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 have been worked out by the soul in the
manner already depicted. No close determinations, as we shall see later,
are made concerning the meaning and nature of the Godhead. The man is
here at an altitude so rare and pure that it forbids any logical or
psychological analysis. God is not something to be explained, but to be
possessed. When the attempt is made to explain Him, He is very soon
explained away; when he is possessed, He becomes not something other
than was present before, but _more_ than was present before; a cosmic
significance is given to the universe and to man's struggle to scale the
heights of the over-world with all its momentous values.

Here, again, the spiritual life has landed us out of psychology into the
deepest experiences of religion and into the consciousness tha