entirely dependent upon the physical or than a mere flowering of the physical; it is seen as a reality higher in its nature than the physical or even than the ordinary life of the individual.  Such a situation is forced on man when once he reflects upon the inward meaning of the content of his consciousness.  It is true that such questions may be thrust into the background, and consequently inhibited from presenting us with their full value and significance.  And it is this which happens only too often in daily life.  The constant need of attention to external things, the absorption of the mind in conventionality and custom as these present themselves in the form of a ready-made inheritance—­all these occupy so much of the attention as to prevent man from knowing and experiencing what his own life is or what it is capable of becoming.  Man has penetrated into the secrets of Nature as well as into the past of human society through close and constant attention to external things. [p.38] He has been able to gather fragments together, piece them into each other, and through this frame laws concerning them.  It is thus that the external world and society have come to mean more to a human being than to an animal.  The animal is probably almost entirely the creature of its instincts and of the percepts which present themselves to it from moment to moment, and which largely disappear.  But man rises above this situation.  The external world and everything that has ever happened on its face are not merely objects external to himself, which contain all their qualities in themselves.  Somebody has to experience all this, and that somebody that experiences all this is mental in his nature, however much this nature has been conditioned by physical things in the past or present.

Eucken emphasises this fundamental fact in all his books.  Wherever a being is capable of experiencing impressions and of giving meanings to these, we are bound to conclude that the power which does this is something quite other than physical in its nature.  It may be that such a power has never been known except in connection with what is physical; it may be that various chemical changes give the truer and clearer explanation of its origin, as far as its origin can be known at all; it may be that there was nothing of the mental visible in the early stages of its development; but all this is very different from stating that [p.39] no potentiality for mental evolution was there.  And it is this potentiality which is the issue at stake.  We have no warrant for stating that it does not exist because it does not lend itself to be verified by the senses.  Where does mind manifest itself to the senses?  It is something which does not exist in space as a horse or a tree.  It may be that consciousness has emanated from simple chemical beginnings and combinations, but it is not a simple or a chemical thing now.  We divide worlds into inorganic and organic.