the stubborn barriers to our spiritual potencies, the flaws in love and righteousness, in Nature and in human nature; in a word, the apparent total loss of what we dare not renounce—­our best and most real treasures."[6] The loss takes place because we have been looking outward instead of inward for support, and prop after prop has given way.  This is the situation to-day, and it has been brought about by no evil power, but by the gradual dawning of the meaning of things.  Still, it is not the whole meaning of things, for, as Eucken points out:  “But we are now experiencing what mankind has so often experienced, viz. that at the very point where the negation reaches its climax and the danger reaches the very brink of a precipice, the conviction dawns with axiomatic certainty that there lives and stirs within us something which no obstacle or enmity can ever destroy, and which signifies against all opposition a kernel of our nature that can never get lost."[7]

The religio-philosophical problem is, then, a return to the Whole of Life.  It is here that any satisfactory answer can be found if found [p.34] at all.  It is necessary to investigate the final grounds as well as the most complete structure of Life; it is further necessary to discover whether the movement of Life necessarily leads to religion.  As Eucken invariably presents the truth of religion, the meaning and significance of religion are to be found through self-consciousness.  This meaning of consciousness is twofold in nature.  On the one hand, it is something that may be known, and, on the other hand, it is something that is active through its own inherent energy.  Here we find a difference between what we may know we are and what we are.  Our knowledge of what we are, the conditions of what we are, the history of what we are—­all these are a help for us to be what we are capable of becoming.  But all these are not the very movement of the becoming itself.  That movement is the resultant of the spiritual potency after experiences in the form of cognition have marked out the path for conation.  This conation is an inheritance; it is present in the form of dissatisfaction with the present situation; it moves in the direction of a goal which is marked out by intellect.  Now, however much this conation may be analysed, it resists being decomposed into a number of elements which make it up, for any such number, except in the very manner they are united, could not produce the situation.  In other words, whatever the history of this conation may be, it is now a unity or whole. [p.35] Conditioned as it is by the surrounding world and by its own history, in so far as it is this, it is determined; but it is still free in so far as it is capable of becoming a new point of departure for life and of proceeding on its way in a world of spirit.  Unless man’s nature contained within itself some unity or whole of the kind already referred to,