ideals as the all-important ones. Higher ideals are left out
of account, so that we find the world to-day spending its energies in
warfare concerning many things of minor importance. How can we expect
fruition and bliss to follow on such lines?

Eucken presents in a convincing manner the danger of resting upon the
external in Society and State. "We are experiencing to-day a remarkable
entanglement. The older forms of Life, which had hitherto governed
history and its meaning, have become too narrow, petty, and subjective
for human nature. Through emancipation from an easy-going subjectivity
and through the positing of life upon external things and, indeed, upon
the whole of the great universe, Life, it was believed, would gain more
breadth and truth; and in a noteworthy manner man undertook a struggle
against the pettiness of his own nature and for the drawing out of all
that was merely human and trivial. A great deal has been gained through
such a change and new tendency of life. In fact we have discovered far
more than we had hoped for. But, at the same time, we have lost
something--a loss which at the outset occasions no anxiety, but which,
however, through painful experience, proves itself to have been the 'one
thing needful.' Through its own development the work has destroyed its
own vehicles; it has [p.116] undermined the very ground upon which it
stood; it has failed, notwithstanding its infinite expansion, through
its loss of a fundamental and unifying Life-process; and in the entire
immersion of man into activity his deepest being has been sacrificed.
Indeed, the more exclusively Life transforms itself into external work,
the more it ceases to be an inner personal experience, and the more
alien we become to ourselves. And yet the fact that we can be conscious
of such an alienation--an alienation that we cannot accept indifferently
--is a proof that more is firmly implanted in us than the modern
direction of life is able to develop and satisfy. We acknowledge
simultaneously that we have gained much, but that the loss is a painful
one. We have gained the world, but we have lost the soul; and, along
with this, the world threatens to bring us to nought, and to take away
our one secure foothold in the midst of the roaring torrent of material
work."[37]

Eucken shows that the individual will obtain his true place in Society
and the State only when spiritual ideals have become fixed norms--norms
which form the highes