experiences here cannot be measured or weighed; and that a certain obscurity is present in them is only what may be expected, considering that the spiritual nature is farther removed from the region of nature with its physical existence than when it deals with problems on the intellectual level.  But such spiritual proofs are found in the fact that these realities present themselves only at the height of spiritual development, and in the fact that they produce an inversion of the nature of man, and change the centre of gravity of his life to a more inward recess of his being [p.52] than is open on the natural or intellectual side.

Thus, once more, the soul is driven forward by its own necessities to a religious reality.  What can it do but grant cosmic origin and validity to such ideals?  If these ideals are not this, then, as Eucken points out, they are the most tragic illusions conceivable.

When they are acknowledged as cosmic realities, man is in the midst of a religion of a universal kind.  But the acknowledgment of these as cosmic realities is something more than a concept.  The men who have come to this conclusion required something more than logical arguments in order to establish this truth.  The conclusions were based upon a specific (characteristic) religious experience of their own.  And such a religious experience was larger and more real than anything that could be established in the form of concepts concerning it.  As we shall notice in a later chapter, it is somewhat on this account that Eucken differentiates between universal and specific (characteristic) religion.

It becomes evident that such contents of the new spiritual world cannot be utilised by man without effort.  These realities have to pass from the region of ideas to the region of actual experiences.  In other words, they must become man’s own religion.  Man has now become convinced of the reality of a universal spiritual life as constituting, in a measure, the [p.53] foundation of the evolution of the soul, and as the goal towards which he must for ever move.  Eucken is unwilling to speculate as to the origin or the goal of this.  The centre of gravity of life must be laid in what may be known and experienced between these two poles.  There is a certainty which is intermediate between man and the Godhead.  It is when this certainty is realised as an actual portion of the soul that man becomes competent to carry farther—­backward and forward—­the implications of this certainty.  And implications of a new kind of Weltanschauung result from the spiritual experiences of the Lebensanschauung of the spiritual life.  On this matter we shall touch at a later stage in the inquiry.