’Amid all the sickly talk about “ideals,” it is well to remember that as long as they are a mere self-painting of the yearning spirit, they have no more solidity than floating air-bubbles, gay in the sunshine and broken by the passing wind.  You do not so much as touch the threshold of religion, so long as you are detained by the phantoms of your thought; the very gate of entrance to religion, the moment of its new birth, is the discovery that your gleaming ideal is the everlasting real.’[94]

But though our knowledge of the eternal world is much less than we could desire, it is much greater than many thinkers allow.  We are by no means shut off from realisation and possession of the eternal values while we live here.  We are not confined to local and temporal experience.  We know what Truth and Beauty mean, not only for ourselves but for all souls throughout the universe, and for God Himself.  Above all, we know what Love means.  Now Love, which is the realisation in experience of spiritual existence, has an unique value as a hierophant of the highest mysteries.  And Love guarantees personality, for it needs what has been called otherness.  In all love there must be a subject and an object, and a bond between them which transcends without annulling their separateness.  What this means for personal immortality has been seen by many great minds.  As an example I will quote from Plotinus’ picture of life in the spiritual world.  This writer is certainly not inclined to overestimate the claims of separate individuality, and he is under no obligation to make his doctrine conform to the dogmas of any creed.

’Spirits yonder see themselves in others.  For there all things are transparent, and there is nothing dark or resisting, but everyone is manifest to everyone internally, and all things are manifest; for light is manifest to light.  For everyone has all things in himself and sees all things in another, so that all things are everywhere and all is all and each is all, and infinite the glory.’[95]

This eternal world is about us and within us while we live here.  ’Heaven is nearer to our souls than the earth is to our bodies.’  The world which we ordinarily think of as real is an arbitrary selection from experience, corresponding roughly to the average reaction of life upon the average man.  Some values, such as existence, persistence, and rationality, are assumed to be ‘real’; others are relegated to the ‘ideal’ Under the influence of natural science, special emphasis is laid on those values with which that science is engaged.  But our world changes with us.  It rises as we rise, and falls as we fall.  It puts on immortality as we do.  ’Such as men themselves are, such will God appear to them to be.’[96] Spinoza rightly says that all true knowledge takes place sub specie aeternitatis.  For the pneymatikost the whole of life is spiritual, and, as Eucken says, he recognises the whole of the spiritual life as his own life-being.  He learns, as Plotinus declares in a profound sentence, that ’all things that are Yonder are also Here below.’