And when the spiritual life creates an entrance into this over-world something happens which makes a fundamental difference in the life.  The life may again and again sink back to its old level, but what has happened will never allow it to remain satisfied on that level.  “We fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake” (Browning).  Life now becomes [p.56] alternately a quest and a fruition.[12] The individual has to gather his whole energies together because something great is at stake.  This is nothing less than the possession of a new kind of reality.  The struggle has yielded a conquest for the time being.  He tastes and “eats his pot of honey on the grave” of enemies within and without.  This fruition means no less than a taste of “eternal life in the midst of time” (Harnack), and the relegating of the whole world of phenomena to a subsidiary place.

This is the kernel of Eucken’s Truth of Religion.  The book deals with the most subtle psychological problems of the soul, and reaches the conclusion of an entrance by man into a divine world.  All this is far removed from the ordinary traditional conception either of God or of religion.  Perhaps the majority of mankind is not as yet ready for such a presentation of religion.  But I think it may be safely said that it is through some such mode of conceiving religion as this that the “great and good ones” of the world found an entrance into a divine world and grasped the conception of the evolution of the soul as a process which begins where organic evolution ends.

* * * * *

CHAPTER III [p.57]

RELIGION AND NATURAL SCIENCE

In the previous chapter we have noticed how man is able to reach an over-world which will grant him a new kind of reality over against the whole remaining domain of existence.  But the evidence hitherto brought forth has been that of the nature of man himself.  We have in this chapter to inquire whether there is a warrant for such a conclusion within the realm of natural science.  Does science give any hint of the presence of spiritual life anywhere in the universe?  Eucken answers distinctly in the affirmative.[13]

The conclusions of natural science have, in modern times, come into direct conflict with religion.  Traditional religion has grown up on a view of the universe which has been [p.58] utterly discarded by modern knowledge.  Religious leaders have often had to be dragged to see the truth of this statement, and, as Eucken points out, many are still far from realising the seriousness of the cleft between knowledge and religion.  The theology of the Middle Ages has not yet disappeared, although fortunately there are some signs of a great reconstruction going on in our midst.  Fortunately, this naive view of the universe is a theology and not a religion; but doubtless even the religion of the soul suffers when its knowing aspect is perpetually contradicted by scientific knowledge.  There is such a close connection between “head” and “heart”—­even closer than between body and mind—­that the use of discarded theories of the universe and of life cannot but prove injurious to the deepest source of life.