These words came to Albert Schweitzer on a boat trip on the Ogooué River in French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon), while searching for a universal concept of ethics for our time.
[page needed]Schweitzer made Reverence for Life the basic tenet of an ethical philosophy, which he developed and put into practice.
Albert Schweitzer believed that ethical values which could underpin the ideal of true civilization had to have their foundation in deep thought and be world- and life-affirming.
It was not until two years after moving out to Gabon to establish the Albert Schweitzer Hospital that he finally found the simple statement which answered his quest.
In his autobiography Out of My Life and Thought, Schweitzer explains this process: "Having described how at the beginning of the summer of 1915 he awoke from some kind of mental daze, asking himself why he was only criticizing civilization and not working on something constructive.".
The present situation was terrible proof of the misjudgment of the generation that had adopted a belief in an immanent power of progress realizing itself, naturally and automatically, and which thought that it no longer needed any ethical ideals but could advance toward its goals by means of knowledge and work alone.
In that mental state, I had to take a long journey up the river ... Lost in thought, I sat on deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal concept of the ethical that I had not discovered in any philosophy.
Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase: "Reverence for Life".
Youth's unqualified joie de vivre I never really knew...One thing especially saddened me was that the unfortunate animals had to suffer so much pain and misery....It was quite incomprehensible to me – this was before I began going to school – why in my evening prayers I should pray for human beings only.
I gave it up...From experiences like these, which moved my heart....there slowly grew up in me an unshakeable conviction that we have no right to inflict suffering and death on another living creature, and that we ought all of us to feel what a horrible thing it is to cause suffering and death..."[6] This awareness affected him throughout his life, as when he would carefully, gently scoop a spider out of a hole it had fallen into before planting a crop there, to feed his patients and their families who also worked on the hospital farm.
We must therefore strive for a civilization that is not based on the accretion of science and power alone, but which cares most of all for the spiritual and ethical development of the individual and of humankind.