The former alone
gives to the latter meaning, and purpose, and value. I _am_ immortal,
imperishable, eternal, so soon as I form the resolution to obey the
law of Reason; and do not first have to _become_ so. The supersensuous
world is not a future world; it is present. It never can be more
present at any one point of finite existence than at any other point.
After an existence of myriad lives, it cannot be more present than at
this moment. Other conditions of my sensuous existence are to come;
but these are no more the true life than the present condition. By
means of that resolution I lay hold on eternity, and strip off this
life in the dust and all other sensuous lives that may await me, and
raise myself far above them. I become to myself the sole fountain
of all my being and of all my phenomena; and have henceforth,
unconditioned by aught without me, life in myself. My will, which
I myself, and no stranger, fit to the order of that world, is this
fountain of true life and of eternity.

But only my will is this fountain; and only when I acknowledge this
will to be the true seat of moral excellence, and actually elevate it
to this excellence, do I attain to the certainty and the possession of
that supersensuous world.

* * * * *

The sense by which we lay hold on eternal life we acquire only by
renouncing and offering up sense, and the aims of sense, to the law
which claims our will alone, and not our acts--by renouncing it with
the conviction that to do so is reasonable and alone reasonable. With
this renunciation of the earthly, the belief in the eternal first
enters our soul and stands isolated there, as the only stay by which
we can still sustain ourselves when we have relinquished everything
else, as the only animating principle that still uplifts our hearts
and still inspires our life. Well was it said, in the metaphors of
a sacred doctrine, that man must first die to the world and be born
again, in order to enter into the kingdom of God.

I see, oh, I see now, clear before mine eyes, the cause of my former
heedlessness and blindness concerning spiritual things! Filled with
earthly aims, and lost in them with all my scheming and striving; put
in motion and impelled only by the idea of a result, which is to be
actualized without us, by the desire of such a result and pleasure in
it--insensible and dead to the pure impulse of that Reason which gives
the law to itself, which sets