great price" before its gaze. Here the
_stirb und werde_ of Paul and Goethe becomes necessary. The real
education of man now begins. His life becomes guided and governed by
norms whose limits cannot be discovered, and which have never been
realised in their wholeness on the face of our earth. What can these
mean? They cannot be delusions or illusions, for they answer too deep a
need of the soul to be reduced to that level. If we blot them out of our
existence, we sink back to a mere natural or mechanical stage. When the
soul concentrates its deepest attention on these norms or ideals they
fascinate it, they draw hidden energies into activity, they give
inklings of immortality. Is it not far more conceivable that such a
vision of meaning, of beauty, and of enchantment is a new kind of
reality--cosmic in its nature and eternal in its duration? Man has to
[p.51] come to a decision concerning this. There is no half-way house
here possible without the deepest potencies of human nature suffering
and failing to transform themselves from bud to blossom and fruit.

At a later stage in our inquiry this question will recur in connection
with the conception of the Godhead. But here it may be observed that to
decide on the affirmative side that somehow such norms and ideals which
mean so much are cosmic realities, is simply to state no more than that
an evolutionary process is taking place towards a new kind of world as
well as a new kind of existence. No outsider is competent to pronounce
judgment on the validity of the proofs possessed within this spiritual
realm. The qualifications here are beyond the range of knowledge,
although knowledge does not cease to act within such a realm. The
experiences here cannot be measured or weighed; and that a certain
obscurity is present in them is only what may be expected, considering
that the spiritual nature is farther removed from the region of nature
with its physical existence than when it deals with problems on the
intellectual level. But such spiritual proofs are found in the fact that
these realities present themselves only at the height of spiritual
development, and in the fact that they produce an _inversion_ of the
nature of man, and change the centre of gravity of his life to a more
inward recess of his being [p.52] than is open on the natural or
intellectual side.

Thus, once more, the soul is driven forward by its own necessities to a
religious reality. What can it do but grant