[531] but a tradition which comes from somewhere else and which is still comparatively intact. How could pragmatism^a otherwise give contents at all? Which IS the experience, the ethical experience? You DO something---what do you experience? You experience that it was wrong or right. HOW DO you experience it? CONSCIENCE^b ALONE wouldn't help, because conscience is erroneous, very often---and was certainly erroneous in all the hundreds of thousands of younger Nazis^c who committed the greatest atrocities imaginable because their conscience forced them to be obedient to the leader. Then what IS the criterion? Is it success? Alright---but what does success mean? Is the success of a politician who uses every means to come to power a criterion for his goodness? And how can pragmatism^d PROVE that this is not what it means---as every pragmatist of course would say? What evidence does he give that THISpolitican [sic.], who becomes powerful by all kinds of frauds and cunning, is NOT justified by the success which he has, if the pragmatic principle is in power? Now here we can only say: this is so INconsistent that, as always in a situation in which

inconsistency is obvious, one must apply a sociological or psychological analysis---not one moment before, because then discussion becomes impossible. But if discussion leads to an absolute inconsistency in the one or both points of views, then the question is: now why is this so? Why are we not ABLE to show what experience in ethical respect means? Why is pragmatism not able? Then we must make a sociological analysis, and it is very obvious if you compare Europe and this country, namely the analysis that the principles of secularized puritanism and revivalism are not yet broken. Now let us imagine that they ARE broken, as they were in Europe, certainly. What then [is] the criterion for the content? Is natural law^e a possibility? But who decides about the contents of natural law? And if not, where do you GET the contents?

Is there a principle, not only the principleof [sic.] oughtness^f and its unconditional ^gcharacter, but also a principle of content? Let me construe my answer, which I want to suggest to you, in three levels. I will anticipate these levels: