Eucken then concludes that Nature and History require for their interpretation the presence of a spiritual life.  Nature involves the spiritual in the very power of mind in knowing external things.  He would not state that the physical course of things is enough in itself to prove the existence of spiritual life.  We are uncertain of any working towards [p.90] definite ends in Nature.  The whole matter belongs to the region of speculation; and speculation based on something other than observation and experiment has greatly retarded progress in connection with the truest interpretation of the highest things.  Eucken would really agree here with the physical scientist pure and simple that, however far back the investigations of the physical world are carried, the scientist does not seem to come to anything at the furthest point which bears more affinity to what is mental than was to be discovered at the point from which he set out.

But in History it is different.  We are here dealing with material which is not in space, and which has not resulted through any mere succession in time.  The material, in fact, is timeless, because it is a synthesis of factors which cannot be reckoned mechanically, and which requires a great span of time in order to be constructed by the spirit of man.  At this level the spiritual life has gained a reality which is over-personal as well as personal.  It is true that this over-personal reality is in the mind of the individual; but that does not mean that the reality is no more than a private experience.  Its content is clearly now higher and more significant than the individual’s own life.  That we cannot locate in space this over-personal aspect of the ideal is probably a disadvantage.  But this cannot be helped; and [p.91] it cannot possibly be otherwise, simply because the over-personal reality is not a spatial thing.  The same may be said of the content of individual experience, even when it does not for the time being hold before itself any ideal.  But such over-personal elements mean more than was to be found on the level of knowing the world.  A further development of spiritual life has taken place; and reality has become objective in its nature and subjective in its apprehension and appropriation by the individual.  Reality has, through the over-personal which has evolved in history, obtained a cosmic significance; and it is out of this region that a Lebensanschauung as well as a true Weltanschauung have developed.

This digression from the subject of this chapter has probably prepared us to see that the potentiality of consciousness and the presence of over-personal elements presenting themselves to consciousness are the two main elements in the construction of the several grades of reality which present themselves on the lower level of Nature and on the higher level of History.

But our question now is, Does the nature of man himself confirm such statements as have already been made?  And it is to man’s own nature and its content we now turn, as these are presented in Eucken’s teaching.