life eternal can never be wholly lost in the stream of time.”  We are here in a region farthest removed from sense and understanding; but the remarkable thing is that the conviction of immortality does not dawn on any lower level; it is not on the lower levels a portion of spiritual experience.  It seems as if an element of immortality is only to be gained at a certain height of the spiritual life.  On all levels below, men seek for proofs in the analogies of Nature, in the supposed return of the spirits of the dead, and in the craving found in their own lives.  All these proofs have one thing in common:  they [p.163] are all of a lower order of value than the meaning which the content of experience gives to immortality on its highest level.  For at this highest level the proof is not something happening outside the man; it is the deepest part of his own being which now actually possesses a taste of life eternal.  It seems, then, that there is no answer to the problem outside ourselves, because it is not something to be known, but something to be experienced after long toil and a stirring of the nature to its lowest depths in the drift of all that is highest and best.[59] It is sufficient for us to possess a life which is spiritual and timeless in its nature:  and when such a life is possessed, empirical proofs are neither demanded nor desired.  It is within one’s own new and spiritual world that proofs are now discovered, and they are timeless and spaceless in their own intrinsic nature.  “Do this, and thou shalt live.”  If the man has to negate all concerning the preservation of his natural individuality, the new world he has gained for his soul will have abundant affirmation within itself, without the support of any earthly props.  It is his own highest life which testifies to him that “death does not count” at all.

Eucken’s whole plea is that spiritual life at the point of its highest manifestation should not be interpreted by anything below itself. [p.164] We have already noticed how, on lower levels, spiritual life was even there interpreted by its norms, and not by its connections with what was below itself.  The disappearance of miracle in religion is an indispensable stage which must be passed over.  It is necessary only on a mid-level of religion, and has really been far more of the nature of a symbol than of a fact.  It is at our peril that in religion we give up such a symbol until a more “inward wonder” has happened within our own soul.  When the self-subsistence of the spiritual life and the reality of the norms of the over-world, now all united in God, are experienced, all miraculous manifestations of the Divine, imaginary or real, are relegated to a secondary place.  They all belong to a point which the man has passed; they are milestones to which he can never return.  “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet.”  As Eucken points out, “This is no other than