Most of the great thinkers of the ages have insisted on the necessity of the recognition and acknowledgment of this deeper life which is in dire need of a content. If man is not to be swamped by the external and become the mere sport of the "wind and wave" of the environment, he has to enter somehow into the very centre of his being and become convinced that the dictates which proceed from that centre are the most fundamental things in life. This has always formed the kernel of religion, however often men, failing to reach that kernel, have lived on the husks. But even this very sham notifies some small attempt in the right direction. In modern times—in the various forms of Idealism and Pragmatism—such a need of getting at the core of being and of being convinced that the effort is worth while, has been emphasised again and again. "Launch yourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all."[8]
"The Stoic and Butler also said, 'Follow God.' In each case you must realise that, whatever you do, you take your life in your hands; you enter on a grand enterprise, a search for the Holy Grail, which will bring you to strange lands and perilous seas. For you cannot say, interpreting, 'Thus far and no further, merely according to the bond and the duty.' In following God, you follow by what has been, what is ruled and accomplished, but you follow after what is not yet. 'It may be that the gulfs will wash us down'; it may be that the gods of the past will rain upon us brimstone and horrible tempest. But he that is with us is more than all that are against us. Whoever keeps his ear ever open to duty, always forward, never attained, is not far from the kingdom. The gods may be against him, the demi-gods may depart; but he, as said Plotinus, 'if alone, is with the Alone.'"[9]
It is impossible for us, as Eucken constantly insists, to stop short of this. Who can prescribe limits to the capability of consciousness when it is focussed, in the form of a conviction, on the deepest problems which press themselves upon it? There is only one objection that the empiricist can bring forward, and that is that all such ideals can never be proved to exist as things exist in space. But, as already hinted, is existence in space the only form of existence? Is it not necessary for something which is not in space to make us aware of what is in space? "If not as men of science, yet as men, as human beings, we have to put things together, to form some total estimate of the drift of development, of the unity of nature."[10]
If the deepest core of consciousness is acknowledged and the vague ideals and ends which present themselves are attended to, something new happens in the life. Life now starts on the great enterprise referred to by William Wallace. It finds its highest reality in an experience born within itself and differentiated for ever from the natural and even the intellectual life. To such a conclusion man is forced; and if the situation is evaded, something within his soul never comes to birth. It is seen at once that in order to know the content of this new world, it is necessary for a long series of struggles to take place. And to this point we now turn.
The deeper consciousness has relegated the natural world to a secondary place, and has further shown man that the main object of life includes not only finding a footing against the dangers of natural things, but to plant oneself within a spiritual world of meanings and values. This cannot be done without an independent and decisive act of the soul. A meaning of life has now revealed itself beyond that of the "small self." This meaning can be reached only through this decisive act of the soul. This meaning is over-individual in its nature; it is a truth, goodness, or beauty, which presents itself as an idea and ideal formed by the experiences of many individuals, at different epochs and in different circumstances. Thus the individual, in order to realise his own life, must work with material presented in the community. Such material has been found helpful in the life of the community. It consists of collective results made up of large numbers of single factors. These have been tied together in the form of various syntheses. Such various syntheses comprise a larger meaning than what ordinarily happens from moment to moment in connection with the relation of the individual to the external world or, indeed, within the individual's own ordinary life. Many of the isolated, fragmentary experiences of the individual have to give way when tested in the light of any larger synthesis. If this were not so, no commercial, social, civilised life would be possible at all. The more real life is now perceived to be that of the larger meaning and value. The individual, solitary experiences may be legitimate, for they often express wants and needs of the individual which have a certain right to obtain satisfaction. But the extent and limits of these rights have to be measured by some norm or standard other than themselves, or else each individual will proceed on his own course regardless of the rights of others. It is the presence of various syntheses which express the collective life of the whole—of each and every individual—that makes civilisation possible. Thus, in the very process of civilisation itself, as Eucken points out, there is present a factor which is termed Spiritual, and which is not to be mistaken for a mere flow of cause and effect, or for one mere event following another. Eucken emphasises this all-important element of the over-individual qualities present in human history. There is here much which resembles Hegel's Absolute. But there is a great difference between the two in the sense that Eucken shows the constant need of spiritual activism on the part of individuals in order to realise and keep alive the norms and standards which have carried our world so far; and there is also the need of contributing something to the values of these through the creation of new qualities within the souls of the individuals themselves.
But the problems of civilisation and morality are not the only, or the highest, problems which present themselves. But even such problems have partially been the means of drawing man outside himself, and of enabling him to see that his self can only be realised in connection with the common good and demands of the community. He now feels the necessity of living up to that standard. This is an important step in the direction of the moral and religious life. It reveals the presence of a spiritual nucleus of our being obtaining a content beyond the needs of the moment; it shows life as realising itself in wide connections; and the individual becomes the possessor of a certain degree of spiritual inwardness in the process. Even as far as this level we find the deeper life—the spiritual life—insisting on the validity of its mental and moral conclusions over against the objects of sense. Without this insistence no knowledge would progress and be valid. The macrocosm is mirrored and coloured in a mental and moral microcosm. A replica of the external world has a reality in consciousness, and this reality is not a mere photograph of the external, but it is the external as it appears to the meaning it has obtained in consciousness. The meaning of the world is thus something beyond the world itself; it is more than appears at any one moment. If the world were less than this, if the percept could not somehow become a concept, all progress would come to a standstill, and we should be no more than creatures of sensations and percepts which vanished as soon as they appeared. But these do not vanish; they persist in various ways, as after-images, concepts, memory. Thus, in the very act of knowing anything at all, something greater than the physical object known is present. And Eucken would insist, therefore, that the mental and spiritual are present from the very beginning and bring to a mental focus the impressions of the senses. In the interpretation of Eucken's philosophy several writers have missed the author's meaning here. They have, through the ambiguity of the term "spiritual" in English, conceived of "spiritual life" as something entirely different from the mental life. It is different, but only in the same way as the bud is different from the blossom; it means at the religious level a greater unfolding of a life which has been present at every stage in the history of civilisation and culture.
But, as already noticed, the mental life is passed when we enter the life of a community. The norms and standards, already referred to, make their appearance and persist in demanding obedience to themselves even at the expense of much within consciousness that points in another direction.
But even such a stage as this does not give satisfaction to man. Much effort and sacrifice are needed to live up to the life of the community. And such effort and sacrifice are often the best means of calling into activity a still deeper, reserved energy of the soul. The soul now recognises a value beyond the values of culture and civilisation. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful appear as the sole realities by the side of which everything that preceded, if taken as complete in itself, appears as a great shadow or illusion. Here we are reminded of Eucken's affinity with Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, as well as of his attachment to the revival of Platonism by Plotinus. Values for life, subsisting in themselves, become objects of meditation, of "browsing," and of the deepest activity of the soul. Life is now viewed as consisting in a great and constant quest after these religious ideals. It sees its meaning beyond and above the range of mentality or even morality, though it is well that it should pass as often as possible through the gate of the former, and is bound to pass always through the gate of the latter. A break takes place with the "natural self"; the mental life of concepts, though necessary, is now seen as insufficient; and life is now viewed as having a "pearl of great price" before its gaze. Here the stirb und werde of Paul and Goethe becomes necessary. The real education of man now begins. His life becomes guided and governed by norms whose limits cannot be discovered, and which have never been realised in their wholeness on the face of our earth. What can these mean? They cannot be delusions or illusions, for they answer too deep a need of the soul to be reduced to that level. If we blot them out of our existence, we sink back to a mere natural or mechanical stage. When the soul concentrates its deepest attention on these norms or ideals they fascinate it, they draw hidden energies into activity, they give inklings of immortality. Is it not far more conceivable that such a vision of meaning, of beauty, and of enchantment is a new kind of reality—cosmic in its nature and eternal in its duration? Man has to come to a decision concerning this. There is no half-way house here possible without the deepest potencies of human nature suffering and failing to transform themselves from bud to blossom and fruit.
At a later stage in our inquiry this question will recur in connection with the conception of the Godhead. But here it may be observed that to decide on the affirmative side that somehow such norms and ideals which mean so much are cosmic realities, is simply to state no more than that an evolutionary process is taking place towards a new kind of world as well as a new kind of existence. No outsider is competent to pronounce judgment on the validity of the proofs possessed within this spiritual realm. The qualifications here are beyond the range of knowledge, although knowledge does not cease to act within such a realm. The experiences here cannot be measured or weighed; and that a certain obscurity is present in them is only what may be expected, considering that the spiritual nature is farther removed from the region of nature with its physical existence than when it deals with problems on the intellectual level. But such spiritual proofs are found in the fact that these realities present themselves only at the height of spiritual development, and in the fact that they produce an inversion of the nature of man, and change the centre of gravity of his life to a more inward recess of his being than is open on the natural or intellectual side.
Thus, once more, the soul is driven forward by its own necessities to a religious reality. What can it do but grant cosmic origin and validity to such ideals? If these ideals are not this, then, as Eucken points out, they are the most tragic illusions conceivable.