pects, no more
than a segment of the reality can be discovered, and such a segment
leaves out of account important elements of human nature. If the
affective aspect takes the lead at the expense of the other two aspects,
we are here again in a region where only certain fragments of our nature
are touched. If the active aspect busies itself without carrying along
with itself the content of meaning and value to be discovered in
consciousness, the true element of the greatness of the reality is
missing. Eucken shows in his _Truth of Religion_ that there must be a
point in the soul, at some deeper level than any of the three, where the
three are working conjointly.[48] It must be so, because what is now at
stake is more than knowing a thing; it is to _be_ the thing we know we
_ought to be._ It is unfamiliarity with such a truth that brings a
difficulty into the mind when face to face [p.138] with the problem of
religion. The mind has not learned how to attend to the truth in its own
self-subsistence, but posits this truth in its relation to the
conditions in the external world which brought it forth.[49] Thus the
conception of truth is made up very largely of its history on its
physical side, and this history of the truth comes to possess the entire
meaning of the truth itself! The road to religion, in its deepest sense,
is barred to everyone who fails or refuses to grant the deeper reality
which presents itself within the soul _a self-subsistence._ The only
existence of such a reality can be its own self-subsistence. The reality
is now conceived as something quite other than an existence in space; it
exists for consciousness and can persist within consciousness.

When reality is conceived as a substance subsisting in itself, the
passage to the Absolute is opened. This Absolute is the most universal
and complete meaning and value which the soul is capable of possessing;
its very nature forces itself upon man as being true; and its value has
revealed itself in its being the only power which will carry farther the
spiritual evolution of the soul. If such an Absolute is left out of
account, it is evident that the most universal [p.139] truth which
presents itself to life as absolutely necessary cannot enter into the
deepest recesses of the soul; it cannot be more than a subsidiary
element accompanying lower intellectual elements of life, which are more
closely allied on such a lower level with physical processes of the body
an