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Updated: May 5, 2025
For it is in the soul's relation with its over-individual and over-historical ideals that permanent qualities can be created and preserved: it is in our own deepest being, through a conviction of the values of sympathy, sacrifice, and love that any genuine history can find its birth and nurture.
The spiritual life is thus individual and over-individual, historical and over-historical, transcendent and immanent. Eucken has worked for many years at this difficult problem a problem so important in the life of civilisation and religion. It has already been hinted that the conception bears striking resemblances to aspects of Hegel's philosophy. But there are differences.
History becomes no more than a succession of changes of which the later are of no more value than the earlier. All this happens, because there is no Eternal no over-world of over-individual and over-historical values present. In a large measure our very religion grants us here but little help.
The spiritual experiences of the past have become over-individual and over-historical norms for our lives; but such norms are no more than ideas until the will enters into a relation with them. And every individual who moves in the direction of such norms brings some contribution of value from the present to be added to the norms of the past.
The community had been unconsciously garnering something over-individual and over-historical for its future use. This becomes the standard by which everything has to be measured. Of course, this norm does not remain static in regard to its own content. But its growth of content depends upon the contributions made to it by individuals in their will-relations.
When this happens, a new meaning will be given to history, and the events of the day will be illumined and valued in the light of the standard of spiritual ideals. Can we then doubt that there works in history a Divine element which is over-historical, and which alone gives their meanings and values to the events of history itself?
Thus, we get in Eucken's teaching the over-historical as the power which operates within the events of history. It is what philosophy has termed the Ideal, and what religion has termed the revelation of God.
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