governed by an inward.  This experience is [p.103] far removed from all attempts to found religion on speculation drawn either from the physical world or from the generalisations of logic.  These have their value—­they point to the presence of some degree of spiritual life when the human mind has worked upon the material presented to it.  But the matter at this highest level does not deal with the relations of life but with life itself in the light of an over-world.

Eucken is nowhere finer than when he detects the necessity for the acknowledgment of such a spiritual foundation of life.  It is not a mere individual need, but the union of an individual need with a reality objective to the need.  If the reality were already the possession of man, no such need could arise.  Still, the reality is present in his mind as an idea and ideal; it is present to the individual, but it is not as yet the possession of the individual except in a measure at the best.  So that the certainty includes within itself a realisation and a further quest.  And the very nature of the quest involves a struggle of the whole nature.  The certainty has gone so far as to show that the highest good which presents itself to the soul is the “one thing needful,” and is possible of partial attainment.  When all this burns within the soul, something of the norm or ideal gets fixed within it, and the individual starts to conquer more and more the new world into which he is now landed. [p.104] Often the life is driven out of its course by alien currents; a great deal of what the man has now left behind himself still clings tenaciously to the new life, and the whole soul becomes an arena often of a terrible conflict.  The spiritual life and its content of a new reality may be temporarily beaten in this warfare; but the battle is finally won if ever the deepest within the soul has been touched by a conviction of the eternal value and significance of the new life.  The conquest is followed by periods of calm and fruition.  Here the deeper energies gather themselves together; they grant a peace which the world cannot give and cannot take away; they create new certainties, new demands, and new attempts for the possession of a reality which is still higher in its nature than anything that previously revealed itself.

Gradually the soul is forced more than ever to the conviction that the whole matter is too serious to be of less than of cosmic significance.  And it is out of this that the idea of the Godhead arises.  It is not a speculative dream but a conclusion forced upon the man by the actual situation; the material for the conclusion is not anything which descends into the soul with a ready-made content.  Eucken states that such a view of revelation belongs to the past history of the race.  It is now no less than a revelation springing from the very nature of the soul at its highest possible level. [p.105] It occurs only when a foundation, a struggle, and a conquest