because it stands in the midst of such connections, and without these it cannot possibly exist.  Man never succeeds in reaching the Divine unless the Divine works and is acknowledged in his own life; what is omitted here in the first step is never again recovered and becomes more and more impossible as life proceeds on its merely natural course.  If, however, the standpoint of spiritual experience is gained, then religion succeeds in attaining entire certainty and immediacy; then the struggles in which it was involved turn into a similar result, and its own inner movements become a testimony to the reality of the new world which it represents."[35]

* * * * *

CHAPTER VI [p.108]

RELIGION AND SOCIETY

Eucken shows that the problems of history are closely allied with those of society.  The best accounts of the meaning he attaches to human society are to be found in The Main Currents of Modern Thought, Der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt, and Life Basis and Life Ideal.  The conclusions reached in these three books are the same—­they are an insistence on the need of spiritual life as a creative power in the utilisation of norms and ideals as well as in the creation of further norms and ideals.  He points out the devious paths which human society has travelled over:  all these, in the case of society and of the individual, are shown to lead to disaster when they depend merely upon the environment or upon the ideals of a utilitarian mode of a historico-social construction.

Society has gained much through the necessity of emphasising some aspects of a Whole—­of thinking and acting collectively—­instead [p.109] of emphasising merely the Parts.  The history of human society, in a very large measure, is the history of shifting the centre of gravity of life alternately from the Whole to the Parts and vice versa.  When the centre of gravity remains in some kind of Whole, a number of individuals move towards the same goal, and much that is subjective has to be shifted to the background of life.  Now, this is a gain, and it is the only path on which a corporate life becomes possible.  Men (and women too) stand shoulder to shoulder when some kind of Whole or Ideal seems to them to be a necessity of their nature.  But progress is brought about not only through cementing human beings together in order to move towards any kind of ideal.  The energy is in the right place, but the question has to arise as to the nature of the over-personal ideal itself.  All over-personal ideals cannot connote the good of all, but the good of all must be present as possessing a validity of its own before any lower over-personal ideal can prevent landing men in disaster.  The over-personal ideals which do not include the good of all often represent the good of a section alone, and all other sections have to become convinced that this is a good.