a more joyous life than this “half-poet, half-thinker.”  Pressed from within and without by many alien elements, he overcame them all and found, despite his physical weakness, what a gift life is.  It is in the direction of a great synthesis of spiritual life and natural phenomena that true art will discover the qualities for a permanent duration.  Such a synthesis will enrich the spiritual life, and will grant it something of higher construction concerning the meaning and value of the union of Nature and Man.  So Eucken has once more landed us into the spiritual life as the source and goal of all true Art.

    “Only the rooted knowledge to high sense
    Of heavenly can mount, and feel the spur
    For fruitfullest achievement, eye a mark
      Beyond the path with grain on either hand,
    Help to the steering of our social Ark
      Over the barbarous waters unto land."[43]

* * * * *

CHAPTER VIII [p.128]

UNIVERSAL RELIGION

We have followed Eucken’s system developing step by step from the stage of knowing the world up through the evolution of spiritual life in history, in the soul, in art, and in society.  Everywhere the investigation has revealed a progressive autonomy and duration of spiritual life in the midst of all the kaleidoscopic aspects of the objects which presented themselves to consciousness.  Something spiritual has persisted and evolved in the midst of all the changes, and the changes have been utilised by this deeper potency of the soul.  Through the evolution of this spiritual potency changes have been brought about in the external world, in human society, and in the individual soul.  This spiritual potency has bent things to subserve its own inherent demands.  The union of conation and cognition within the soul has brought forth everything that has happened outside the natural process of the physical world, and much even of that world [p.129] has been made subservient to man.  When the attention is turned to this “fact of facts” concerning the work of spiritual life, individually and collectively, it is impossible to consider it as a mere addendum to the natural process, however closely connected it may be with that process.  Sufficient has been said to prove the superiority of spiritual life over the whole aspects and manifestations of Nature.  The question, then, cannot be laid aside concerning the nature of the life of the spirit in itself.  What is it now?  What is it capable of becoming?  Why should its evolution snap at its highest point?  Why cannot the power that has accomplished so much in the history of our world, and has always done this the more efficiently the more a remove from the realm of the sensuous took place—­why cannot such a power proceed farther on its course?  And what limits can be set to it?  The pertinency of such and other questions cannot be doubted.