The distinctive vision of life that one encounters in the writings of Semën Liudvigovich Frank might be termed "expressivist humanism". Expressivist arguments representing morality as a matter of deeply personal "states of mind and feelings" sat uncomfortably alongside a neo-Kantian conception of an "absolute", impersonal realm of values. The turning-point in Frank's philosophical development may be said to have arrived when he found a way to bridge the gap between these two conceptions. The point of departure of Frank's social theorizing was the same intuition that grounded his metaphysics generally: the intuition of the individual self as inwardly fused with the total unity of being. Frank's social ethics is distinguished from other doctrines of positive liberty by a kind of historicism. Consistent with the basic tenets of his epistemology, Frank believed that the divine will, like any other spiritual force welling up from the primordial ground, ultimately eludes conceptual thinking.