connected with spiritual life.  “Without the presence of a spiritual world [the resultant of the union of the spiritual potencies and external objects], art has no soul and no secure fundamental relationship to reality, and in no way can it develop a fixed style.  We hear to-day of a ‘new style,’ and are in the saddle after such a conception.  But shall we find it so long as the whole of life does not fasten itself upon simple fundamental lines and does not follow the main path in the midst of all the tangle of effort?  How is it possible to attain to a unity of interpretation where our life itself fails in the possession of a governing unity?  We discover ourselves in the midst of the most fundamental transformations of life; old ideals are vanishing, and new ones are dawning on the horizon.  But as yet they are all full of unrest and unreadiness; and the situation of man in the All of things is so full of uncertainty that he has to struggle anew for the meaning and value of his life.  If art has nothing to say to him and no help to offer—­if it relegates these questions far from itself—­then art itself must sink to the level of a [p.126] subsidiary play the more these problems win the mind and spirit of man.  But if art is capable of bringing a furtherance of values to man in his needs and sorrows, it will have to recognise and acknowledge the problems of spiritual life as well as participate in the struggle for the vindication and formation of a spiritual world.  When art does this, these questions which engage our attention are also its questions."[41]

In spite of the contradictions of life, in spite of much which seems indifferent to human weal and woe within the physical universe, the contradictions may be surmounted by the union of man’s spirit with other aspects of existence which look in an opposite direction.  The ideal world of art is not to be discovered by ignoring these contradictions, but by acknowledging them to the full, and by seeing that Nature is supplemented by man and his soul.  Such a union, as has already been pointed out, will create an earnestness and joyousness of life; it will enable man, when any teleology of Nature herself fails to give him satisfaction, to realise a teleology within the substance of his own life—­spiritual in its essence, infinite in its duration, and the flowering of a bud which has grown with the help of the natural cosmos.  When Nature is thus viewed as a preparatory stage for spirit, it will wear an aspect very different from the mechanical one.  Its real teleology [p.127] will be seen:  there can be no dispute about it; it has actually produced man, and man has now to carry farther the evolutionary process.  Eucken has presented this aspect in a fine manner in his article on Schiller in Kantstudien[42] (Band X., Heft 3), Festschrift zu Schillers hundertstem Todestage.  No one in modern times discovered the contradictions of the world in regard to the needs of man more than Schiller.  And yet no one led