But even such a stage as this does not give satisfaction to man.  Much effort and sacrifice are needed to live up to the life of the community.  And such effort and sacrifice are often the best means of calling into activity a still deeper, reserved energy of the soul.  The soul now recognises a value beyond the values of culture and civilisation.  The Good, the True, and the Beautiful appear as the sole realities by the side of which everything that preceded, if taken as complete in itself, appears as a great shadow or illusion.  Here we are reminded of Eucken’s affinity with Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, as well as of his attachment to the revival of Platonism by Plotinus.  Values for life, subsisting in themselves, become objects [p.50] of meditation, of “browsing,” and of the deepest activity of the soul.  Life is now viewed as consisting in a great and constant quest after these religious ideals.  It sees its meaning beyond and above the range of mentality or even morality, though it is well that it should pass as often as possible through the gate of the former, and is bound to pass always through the gate of the latter.  A break takes place with the “natural self”; the mental life of concepts, though necessary, is now seen as insufficient; and life is now viewed as having a “pearl of great price” before its gaze.  Here the stirb und werde of Paul and Goethe becomes necessary.  The real education of man now begins.  His life becomes guided and governed by norms whose limits cannot be discovered, and which have never been realised in their wholeness on the face of our earth.  What can these mean?  They cannot be delusions or illusions, for they answer too deep a need of the soul to be reduced to that level.  If we blot them out of our existence, we sink back to a mere natural or mechanical stage.  When the soul concentrates its deepest attention on these norms or ideals they fascinate it, they draw hidden energies into activity, they give inklings of immortality.  Is it not far more conceivable that such a vision of meaning, of beauty, and of enchantment is a new kind of reality—­cosmic in its nature and eternal in its duration?  Man has to [p.51] come to a decision concerning this.  There is no half-way house here possible without the deepest potencies of human nature suffering and failing to transform themselves from bud to blossom and fruit.

At a later stage in our inquiry this question will recur in connection with the conception of the Godhead.  But here it may be observed that to decide on the affirmative side that somehow such norms and ideals which mean so much are cosmic realities, is simply to state no more than that an evolutionary process is taking place towards a new kind of world as well as a new kind of existence.  No outsider is competent to pronounce judgment on the validity of the proofs possessed within this spiritual realm.  The qualifications here are beyond the range of knowledge, although knowledge does not cease to act within such a realm.  The