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 [p.48] 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 [p.49] 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.