This is Eucken’s main thesis, and connected with this thesis is the fact that religion can come to birth in the soul of man only through a conquest of the ordinary, natural world which surrounds him.  The world which surrounds him hinders more than it helps the birth of religion in the soul.  The aim of religion is therefore not the perfecting of man in a natural sense, but the bringing about of a union of human nature and the Divine.  Religion must therefore include a “world-denial and a world-renewal.”  There is not enough for man’s deeper nature either in the physical world or in the ordinary life of the hour.  The natural world knows of no complete self-subsistence, for everything is connected with its environment, and it is in this connection with its environment that life below man largely obtains its existence.  But in man we discover a transition stage from the sensuous to the non-sensuous, and it is in the latter that the meaning of the former can be obtained.  The history of civilisation and culture is a history of this all-important fact.  The meaning of man is, therefore, not to be found in his relationship to the physical world, but in his own consciousness.  Although we may not be aware of it, consciousness is the power which, in the long and slow progress of the ages, has overcome the sensuous and made it subservient to the [p.32] meaning and value which its own content of experience has presented.  The necessity and proof of religion are not then discovered in anything in the external world, but in the realisation of the fact that we are meant to be citizens of a world higher in its nature, the birthright of which is to be found within our own nature.  The conquest of nature and the growth of culture are proofs to man of his superiority to the world of sense impressions.  This denial of the sufficiency of the world of sense in the evolution of the human soul, on the one hand, and the affirmation of the potentiality of a higher world of spirit on the other hand, constitute the nucleus of the Christian religion.  Its superiority consists in giving their rights to both worlds, and also in showing that they do not possess the same value.  This essential nature of Christianity will be demonstrated later.

We must return, then, to consciousness itself and see what may be discovered within it concerning the meaning of religion.  The great thinkers of the ages have all been agreed as to the impossibility of finding sufficient proofs and meanings of religion either from Nature or from some supernatural source flowing in a miraculous manner towards our earth.  The growth and interpretation of natural science in modern times have rendered it impossible to find proofs of religion in any external mode.  Yet the problems of man’s [p.33] Whence and Whither raise themselves with energy and even tragedy in our own day.  These, as Eucken points out, are “problems concerning our Whence and Whither, our dependence upon strange powers, the painful antitheses within our own soul,