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 [p.44] 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 [p.45] 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.