Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/405

 depends upon a moral one, and to find out a connection between the force which, by acting according to eternal laws of Nature, gives the world stability, and the morality which has its seat in the human breast. This is therefore the rock on which the best thinkers have foundered. Spinoza occasionally tacks a moral theory on to his Pantheistic Fatalism by means of sophisms, but more often leaves morality terribly in the lurch. Kant, when theoretical Reason is exhausted, sends his Categorical Imperative, laboriously worked out of mere conceptions, on the stage, as deus ex machina, with an absolute ought. But the mistake he made by it only became quite clear when Fichte, who always took outbidding for outdoing, had spun it out with Christian Wolfian prolixity and wearisomeness to a complete system of moral fatalism in his "System of Moral Doctrine," and subsequently presented it more briefly in his last pamphlet.

Now, from this point of view, a system which places the reality of all existence and the root of the whole of Nature in the Will, and in this will places the root of the world, must undeniably carry with it, to say the least, a strong prejudice in its favour. For, by a direct and simple way, it reaches, nay, already holds in its hand before coming to Ethics, what other systems try to reach by roundabout, ever dubious by-paths. Nor indeed can any other road ever lead to this but the insight, that the active and impulsive force in Nature which presents this perceptible world to our intellect, is identical with the will within us. The only Metaphysic which really and immediately supports Ethics, is that one which is itself primarily ethical and constituted out of the material of Ethics. Therefore I had a far greater right to call my