If, on the other hand, an acknowledgment of the reality of this spiritual life is made, new questions immediately arise.  And the most fundamental of these questions have always been those farther removed from any sensuous or physical domain.  They are questions concerning the value and meaning of life.  It is a deep conviction of the reality of the deeper kernel of our being that alone constitutes the entrance to a new kind of world.  But to acknowledge the presence of such a new world does not signify the possession of it simultaneously with the acknowledgment.  The new world is discovered, but it is not yet possessed.  There are terrible obstacles in the way; there are enemies without and within to be conquered.  It is of little use entering into this struggle without an acknowledgment—­born of an inward necessity—­of the spiritual nucleus of our nature.  Unless man has accustomed himself to hold fast to this “subtle thing termed spirit” [p.42] he will soon be swamped in the region of the natural life once more; and when this happens the spiritual nucleus loses the consciousness of its own real subsistence as something higher in its nature than physical things or than the body and the ordinary life of the day.  If the enterprise is to issue in anything that is great and good—­into a spiritual world with an ever-growing content here and now—­an insistence upon the reality of this deeper life coupled with the highest end which presents itself to the life must be made.  Something is now seen in the distance as the meaning and value of life—­something which our deeper nature longs for, and which has created a cleft within the soul between the ordinary things of sense and time and that which “never was on sea or land.”  It is something of this nature which Eucken discovers as the germ of all the spiritual ideas of religion as well as of the essence of religion itself.  The Godhead, Eternity, Immortality, are concepts which arise within the soul through a consciousness of the inadequacy of all natural things and of even mental descriptions and explanations to answer and to satisfy the potency and longing of human nature.

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 [p.43] 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