and its contents.  It is something revealed, but not as yet possessed; it is hard to be reached; and even within the man’s own nature obstacles and hindrances of various kinds are to be found.  But the new reality persists in the midst of the hindrances; the man discovers himself as the possessor of a deeper kind of truth than was present and operative in the ordinary life.  A cleavage is therefore made between the “small self” and the spiritual life.  In the degree the former wins through the calling forth of the deepest activities of the soul, in that degree does the transcendent aspect of the new reality urge itself upon man.  And when the two aspects—­immanent and transcendent—­of the reality are firmly grasped by the soul, the soul moves upward in the exploration and possession of its new world.

The failure to enter into this region of religion is due to the fact that men often attempt to construct religion on certain so-called faculties of the soul.  Some attempt to discover and establish religion through the power and conclusions of the intellect.  It is evident that when the knowing aspect of consciousness [p.137] takes such a leading part, and deliberately ignores the affective and active aspects, no more than a segment of the reality can be discovered, and such a segment leaves out of account important elements of human nature.  If the affective aspect takes the lead at the expense of the other two aspects, we are here again in a region where only certain fragments of our nature are touched.  If the active aspect busies itself without carrying along with itself the content of meaning and value to be discovered in consciousness, the true element of the greatness of the reality is missing.  Eucken shows in his Truth of Religion that there must be a point in the soul, at some deeper level than any of the three, where the three are working conjointly.[48] It must be so, because what is now at stake is more than knowing a thing; it is to be the thing we know we ought to be. It is unfamiliarity with such a truth that brings a difficulty into the mind when face to face [p.138] with the problem of religion.  The mind has not learned how to attend to the truth in its own self-subsistence, but posits this truth in its relation to the conditions in the external world which brought it forth.[49] Thus the conception of truth is made up very largely of its history on its physical side, and this history of the truth comes to possess the entire meaning of the truth itself!  The road to religion, in its deepest sense, is barred to everyone who fails or refuses to grant the deeper reality which presents itself within the soul a self-subsistence. The only existence of such a reality can be its own self-subsistence.  The reality is now conceived as something quite other than an existence in space; it exists for consciousness and can persist within consciousness.