lective life of the
whole--of each and every individual--that makes civilisation possible.
Thus, in the very process of civilisation itself, as Eucken points out,
there is present a factor which is termed Spiritual, and which is not to
be mistaken for a mere flow of cause and effect, or for one mere event
following another. Eucken emphasises this all-important element of the
over-individual qualities present in human history. There is here much
which resembles Hegel's Absolute. But there is a great difference
between the two in the sense that Eucken shows the constant need of
spiritual activism on the part of individuals in order to realise and
keep alive the norms and standards which have carried our world so far;
and there is also the need of contributing something to the values of
these through the creation of new qualities within the souls of the
individuals themselves.

But the problems of civilisation and morality are not the only, or the
highest, problems which present themselves. But even such problems have
partially been the means of drawing man outside himself, and of enabling
him to see that his self can only be realised in connection with the
common good and demands of the community. He now feels the necessity of
living up to that standard. This is an important step in the direction
of the moral and religious life. It reveals the presence of a spiritual
nucleus of our being obtaining a content beyond the needs [p.48] of the
moment; it shows life as realising itself in wide connections; and the
individual becomes the possessor of a certain degree of spiritual
inwardness in the process. Even as far as this level we find the deeper
life--the spiritual life--insisting on the validity of its mental and
moral conclusions over against the objects of sense. Without this
insistence no knowledge would progress and be valid. The macrocosm is
mirrored and coloured in a mental and moral microcosm. A replica of the
external world has a reality in consciousness, and this reality is not a
mere photograph of the external, but it is the external as it appears to
the meaning it has obtained in consciousness. The meaning of the world
is thus something beyond the world itself; it is more than appears at
any one moment. If the world were less than this, if the percept could
not somehow become a concept, all progress would come to a standstill,
and we should be no more than creatures of sensations and percepts which
vanished as so