"subtle thing termed spirit" [p.42] he will soon be swamped in the
region of the natural life once more; and when this happens the
spiritual nucleus loses the consciousness of its own real subsistence as
something higher in its nature than physical things or than the body and
the ordinary life of the day. If the enterprise is to issue in anything
that is great and good--into a spiritual world with an ever-growing
content here and now--an insistence upon the reality of this deeper life
coupled with the highest end which presents itself to the life must be
made. Something is now seen in the distance as the meaning and value of
life--something which our deeper nature longs for, and which has created
a cleft within the soul between the ordinary things of sense and time
and that which "never was on sea or land." It is something of this
nature which Eucken discovers as the germ of all the spiritual ideas of
religion as well as of the essence of religion itself. The Godhead,
Eternity, Immortality, are concepts which arise within the soul through
a consciousness of the inadequacy of all natural things and of even
mental descriptions and explanations to answer and to satisfy the
potency and longing of human nature.

Most of the great thinkers of the ages have insisted on the necessity of
the recognition and acknowledgment of this deeper life which is in dire
need of a content. If man is not to be swamped by the external and
become the [p.43] mere sport of the "wind and wave" of the environment,
he has to enter somehow into the very centre of his being and become
convinced that the dictates which proceed from that centre are the most
fundamental things in life. This has always formed the kernel of
religion, however often men, failing to reach that kernel, have lived on
the husks. But even this very sham notifies some small attempt in the
right direction. In modern times--in the various forms of Idealism and
Pragmatism--such a need of getting at the core of being and of being