the great idealists of the world that
reality in its highest manifestation is [p.130] something that pertains
to spirit and meaning rather than to matter and its behaviour.[44] Our
rigid clinging to a meaning of reality from the side of its physical
history is doubtless a remnant of a race--memory which may be largely
physical in its nature. We find a difficulty in conceiving as yet a
reality existing in itself--existing in itself though material elements
have helped it on its upward course. But even here it is not at all
certain that nothing but material elements have operated in this
fundamental process. Men have by now known enough of the connection of
mind with lower processes in order to be aware of a mystery present in
the whole operation--a mystery which does not yield itself to the
senses.

But even such a past history of the spiritual life is not all that can
be said concerning it. It is _now_ in process of evolution, and its
greatest work is always accomplished not by looking backward but
forward. The whole universe has operated in bringing spiritual life into
existence. Are there any reasons whatever for concluding that the whole
universe is not co-operating _now_ in its further development? Life,
civilisation, culture, morality, and religion are proofs that this life
of the spirit is moving onward and upward. It does not move without
checks and entanglements [p.131] from without and within, but in every
"long run" it is gaining some new ground and tilling it as its own. It
dare not turn back; it dare not throw away the pack of the _Sollen_ (the
Ought) off its shoulders. The over-individual norms have planted
themselves too strongly in the heart of humanity to be ever uprooted.
The meaning and value of life now lie in a _beyond_. It is not a
_beyond_ within any physical region that _was_; neither is it, so far as
we know, a _beyond_ in any physical region that _is to be_. It is a
_beyond of the spirit_; and as it is the most real and most requisite
possession of man, how can it have anything less than a _cosmic_
significance? The future of spiritual life is therefore governed not by
something that is _to be_ in the cosmos, but by something that is _now_
present in it--by the acknowledgment, assimilation, and appropriation by
man and humanity of spiritual norms which are far beyond their present
actual situation.

The whole meaning here is that something _sub specie aeternitatis_ has
to take the foremost pla