life.  And it is this aspect which produces the conviction of such a revelation as being objective in its very nature.  It belongs to something or somebody outside our own individual experience or achievement.  That there is much which is mysterious in all this, is only what might be expected.  But the very fact that the Higher comes with such power when the soul expects, assimilates, and appropriates it [p.141] is a proof of its existence somewhere at the core of the universe.  It cannot mean an illusion; it brings changes of too fundamental a nature to be no more than that.  Its very value and the enormous difficulty of turning it from being an idea into being a possession demand too much energy of the soul to allow of its being dismissed without any more ado.  It contains elements so different in their nature from the ordinary life of the hour as to render it impossible to be considered of no more than of subsidiary importance.  For it has to be borne in mind that the values and norms farthest removed from the regions of sense and intellect appear only when man follows the drift of his own higher being; it is not when he remains effortless and satisfied with the life of the hour that such values and norms appear.  They appear when the ordinary life is seen through as no more than a stage for the further evolution of the soul through the grasping of a higher kind of reality than has as yet presented itself to it.  As Eucken says:  “Religion proves itself a kingdom of opposites.  When it steps out of such opposites, it destroys without a doubt the turbidity and evanescence of ordinary commonplace life, and separates clearly the lights and shadows from one another.  It sets our life between the sharpest contrasts, and engenders the most powerful feelings and the most mighty movements; it shows the dark abyss in our nature, but also [p.142] shows illumined peaks; it opens out infinite tasks, and brings ever to an awakening a new life in its movement against the ordinary self.  It does not render our existence lighter, but it makes it richer, more eventful, and greater; it enables man to experience cosmic problems within his own soul in order to struggle for a new world, and, indeed, in order to gain such a genuine world as its own proper life."[50]

All this is not a matter of speculation, but of fact.  And it is in the recognition of this fact that Eucken’s philosophy of religion constitutes a new kind of idealistic movement—­a movement tending more and more in the direction of Christianity.  But he differs here again from the absolute idealists and the pragmatists.  The former base their Absolute upon the demands of logic, whilst Eucken bases all upon the demands and potencies of life; the pragmatists emphasise the primary place of the will in the development of the inner life, but they have certainly ignored the presence of over-individual norms, as the goal of volition, whilst Eucken holds to the necessity of both.  With the absolutists