have been worked out by the soul in the manner already depicted.  No close determinations, as we shall see later, are made concerning the meaning and nature of the Godhead.  The man is here at an altitude so rare and pure that it forbids any logical or psychological analysis.  God is not something to be explained, but to be possessed.  When the attempt is made to explain Him, He is very soon explained away; when he is possessed, He becomes not something other than was present before, but more than was present before; a cosmic significance is given to the universe and to man’s struggle to scale the heights of the over-world with all its momentous values.

Here, again, the spiritual life has landed us out of psychology into the deepest experiences of religion and into the consciousness that the intermediate realities which presented themselves as over-individual norms and ideals are realities of cosmic significance.  The Godhead is now possessed.  As Jacob Boehme presents it:  “From my youth up I have sought only one thing:  the salvation of my soul, the means of gaining possession of the Kingdom of God.”  Here, as Professor Boutroux[33] points out, “Jacob Boehme learnt from the mystics what it means to possess God.  One must take care, so these masters [p.106] teach, not to liken the possession of God to the possession of anything material.  God is spirit, i.e. for the man who understands the meaning of the term, a generating power previous to all essence, even the divine.  God is spirit, i.e. pure will, both infinite and free, with the realisation of its own personality as its object.  Henceforward, God cannot be accepted by any passive operation.  We possess Him only if He is created within us.  To possess God is to live the life of God.”  This is on lines precisely those of Eucken, and something of this nature seems to be gaining ground to-day in a strong idealistic school in Germany.  We may soon discover that a true mysticism is the flowering of the bud of knowledge; that true knowledge constitutes a tributary which runs into the ocean of the Infinite Love of the Divine and becomes the most precious possession of the soul.[34]

Eucken touches on this subject in an extremely interesting chapter in his Truth of Religion.  “This is a question of fact, and not of argument....  Because we convinced ourselves that things were so, we gained the standpoint of spiritual experience over against a merely psychological standpoint.  For the [p.107] latter standpoint occupies itself with purely psychic processes, and in the province of religion especially it occupies itself with the conditions of the stimulations of will and feeling, which are not able to prove anything beyond themselves.  The spiritual experience, on the contrary, has to do with life’s contents and with the construction of reality; it need not trouble itself concerning the connections of the world except in a subsidiary manner,