What Eucken means by universal religion is the establishment of this independency and supremacy of spiritual life over all else in the world.  We have already dealt with this aspect in former chapters; the conclusion was reached that everywhere the presence of a life of the spirit made itself felt, and gave a meaning and interpretation to all life and existence.  That is the conclusion Eucken arrives at in his Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt. The problem of religion qua religion is hardly touched.  But, indeed, what other than religion can all these conclusions mean?  Norm and potency are emphasised.  An elevation above the world and above the “small self” has taken place.  But something still has to be done before we have entered into the very heart of the matter.  The problems which arise after all the conclusions previously arrived at are acknowledged must be taken into account.  Having come so far in regard to the value and meaning of spiritual life, we are bound to go farther.  No point occurs where we can find a terminus.  Though we have already been constrained to grant the norms a reality of their own, we have only just touched, here and there, [p.135] upon their cosmic significance.  The matter thus reaches a further point than we have yet touched.  What justification is there for granting spiritual life this cosmic significance?

Attention has already been called to the fact of a distinction between nature and spirit.  But attention has now to be directed to the necessity of emphasising the reality of spirit.  The nature of spirit is revealed most clearly in the life and content of human consciousness.  No anthropomorphic standard from without can come to our aid to establish the existence of spirit.  The standard is to be found within the consciousness itself.  A distinction has to be made between nature and spirit.  However much they resemble each other in the beginnings of life, spirit has travelled far beyond nature or matter.  It has developed for itself an essence which may be designated as substance.  The chief characteristic of matter is that it occupies space; but spirit, though connected with, and largely conditioned by, matter as it exists in space, is now something quite other—­something which has to be granted an existence of its own, and which forms the beginning of a new kind of world and unfolds a new kind of reality.

The reality of spiritual life is not discovered in anything which is external to life; it is to be found in life itself.  The reality is revealed and, indeed, created by an act of the spirit of man.  Such an act must be the act of one’s [p.136] own deepest being.  But although such a new reality is not to be found in anything external to life, yet the very revelation points, as we have already observed, to something which is over-individual.  Even the meaning of the reality itself, from its immanent side, is something quite other than the natural life