ry act in a world of _meaning_. When such a
meaning comes to be acknowledged, it forms a kind of standard which
interprets any future facts that enter into it. The further the progress
of the knowledge of physical objects advances the more the concepts
become removed from the level of the sensuous; as is witnessed, for
instance, in the forms of laws and hypotheses, which constitute the very
groundwork of physical science. The physical scientist, whether he is
conscious of it or not, has constructed an ideal world of _meaning_
which constitutes the explanation [p.88] of the external world. This is
a fact so familiar that it needs no further elucidation here. But there
is great need for calling attention to the power which _does_ all this
as well as to the reality of the interpretation which that power, in its
contact with physical phenomena, has brought forth. That such a power of
the mind is connected with physical existence does not in the least
explain its nature. It is not physical _now_; it is meaning and value,
and there is no such thing as meaning or value in the nature of physical
objects in themselves. Their meaning and value come into being when they
serve a purpose which the mind has framed concerning them. Eucken
insists that a reality must be ascribed to so much as all this--to that
which knows and interprets Nature. However much Nature and Spirit
resemble one another, however much the latter is dependent on the
former, Nature must be conceived as exhibiting a lower grade of reality
than mind. Indeed, Nature could not exist for mind unless there were a
mind to know it; and this fact inevitably leads us to ask the question,
whether Nature could exist at all.[25]

Eucken maintains that the insufficient attention paid to this priority
of the subject is the [p.89] defect of all the systems which have
reduced life and all its values to their lowest denominator. A naive
realism is a relic of past ancestry; it is a failure to conceive
anything as reality unless it lends itself to the senses. Had men not
grasped a higher order of reality than that of the external object, none
of the mental and moral gains of the world would ever have been
realised. Hence, man has to insist that the mental or spiritual life is
the possessor of a reality of its own, although much of the material
comprising that reality has been drawn from the physical world through
the senses. But the spiritual life has proceeded far beyond these
init