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least provisionally. The physical fact that he can understand the nature of our doubt is indeed presupposed ere we can go further, but that is no objection to our progress. The physical fact that we have an intelligent hearer must always be presupposed by us. If one cannot feel the doubt, then he cannot undertake any ethical inquiry. We only say to him: “If you doubt about the acceptance of a moral aim, this that we have pointed out to you is the real reason for your doubt. If now you understand your doubt, then you are actually in the state that we have described above. Your doubt has in fact a general character. It means a provisional moral skepticism, founded on an insight into the conflict of aims. This insight means skepticism because, and only because, you are at the moment of insight yourself possessed of the conflicting aims, yourself at war with yourself, and therefore undecided. This spray of aims into which your first pure idea of a moral aim as such has been scattered, this confused and blinding cloud of purposes, represents for you your own moral position. Divided in yourself, disunited, confused, you float cloud-like and inactive, seeking unity of aim and finding none. But if you reflect on all this, you see that in truth you occupy the position that we have above described. You really have still a highest aim. You seek unity. You desire the warfare to cease. You have an ideal. All this is, to be sure, a physical fact, dependent on your nature as voluntary being; but it is not valuable just for that reason alone, but for the reason that, in discovering this fact, you have discovered what you