What is all this that has happened?  What has brought it about?  What is the individual potency that knows the world and passes beyond it?  What are the ideals and norms which revealed themselves in the co-operative movements of humanity, and only revealed themselves when humanity was at its highest attainable level?  Enough has been said to show that it is more than Nature, that characteristics are found within it entirely unknown in Nature.  We are bound to take this more into account, for it has constructed all the gains of mankind. [p.68] What can it be, in the individual efforts of the soul and in the ideal constructions of science and the higher ethical and religious constructions of life, but a reality higher than sense and outside the categories of space and time?  What better name can be given to it than a Spiritual Life in contradistinction to the life of Nature?

When this life of the mind and spirit of man is acknowledged, it is seen to be the beginning of a new order of existence.  There appears within it a new kind of reality.  It is the standpoint from which natural science itself has arisen.  Such an acknowledgment of life as a new kind of reality alters in an essential manner the whole view of the world.  Nature now signifies not the whole of things, but only a step beyond which the cosmic process progresses.  Two worlds, instead of one world, now appear—­one growing out of the other, but keeping a connection still with the other.  Nature consequently gains a deeper significance of meaning when we recognise that it gives birth to mind and spirit —­characteristics which merge into consciousness, values, and ideals.  Nature is not discarded in our new view, but it takes a secondary place.  The primary place must be given to the spiritual life—­the life which is active as an organisation in knowing and being and doing.  And when this truth is realised, this life of mental and spiritual activity becomes the [p.69] centre from which the new reality will obtain an ever greater content.  The deepest aspect of reality is then discovered, not without but within.  This reality is now conceived as something which belongs to a new kind of world, and this new world stands above the physical world.  Man, when he conceives of things in this manner, will be able to bear the indifference of the physical course of existence towards the spiritual potencies of his being.  The natural process may seem to harass and even destroy him; it matters not, for he has been led to a conviction of the possession of qualities which have not come into activity and power in any world below him, and which have laws of their own and goals spiritual in their nature.  But all this will not come about as a shower of rain descends.  The spiritual life has to insist on its superiority to the natural process, and to construct, with the deepest energy of its being, ever richer moral and spiritual contents for itself; for it is these contents which constitute the growth of the meaning and value of the new world, as well as of its indestructible reality beyond the process of Nature.