idea of the soul which is suggested 
 by the facts of death or by dreams may lead to a belief in 
 another world which is not at all a better one. Even among 
 the lowest savages, who show no traces of religious impulses, 
 the idea of a life after death is often developed. The dead are 
 furnished with shoes for the long journey, but that they will 
 find a better life in the strange land is at first not involved in 
 the consideration. Yet the way from such ideas to the para- 
 dise is only a short one. Even to the lowest Indian the be- 
 yond is a place for enjoyment and pleasure, and for the hunter 
 it is a hunting-ground rich with buffaloes. But while the 
 better life is at first often independent of the desire for salva- 
 tion, still more often the salvation is independent of a heav- 
 enly life. Here on earth the suffering of the soul will disappear, 
 and all will come to complete unity by divine influence, by 
 benevolent providence, by prayers, and good deeds. Yes, 
 even the life after death does not necessarily have to be re- 
 moved from earth. The doctrine of transmigration of souls, 
 for instance, in the ethically shaded form of Brahmanism, is 
 surely a doctrine of salvation. The man whose existence is 
 filled with good deeds is raised by divine influence to a higher 
 stage of life, which is freed from the pains and struggles of the 
 lower stage. The partial liberation from the present suffering
 
 378 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 will thus come when the present life-struggle is fought to an 
 end, but it will come in the form of an earthly life. 
 
 Yet the fullest liberation is found for the Indian thought 
 only in the complete emancipation from the treasures of life. 
 Life is suffering because it is desire. When the desire in us is 
 annihilated, the torture of existence is ended. An unselfish, 
 mild, pure state of mind and the discipline of abstinence is 
 Buddha's sermon for the masses; but those who want to 
 reach the beatitude of complete deliverance must go beyond 
 it and come to a state in which all sensuous excitements are 
 extinguished and a dreaming ecstasy is brought about. The 
 centre of gravity seems to lie only in the liberation from pain, 
 but Buddha says that everybody is himself the cause of his 
 suffering, and by himself he will be liberated. That which is 
 to be aimed at is then ultimately not deliverance from the 
 world, but liberation from the selfish attitude towards the 
 world. Only when we relate the things to ourselves as indi- 
 vidual persons do they become evils. If we sink into that 
 absolutely valid reality, there is no longer anything ugly or 
 anything painful. This salvation from the conflicts of the 
 world is therefore ultimately the own rising to the standpoint 
 of pure valuation. 
 
 It seems as if the highest conflict, the conflict of the pure 
 values themselves, is not touched by all that. But it is clear 
 that we become conscious of that conflict of values only by 
 the selfish reference of the world to our own personality. The 
 necessity of the world-process and the beautiful harmony of 
 things and the purity of moral ideals are not in themselves in 
 conflict. The opposition comes only by their mutual crossing 
 in our personal will-experience because the unity of our per- 
 sonality then demands also a unitedness of those demands 
 for values. The necessary natural process which as such is 
 valuable becomes perhaps an anti-value when it contradicts 
 the demand for harmony and brings us misery. In the same 
 way the harmony of joy which is valuable may become a sin
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 379 
 
 when it contradicts the value of morality. And again every- 
 thing which is valuable in the world of moral purity and 
 beautiful harmony may become untrue for us when it con- 
 tradicts our demand for a reliable order of things. The mis- 
 ery, the sin, and the untrue are thus rebellions against aes- 
 thetic, ethical, and logical values as soon as they are referred 
 to the individual person. As long as they are only related to 
 the world itself, they are merely mutually independent values. 
 If the. relation of the values to a personal will is extinguished, 
 then there ceases the mutual disturbance of the values, be- 
 cause then they no longer have any mutual relations. He 
 who sinks into the world without reference to his own self 
 has therefore overcome the opposition of the true values. 
 But he has not overcome the opposition by reconciling and 
 uniting them, but by eliminating the demand for such unity 
 through renouncing his own self. The world in itself is not 
 sinful, not unhappy, not untrue. Each of its values is a be- 
 coming of a special kind, an elaboration of special ideals 
 which do not disturb each other, but which do not come in 
 contact with each other. Indian philosophy thus opens a way to 
 a new kind of unity, the unity not in the world but in the soul 
 which strives for ideals. Not the god who dominates the all 
 but the soul which starts the valuations of the world must 
 now be conceived as the ultimate unity. But if that is the 
 meaning, then religion has been transformed into philosophy. 
 He who seeks the unity by sinking impersonally and there- 
 fore over-personally into the world, and therefore finds it not 
 in God but in the seeking self, is on the way to a philosophical 
 view of the world, even when he continues to speak the lan- 
 guage of religion. Buddhism is therefore in its ultimate mean- 
 ing philosophy. In the same direction moves the religion of 
 salvation in all times as soon as the impersonal sinking into 
 the world becomes the predominant element. Neoplatonism 
 expresses it clearly. 
 The Jewish religion began with a strong personal claim on
 
 380 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 the world ; the conflict was therefore intensely felt, and was 
 referred entirely to the given world itself. Only a god beyond 
 this world could remove this inner friction of the experience. 
 The fulfilment of the prescriptions which God likes can secure 
 the earthly welfare in which all conflicts of the inner world 
 are harmoniously solved. The promised kingdom for which 
 they hope is at first still to come on earth. The beyond of the 
 experience is simply experience of the future. Only late the 
 Jewish nation developed the belief in the life after death, a 
 belief which was living in the Greek mysteries as well as in the 
 Persian and Egyptian national consciousness. In Christianity 
 this belief enters into the centre of the ideas. Not a kingdom 
 on earth but a kingdom in heaven will come, in which bodily 
 human existence and happiness and justice and peace will be 
 united. The unity of the logical, sesthetic, and ethical values 
 in the inner world is completely realized in the Christian 
 belief in a beyond. The earthly life with its conflicts is now 
 embedded in a larger whole as an harmonious part. In this 
 infinite totality all limitations of experience and all struggles 
 of the world are annihilated, and this supreme value which 
 harmoniously unites all values is more certain than the ex- 
 perience itself because the conviction of belief maintains it. 
 In the religion of Islam all that reappears. 
 
 It corresponds exactly to the meaning of values that in the 
 church of Christ and in the church of Mahomet, there is a 
 hell with its tortures as well as a heaven. Values can never 
 be affirmed without making the denial thinkable, too. The 
 absolutely ultimate value can be reached by the soul only if 
 it wills values at all. The moral value is the only one which 
 must be created by own activity. Whoever denies it by sinful 
 deed does not will any unity in his deepest willing, and there- 
 fore destroys for himself the heavenly certainty. The imag- 
 ination may give to the tortures infinite content, but the 
 deepest torture after all remains that the unity of will cannot 
 be reached, that the heaven is closed. The decisive fact is
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 381 
 
 that a heavenly kingdom in full unity of valuation exists. 
 "Thy kingdom come" is the prayer of the soul which desires 
 salvation. In this highest completion of the inner world 
 nothing is fundamentally changed when in the sense of 
 Paulinism the future resurrection is not referred to the body 
 but to the spirit, and if the death of the crucified one is 
 thought as atonement. Christ now intermediates the salva- 
 tion, but the state of being saved maintains the same features. 
 
 The Christian thought of salvation, too, leads beyond it- 
 self, or rather leads from the purely religious to the philosoph- 
 ical attitude. The moral consciousness has often objected to 
 the idea of atonement, the aesthetic consciousness has re- 
 volted against the idea of a final condemnation, the logical 
 consciousness has resisted the consequences which seemed 
 to belong to resurrection. But the philosophizing change in 
 the idea of immortality arises after all from quite different 
 considerations. In the unphilosophical form this belief stands 
 and falls with the presupposition that our inner world is a 
 process in time, a process which by an unlimited temporal 
 prolongation becomes the possible bearer of infinite values. 
 But just this presupposition does not hold. When we dis- 
 cussed the sciences and separated the historical aspect from 
 the naturalistic one, we recognized that all historical reality 
 is given by deeds of will which are not describable and ex- 
 plainable things, but attitudes which must be interpreted, 
 understood, and appreciated. As such living realities the 
 human experiences, we saw, are not in a causal connection, 
 and not in the time of the physical things. Their reality lies 
 in the connection of their meaning, and this connection be- 
 longs to the realm of freedom. The question of causes and of 
 temporal duration is for these immediate will-experiences as 
 little admissible as the question of their space-form, or weight, 
 or color. 
 
 Of course we saw that everything in the world can be 
 treated as object ; the self then becomes a passive spectator,
 
 382 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 and the experience becomes a causal content of consciousness. 
 We recognized that as the task of psychology. But then the 
 immediate life-reality is sacrificed ; it is an abstract aspect 
 which becomes necessary for the special purposes of explana- 
 tion. If we do not have to explain the inner world, but to 
 understand it in its meaning and in its values, we must try not 
 to analyze it psychologically, but to grasp it in its immediate 
 will-character. In this purposive life-reality our inner life is 
 not in the time-form of the physical things. Our self is directed 
 towards things which are considered as present, or as past, or 
 as future, but the self itself does not become a thing by that, 
 and is not simultaneous with its present things. The self 
 itself remains outside of the physical time because it posits 
 and embraces that time in all its directions. In the over- 
 temporal act of the will, the total infinite time of the things 
 is enclosed. An immortality which is merely a prolongation 
 of a temporal process can therefore refer only to that psycho- 
 logized mental thing. The free over-temporal self, the acts of 
 which constitute our immediate life, cannot go on through an 
 infinite time because it cannot enter into time at all. 
 
 In any case, no real value could arise if our self-reality 
 were to live its life in the physical time. All that is banished 
 into time is absolutely not existing if it does not lie in the 
 present instant. The past and the future are equally beyond 
 reach. Reality then transforms itself into an unending pro- 
 cession of single instants, and everything which is merely 
 instantaneous is in itself absolutely without value. We saw 
 that every value depends upon the identifying realization 
 between separate contents. Schiller's Don Carlos exclaimed : 
 "One instant lived in paradise is not too dearly bought by 
 death." But such an instant would be entirely worthless. 
 The value could set in only if at least two instants were given, 
 and the second were recognized as the identical realization of 
 the first. But that is possible only when the two separated 
 contents are taken into one unified act. The first must there-
 
 THE VALUES OF HOLINESS 383 
 
 fore not have become unreal when the second enters. The 
 anticipation and the realization must not be two temporal 
 processes, as in temporal form the first would no longer exist 
 when the second arises. They must rather be separated parts 
 of one atemporal will-act. But if one single temporally con- 
 ceived and therefore psychologized experience is worthless 
 in itself and unfit to enter into a value, the mere multiplica- 
 tion cannot change anything. A mere chain of temporal con- 
 tents of consciousness therefore remains indifferent from the 
 standpoint of value, even if it goes through uncounted mil- 
 lions of centuries. The mere extension of our psychological 
 phenomena in time would be, for the meaning of the person- 
 ality, just as accidental, external, and ultimately worthless as 
 the expansion of our body in space. Our life would not be- 
 come more valuable if our arm should reach to the furthest 
 star. In the purposive atemporal experience lies our personal 
 reality. Therefore the unified identification of values can be 
 found for our inner world not by a temporal prolongation 
 but only outside of time. 
 
 The spiritual beyond, accordingly, begins not after geons, 
 or after the bodily temporal occurrence of our death, but 
 must be included in our over-temporal will-connections. It 
 is a beyond because it transcends all the real acts of our will, 
 and can never be completely grasped in a concrete life- 
 experience. It is therefore an ideal, but this ideal can be be- 
 lieved as real because our conviction maintains it. The true 
 salvation in the spirit of Christianity is the victorious arising 
 of that will-attitude in us by which every opposition of values 
 is overcome and the full unity of the true, the harmonious, 
 and the good is reached in our soul. It is the salvation of the 
 over-personal blessedness. All understanding of this ultimate 
 unity then leads into the depth of the own soul. Now the 
 salvation no longer results as the effect of a divine action, 
 but by our own aiming toward a higher purer life. The be- 
 yond of our inner world lies at the bottom of our self, and by
 
 384 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 that insight the religious thought takes a turn towards phil- 
 osophy. Nevertheless, the Christian thought remains also 
 in this form still true religion. It remains religion because in 
 the centre stands the certainty that this own consciousness 
 of the unity of values is upheld by the belief in God. The be- 
 lief in the divine power of uniting the values is now itself the 
 saving fact. That again is certainly not to be understood 
 in any psychological sense. The decisive reality remains un- 
 expressed if this belief comes to be described as a psychical 
 cause and this expansion of our soul as a psychical effect. 
 What is really in question is the connection of meanings in 
 free volitions. To love God means to the inner world the 
 absolutely valid conciliation of all mutually opposing evalua- 
 tions. The torn and broken experience of the self has become 
 in the belief a meaningful unity, the inner struggle has come 
 to rest, the helpless bondage has been transformed into free- 
 dom by salvation.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 
 
 The pious soul finds God in a vague longing toward the unity 
 of values; to find this unity of values by a conscious, con- 
 ceptionally clear, purposive labor is the ultimate task of all 
 philosophy. Thus the goal remains a common one, but the 
 way towards it is entirely different. This difference is too 
 easily misunderstood, and yet the God to whom prayer rises 
 has lost his deepest religious meaning if he transforms him- 
 self into the absolute of the idealist. The ultimate principle 
 which philosophy is seeking is not meant to come to us in 
 creation, revelation, and salvation. Certainly religion, too, 
 has reached an absolutely ultimate. There cannot exist a 
 being who stands behind the Godhead. As soon as the pur- 
 pose is to apprehend the given worlds of truth and of har- 
 mony and of goodness as identical with one another, the 
 belief in God alone can bring us certainty. No philosophical 
 remodelling of this belief can supplement this completing 
 thought or still less replace it. Only by the relation to God 
 can these conflicting worlds be united in such a way that one 
 fulfils itself in another and that their totality itself becomes 
 a pure value. Yet the presupposition for this deed of belief 
 remains that these at first conflicting worlds are given as 
 experienced realities. From the things of life which we find, 
 from the real nature and history, from the love and happiness 
 that men really experience, from the moral order which 
 is really given to us, our longing arises to the holy, which is 
 supra-real and which unites all that is given. From such 
 starting-points the unity cannot be reached in any other way ; 
 no philosophical thought can explode this belief. The valu-
 
 386 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 able experiences themselves do not become changed by this 
 superstructure of a divine reality. 
 
 All this must be entirely different as soon as philosophy 
 tries to seek the unity of the values. Then the first step 
 must be to examine the presuppositions of the values them- 
 selves. That which we call the given and that which we call 
 the experience must themselves become problems of thought. 
 By such a turn the direction of the search becomes entirely 
 changed. If we examine the given experience itself we must 
 turn from the experience to the experiencing subject, from 
 the values to the evaluating consciousness, from the world 
 to the I and its reason. But if those realms of value are de- 
 pendent upon the actions of the self, their unification can no 
 longer be brought about by merely uniting the separated ex- 
 periences, but rather must be brought about by uniting the 
 evaluating actions of our L Instead of outward movement 
 to an inexperienceable reality beyond the world which re- 
 ligion seeks, we then necessarily have an inward movement 
 to the absolute in ourselves, in which the different evaluating 
 acts have started. This new direction towards the absolute 
 by an examination of the inner conditions of valuation can 
 indeed be in question only when the longing for an ultimate 
 unity has led to a methodical and systematic labor of thought. 
 Such intentional elaboration of values was what we recognized 
 as civilization in the narrower sense of the word. Philosophy 
 is therefore an achievement of civilization like science and art 
 and law. Religion creates its value by its naive immediate 
 feeling of life which is at the bottom of our certainty of 
 existence, of our joy in life and happiness, of our belief in 
 development and progress. Of course at the higher stage re- 
 ligion absorbs numberless values of civilization. The nature 
 which God created may be conceived by the believers in 
 accordance with the scientific work of physics and chemistry. 
 The belief may make use of all cultural means of poetry and 
 music, painting and architecture. The church may be secured
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 387 
 
 and propagated by legal and moral achievements of civiliza- 
 tion. But the original religious deed of belief remains always 
 an immediate apprehension of the value. Religion is there- 
 fore a life- value to us, philosophy a cultural value. A mutual 
 suppression and interference are no more in question than 
 any conflict between the naive unity- value of love and the 
 systematic unity- value of art. 
 
 For us there is no special proof necessary that the sys- 
 tematic examination of the possible fields of value really leads 
 back to the evaluating soul. Our total undertaking was evi- 
 dently one long example of such a method. In studying the 
 various groups of values we had to understand them as func- 
 tions of the subject. We had no free choice there. If we were 
 really to examine the true and the beautiful and the good 
 and the holy with reference to that which is similar and which 
 is dissimilar in them, we had to turn from what is apparently 
 given as completed structures to those inner energies in us 
 which posit the separated values in the swarming experi- 
 ences. If the question is now how far these values themselves 
 can be brought to a unity, it is evidently for us the most 
 natural continuation of our analysis to turn again to this 
 inner positing of values in ourselves and to seek its ultimate 
 conditions. 
 
 The true goal of philosophy, we said, is the unification of 
 the values. The examination of the special values gives the 
 special part of the philosophical task : the logic, the aesthetics, 
 the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of nature, the phil- 
 osophy of history, and so on. But the totality of philosophy 
 is more than the sum of these parts. They all find their ulti- 
 mate foundation in the closing examination concerning the 
 inner unity of the evaluations themselves. Only by binding 
 together and uniting all the valuations does the world-totality 
 itself become valuable, and that alone gives us a philosophical 
 view of the world. The philosophical view of the world, on 
 the other hand, can alone give meaning to our life. If we
 
 388 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 interpret the task of philosophy in this way, we do not take 
 sides for one philosophical school against other philosophical 
 tendencies. When we defined the task of religion as unity 
 of values, by such a definition we drew boundaries inside 
 which there was room for Buddhism and the cult of the Greeks 
 and Christianity and Islam. If we define as the goal of phil- 
 osophy the unity of the evaluating acts, again we have not 
 excluded any special kind of philosophy by it. The ultimate 
 problem of the philosophers has found very different formula- 
 tions in the history of philosophy. Yet without any deep 
 intruding changes of the historical systems, it might be de- 
 monstrated that the solutions of the ultimate philosophical 
 problem have always meant a fundamental reconciliation of 
 all contradictions in the evaluating deeds. 
 
 Such a view does not involve the demand for a fundamental 
 metaphysical principle. On the contrary, the reconciliation 
 of the conflicts of valuation may be secured far from all meta- 
 physics. The opposition between the valuation of know- 
 ledge, with its demand for causal laws, and the valuation of 
 morality, with its demand for freedom, is, for instance, com- 
 pletely abolished as soon as it becomes clear that both do not 
 refer to the same world at all. Moreover, in the sphere of ex- 
 perience itself a kind of unity is established as soon as one 
 particular valuation becomes in principle super-ordinated 
 above all others. For instance, if the connections of the outer 
 world are posited as the only values which are absolutely 
 valid, we must come to a naturalistic, materialistic view of 
 the world in which there can be no conflict of valuation. Cer- 
 tainly such quarter-philosophy will very quickly prove itself 
 insufficient, inasmuch as such a valuation of nature cannot 
 itself be deduced from a world which is nothing but nature. 
 But in that case all the other valuations would simply be 
 accompaniments of the moving matter, and therefore funda- 
 mentally subordinated to the causal process, and finally em- 
 bedded without conflict in the unified view of the world. In
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 389 
 
 the same way any other group of values can be raised over 
 all the remaining ones and can thus secure unity by the 
 domination of one factor. 
 
 If instead of the connections of the outer world the con- 
 nections of the fellow-world are emphasized, the result is a 
 not less one-sided philosophy in which the historical develop- 
 ment alone is evaluated, and all the other valuations are then 
 historical deeds which result from it. If, instead, the connec- 
 tion of the inner world as psychical content is over-evaluated, 
 the result must be a positivistic philosophy of the inner 
 experiences, which again easily forces all other values into 
 its service. Hence systems which are apparently the most 
 extreme opposites in philosophy agree in their effort to give 
 preference to the valuation of connection, and to make these 
 logical values supporters of all the other possible valuations. 
 Only contents of knowledge, not agreements or developments 
 or realizations, can then claim fundamental value. In con- 
 trast to such systems, aesthetic or ethical philosophy may go 
 the opposite way with the same one-sidedness, perhaps 
 merely to oppose the naked philosophy of the intellect. The 
 romantic philosophy, for instance, subordinates everything to 
 the valuation of unity, and again it may be either the unity of 
 the inner world which controls everything, or the harmony 
 of the fellow-world, or the loving devotion to the accord of 
 the universe. A philosophy of duty, on the other hand, in- 
 terprets all knowledge, that is, all the evaluating true judg- 
 ments, as a special case of moral obligation. In this way we 
 see before us numberless possibilities to secure the unity of 
 the valuations in experience by super-ordinating one special 
 kind of value over all others. Our definition of philosophy, 
 which seeks the philosophical task in the unification of the 
 valuation, leaves us ample room for all the varieties of phil- 
 osophy which history has matured. 
 
 For us such a solution of the problem has become impossi- 
 ble. We have examined the valuations, and have become cer-
 
 390 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 tain that the values are coordinated to each other. We have 
 lost the right to conceive one group of values as dependent 
 upon another. Each valuation arises with equally valid claim 
 from the immediate life-experience. To apprehend the world 
 in its self-realization, in its progress, in its achievement, is 
 not a more and not a less ultimate value than to understand 
 it in its harmony and beauty, or to recognize it in the security 
 of its existence and of its lawfulness. Our study of the values 
 therefore excludes for us every philosophy which ignores the 
 equality of right between the logical, aesthetic, and ethical 
 valuations. Existence as such is not prior to and not more 
 fundamental than goodness or harmony. 
 
 If the various values are entitled to equal rights, no one of 
 them can serve as the one fundamental value from which the 
 others are to be deduced. Hence we must either forego their 
 unification, or we must conceive them all together as deduci- 
 ble from a fundamental act which lies further back. To forego 
 the unity cannot mean anything else than to conceive the 
 world in its totality as contradictory and therefore worthless. 
 Each value may remain valid in its particular sphere, but only 
 in reference to the special field. Referred to the world- to- 
 tality, everything would lose its pure value when the contra- 
 diction between moral, true, and beautiful reality cannot be 
 overcome in the totality. To have value meant for any ex- 
 perience to show itself identically realized in a new experi- 
 ence. The world as a whole therefore has,,a value only when 
 the separated realities show themselves ultimately as vari- 
 ous realizations of an absolute reality which remains in them 
 identical with itself. 
 
 To be sure, we can go through our life without concern for 
 the value of the totality. It is the habitual method of man- 
 kind to act, to enjoy, and to estimate the world in pieces. 
 But whoever has found in himself the deeper question as to 
 the unity cannot find rest in the negative reply. The answer 
 that the world does not have any unity, that the valuations
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 391 
 
 fall asunder, and that a self-asserting totality does not exist at 
 all is ultimately no possible answer. It is no answer because 
 when we ask for the values of unity we do not mean to ask 
 about something ready-made for which it would be possible 
 to state whether it exists or does not exist. The question 
 means rather how is the unity to be created. Values are tasks 
 which are to be fulfilled. We saw that the values of the true 
 and beautiful and good were also not simply hidden some- 
 where ready-made, and now to be discovered. He alone found 
 them who created them. To find a valuable world-totality 
 is in the same way nothing but a task : the task of apprehend- 
 ing the world in such a way that everything which we ac- 
 knowledge as valuable is a necessary content in it, and that 
 nevertheless the world remains in unity with itself. Before 
 such a task the question can be only whether we are success- 
 ful in the fulfilment or not. The purpose of apperceiving the 
 world of harmony, of truth, and of morality as a valuable 
 self-completing whole demands our effort just as science and 
 art and law demanded it. To deny to the seeker the valuable 
 totality of the world is as meaningless as it would be to tell 
 the naturalist that the parts of nature are not really in causal 
 connection. He would answer that the experience can be- 
 come a causal nature only by his logical work as the value of 
 connection in the world depends upon his thinking the iden- 
 tification. In this way the philosophical world-totality is also 
 certainly not something ready-made, not something which 
 the philosopher has to unveil from its masking drapery. It is 
 the goal of apprehension towards which he aims. His ques- 
 tion regarding such a valuable world-whole is therefore, if 
 he understands himself correctly, not whether there is an 
 ultimate reality or not. His question is only what the char- 
 acter of such unity is, or rather how the world must be con- 
 ceived to gain that unity. That such unity really is valid is 
 thus presupposed in the question itself. Those who do not 
 ask for it cannot know it. But those who do ask, and are
 
 392 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 thus already seeking, possess the certainty of its reality, and 
 their search refers only to the elaboration. 
 
 At the very threshold another objection must also be re- 
 moved. If philosophy declares the ultimate meaning of the 
 world to be a self-asserting unity of values, this result of 
 thought must be fixated through conceptions and must be 
 expressed in judgments. But through this fixation and expres- 
 sion the coordination of the values again seems sacrificed, in- 
 asmuch as the whole now becomes object of knowledge and 
 therefore becomes subordinated to the logical valuation. But 
 that is misleading. The fundamental difference is neglected 
 here, the difference between the sciences of experience and 
 metaphysics. In all the sciences, in the natural sciences, in 
 mathematics, in the historical sciences, and in the philosoph- 
 ical special sciences, we always had to do with the connection 
 of the given, with the relation of things or beings or norms 
 with each other. As soon as we are to grasp the deepest 
 fundamental reality, we have an entirely different task. The 
 unification of the separated groups of values, as we saw, was 
 not to be reached simply by combining the given realities, 
 but by embedding them in a beyond of experience. The 
 great evaluating deeds must be recognized as parts of a self- 
 asserting absolute act, which as such is postulated but not 
 experienced. If we call the unification of our experiences 
 our knowledge, the unification of our experiences with a post- 
 ulated absolute fact cannot again be treated as knowledge. 
 An entirely different deed of the I has to come in. It is an act 
 of conviction. From the bottommost depths of the person- 
 ality this postulate breaks out. Only if such a self-asserting 
 absolute fact is posited from which all special valuations 
 emanate is the world-totality itself really valuable. 
 
 This valuation of the totality is therefore a value of special 
 kind, a metaphysical value of conviction, which is funda- 
 mentally to be separated from the logical values of connec- 
 tion. Without the deepest decision, without staking and
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 393 
 
 pledging the whole personality, in short without conviction, 
 there is and can be no ultimate philosophy. This ultimate 
 deed of conviction is indeed never a merely describable pro- 
 cess which could be expressed in its real meaning through the 
 terms of science. Those who would like to narrow down the 
 account of reality to a mere description of objects may there- 
 fore feel satisfied in ruling out such philosophy as "ineffable." 
 If there were expression only where there is description, phil- 
 osophy would indeed have to choose between ineffability and 
 despair. The pseudo-philosophies of materialism or positiv- 
 ism would have to take the place of real philosophy, and yet 
 they could remain enthroned only so long as no one dared to 
 ask what they mean by their claim to be true. But being 
 ineffable in this sense is a fate which the absolute deed of 
 philosophy shares with every single historical will-act if it is 
 taken in its immediate reality. Even the most modern forms 
 of "realism" put themselves in the wrong from the start 
 when they give an account of the will in the same way in 
 which they describe the trees. Wherever there is will the 
 immediate life-reality is lost if the psychological abstractions 
 make it a describable object. To be ineffable means, then, 
 not to have been pressed into the thought-forms of natural 
 science, but to have been left in the life-form of immediate 
 reality. There is a richer form of expression than mere ob- 
 jective description. Every yes and no, every affirmation and 
 every denial, even the affirmation of easily effable realistic 
 half-philosophy, proves in every statement the possibility of 
 expressing that which is not describable. 
 
 This ultimate value of conviction is now indeed super- 
 ordinated over the logical and aesthetic and ethical groups of 
 values. A philosophy maintained by such a conviction does 
 not raise the logical valuation over the other valuations 
 because the certainty of conviction is not based on logical 
 knowledge. All the values, the logical, aesthetic, ethical, and 
 religious ones, thus remain coordinated with reference to the
 
 394 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 ultimate principle to which the conviction relates them. The 
 fact that this conviction must be communicated by concep- 
 tions, judgments, and sentences does not at all transform it 
 into a scientific knowledge. The poet, the priest, the states- 
 man, the judge, makes use of the same linguistic means with 
 which the investigator communicates his descriptions; yet 
 they certainly do not communicate to us knowledge, but 
 attitudes, decisions, and inspirations. 
 
 We now stand before a new ultimate value, the absolute 
 of philosophy, the fundamentally ultimate which bears all 
 reality in itself. It is the over-experienceable in which all 
 experience comes to completion. No knowledge can reach 
 it; only conviction can make it certain. And yet this con- 
 viction again is only a special kind of evaluation, that is, a 
 special kind of pure identification. It is the identification of 
 all the other values. This identity of all the mutually opposing 
 values is reached by understanding all the values as expres- 
 sions or realizations of a last self-asserting reality. The worlds 
 of those values which enter into our experience represent the 
 self -asserting self-realization of the one metaphysical deed. 
 Nothing can have validity which is not maintained by this 
 ultimate act, as soon as the task of raising the totality of 
 values itself towards the level of a value is completed. But 
 from the world of evaluated experiences, how can we reach 
 that postulated, primary reality? On the ground of sys- 
 tematic philosophy of course it cannot be a question of fantastic 
 speculations and dreams. We have just as much right to 
 leave the solution of a cubic equation to the play of imagina- 
 tion. Entirely definite, extremely complex facts are given, 
 and from them the self-asserting underlying fact is to be 
 determined. To be sure, it must remain the deed of conviction 
 that can give to this ultimate principle validity and in this 
 sense reality, but the determination of its characteristics 
 demands at first strictly logical labor before the conviction 
 can evaluate the last result.
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 395 
 
 What we are seeking must be sharply determinable in its 
 content, and must bear in itself the total richness of our expe- 
 rience, and yet must not itself be experienceable. My experi- 
 ence is the life-content of my personal self, and what is to be 
 conceived as experienceable at all must belong to a self. The 
 conditions for the possibility of being experienced are there- 
 fore annulled as soon as the selfhood, that is, the relation to 
 the individual personality as such, is eliminated. My contents 
 of experience, the whole world of my values, must thus be- 
 come over-experienceable as soon as I give up my self, that 
 is, as soon as the I annuls itself. With the I falls the thou, and 
 with the total reference to individuals falls the opposition be- 
 tween the self and the things. Thus, if we give up the bound- 
 aries of the inner world, then we also annul the fellow-world 
 and the outer world as such. The content of experience has by 
 that ceased to be experience. It has become over-experience- 
 able manifoldness : the self has been expanded to the all. 
 Over-experienceable thus means not something which we do 
 not know at all. An inexperienceable manifold of such a kind 
 would lie outside every possible interest. The over-experi- 
 enceable which enters into our conviction is the real experi- 
 ence for which, by annulling every relation to a self, the char- 
 acter of being experienceable to a self is eliminated. When 
 inner world, fellow-world, and outer world become trans- 
 formed in this way into an over-experience, we know from 
 the start at least this about it. As soon as this over-experi- 
 enceable reality posits in itself an I, it constitutes by that 
 positing at the same time a thou, and in positing subjects in 
 this way it also posits the opposition to objects. In short, 
 as soon as there arises an I in the over-experienceable, the 
 whole system of inner world, fellow-world, and outer world 
 becomes necessary. 
 
 It may be pointed out at once that such over-experienceable 
 reality is of course over-personal or impersonal in an entirely 
 different sense from that in which the special values were over-
 
 396 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 personal. It was indeed essential for the truth and the beauty 
 and the good that they are not related to the states of the 
 own personality like the agreeable or the useful. Their valua- 
 tion was independent of the self, inasmuch as they represent 
 pure values only if they are equally valid for every possible self. 
 The pure value is necessary and general. However, the de- 
 taching of the values from our accidental self meant there 
 no elimination of the relation to individual subjects. On the 
 contrarj^, the value was value for personalities, it was over- 
 personal only in so far as it was valid, not for this or that 
 personality, but necessarily for every thinkable personality. 
 But now our over-experience demands that we think away 
 the relation to individual personalities. 
 
 By such a decision all the further steps appear necessary. 
 What remains from our total experience as soon as our self 
 has been enlarged to an over-personality? Of course, at first 
 everything must fall away which has as content our own self 
 in its accidental states, in its pleasures and pains. As soon as 
 the particular standpoint of the self is made void, pleasure 
 and pain have lost their meaning. They were only the indi- 
 cations for the way in which the self grasps the world from 
 the standpoint of its particular interests. But evidently not 
 enough is done by eliminating these feeling-acts of personal 
 attitude. In the same way everything in our experience which 
 lies outside of the pure values belonged to the particular per- 
 sonality. We recognized that the value was everywhere based 
 on the demand that its content must be acknowledged by 
 every thinkable subject. The anti-value, for instance the 
 error or the wrong or the regress or the discord, is accordingly 
 that which cannot be postulated as belonging to every think- 
 able subject. It can be maintained only by particular per- 
 sons, and therefore it stands and falls with the individual self. 
 As soon as the self in its individuality is extinguished, there 
 can remain from the total experience of the self only that 
 which can be conceived as common to every thinkable self,
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 397 
 
 the realm of values. But we cannot rest even here. In the 
 values, too, a personal factor meets a general factor. The 
 maintaining of the identical, that striving for the unity in 
 the otherness and for the realization of the given in new form, 
 is general and independent of the particular self. Whether we 
 had to do with logical or aesthetic or ethical or religious values, 
 we always found the valuation determined by this longing for 
 identification, and this was fundamentally independent of 
 a particular self. This act therefore can enter completely into 
 the impersonal over-experience. But the identified contents 
 — they may be parts of the outer world, or of the fellow- 
 world, or of the inner world — are after all in every valuation 
 again in the particular form of their relation to the self. Their 
 space-position and their temporal form, their grouping and 
 their vividness, are dependent upon the particular standpoint 
 of the single self. 
 
 If everything is really to be eliminated which is posited by 
 the particular self, the separation between inner world, fel- 
 low-world, and outer world disappears, and nothing can re- 
 main in the space-time relation which is posited by the par- 
 ticular standpoint. That which is maintained as identical is 
 therefore now no longer an outer world which stands in op- 
 position to the maintaining will ; hence the will which main- 
 tains the over-experience finds no content outside of itself. 
 Its content therefore must be contained in its own activity, 
 that is, in the over-experience the will has become its own con- 
 tent. Then only have we an over-experience which is liberated 
 from the selfhood. It is a striving which has become its own 
 content, and which aims to maintain this content. A per- 
 sonal self, then, does not belong to this ultimate striving. Yet 
 it is not incomparable with the self, as in the self, too, this 
 will towards identical maintaining binds all valuable expe- 
 rience. The fundamental act of the self thus remains even 
 after eliminating all the characteristics of the individual per- 
 sonality as such. That fundamental act shares its essential
 
 398 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 principle with the self, but it is no longer an individual self. 
 It is conceived as the selfhood without individuality. We 
 might suggest it by the word "over-self." The over-self is 
 therefore reached as soon as the reference to the personal 
 conditions in our experience is eliminated. On the other 
 hand, as soon as the over-self posits in itself a limited per- 
 sonal self, its undifferentiated content must at once separate 
 itself into a self, a co-self, and a not-self, that is, into inner 
 world, fellow-world, and outer world. 
 
 We look back once more over the last part of our road. 
 Our evaluated experience is full of contradictions and with- 
 out inner unity. The logical, aesthetic, and ethical values, 
 all of which were found in each, the outer world, fellow-world, 
 and inner world, appear as separated realms of value inde- 
 pendent of each other. But we demand that we be able to 
 apprehend the world-totality as a value, and that means we 
 postulate that the world-totality remain in unity with itself. 
 The separated worlds of our experience must therefore be 
 understood as various part contents and expressions of one 
 fundamental world which lies beyond every possible indi- 
 vidual experience, and which remains identical with itself in 
 every becoming and change. We had to examine, therefore, 
 how far experience involves an over-experience from which 
 it can be deduced. We asked what remains of experience 
 when the conditions of individual experience, namely, the 
 relation to a personal self, are annulled. We have found that 
 then there remains that fundamental striving which we 
 recognized as the underlying act of every valuation, namely, 
 the striving for a new which is identical with the old. Inas- 
 much as this over-personal act shares this striving with the 
 self, we called it an over-self. Such a will to the identical 
 maintaining has in that over-experience no external mate- 
 rial, no outside object, as the ultimate reality cannot still 
 have something beside itself. Its object must therefore lie 
 in itself. The over-will is its own content. But as soon as
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 399 
 
 in its unfolding a self arises, the manifold of inner world, 
 fellow- world, and outer world would be posited by it, and with 
 them the logical, aesthetic, and ethical series of values. From 
 the fundamental will towards identical maintaining the over- 
 will would bring forward the total of valuable experiences 
 with their separated and contradictory realms of values. The 
 over-self, which is united in itself and which we postulated by 
 conviction, would thus become the source of all those inde- 
 pendent and contradicting experiences to which our know- 
 ledge, our enjoyment, and our estim.ation are related. 
 
 The character of this over-experience can now be followed 
 up. We know at first that it is a striving. The over-self which 
 encloses in itself the conditions for every possible experience 
 is thus certainly not a thing which has existence : the funda- 
 mental reality is life-activity, deed. We know further that 
 it is a striving towards identical maintaining. The over-self, 
 therefore, can never lead beyond that originally given, as its 
 own meaning lies in the maintaining. We know further that 
 the over-self does not find any material outside of itself, as 
 every outside content of experience is dependent upon that 
 individuality which is eliminated in the over-self. Finally, 
 we know that the evaluating identification never refers to a 
 merely unchanged. On the contrary, wherever we had to do 
 v/ith logical, or aesthetic, or ethical, or religious values in the 
 outer world, the fellow-world, or the inner world, the identical 
 was always somehow changed and enhanced. Either it be- 
 came more vivid, or it realized itself externally, or it entered 
 into new space-time forms, but in every case it changed its 
 character in such a way that it could become the starting- 
 point for new action and deed. We saw that to be realized 
 means to remain identical and yet to become the foothold for 
 a new action. If this energy is to be effective in the over-self, 
 the striving which is directed towards self-assertion must 
 not only maintain itself, but must realize itself, enhance it- 
 self, move on to new and ever new footholds of new actions.
 
 400 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 If a striving is to realize itself and thus to fulfil itself, and yet 
 to maintain itself, it becomes necessary indeed that the real- 
 ization shall be of such a kind that it leads to new striving. 
 If the fulfilment were not to lead to new striving, it would 
 be extinguished by the fulfilment and would therefore cease 
 to be striving. The over-self is a striving which aims to 
 maintain itself identical, that means to maintain itself in 
 its striving. Every goal which is reached must therefore 
 be starting-point to a new activity and must enhance itself 
 incessantly. 
 
 From here we can already take a wide outlook. If this 
 over-self were to create in itself the limited standpoint of a 
 self, the whole inner world, fellow-world, and outer world, 
 we saw, must arise, and with them the whole manifoldness 
 of the values of experience. The over-self would then realize 
 itself by its own deed in the pure values of logical, aesthetic, 
 ethical, and religious life. The over-self would bear the worlds 
 of experience and realize itself in them. It is clear that that 
 would indeed fulfil the conditions by which the totality would 
 become a value, inasmuch as the striving of the over-experi- 
 ence and the values of the world-experience are now related 
 to each other like purpose and realization. The over-self re- 
 mains loyal to itself when it expresses itself in the world of 
 the experienceable values. The manifoldness of values would 
 then be no longer a conflict in which the values interfere with 
 each other, because in those values works that one aim of 
 the over-self towards self-assertion. The total world is abso- 
 lutely valuable, as all v/hich we know of it — on the one side 
 the aiming over-self which is posited by the conviction, on the 
 other side the true, beautiful, and good which is posited by 
 experience — blend in a perfect unity. One realizes itself in the 
 other, and our will towards identification becomes satisfied 
 in a general, necessary way. It cannot have any possible 
 meaning to go beyond that and to ask still further as to the 
 value of the world. The all is now completely in unity with
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 401 
 
 itself, and therefore leaves no demand for identification un- 
 satisfied. This value of unity is necessarily the last. If we 
 were to ask further on whether it has any value that such a 
 valuable all exists, we should contradict ourselves. To seek 
 the value of the existence of the world-whole would mean 
 that we seek something else which can be posited as identical 
 with the world-whole and which realizes itself in it. But if 
 this other were still real, the world-whole would not be the 
 whole : the presupposition would be given up. The value of 
 the world, like every thinkable value, can only lie in the mu- 
 tual relation of its parts. An absolutely single can never have 
 a value in itself, even if it is a world-totality. In the identi- 
 fication of its own deeds, the infinite value of the world- 
 totality is completed. 
 
 The counterplay manifests itself when we look towards 
 the over-self from the standpoint of our self. Our whole 
 experience, w^th all its contradictions, by the relation to the 
 over-experience now gains its unity, its rest, its final meaning. 
 The experiences which were independent of each other and 
 therefore accidental now become harmonious parts of the 
 deeds of an over-self which realizes itself from inner neces- 
 sity. The values of the world of experience by that relation 
 are anchored to the deepest bottom of ultimate reality. An 
 entirely new meaning of the values now becomes clear. We 
 called valuable that realization of the parts of experience 
 which in a general and necessary way had to satisfy every 
 possible subject. But now the meaning of the value tran- 
 scends the desire and satisfaction of all thinkable selves and 
 enters into connection with the over-experience of the over- 
 self. The experience accordingly takes its ideals from an 
 over-experience which, to be sure, is not to be found beyond 
 the things like a god, but which is effective and valid imper- 
 sonally in ourselves. The valuable is therefore that which is 
 in harmony with the will of the over-self. 
 
 Apparently by this last meditation we have argued in a
 
 402 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 circle. We acknowledged the over-self because by it the world 
 becomes a value for us, and now we find that a value is that 
 which is in harmony with the over-self. The over-self is de- 
 manded by the valuation, and the valuation is conditioned 
 by the over-self. One of the two evidently must be the 
 original starting-point, but the critical examination of such 
 a last hold can be given to us only in the real experience of 
 the self. Hence the relation is simply this : the self posits the 
 over-self by an act of conviction, because it is an absolutely 
 necessary value for every thinkable self. In the metaphys- 
 ical view of the world which arises by this positing, the over- 
 self is the only fundamental will and everything which cor- 
 responds to its will is valuable. Accordingly the deed of our 
 self posits the over-self from which every self arises. The self 
 must expand itself towards an over-self to find in it the rest, 
 the certainty, and the identity with the absolute whole. 
 
 The character and the working of the over-experience must 
 come to sharper relief when we refer the world of experience 
 to it. We must therefore examine how the experience changes 
 when it is conceived as melted into this over-experienceable 
 striving. Here for the last time we might separate outer 
 world, fellow- world, and inner world, and examine for each 
 realm how it enlarges its meaning in the relation to the over- 
 reality until all manifest themselves in common as the life 
 of the over-self which continually enhances its aiming, which 
 remains loyal to itself, and which has as its only goal the eter- 
 nal value. 
 
 A. — Vi^ORLD 
 
 From the swarming of our impressions the valuable outer 
 world of our knowledge arose. Such a world was no longer 
 made up of the chance impressions of this or that one, but it 
 was constituted by the existing and connected things which 
 are valid in their reality for every possible subject. From the 
 same material of the swarming impressions of life also arose
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 403 
 
 the valuable outer world of our pure joyful devotion. That 
 world was no longer made up of the chance pleasures of this 
 or that one, but was constituted by the harmonious beautiful 
 surrounding which in its unity was valid for every possible 
 subject. Finally, from those swarming impressions arose the 
 valuable outer world of development and achievement as ob- 
 ject of our estimation. That world was no longer made up by 
 the chance aims of this or that one, but it was constituted 
 by the energies which unfolded themselves and enhanced them- 
 selves to higher and higher values which were valid for every 
 one. Yet the one world did not know about the other : one 
 moved on in necessity, the other in freedom ; one was always 
 perfect, the other always uncompleted. That which was true 
 was perhaps not beautiful or did not show progress; that 
 which developed itself perhaps disturbed the harmony ; that 
 which was beautiful perhaps could not be brought into con- 
 nection. And yet the world as a whole must ultimately be 
 united in itself, must be self-asserting and thus identical with 
 itself, if it is not to be without value as a whole. And if it is 
 worthless as a whole, the values of the parts would be lowered 
 to the level of illusory values. 
 
 But we recognized that this ultimate unity could become 
 conceivable for us as soon as we understand that those sepa- 
 rated worlds of experience are only different expressions and 
 realizations of one and the same fundamental world. Such 
 an apprehension offered itself as natural as soon as we had 
 found that those valuable worlds of the pure experience arise 
 only by particular attitudes in our apprehension, and that 
 these various attitudes can all be resolved into one common 
 behavior of our will. Hence in the ultimate reality we have 
 not separated worlds, but separated deeds of one will. This 
 fundamental will in us, however, necessarily lies beyond ex- 
 perience. We know it only by its achievements, we know it 
 as a necessary presupposition without which the performances 
 in us cannot be understood. We know it because we experience
 
 404 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 its results, but we cannot find it in its own reality in the midst 
 of our individual self. The individuality of the self must be 
 given up if we think ourselves into the standpoint of that 
 fundamental self, and in giving up the individuality of the 
 self of course we eliminate also the outer world, in so far as 
 it presents itself from the strictly individual standpoint. The 
 beyond of this self-experience is accordingly a fundamental 
 will which creates in itself the individual selves as well as the 
 various logical, aesthetic, and ethical forms of apprehension. 
 And this over-self, this fundamental will, no longer finds the 
 outer world which the individuals find, but can find only 
 itself as material of apprehension. 
 
 That lies far away from such playing philosophy of will as 
 that of Schopenhauer, which is based on the external simi- 
 larity between the things and ourselves. Such a philosophy 
 argues that the things move like ourselves, that we do not 
 know their inside, but that we know our own inside as will, 
 and that we therefore have the right to draw the conclusion 
 that in a corresponding way the things also are will in their 
 inside. Our result has nothing in common with such meta- 
 physics. The things which natural science knows have no 
 inside. They are and remain always exactly that which they 
 present themselves as being in the thought-forms of natural- 
 istic apprehension. As parts of the chain of causes and effects, 
 they can never be will. In the over-experience of the over- 
 self, they are will to us because the outer world as such has 
 been entirely annihilated in it. The outer world as such arises 
 in contrast to and together with the inner world of the indi- 
 vidual self. If the individual self is annulled, the outerness 
 of the world is annulled too. The over-self therefore cannot 
 find anything without; and as we found that the only thing 
 we know about the over-self is that it shares with our indi- 
 vidual self the will to activity, we must conclude that the will 
 of the over-self finds as material only its own willing. To 
 introduce any additional element would be fantastic specula-
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 405 
 
 tion. Real philosophy is bound to calculate with those ele- 
 ments which are objectively found either in the experience 
 or in the presuppositions which are necessary to make ex- 
 perience possible. On this basis the fundamental postulate, 
 that the ultimate reality is one, can be fulfilled only if we 
 demand that the content of the world is a world-will. 
 
 On the surface it looks as if there still remains the torturing 
 question : What then, after all, is this material of the world? 
 Even if the evaluating over-self and the evaluated world are 
 one and the same fundamental will in the infinity of its aim- 
 ing, we are anxious to test its substance as a chemist analyzes 
 his material. But all such questions arise from misunder- 
 standings. From the start we have emphasized that the will is 
 no being, but an activity. Only when the over-self apprehends 
 itself and makes itself in this way an object, can it become 
 content to which the evaluating I finally attaches the value 
 of existence. Yet even when everything is deed of the will, 
 the imagination may be unwilling to stand still before such 
 a boundary-line. This world-will, it seems, must have some 
 quality which we must be able to describe or to characterize. 
 But here all questioning becomes meaningless, not because 
 we do not have enough knowledge, but because such a ques- 
 tion negates the presuppositions. An inquiry into the "stuff" 
 of the world can have a meaning only when there are different 
 stuffs which can be discriminated. But when everything is 
 equally will, it cannot have any meaning to find out what this 
 will really is, as there cannot be anything to which it might 
 be referred or with which it might be compared. If there is 
 nothing possible which is different material, a description 
 of the material could not even satisfy any justified logical 
 interest. 
 
 We know, then, only the one character of the absolute : it is 
 will. In the beginning there was a deed, but the beginning 
 does not lie in time, as time is only the form-thought of that 
 object world which is created by the primary deed. The deed
 
 406 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 is always something entirely united and undifferentiated, 
 something which has lost its immediate life- value when it is 
 decomposed. The analyzing psychologist must separate the 
 will-action into its different successive parts because he con- 
 ceives the mental states as accompaniments of physical things. 
 The historical life does not know this breaking in pieces, and 
 if we want to understand the primary deed of the over-self, 
 we must start from this real immediate life-experience of the 
 historical personality, not from the products of psychological 
 abstractions. In that over-experience, too, the deed is there- 
 fore a realization of purpose, a fulfilment of the desire, a will 
 which is victorious. Now this over-will is to be the totality 
 of the real. Then it cannot find, or grasp, or aim at anything 
 which lies outside itself. The only goal which the will aims 
 to reach through its deed must be the willing of itself. But 
 we know that to reach a goal means that the will maintains 
 its object in a new form, which is a starting-point for new 
 intentions. We saw in every case that the realization through 
 the will meant a transformation into something new which 
 is identical with the old in its content, but which by its 
 new vividness or by its new form allows a new purpose and 
 a new action. The will always reaches out for a goal which 
 represents the foothold for a new will. Hence the funda- 
 mental will also can have no other aim than to reach start- 
 ing-points for new will. The will must therefore incessantly 
 enhance itself in its willing, and yet must remain in every 
 enhancement identical with itself and must fulfil itself. The 
 meaning of the world is accordingly an aiming towards a 
 greater abundance of aiming which yet remains identical 
 with itself. It is a self-unfolding of the will, which must lead 
 to new and ever new volitions which represent the real world, 
 and yet which cannot have any other aim than that of striv- 
 ing. There can be no other world and no other world-purpose. 
 We now have to ask at first how things may be conceived as 
 arising from this fundamental will.
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 407 
 
 In every will-act of ours the resolving analysis may find 
 the starting-point of the striving, the striving itself, and 
 finally the goal of the striving which becomes realized. They 
 are melted into a perfect unity, and only in this unity and 
 totality have they the meaning of a will-act. The resolution 
 into those three parts belongs to a consideration which does 
 not belong to the experience of the deed as such. The same 
 must hold true for the fundamental will of the over-self. The 
 world as absolute reality is the unresolved unity of this eter- 
 nal deed. But for this fundamental deed it must also hold 
 true that as soon as the striving is resolved from the totality, 
 it stands opposite the starting-point of the striving and the 
 goal of the striving. The starting-point is that which the will 
 no longer wills when it seeks the goal : the goal is that which 
 the striving has not yet reached. The striving is the move- 
 ment from the will, which is given up as will and is no longer 
 willed, to the new will which has not yet unfolded itself. In the 
 deed itself the not-yetand the no-longer are one. Their atem- 
 poral, mutual relation gives unity and meaning to the deed. 
 But from the standpoint of the detached striving factor of the 
 deed, the no-longer and the not-yet stand separated against 
 each other. Such striving thus becomes itself the relation- 
 point for an opposite pair of directions. This relation-point 
 we call the now. From the standpoint of such now the no- 
 longer becomes the past and the not-yet becomes the future. 
 With the resolution of the striving from the atemporal will- 
 totality the time is posited as a relation between starting- 
 point and goal. The striving distributes itself in this way 
 over separated time-elements, and by that ceases to be the 
 one eternal striving. It resolves itself into an infinite series 
 of striving units. 
 
 When the striving separates itself from its content, still a 
 further antithesis is posited. Just because the striving main- 
 tains the content in the transition from the past to the future, 
 this content is acknowledged as something independent. It
 
 408 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 is now not a part of the striving itself, is therefore outside of 
 the striving effort, and in this way the not-here arises as 
 against the here. The time had the double face; from the 
 now it looks forward and backward. The space at first knows 
 only one opposition, here and without. But that without re- 
 fers to the whole manifoldness of the simultaneous contents. 
 With every single content the character of the without shades 
 itself and becomes a particular space-direction. In this way 
 arises the endless manifoldness of space-directions as soon as 
 the striving as such detaches itself from the totality of the 
 deed. It has no metaphysical significance that for certain 
 determinations three space-directions are selected from the 
 endlessly many. For the space, too, it holds true that the 
 here for one act may be the without for the other. The here 
 character of the striving then resolves itself again into an 
 unlimited number of separated centres of striving with an 
 unlimited number of here-points. As soon as the striving 
 separates itself from its content in the deed of the over-self, 
 the time-relation and the space-relation of the content are 
 accordingly posited, and with them the unlimited resolution 
 of the striving in independent units. But that leads us to our 
 individual selves. The acts of our I are such detached and 
 endlessly resolved resolutions of the one absolute striving of 
 the over-self. How groups of such self-acts combine them- 
 selves to united personalities we followed up when we dis- 
 cussed the existence of beings. We have to return to that 
 when we speak about mankind, but at first we are interested 
 in the other side of the process. With the same act by which 
 the striving in the primary deed resolved itself into striving 
 individual beings, the content of the will has transformed 
 itself into spatial and temporal relations. From the sum of 
 these relations the striving finally elaborates the one space 
 and the one time which embrace all thinkable contents of 
 striving. 
 The world in space and time therefore has reality only for
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 409 
 
 the apprehension of the numberless individual selves who 
 have been resolved as striving activities from the over-self. 
 Of course at first it is not a world, but only a manifoldness. 
 But as every single I is part of the striving of the over-self and 
 accordingly manifests its character, this spatial temporal 
 manifold must group itself in accordance with the funda- 
 mental tendency of the over-self. We recognized as its funda- 
 mental aim that everything which is grasped must be trans- 
 formed by striving into something new, that in the new the 
 old is to be maintained, and that the old in the new becomes 
 the starting-point for a new striving. This identifying trans- 
 formation can go on in three directions, and we have studied 
 those three directions most carefully. The individual self 
 manifesting the striving of the over-self must apprehend its 
 space-time world, therefore, as a world of logical knowledge, 
 of aesthetic enjoyment, of ethical estimation. It is the same 
 over-striving that through the individual self performs this 
 threefold upbuilding and which binds these different deeds 
 of the self together in the unity of an individual self. 
 
 We saw how the striving of that type which we call know- 
 ledge aims to grasp those contents which can be maintained 
 in the transition from one self to another self. That gave us 
 the existence of the things. This striving aims further to 
 maintain the content in the transition from the no-longer to 
 the not-yet, and that gives us the value of the connection of 
 things. The transition from one content to the other which 
 is sought in the fields of existence and connection demands 
 accordingly that the self pass from one I to another I, or 
 from one time to another time, but that the content itself re- 
 main unchanged. The content as part of the fundamental 
 deed of the over-self was will, but if the self in its knowledge 
 of the world entirely abstracts from every change of the con- 
 tent, this will-content does not come in question at all in its 
 will-character. It is extinct will, which no longer wdlls any- 
 thing else. It is a completed will, which in its completion
 
 410 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 goes unchanged into other selves and into other times. The 
 nature which is object of our knowledge of existence and con- 
 nection is therefore a deed of will which does not will beyond 
 itself, and which cannot unfold itself in its will. It is the 
 world, the parts of which have and maintain only spatial 
 temporal existence. Their will is extinct because the self in 
 its search for knowledge aims only towards maintaining the 
 same content in its transition to other selves and to other 
 times, and therefore only elaborates that which is essential 
 for the maintaining of the content in this particular transi- 
 tion. Nature as such therefore has no will. 
 
 On the other hand, in the world of aesthetic enjoyment this 
 transition to other selves and to other times is not in ques- 
 tion. The essential factor now is the relation among the va- 
 rious contents. Their will is therefore not at all extinct. Every 
 particular content now must come into the world in its will- 
 character, and the transition from one content to the other 
 can maintain the old in the new only if they will the same 
 and thus resound harmoniously. The beauty and harmony 
 of nature and of art now become living. Finally, in the world 
 of development and realization the will of the things trans- 
 forms itself into reality. Thus, here too, the will of the con- 
 tent stands in the foreground. The self now seeks the transi- 
 tion not from one will to another will, as in the case of aesthet- 
 ics, but from the will to fulfilment. But that means it is a 
 transition from a will which aims beyond itself to a will which 
 is completed in itself, and which can therefore enter with a 
 value of existence into new situations and actions. 
 
 The three worlds are consequently the necessary products 
 of the one striving achievement of the self. But these three 
 directions of the striving necessarily belong together because 
 together they form the primary deed. We recognized that the 
 primary deed of the over-self demanded first that the will 
 strive towards an enhanced will, further that in this transi- 
 tion to the new the will maintain itself, and third that in this
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 411 
 
 way it unfold itself. If in this united deed the will as striving 
 separates itself from the will as content, the content became 
 a manifoldness in space-time, and the striving resolved itself 
 into an unlimited number of selves. That which in the orig- 
 inal deed was a unity must therefore resolve itself into several 
 parts in every individual self. In the original deed of the 
 over-self that which maintains itself as the content was the 
 will itself. In the deed of the individual self the maintained 
 content has become an object without, and therefore a three- 
 fold possibility arises. The content is followed up without 
 reference to its will in reference to the other selves or to other 
 space and time parts ; or secondly, the content is followed up 
 with reference to its will in other wills ; or thirdly, the content 
 is followed up in its own will until it fulfils itself. All these 
 three transitions are necessary parts of the united deed in 
 which the will maintains itself because it is will, in which the 
 will agrees with itself because it is one, in which the will ful- 
 fils itself because it is a deed. These are the three essential 
 features of every deed. In the over-self they are the one un- 
 broken deed, but as soon as in the over-self the striving as 
 an I detaches itself from the whole and thus creates the num- 
 berless selves and the space-time world, this one deed must 
 resolve itself into those three factors. The self, therefore, must 
 have the logical, the sesthetic, and the ethical worlds as three 
 separated worlds which become one only if the selfhood is 
 annulled again and the individual steps back into the over- 
 self. Nature as connection, nature as harmony, and nature 
 as development are therefore only three sides of the one orig- 
 inal deed of the over-self. In the world of reality the neces- 
 sity of the connection, the unity of the harmony, and the 
 progress of the development are reconciled, as all three belong 
 to the free deed of the fundamental will. The individual self 
 alone knows their conflict, which disappears as soon as the 
 conviction eliminates the boundaries of the self and with the 
 self the space-time limitations of the content.
 
 412 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 B. — MANKIND 
 
 The manifoldness of the selves also appeared different in 
 the logical, in the aesthetic, and in the ethical view of the 
 fellow-world. At one time we saw it in its historical connect- 
 edness, the second time in the love and unity of its members, 
 the last time in its self-loyalty and in its progress. But here, 
 too, all the inner contradictions must disappear as soon as the 
 fellow-world is related to the ultimate will of reality. Then 
 only the meaning of mankind becomes significant. 
 
 Our experience began with the fact that we find the inner 
 world of our self as against a fellow-world of other selves. 
 They were not perceived things in the outer world, but will- 
 ing beings whom our will immediately acknowledges. The 
 over-experience which becomes opened to us by our convic- 
 tion now embeds self and fellow-world together into the 
 eternal will of the over-self. The free deed of the over-self 
 makes the separated selves in their manifoldness arise out of 
 itself. And the will which the selves receive from that over- 
 self posits the necessary conditions for the experiences of 
 the separated personalities. The ultimate over-will in its free- 
 dom is therefore not only bearer of the selves, but also bearer 
 of the necessary forms of their worlds, and that means of their 
 worlds of knowledge, of enjoyment, and of estimation. In the 
 elaboration of these experiences which express the will of 
 the over-self the individual selves therefore realize the over- 
 personal goal. The values which the selves acknowledge as 
 common for their worlds of experiences are accordingly 
 manifestations of the one fundamental will, and its self-loyal 
 unfolding becomes the content of the process of mankind. 
 
 We must avoid, however, the misleading idea that the 
 selves are in a way secretions or products of the over-self as if 
 they had their reality without the eternal deed of the over- 
 self. The over-self would then be complete and effective in 
 itself without reference to the fact that it produces many sin-
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 413 
 
 gle selves. No ; the selves are in the over-self as the drops in 
 the stream, and the total development of mankind is part of 
 the primary over-will itself. In religion the belief finds a crea- 
 tor who stands as against the self in a beyond into which the 
 personality may enter without being annihilated ; in philo- 
 sophy the conviction seeks an over-self of which the self is 
 a necessary part in an over-experience into which it cannot 
 enter without enlarging itself to the over-self. Religion is 
 philosophy for the I who maintains its selfhood also in the 
 face of the all ; philosophy is religion for the I which in its 
 own deed finally grasps the all and through the all gives up 
 the selfhood. 
 
 As the drops in the stream ! And yet such a metaphor, too, 
 is entirely misleading if it is to say more than that the selves 
 do not live outside the deed of the over-self. It misleads 
 as soon as it suggests that the sum of the drops makes up the 
 stream itself. The sum of the selves and of the experiences of 
 the selves is not at all the totality of the over-self. For the 
 over-self the content of the striving has not entered into the 
 form of the self-experience, as we saw that this latter form is 
 dependent upon the standpoint of the I. The mere accumu- 
 lation of self-experiences, therefore, could never reach the 
 content of the over-self. In the same way the mere sum of 
 an unlimited series of selves would only bring a repetition 
 of wills which are directed towards self-experience and never 
 that over-will which is directed towards a world-totality. On 
 the other hand, in the self and in the over-self the kind of the 
 will must necessarily be the same. Both can manifest only 
 the will striving to enhance the content in order to make it a 
 new foothold for volition and yet to maintain the old content. 
 As striving, the self is thus equal to the over-self. The over- 
 self which makes up the total ultimate reality was the striving 
 which aims towards its own enhancement and yet maintains 
 itself. Every point reached is accordingly a starting-point 
 for a new will to new goals, and the new goal is again striving.
 
 414 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 At every thinkable stage of this timeless eternal deed every- 
 thing must be possible content of striving and yet striving 
 itself as well. As far as it is considered as content, it takes 
 the temporal spatial form of experience. As far as it is con- 
 sidered as striving, it multiplies itself into the unlimited 
 number of selves, and only in so far as striving and content 
 are experienced as the same, is it the one over-personal world- 
 deed of the absolute. 
 
 The question arises why the absolute moves towards the 
 separation of striving and content at all. What is the purpose 
 towards which the will strives when it splits its deed into the 
 will as striving and the will as content? But such a question 
 distorts the process. We have not a temporal succession. It 
 is not as if the deed was at first united action and then at a 
 certain stage of development a bifurcation began by which it 
 divided itself into the aiming of selves and the experienced 
 content. On the contrary, the unity of the world-positing 
 absolute deed continues to be maintained in eternity, and on 
 the other hand, even in the lowest stage of the deed in the 
 midst of the one deed the separation is incessantly performed. 
 While the deed is closed in itself and fulfils itself as the whole 
 in perfect completion, yet in the midst of this whole the will 
 as it wills to grasp itself stands out in opposition to that which 
 it grasps in itself. That is, the striving stands in the midst of 
 the deed in contrast to the goal. We ourselves as selves are 
 that striving in the midst of the absolute deed, and therefore 
 we find the world-experience as in contrast to ourselves. If 
 we could stand outside of the selves, the absolute deed would 
 be closed in itself and the whole would appear to our view as 
 a whole. But as we are the striving in the midst of that whole 
 deed, the will as a content remains something foreign to us. 
 And by this separation that movement sets in which makes us 
 individual selves and the not-self an outer world. For the 
 deed of the over-self accordingly nothing new is added when 
 in the midst of its own definite acts the relation between the
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 415 
 
 will as subject and as object resolves itself. We grasp it then 
 only from one side, from the side of the will as striving. We 
 are the striving and yet at the same time the whole deed. 
 
 But finally we are also parts of the content. If the world- 
 deed is the will which maintains itself, every particle of this 
 world-will must also belong to that which is maintained, 
 that is, to the content of experience. As such, we are bodies, 
 and only through them the personality which enters into 
 the historical mankind becomes completed. We saw how the 
 world-deed narrows itself into the L As soon as the content 
 of the striving is shaped in the space-time form, the striving 
 itself as starting-point for the directions of time and space 
 must represent a here and now. From this here-now stand- 
 point each self must stand as against the world-experience. 
 This standpoint selects the particular content of experience 
 which can exist for the striving of the individual self. On 
 the other hand, changes in the midst of the space-time world 
 can result only through other space-time changes. The striving 
 of the will can enter into processes of the outer world, there- 
 fore, only when some physical causal action coincides with 
 the will. The world of the self thus depends upon the pre- 
 supposition that a particular will with a particular here and 
 now finds just here and now an organism in which correspond- 
 ing movements proceed. The striving in the over-self, which 
 by its resolution transforms itself into an unlimited number of 
 possible selves and posits by them the space-time world, can 
 therefore realize from this unlimited series only certain selves 
 as personalities. The conditions for a real self are fulfilled 
 only when the particular will as will and as content possess 
 the same space-time value. But evidently this is not a chance 
 coincidence. The space-time position of the particular I 
 resulted from the particular selection of the things towards 
 which the will took attitude. The will of the I was here and 
 now only in the sense that certain things were past and future, 
 before and behind. But the selection of these things depends
 
 416 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 upon the relation to an acting organism. The here and now 
 of the particular will must therefore be given with the body. 
 From the unlimited series of possible selves, accordingly, 
 a self must be realized wherever an acting organism posits 
 by its movements particular relations to its surround- 
 ings. The width of this experienced world is accordingly 
 determined by the manifoldness of these organic reactions. 
 The being may be an earthworm or a man of civilization. 
 But by this selecting dependence upon the body the self never 
 becomes an object like the body, but remains a free will which 
 is limited only with regard to its objects. As such a free will 
 it cannot be perceived, but must be acknowledged, and esti- 
 mated, and all mankind builds itself up by this relation from 
 will to will. 
 
 Only when we view mankind in this metaphysical con- 
 nection do we recognize the ultimate meaning of its inex- 
 haustible activity. We understand that by mankind's striv- 
 ing for the securing and realization of values the will of the 
 eternal over-self maintains and enhances itself. From the 
 standpoint of the individual self we have separated logical 
 and aesthetic and ethical apprehension. Those various values 
 of mankind are now recognized as different sides of the one, 
 united, absolute deed. Every particular aspect emphasizes 
 only particular elements. The knowledge of the fellow-world 
 demanded that we maintain and identify the volitions which 
 started from the same subject ; we gained by it the value of 
 existence of the beings. In the historical connection know- 
 ledge maintained the will which was directed to the same ends 
 in the transition from man to man. It was a definite identical 
 will which was followed up by such logical consideration. On 
 the other hand, when the aesthetic value was sought, the 
 mutual relation of the various beings was grasped ; it was the 
 identification through the harmony of souls, through friend- 
 ship and love. Finally, when the ethical standpoint was 
 taken, the will in its striving towards the realization, and that
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 417 
 
 means towards enhancement, was maintained in order to be 
 identified with a new stage and volition and deed. In this 
 way every one of the values gives valid expression to the 
 self-enhancing self-assertion of the will, but no one value 
 represents the totality of this deed. The deed is split as soon 
 as the striving has separated itself from its content, and the 
 all-striving has thus been divided into the unlimited number 
 of single beings. The deed becomes a totality again only when 
 the single beings annul the limitation and grasp their own 
 ultimate reality in the over-personal will of the absolute self. 
 
 From this deepest source flows the right understanding of 
 the human task and of the position of the individual in man- 
 kind. Only in the certainty of this connection with the over- 
 self do we know on principle that every one of us is unique and 
 cannot be replaced and is necessary for the fulfilment of the 
 world-plan. If we know life merely from the swarming of 
 the day, the one may appear hardly distinguishable from his 
 neighbor. Only a few have anything new to say, and many a 
 man may appear superfluous and accidental. From the stand- 
 point of the whole we understand that this all is a unique 
 drama, in which every volition has its necessary place. Only 
 from the unity of this whole do we know that no self can be 
 repeated in any other world. The world is a living willing 
 activity and not a dead accidental process. Our own deed 
 becomes in that way alone a responsible irreplaceable parti- 
 cipation. While our self by its relation to the whole goes over 
 into the eternal, at the same time our self gains eternal and 
 inexhaustible significance. In our own small life-purpose, we 
 now will the great infinite whole. Nobody else can satisfy our 
 will, and nobody else can disburden us from our duty. 
 
 This deepest connection also brings man nearer to man. 
 We are unique as selves, but ultimately we are all in the one 
 embracing over-self. Yes, we all are the same over-self and 
 separate ourselves only by our relation to the space-time 
 world which itself arose by the splitting of the primary deed
 
 418 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 into striving and content. That is not to be, as it sometimes 
 has been, the way to an ethical doctrine. The sympathy with 
 another, in whose pain we participate because he is ultimately 
 one and the same with us, has no moral significance for our 
 philosophy. Pleasure and pain and accordingly participation 
 in pleasure and sympathy were lying outside of morality for 
 us. But this ultimate unity unites us in our common duty. 
 Even when we examined the spheres of experience we found 
 that the true values must be common to all human beings. 
 We recognized that the evaluating will was the fundamental 
 condition, the "a-priori," of the common world of experience. 
 If we will to build up a world which is not merely a personal 
 dream and accidental chaos, it must be the world of values. 
 Yet only from this relation to the over-self comes the higher 
 sanction of this common will. The aim towards building up 
 the world of values is now no longer merely the necessary will 
 of every being who wills to be acknowledged as a self, but it 
 is a task which precedes the arising of the selves themselves. 
 It is the task which gives any meaning whatever to the self- 
 hood and to the content of experience. 
 
 Certainly from the standpoint of experience, we recognized 
 the development and achievement of men, their happiness 
 and their peace, their science and their art, as something 
 absolutely valuable. Yet that meant for us then only that it 
 must be valuable for every possible I. But what new width 
 and significance and dignity come to the history of mankind 
 now that it unveils itself as the unfolding of an eternal will ! 
 Every truth and every work of art, every act of justice and 
 every moral victory, every economic progress and every re- 
 ligious inspiration, now becomes a new enhancement of an 
 eternal will. In every cooperation of men who build up values 
 in the family and in the tribe, in the community and in the 
 state, in the widest circle of civilization a continuous growth 
 of the living world-positing energy is manifested. In every 
 fighter for new values, in every leader of mankind, the deepest
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 419 
 
 world- will strives upward. But when the meaning of the social 
 work towards values becomes metaphysically deepened, at 
 the same time the counter-will which selfishly destroys values 
 must be sharpened in its contrast. To hold the untrue and 
 the ugly, to create the unjust and the immoral, to interfere 
 with the development and to destroy the harmony now means 
 more than a mere opposition to the labor of others. It 
 means metaphysical solitary confinement. The life which 
 raises up pleasure as its purpose now views below and about 
 it an infinite abyss. Such a life has lost the connection with 
 a world-totality. The world-will which bears all existence 
 and gives meaning to reality is on principle annulled by the 
 conscious denial of values. Suddenly everything has become 
 meaningless, purposeless, empty. The I which seeks only its 
 pleasure is banished into eternal solitude. 
 
 That must not be misunderstood as if a soul becomes an- 
 tagonistic to values if it seeks in its action its own self. Only 
 if the pleasure is brought into opposition to the value and if 
 accordingly that which is desired for the self is preferred to 
 that which is absolutely valid is the metaphysical ground 
 destroyed. The strong personality, on the other hand, which, 
 moved by passions, seems to seek itself, seeks the values and 
 only tries to give to the values the stamp of the own particu- 
 lar deed. Just that creates in the world of will ever new evalu- 
 ation and always enhances anew the deepest energy. Such 
 a powerful will of the self and such self-feeling in the fight 
 against the colorless society pattern, such creation in accord- 
 ance with the own will is surely not opposed to the world- 
 will. It is a trans valuation. That is meant not in the sense 
 that it demonstrates transitoriness and change in the pure 
 values. No, the values remain unchangeable, but the fulfil- 
 ment of the evaluation, the content of the evaluated relations, 
 must change in order that the world-will may enhance itself 
 from stage to stage. We saw that value never belonged to 
 anything isolated, but always to a relation, always to an
 
 420 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 identification of the separated. The will must progress to new 
 and ever new identifications of the world, inasmuch as the 
 world itself must continually progress and the world must 
 progress because it is will ; in every act its reality seeks a new 
 starting-point for a new will. He who destroys in order that 
 he may put the energies of his self into the world-process, he 
 who banishes traditional valuations in order that from his 
 deepest soul he may wrest new values from the world-will 
 and throw them into the becoming of mankind, is eternally 
 right, and the crowd which only wants to enjoy is wrong in 
 contrast to such a great self-asserting individuality. All the 
 energy and all the value of our self thus ultimately originates 
 from the infinite all-will. And yet the reality and the validity 
 of this over-self will originates for eternity from the convic- 
 tion of our own self. 
 
 C. — OVER-SELF 
 
 We stand before the last question: What does the inner 
 world in itself become when it is referred to the over-reality? 
 In a certain sense we have answered that question before. 
 When the fellow-world of our experience by its relation to the 
 absolute enlarged itself to mankind as a whole, it necessarily 
 included also our own self. Each of us is a member of man- 
 kind, and the meaning of our single self then lies in the part 
 which we take in the upbuilding of the values. Only in so far 
 as we help mankind to create values do we fulfil the task 
 which the absolute bears in itself and which becomes realized 
 by the history of mankind. We are a single small fraction of 
 the totality which appears to logical knowledge as the neces- 
 sary historical connection, to aesthetic appreciation as com- 
 munity of souls, to ethical estimation as free purposive pro- 
 gress. 
 
 But our self was for us not only a chance, single member 
 in the masses; it remains always at the same time the 
 one, closed, inner world. This inner world of the self was torn
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 421 
 
 by contradictions, too. The logical self-apprehension recog- 
 nized as the real I the reason with its necessary connection of 
 valuations. The aesthetic self-intuition sought an I which 
 offers the completed unity of happiness. The ethical self- 
 certainty acknowledged an I which realizes itself. Only when 
 the inner world too is recognized as emanation of a deeper 
 will can this apparent contradiction disappear. Then the dif- 
 ferent values represent merely various aspects of that funda- 
 mental reality. The I can find this deeper will only as content 
 of its conviction. In its own acting, it must posit itself as 
 identical with the embracing will which is absolute. In itself 
 it must therefore annul its selfhood to posit itself in unity 
 with the absolute which gives infiniteness. The self enlarges 
 itself into the over-self by its own deed. The limitations of 
 the one-sided aspect then fade away. In the will of the over- 
 self necessary connection, harmonious unity, and self-loyal 
 realization are posited in one and the same deed. The will of 
 the over-self had to maintain itself. By that it had to enhance 
 itself, to realize itself, to progress from stage to stage, and 
 thus harmoniously to fulfil all its willing. In the narrowed 
 apprehension of the I, this will -process resolves itself into the 
 separated values. In the over-self the one fundamental deed 
 embraces necessity and freedom, unity and progress. 
 
 Accordingly we find in ourselves the over-self in the blend- 
 ing allness of values, as soon as the boundaries of the self 
 begin to disappear. We must now look from the self towards 
 the over-self, and we shall ultimately glance for the last time 
 from the over-self back to the self. In other words, we will 
 indicate once more the purest meaning of our view of the 
 world in order ultimately to trace once more the life-purposes 
 of the personality. Indeed, the view of the world has become 
 completed for us only now since we have come to understand 
 how the world and mankind and the self are embedded in the 
 deed of the over-self for eternity. 
 
 For eternity! We have reached that highest point from
 
 422 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 which the meaning of eternity unveils itself. And through 
 it we recognize the deepest aiming of the absolute. The three- 
 fold valuation of connection, unity, and realization has shown 
 itself now as a mere resolving of one united deed which in 
 the over-reality is really a single one. On the other hand, the 
 three contents of the world, outer world, fellow-world, and 
 inner world, presented themselves also as mere separated 
 aspects of this same absolute deed. The resolution into those 
 three different values resulted as soon as in a way we took 
 a cross-section of the world-deed, and the resolution into the 
 three world-contents when we took a longitudinal section, if 
 such metaphors may be allowed. In the absolute over-deed 
 all those separations are again annulled. The I, the fellow-I, 
 and the not-I are in the over-I one and the same; and the 
 logical, the aesthetic, and the ethical valuation form in the 
 over-I one single unfolding will, and accordingly one single 
 deed : the world-deed. 
 
 The world is a deed. From here everjrthing becomes illu- 
 minated. A deed is the realization of that which is willed. A 
 deed is not only a final action as if it were simply a process. 
 The action is part of the deed only if it corresponds to the will. 
 In every deed that which is willed and that which is achieved 
 are posited as one. As purpose of the will the goal is a not- 
 yet, a future. In view of the achievement the mere willing of 
 the goal has become a no-longer, a past. Only when both 
 are perfectly one do we have a deed. In the deed, therefore, 
 past and future are one, and that alone is the meaning of 
 eternity. The world-deed is eternal in time just as the circle 
 is eternal in space. Nowhere a beginning and nowhere an 
 end in the circle. In the eternity of the fulfilment of the 
 world-deed the over-self does not know a past which is not 
 also future nor a future which is not also past. The world 
 is eternal because in every fibre of its ultimate reality it is 
 nothing but deed, and because every deed posits future and 
 past as a unity.
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 423 
 
 The world is a deed. A deed is an identification. Now we 
 understand why every will which arose from the depths of 
 the world-will remained fundamentally a striving for identi- 
 fication. Here lies the last ground for form and content of 
 our values. We recognized all our values as such relations of 
 identities, and all striving of the personalities for values was 
 an expression of this demand for finding that which remains 
 identical with itself in the experience. This demand for iden- 
 tification meant at the same time the demand for the self- 
 assertion of the world. This demand is not itself an object of 
 experience. It manifests itself in its deed, and only from the 
 result, from the evaluated world can we recognize this ab- 
 solute deed. The personality must be impelled by such a 
 deed inasmuch as all our willing and realizing in experience 
 must participate in the deed and will of the eternal absolute. 
 The deed demands that everything remain worthless which 
 does not identify the grasped content in a new experience 
 and which does not in this way remain loyal to its will. 
 
 The world is a deed. A deed is a realization, and as realiza- 
 tion we recognized the fulfilment of will in a form which de- 
 mands new will. Realization is therefore enhancement of 
 will. Hence at no stage can the deed of the over-self come to 
 a standstill. And it can never go backward, as every realiza- 
 tion must lead to a new will which has all the earlier stages 
 as presuppositions. Every new stage therefore realizes the 
 ultimate meaning of the preceding stages. But just that 
 meant to us progress. In every valuable process the will of 
 the world is enhanced. Yet that does not mean that that 
 which is reached is in itself more valuable than the stage 
 which is left behind. The value always lay only in the rela- 
 tion, in the realization, in the positing as identical. Every 
 single enhancement of the will is therefore absolutely valu- 
 able, and nothing can be still more valuable than that which 
 is absolutely valuable. Even the highest stage which the will 
 may reach is always valuable only with reference to the ear-
 
 424 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 Her stage. Only the relation is valuable, because it is the ful- 
 filment of the will. The ultimate goal of the world lies at an 
 endless distance. And yet even that furthest final point can- 
 not be more valuable in itself than that which is left behind. 
 Only the movement towards a goal, the maintaining and en- 
 hancement, is endlessly valuable. 
 
 The world is a deed. Deed means fulfilment and comple- 
 tion. If the world is to be a deed, it must always be complete 
 in itself, and yet its goal was to lie at an infinite distance. 
 There is no contradiction. It is a necessary, inner counter- 
 play of the eternal will. In the infinite lies the last stage of 
 the world, but no stage can belong to this world which does 
 not belong to its will and therefore to its moving from the 
 start. Whatever the world-will may desire, it must be a 
 self-unfolding of the original will. The over-self can never be- 
 come disloyal to itself. Its unlimited development is given 
 in the law of its own free deed as the curve of geometry is 
 given in the formula of its smallest part. If the over-self 
 would know itself entirely, it would from the beginning be 
 obliged to will the world in its infinity. All becoming is the 
 self-unfolding of this one will. The world is therefore an 
 infinite enhancement of will, and yet a completed deed, 
 as nothing which is not willed can ever be added to this will 
 which maintains itself. With the first positing this endless, 
 infinite, eternal world is perfectly closed, and it is meaningless 
 to ask for a world which lies outside of it. 
 
 The world is a deed. The deed in its totality embraces con- 
 nection and unity and achievement. Only by annulling its 
 totality in separating the not-I from the I the three aspects 
 of the world became resolved, and each became the starting- 
 point of a special world-valuation. Each became the "a- 
 priori" of a particular evaluated world. But just for this 
 reason those separated evaluations can be valid only for the 
 world of experience which resulted from that opposition of I 
 and not-I. For the over-experience, for the ultimate reality
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 425 
 
 of will, accordingly, the logical, or aesthetic, or ethical stand- 
 ards of valuation must be insufficient. Thus the deed of the 
 over-self can be measured only by the metaphysical value 
 which is the inner unity of those three values of experience. 
 The ultimate reality, therefore, can never be grasped by mere 
 logical knowledge, and every philosophy which is based 
 merely on logical thinking must be impotent on principle. 
 But in the same way such a philosophy cannot be supported 
 merely by aesthetic feeling which seeks the value of unity, or 
 by ethical consciousness which evaluates the realization. 
 Every single effort of such evaluating one-sidedness must 
 bring the absolute which is to bear all experience down into 
 the realm of experience itself. The deed of the over-self would 
 then glide back into individual life. Conviction alone in which 
 the world manifoldness is posited as a unity can grasp the ul- 
 timate reality. Only through conviction the over-deed annuls 
 the metaphysical solitude of the self and binds together the I 
 and the not-I in their truth and unity and freedom. The 
 world-will is will towards values. But the created value ap- 
 pears only in the experience of the I as truth, harmony, and 
 goodness. In the ultimate over-personal reality the world is 
 grasped through the metaphysical over- value which creates 
 all those values of experience. Through the conviction of 
 belief in this metaphysical value the I enlarges itself to 
 the over-I which contains in itself the I with the fellow-I 
 and the not-L 
 
 The world is a deed. It is no thing, no content, no mere 
 existence with which the world begins and the parts of which 
 now simply last in indifference. It is no deed-material which 
 hangs together in accidental parts externally and the elements 
 of which continue. The world is a living deed, and the work 
 of this deed is to be performed. From here we understand 
 the task and the meaning of our individual selfhood. 
 
 Whoever has proceeded from fluctuating chance volitions 
 to real convictions finds this unswervingly before his soul;
 
 426 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 our life has meaning and purpose. We are not embedded 
 helplessly into a blind accidental game which destroys the 
 values of experience, but with our whole life-reality we belong 
 to a world which strives upward. The rigid necessity which 
 forces us has shown itself as a value, too, as a value which 
 our own will is positing in its pure willing towards the goal 
 of the world. Banished is the anxiety that the over-reality 
 may be meaningless, and that our world of experience with 
 all its truth and beauty and goodness may be a useless pur- 
 poseless upbuilding. In the beyond of the self there works a 
 will towards values which bears our own valuation, and which 
 cannot be sacrificed itself in any infinity. 
 
 This life in the world of values is a great affirmation. Pre- 
 judiced pessimists think that if all existence is will, life must 
 be intolerable. They say that each will is dissatisfaction with 
 that which is given, and when the will is satisfied all interest 
 is annulled. The world would thus be a pendulum movement 
 between pain and apathy. We now know the opposite. Just 
 because the world and life are unending will, the true life is 
 filled with the greatest possible measure of pure satisfaction. 
 We recognized that the will is not at all displeasure. Only 
 the realization of that which is not willed brings dissatis- 
 faction. The continuous willing as such is not at all a suffering. 
 On the contrary, it is a necessary condition for the joy which 
 floods from the fulfilment. The fulfilment itself, on the other 
 hand, does not annul the will, and therefore does not deprive 
 us of the possibility of new satisfaction. We recognized that 
 fulfilment and realization cannot mean anything else than 
 transition to new starting-points for a new will. As the world 
 is nothing but will, the will always wills only new willing, and 
 every realization is fulfilment just because it secures new voli- 
 tion. He who posits the value bears in himself a joy which 
 necessarily realizes itself in every pulse-beat of life. Will itself 
 becomes an inexhaustible source of satisfaction. No suffering 
 and no disappointment can dry up this eternal source. It
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 427 
 
 ceases only when the value is destroyed on principle, when 
 the unity with the over-self is accordingly denied, when the 
 world-affirming meaning of life is lost by the own will. He who 
 does not will the value does not fundamentally will his own 
 will, and life itself is therefore sacrificed. What remains is 
 only the phantom of life. "The true life," says Fichte, "lives 
 in the eternal. It is a whole in every instant, the highest life 
 which is possible at all. The phantom life lives in the chang- 
 ing. The phantom life therefore becomes an incessant dying; 
 it lives in dying." 
 
 It would be meaningless to hope for more from life than 
 such a fulfilment of the own will. Nothing but fulfilment of 
 the own demand could ever bring any satisfaction at all to 
 us. And this fulfilment does not lie in a far distant life, is not 
 a seeking for an ultimate, perhaps unattainable, goal. Every 
 act offers a totality of value, and in every will through truth 
 and harmony and morality something perfect can be created. 
 That all this is possible makes our life the best and most 
 blessed. Such optimism is now no longer threatened for us 
 by the inner opposition of the values. Those contradictions 
 have been annulled in the over-self. We know that those 
 contradictory valuations are ultimately only different aspects 
 of the fundamental deed which is a unity in itself, and that 
 the conflict is irreconcilable only in the limited experience of 
 the self, not in the ultimate reality. As soon as we grasp the 
 self in the over-self, the parts unite themselves harmoniously 
 in a totality. On the other hand, as soon as the over-self has 
 become the limited self and the original deed therefore re- 
 solved into a will towards the separated values, their conflict 
 is necessary. And in this conflict was ultimately lying also 
 the contrast between the will towards the value and the striv- 
 ing against the value, between happiness and suffering, be- 
 tween progress and death, between morality and sin. That 
 our individual life is overshadowed by suffering and disap- 
 pointment, that error and temptation and non-fulfilment
 
 428 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 penetrate into our days, in short that human fate is after all 
 only a human life is therefore posited with the will to be a 
 self. 
 
 The mere desire for pleasure and the mere avoiding of pain 
 cannot possibly be the goal of our life if it is to maintain 
 meaning and value at all and is not in its lonely selfishness 
 to detach itself from the world-will. We recognized that fully 
 at every stage of our philosophical inquiry. We saw that the 
 pleasure, too, has its aesthetic place in the inexhaustible value 
 of happiness, but it was the unity of the inner experience 
 which was demanded in such a valuation, not the content of 
 pleasure as such. It is aesthetically valuable to be happy, but 
 it is without ethical value to strive for pleasure, and it is 
 ethically worthless to prefer pleasure to the values of will. 
 The moral task of our life is to realize the absolutely valid 
 pure values by our own deed. In this life-work, we know our- 
 selves as free creators. We are free because our will in the 
 reality of life is not posited as a link in the chain of causal 
 connections. It is meaningless to ask there for its causes. Our 
 will is completely determined by its inner relations and inten- 
 tions. We do not perceive our will like a thing, but experience 
 it in an incomparable way as an own self-certain striving, as 
 a free realization. And every realization meant to us an en- 
 hancement of the free will. On the other hand, the values 
 which we seek in freedom are not given to us, but are de- 
 manded from us. They are not experiences, but new crea- 
 tions from the material of experience. This free work of our 
 life is unique ; we recognized it as irreplaceable in the only 
 world of the deed of the over-self. And this life-work from 
 birth to death is in every valuable deed a whole, in every 
 realization of values eternal, an eternally valuable part in the 
 infinite atemporal all. 
 
 It is eternally valuable because a will maintains itself in its 
 seeking of values and therefore remains loyal to itself. We 
 recognized as a fundamental principle of the pure value that
 
 THE VALUES OF ABSOLUTENESS 429 
 
 that which is grasped remains the same in the new form. 
 Outside of us and beside us and in us value belongs only to 
 that which the will grasps as realization of the willed. If we 
 are not loyal to ourselves, we ourselves become worthless and 
 sacrifice ourselves. To remain faithful is therefore the ulti- 
 mate demand, and to be faithful to ourselves means to realize 
 our will. And to realize means to maintain the old in the new 
 and yet to take the new as starting-point for new volitions. 
 A mere skipping and mere sudden transition from one state 
 into another would never have meaning. To fall asleep wish- 
 less as the beggar's child and to awake as the child of the 
 fairy king, without memory, without identification of present 
 and past, is neither progress nor connection nor happiness. 
 The new must have been willed in the old and the old must be 
 grasped in the new, to be valuable. In self-loyalty to enhance 
 our own will by creating that which we willed with our deepest 
 intention, and to help in this way to build up a world of values 
 in which the absolutely valid becomes expression of our 
 personal will — that is the one all-embracing task of our per- 
 sonality. 
 
 To upbuild a world of values ! That is not attainable for 
 our isolated energies. We can only take part in the common 
 task of mankind. This mankind we recognized as united by 
 its belief in the values, and this unity, too, was no accidental 
 occurrence. We saw that only those whose deepest will posits 
 the forms of the values as necessary can be acknowledged as 
 members of mankind. To unfold his own will in self-faith- 
 fulness means therefore for every one to help the upbuilding of 
 the same common world. In this common work the power 
 became enhanced. The history of mankind thus became an 
 endless unfolding of the own. will. For mankind, too, it re- 
 mained true that the pleasure cannot be the goal of the deed. 
 To bring the greatest possible pleasure to the greatest possible 
 masses the wide circuit through the history of civilization 
 would not have been necessary. The realization of pleasure
 
 430 THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 has hardly been changed and remains indifferent at every 
 stage. To progress in the sense of the self-assertion of the 
 will in will-enhancement remains for mankind, too, the ulti- 
 mate meaning of duty. In science and art, in love and peatie, 
 in industry and state, in morality and law, in religion and 
 philosophy : mankind is to unfold in freedom what is intended 
 as necessary goal of its own will. 
 
 Even nature serves this upbuilding of a world of values 
 through history. Nature is willing to become material and 
 tool of the evaluating will. In the progress of economy nature 
 climbs from step to step through richer and richer forms of 
 serviceableness. In its beauty and in its development nature 
 shows its will ; in its causal lawfulness, nature guarantees its 
 loyalty. The total outer world resounds with the will of the 
 beings. But this eternal unity of outer world and fellow-world 
 and inner world in the whole richness of their connections 
 and unities and realizations would never have been possible 
 if they were not all flowing from the same eternal absolute 
 deed of the over-self. 
 
 That this over-self is real, and that its will really and un- 
 changeably binds our world of values, and that our loyal life 
 is therefore endlessly valuable, no knowledge can teach us. 
 No knowledge could be sufficient. This certainty is founded 
 on the rock of conviction, and on conviction, therefore, is 
 based every value of truth, of unity, of realization, of com- 
 pletion. But this conviction itself is ultimately our own 
 deed. We cannot leave this deed undone unless we are to 
 sacrifice ourselves, as only through this deed our total world 
 of willing is formed into a unity. But it remains our own 
 deed. In the will towards the unity of our own willing the 
 world-deed is closed, in which every demand is satisfied, 
 every question answered, every striving fulfilled. To be faith- 
 ful to ourselves in eternity — in such a deed all values of the 
 world are safely harbored.
 
 INDEX
 
 INDEX 
 
 Absolute, 2, 47, 77, 113, 318, 328, 
 
 348, 394, 405, 414. 
 Absoluteness, 385. 
 Achievement, 258, 301, 330. 
 Acknowledgment, 24, 38, 88, 110. 
 Action, 61, 74, 335, 399. 
 Activity, 23. 
 Adjustment, 187, 360. 
 Esthetic, 163, 177, 180, 204. 
 Esthetics, 59, 156, 167, 387. 
 Affirmation, 159. 
 Agreement, 78, 197. 
 Animals, 110. 
 Anticipation, 72. 
 Anti-naturalism, 44. 
 Applied Art, 205. 
 Appreciation, 17. 
 A-priori, 79, 166, 354, 418, 424. 
 Art, 168, 187, 204, 307. 
 Artist, 171, 212. 
 Atemporal, 383, 407. 
 Atoms, 11, 126. 
 Atonement, 376. 
 Attitude, 24, 91, 104, 144. 
 Authority, 52, 
 
 Bar, 244. 
 
 Beauty, 40, 165, 204, 249. 
 
 Being, 88. 
 
 Belief, 386. 
 
 Biology, 35, 110. 
 
 Body, 106, 415. 
 
 Books, 227. 
 
 Bust, 212. 
 
 Causal, 10, 128, 140, 144. 
 
 Causality, 126. 
 
 Chaos, 75. 
 
 Choice, 62. 
 
 Chord, 246. 
 
 China, 363. 
 
 Christian, 367, 375, 380. 
 
 Civilization, 80, 165, 257, 279, 317, 
 
 373, 386. 
 Classification, 132. 
 Climax-value, 31. 
 Coercion, 321. 
 Color, 178, 225, 245. 
 Comedy, 236. 
 Community, 285, 310, 331. 
 Completion, 78, 258. 
 Conception, 111, 124. 
 Conclusion, 159. 
 Conditional, 28. 
 Connection, 87, 116, 146. 
 Conscience, 196, 331, 341. 
 Consciousness, 13, 18, 43, 110. 
 Conservation, 78, 128. 
 Consistency, 64. 
 Content, 221. 
 Contradictory, 352. 
 Conviction, 392, 425. 
 Creation, 359. 
 Criminal, 62. 
 
 Dance, 206. 
 
 Darwinism, 264, 283. 
 
 Death, 271, 376. 
 
 Decision, 58, 258. 
 
 Deduction, 161. 
 
 Description, 17, 130. 
 
 Desirability, 31. 
 
 Desires, 29. 
 
 Details, 221. 
 
 Development, 36, 257, 264, 301, 340. 
 
 Devotion, 182, 192. 
 
 Discord, 215. 
 
 Displeasure, 65. 
 
 Dogmatic, 88. 
 
 Drama, 210, 230, 234. 
 
 Economist, 27. 
 Economy, 304, 308.
 
 434 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Education, 298, 317. 
 Egotism, 332. 
 Egypt, 366. 
 Emotion, 363. 
 Empirio-criticism, 34. 
 Enjoyment, 183, 347. 
 Estimation, 267, 303. 
 Eternity, 421. 
 Ethical, 156, 255, 330. 
 Existence, 81, 87, 95, 208, 350. 
 Expectation, 127, 209. 
 Explanation, 17, 130, 169, 266. 
 
 Fairy-tale, 231. 
 Faithfulness, 343. 
 Fate, 199. 
 
 Feeling, 66, 172, 250. 
 Fellow-will, 105. 
 Fellow-world, 92. 
 Fetish, 270. 
 Fine Arts, 218. 
 Force, 131. 
 Form, 223, 237. 
 Freedom, 145, 283, 372. 
 Friendship, 191. 
 Fulfilment, 71, 400, 424. 
 Future, 407. 
 
 General, 124. 
 
 Generalization, 127. 
 
 God, 266, 356, 359, 371, 379, 385. 
 
 Gratification, 1. 
 
 Growth, 263. 
 
 Greece, 366, 374. 
 
 Happiness, 195, 279, 332, 353, 368. 
 
 Harmony, 183, 345. 
 
 Heaven, 380. 
 
 Hero, 234. 
 
 Historian, 139. 
 
 Historical, 230. 
 
 History, 118, 122, 138, 277, 301, 371. 
 
 Holiness, 347. 
 
 Humanists, 35. 
 
 Idea, 135, 186, 301. 
 Idealism, 3, 41, 44, 49, 196, 304, 
 312, 318. 
 
 Identity, 72, 75, 95, 117, 134, 158, 
 
 261, 338, 394, 406, 423. 
 Illusions, 2, 364. 
 Imagination, 97, 100. 
 Immediacy, 23, 42. 
 Immoral, 340. 
 Immortality, 381. 
 Impression, 94. 
 Inclination, 320. 
 Independence, 76. 
 India, 364, 378. 
 Individual, 322, 415. 
 Individuality, 14, 190, 286, 396. 
 Induction, 161. 
 Industry, 304. 
 Ineffable, 393. 
 Influence, 152. 
 Intention, 262. 
 Introjection, 170. 
 Invention, 229, 360. 
 Islam, 369, 375. 
 Isolation, 181. 
 Israel, 367. 
 
 Judgment, 54, 88, 119, 159, 392. 
 
 Knowledge, 38, 87. 
 
 Labor, 311, 314. 
 
 Landscape, 178, 185, 205, 215. 
 
 Language, 111. 
 
 Law (Natural), 122, 132. 
 
 Law (State), 317, 321, 330. 
 
 Lawlessness, 326. 
 
 Life, 11, 42, 229. 
 
 Light, 177, 225. 
 
 Lines, 224. 
 
 Literature, 227. 
 
 Logic, 387. 
 
 Logical, 85, 156, 180, 393, 425. 
 
 Love, 188. 
 
 Loyalty, 63, 192, 429. 
 
 Man, 12, 188. 
 Manifoldness, 178, 195. 
 Mankind, 412. 
 Material, 10. 
 Materialistic, 312.
 
 INDEX 
 
 435 
 
 Meaning, 220, 238. 
 
 Mechanism, 10. 
 
 Melodrama, 236. 
 
 Melody, 246. 
 
 Memory, 96. 
 
 Metaphysics, 48, 156, 167, 345, 356, 
 
 388, 416. 
 Miracle, 371. 
 Money, 30, 315. 
 Moral, 38, 60, 190, 196, 320, 340, 
 
 428. 
 Morality, 54, 297, 329, 351. 
 Music, 241. 
 
 Nation, 292. 
 
 Naturalism, 41. 
 
 Naturalist, 13, 126. 
 
 Nature, 117, 121, 274, 410, 430. 
 
 Necessity, 50. 
 
 Norms, 52. 
 
 Novel, 215. 
 
 Object, 140. 
 Objective, 29. 
 Obligation, 46, 341. 
 Opposite, 92. 
 Organism, 136. - 
 Ought, 51. 
 
 Over-experience, 395, 399. 
 Over-individual, 39. 
 Over-personal, 70, 156, 395. 
 Over-reality, 318. 
 Over-self, 398, 412, 420, 430. 
 Over-will, 398. 
 
 Pain, 19, 66. 
 
 Painting, 207, 209, 219. 
 
 Parallelism, 136. 
 
 Past, 142, 407. 
 
 Penalties, 327. 
 
 Perseverance, 129. 
 
 Persia, 365, 373. 
 
 Personality, 27, 69, 92, 122, 297, 
 
 337, 378, 408, 419. 
 Persons, 102, 118, 138. 
 Philosophy, 5, 227, 318, 352, 386, 
 
 413, 425. 
 Phylogenetic, 272. 
 
 Physical, 90. 
 
 Physics, 313. 
 
 Plastic, 209. 
 
 Pleasure, 19, 51, 65, 193, 196, 332, 
 
 428. 
 Poem, 212, 230. 
 Poet, 227. 
 
 Positivism, 18, 289, 393. 
 Postulate, 96, 392. 
 Pragmatism, 2, 34, 41, 44. 
 Predestination, 368. 
 Priests, 373. 
 Progress, 262, 270, 277, 281, 293 
 
 325. 
 Pseudo-values, 28. 
 Psychical, 15, 90, 135, 168. 
 Psychologism, 90. 
 Psychology, 4, 16, 89, 101, 134, 147, 
 
 167, 248. 
 Psychophysical, 241. 
 Psychophysicist, 15. 
 Purposes, 27, 265, 426. 
 Purposiveness, 269. 
 
 Race, 284. 
 
 Reaction, 67. 
 
 Real, 175. 
 
 Realism, 393. 
 
 Realization, 69, 325, 399, 423. 
 
 Reason, 118, 155. 
 
 Reconstruction, 23. 
 
 Regress, 271. 
 
 Regularities, 128. 
 
 Relations, 99. 
 
 Relative, 30. 
 
 Relativism, 2, 36, 58. 
 
 Religion, 354, 358, 369, 413. 
 
 Religious, 222. 
 
 Renunciation, 364. 
 
 Responsibility, 62. 
 
 Revelation, 370. 
 
 Rhyme, 209, 238. 
 
 Rhythm, 209, 239, 243. 
 
 Salvation, 376, 381, 383. 
 Satisfaction, 13, 65, 311, 347, 426. 
 Science, 10, 87, 116, 119, 122, 130, 
 133, 220.
 
 436 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Sculptor, 209. 
 
 Self, 90, 104, 296, 334, 337, 382, 395, 
 
 412. 
 Self-agreement, 165, 204. 
 Self-assertion, 78, 349. 
 Self-deception, 211. 
 Self-loyalty, 342. 
 Self-perfection, 211, 357. 
 Self-realization, 63, 262, 303, 338. 
 Sensations, 43. 
 Sensuous, 183, 199. 
 Skepticism, 2, 38. 
 Social, 52, 304, 323. 
 Society, 317, 419. 
 Sociologists, 34, 123. 
 Sophists, 3, 41. 
 Soul, 112. 
 Sound, 243. 
 
 Space, 97, 130, 207, 408. 
 Spectator, 20. 
 Statutes, 320. 
 Stimulus, 69. 
 Style, 239. 
 
 Subject, 103, 109, 138. 
 Suggestion, 93, 106, 108. 
 Sympathy, 190. 
 System, 78, 80. 
 
 Technical, 313. 
 Teleological, 264. 
 
 Theatre, 210, 214. 
 Thing, 94, 98, 118. 
 Thou-experience, 211. 
 Time, 97, 130, 142, 382. 
 Tone, 177, 242. 
 Totality, 390, 401. 
 Transformation, 24. 
 Transition, 73. 
 Transmigration, 377. 
 Transvaluation, 5. 
 Truth, 35, 54, 88, 166. 
 
 Understanding, 149. 
 Un-equation, 266. 
 Unity, 165, 172, 187, 204, 352, 403. 
 Unreal, 208, 222, 229, 232, 252, 254- 
 Utilitarianism, 53. 
 
 Validity, 56. 
 Vitalism, 265. 
 Volitions, 150. 
 Voluntarism, 17. 
 
 Will, 13, 59, 64, 105, 123, 141, 143, 
 156, 169, 200, 288. 337, 403, 409, 
 424. 
 
 Words, 238. 
 
 World, 9, 75, 271, 402. 
 
 World-will, 405.
 
 , (91 be RiVierisiDe prcjs^ 
 
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