Now, as scarcely anything else in life is more called upon to co-operate in the renewing of culture than philosophy, so the system here concisely presented is placed in the service of this task; it attempts a construction chiefly by the union of three demands and points of attack: it requires a more energetic development and a complete unification of the life-process; it requires the acknowledgment and development of a spiritual life of independent nature present to us; and lastly, it requires that this life shall be understood and treated as the world’s consciousness of itself and thus as the only reality. All these demands must tend towards an essential alteration of the existent state of culture; they make much inadequate that previously sufficed; but they also reveal an abundance of new prospects and the possibility of a thorough inner elevation.
It is a leading idea of our whole investigation that only from the life-process itself are we able to orientate ourselves in relation to ourselves and the world; and this idea is in agreement with the present mode of thought in science. But to apply to our own time that which is already acknowledged in general ideas is by no means simple. To give the life-process such a position in our thought and to estimate it so highly is possible only when life is distinctly distinguished from the states of the mere subject, from the mere reflex of the environment in the individual. This detachment cannot be accomplished unless we comprehend as a whole that which exists in individual manifestations of life; distinguish different levels in life, indicate relations and movements within them, and thus advance to new experiences of life; reveal a union of fact, a distinctive synthesis in life, which from a transcendent unity shapes the multiplicity that it contains. But if in general it is difficult to free ourselves so much from the condition of life in which we find ourselves, to be able to illuminate this condition in this way, and to throw its inner framework into relief; for us there is also to be added the immeasurable expansion that directs the interests and the vision to the outside, and is accustomed to treat, as a mere supplement, a mere means and instrument, the life that in reality sustains all infinity. A culture that has made the attainment of results the chief thing has been detrimental to the spiritual, which no longer trusts itself to encompass these achievements and to change them in a development of life, to take up the conflict for dominion over reality. It willingly flees to the passivity of the subject, where sooner or later it expires in complete destitution.
If inwardness is so feeble and external relations so overwhelm us, life necessarily receives its content from outside, and seems to be determined essentially by that which happens around us. It is this that lends so much power to-day to a superficial enlightenment that centres in natural science, and expects life to be advanced without limit, and man to be revived and ennobled, simply by reaching a more valid representation of the environment. We do not ask here how far the representations proposed overcome the difficulties of the older representations, or whether new and more difficult problems do not arise from the solutions offered; but we do ask whether life can obtain its aim and content from outside, and whether it can be treated simply as an addition to nature without degenerating inwardly, and losing all inner motive. We ask what the theories based chiefly on externals make of man, and what they achieve for his soul. We summon him to an examination, to see whether the picture that is held up to him by these theories agrees with what he longs for, and, by a compelling necessity of his being, must long for.
To-day it will also be evident that the final decision does not rest with the intellect, but with life as a whole. For, little as intellectual achievement is absent from truth, the masses—and to the masses belong those at the average level of all classes, higher as well as lower—will always hold fast to the external impression. The advance beyond this impression and the appreciation of the inner conditions of knowledge will always remain a concern of the minority. There is, however, a point where the problem becomes real to each individual, and where each can offer his opinion: this is in reference to the question of the happiness and the content of life. The more this question is felt, the greater will be the thirst for a substantial truth in contrast with the shadows of the Enlightenment; the more will the question concerning the nature of life as a whole receive its due consideration, and the perception of things externally will give place to a comprehension of their inner reality. Only with such a revolution can our life and we ourselves be transformed from a state of spiritual destitution to one of independent energy; only thus can we discover the wealth that is within us; only thus can culture, from being an occupation with things, become a preservation and an unfolding of our own selves; only thus can we strive for more simplicity in contrast to the complexity that would otherwise be our condition; and only thus can we wrest from what would otherwise be chaos, fundamentals and tendencies. Our demand, therefore, that the starting-point should be the life-process itself is in harmony with the innermost longing of the time—even if this longing is often indefinite—after a deepening of life and an attainment of its independence.
If the turning to the life-process puts the question, the assertion of an independent spiritual life gives the answer to it: however strange this assertion may seem in relation to superficial temporal experience, it meets a deep longing. For we are completely satiated with narrowly human culture; the movements and experiences of the Modern Age, and in particular of the present, make us so clearly conscious of all that is trivial, simply apparent, disagreeable, feeble, shallow, empty, and futile in human conduct, that all hope of finding satisfaction in this conduct, and of advancing life essentially by its means and powers, must be abandoned. We have, therefore, to face the following alternative: either absolute doubt and the cessation of all effort, or the acknowledgment of a “more” in man; there is no third possibility. But in the context of our investigation no discussion is required to show that this “more” cannot consist in an individual’s elevation of himself above others; that it cannot consist in a so-called Superman—a view that only involves us more in the narrowly human. Either the “more” sought for is only imaginary, a covering of tinsel with which we conceal our nakedness, or a world transcending the merely human, a new stage of reality, reveals itself to man, which can become his own life. As it is this transcendent world alone that engenders a universal life within us and opposes the insignificantly human; so also from this alone, and as its manifestation, can culture become independent in relation to man. Only when it is understood in this way can culture include aims and tasks that do not strengthen man in his narrowness, but free him from it, and make him spiritually greater.
Not only the conception but the whole nature of that which is called culture is an unstable hybrid. It should elevate man above nature, and give to his life a characteristic spiritual content; but at the same time we have a dread of a detachment from the experience of sense and of the construction of an independent world, because these must lead to that which, of all things, is the cause of most alarm, to a change of a metaphysical character, to a transformation of existence. In truth, in the work of humanity two tendencies are usually undistinguished, which, if life is to continue to advance, need to be distinctly separated: a spiritual culture and a merely human culture. The former reveals new contents and aims; with it a new world emerges within man, and transforms his life from its basis: the latter uses that which a higher organisation has given us, solely as a means for the advancement of our natural and social existence. Merely human culture turns the spiritual into a mere means to increase narrowly human happiness, whereas the spiritual by its very nature makes us feel the whole of this happiness to be too insignificant, indeed intolerable. The difference of a merely human and a spiritual culture extends from the fundamental disposition to all the separate departments of life. Religion, for example, is to the former a means by which the individual may make himself as comfortable and as secure as possible in an existent world, and conduct his own insignificant ego through all dangers; to the latter, it signifies a radical break with that world and the gain of a new life, in which care for that ego, or even the state of society, is relegated completely into the background. To the one, morality is simply a means in the organisation of human social life, in the accommodation of the individual to his environment; to the other, it discloses a new fundamental relation to reality, and in the transformation of existence in self-determining activity allows life to win an inner union with the infinite and its self-consciousness. On the one hand, art, science, the life of the state, education, and so forth are the idols of utility, of expediency, the adornments of a given existence; on the other, they are the gods of truth, of inner independence, of world-renewing spontaneity. That there should be an end to the confusion of the worship of idols and of gods; that spiritual culture should be distinguished from merely human culture; that the spiritual content of the individual departments of life should be energetically developed, and the spiritual poverty of merely human culture made clear—all this is the urgent demand of the present, without the fulfilment of which its state of confusion cannot be overcome. Yet spiritual culture can never become independent unless the spiritual world is independent. Only the presence of this spiritual world makes it possible for culture, at the level at which it is generally found, to be tested by a transcendent standard to see how much spiritual substance, how much content and value, it contains. This test will prove that we possess far less spirituality than we think; and that the most of what is called culture is no more than the semblance of culture, no more than imagination and presumption. But at the same time we recognise and gain in the little spirituality that remains to us incomparably more; we win the presence of a new world, and by this, depth of life and the possibility of an inner renewal. Our life would be indescribably shallow if it were to pass on one level and were to be exhausted in the experiences at that level. The acknowledgment of an independent spiritual life saves us from this shallowness, in that it shows an inner gradation within our own province and sets life as a whole a task.
If the acknowledgment of a spiritual world, inwardly present to us, gives to culture a distinctive character, this character receives a further modification from the particular manner in which the spiritual life makes its appearance and becomes established within our existence; at the same time, from this position there is also the possibility of different sides and tasks within an all-comprehensive work of culture. Of special significance in reference to this modification is the circumstance that the spiritual life does not possess man as a natural fact, does not operate within him with complete power and sure direction from the beginning, but is present to him at first only as a possibility, and as a transcendence of the general condition of things. In accordance with this, although the spiritual belongs to our nature, it is not so much “given” to us as set as a task; for its realisation it needs our own attention and appropriation; all development of the spiritual life within us, therefore, involves our own activity and so receives an ethical character. The spiritual life also has such an ethical character because, transcending our original condition, it must be conveyed to us, and must be maintained by an imparting and an activity. In the spiritual life we find ourselves in a sphere of activity and of freedom in contrast with that of nature; in this way our life becomes our work, our own life in a much more real sense. We see this in the case of the fundamental form of the spiritual life that is called “personality.” We men are by no means personalities from the beginning; but we bear within us simply the potentiality of becoming a personality. Whether we shall realise our personality is decided by our own work; it depends primarily upon the extent to which we succeed in striving beyond the given existence to a state of self-determining activity. The fact that we thus take part in the formation of our own being proves that we are citizens of a new world—a world other than nature—and shows that we are incomparably more than we could become simply as parts of nature. Neither philosophy nor religion will convince one who, at this point, does not recognise an elevation to a higher power, indeed a transformation of existence. But one who recognises this will desire such a transformation and such an elevation of culture also; he will not come to an easy compromise with the given condition of things and draw the greatest possible amount of pleasure from this condition; but he will set culture an objective ideal; arouse it from the prevailing state of indolence; fully acknowledge the antitheses of experience, and will be provoked rather to make further exertions than disposed to abandon himself to these antitheses. Life finds its main problem in itself, solely in the development of an ethical character, and attains to complete independence and a transcendence of nature only when the spiritual takes precedence. Every culture that does not treat the ethical task, in the widest sense, as the most important of tasks and the one that decides all, sinks inevitably to a semblance of culture, a half-culture, indeed a comedy. The æsthetic system, with its transformation of life into play and pleasure, with its beautiful language and its spiritual poverty, is such a life. To-day, therefore, we can revive and strengthen culture only by establishing such an ethical conviction. Only a culture of an ethical character can develop an independent and positive spirituality; only such a culture can free the impulse of life from being directed simply to natural self-preservation, and in doing this not make the impulse weaker, but stronger. In nothing have minds been more divided and in nothing will they become more divided than with regard to the question whether, after the perception of the inadequacy of mere nature and society, a new world reveals itself to them, or whether this negation is the ultimate conclusion; the former will be possible only through that which we call ethical.
The conception that we have here presented of the spiritual life and of its relation to man also makes it for the first time possible to understand and acknowledge the manifold and opposing elements in our time without falling into a shallow eclecticism. Realism advances in power, and Idealism seems to be endangered in respect not only of its form but also of its innermost nature. Idealism is indeed in danger so long as the spiritual life has not attained to independence in relation to man; for, so long as the spiritual life is regarded as a production of man the knowledge of man’s relation to nature and his animal origin must lead to a serious prostration, to a complete dissolution of Idealism. If, on the other hand, it is established that with the spiritual life a new order transcending the power of man makes its appearance within him, then the recognition of human incapacity becomes a direct witness to the independence of the spiritual life. We must, therefore, cease to treat spiritual developments, such as religion, art, morality, as the natural attributes of all called men. Man’s natural character simply offers tendencies and relations which can find a spiritual character only by the revelation of a spiritual world. The decisive point of transition is not between man and animal, but between nature and spirit. But even where culture is supposed to be at its highest, human existence is for the most part at the level of nature—and is only embellished in some degree.
In Idealism a religious shaping of life is to be distinguished from an immanent shaping of life by spiritual creation, especially in art and science. The demand for a universal spiritual system involves the rejection of the specific religious system as being in many ways too narrow and open to hostile criticism; this universal system, however, as it is presented when the spiritual life is acknowledged to be independent, is closely related to religion. Not only is all spirituality within us dependent upon a universal spiritual life, but this spiritual life within us always presents itself as something transcendent and is not coincident with our life. This religious character must be the more clearly emphasised the greater the toil with which the spiritual life must defend itself from a world apparently alien and hostile. Immanent Idealism, filling life as it does through art and science, cannot possibly be the whole and conclusive—for this reason at least, that it has too little with which to counteract the perplexities of spiritual and of material life, and because it concentrates life too little within itself. But a scientific character is indispensable to a universal spiritual culture, in order that life may not pass in subjective feeling and presentation, and that life may have an objective character, and be led to the clearness of a universal consciousness. An æsthetic form and creative activity pertain also to this life; for, otherwise, no representation of reality as a whole could be obtained from the confused impressions of immediate experience; the spiritual could attain to no clear present, and could not permeate reality with ennobling power, and change all that is deformed and indifferent to it in the original condition of things.