Life, many problems present themselves. How can we reconcile freedom and
personality with the existence of an Absolute? What is the nature of
this Absolute, and in what way is the human related to it? What place
should religion play in the life of the spiritual personality? These
are, of course, some of the greatest and most difficult problems that
ever perplexed the mind of man, and we can only deal briefly with
Eucken's contribution to their solution.

Can a man choose the highest? This is the form in which Eucken would
state the problem of freedom. His answer, as already seen, is an
affirmative one. The personality chooses the spiritual life, and
continually reaffirms the decision. This being so, it is now no longer
possible to consider the human and the divine to be entirely in
opposition. And the more the spiritual personality develops, so much the
less does the opposition obtain, until a state of spirituality is
arrived at when all opposition of will ceases--then we attain perfect
freedom. "We are most free, when we are most deeply pledged--pledged
irrevocably to the spiritual presence, with which our own being is so
radically and so finally implicated." Thus freedom is obtained in a
sense through self-surrender, but it is through this same self-surrender
that we realise spiritual absoluteness. Hence it is that perfect freedom
carries with it the strongest consciousness of dependence, and human
freedom is only made possible through the absoluteness of the spiritual
life in whom it finds its being.

English philosophers have dealt at length with the question of the
possibility of reconciling the independence of personality and the
existence of an Absolute. From Eucken's point of view the difficulty is
not so serious. When he speaks of personality he does not mean the mere
subjective individual in all his selfishness. Eucken has no sympathy