here again it is by no means necessary to surrender to naturalism a
field which it has tried to take possession of, but is certainly unable to
hold. We need not try to force naturalism to read out of empirical
psychology the high conclusions as to human nature and spirit which
pertain to the religious outlook, or to find in the "simplicity" of the
"soul monad" a kind of physical proof of its indestructibility, or
anything of that kind. We maintain that to comprehend the true inwardness
of the vitality, freedom, dignity, and power of the spirit is not the
business of psychology at all, but may perhaps be dealt with in ethics, if
it be not admitted that with these concepts one has already entered the
realm of religious experience, and that they are the very centre of
religious theory. But undoubtedly we must reject in great measure the
claims which naturalism makes upon our domain, and maintain that the most
important starting-points for the higher view are to be found in the
priority of everything spiritual over everything material, in the
underivability of the spiritual and the impossibility of describing it in
corporeal-mathematical terms and concepts.

Individual Development.

What lives in us, as far as we can perceive and trace it in its empirical
expression, is not a finished and spiritual being that leaps, mature and
complete, from some pre-existence or other into its embodied form, but is
obviously something that only develops and becomes actual very gradually.
Its becoming is conditioned by "stimuli," influences, impressions from
without, and perfects itself in the closest dependence upon the becoming
of the body, is inhibited or advanced with it, and may be entirely
arrested by it, forced into abnormal developments which never attain to
the level of an "ego" or "personality," but remain incomprehensible
anomalies and monstrosities. In general, the psychical struggles slowly
and laboriously free from purely vegetative and physiological processes,
and gains control over itself and over the body. Its self-development and
concentration to full unity and completeness of personality is only
achieved through the deepest self-culture, through complete
"simplification" as the ancients said, through great acts and experiences
of inward centralisation such as that which finds religious expression in
the metaphor of "regeneration." What "building up" and self-development of
the psychical means remains obscure. If