The spiritual life has ascended too high and accomplished too much to be treated with indifference.  And yet that is the way it is being treated only too widely to-day.  Men hesitate to grant to it a reality of its own because of its close connection with mechanical and chemical elements.  They half affirm and half deny its reality.  The question arises, What is reality?  Eucken agrees with the great idealists of the world that reality in its highest manifestation is [p.130] something that pertains to spirit and meaning rather than to matter and its behaviour.[44] Our rigid clinging to a meaning of reality from the side of its physical history is doubtless a remnant of a race—­memory which may be largely physical in its nature.  We find a difficulty in conceiving as yet a reality existing in itself—­existing in itself though material elements have helped it on its upward course.  But even here it is not at all certain that nothing but material elements have operated in this fundamental process.  Men have by now known enough of the connection of mind with lower processes in order to be aware of a mystery present in the whole operation—­a mystery which does not yield itself to the senses.

But even such a past history of the spiritual life is not all that can be said concerning it.  It is now in process of evolution, and its greatest work is always accomplished not by looking backward but forward.  The whole universe has operated in bringing spiritual life into existence.  Are there any reasons whatever for concluding that the whole universe is not co-operating now in its further development?  Life, civilisation, culture, morality, and religion are proofs that this life of the spirit is moving onward and upward.  It does not move without checks and entanglements [p.131] from without and within, but in every “long run” it is gaining some new ground and tilling it as its own.  It dare not turn back; it dare not throw away the pack of the Sollen (the Ought) off its shoulders.  The over-individual norms have planted themselves too strongly in the heart of humanity to be ever uprooted.  The meaning and value of life now lie in a beyond.  It is not a beyond within any physical region that was; neither is it, so far as we know, a beyond in any physical region that is to be.  It is a beyond of the spirit; and as it is the most real and most requisite possession of man, how can it have anything less than a cosmic significance?  The future of spiritual life is therefore governed not by something that is to be in the cosmos, but by something that is now present in it—­by the acknowledgment, assimilation, and appropriation by man and humanity of spiritual norms which are far beyond their present actual situation.