ABSTRACT
The ethics of pleasure, of happiness, of self-preservation, the Kantian ethics of universality, Fichte's doctrine of activity, seek for the supreme value in the sense of the most elementary and general. If none of the discernible values is supreme, one must assume and postulate a supreme value over them all, and in contrast to all of them; one must unequivocally describe it as unknown, but on account of its mere position of superiority allow it to gain currency. The transitoriness of every morality is not so much a consequence of a restricted view of values, as of arbitrariness in regard to a unifying principle. Cf. Hegel's thought, that in every philosophical system there is a portion of eternal truth, and that it is the task of philosophy to gather these fragments of one absolute truth into an ideal system, must be fruitful, mutatis mutandis, for ethics.
