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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.

They do so because the cause to which the loyal study of science is devoted, the cause of the enlargement of human experience, is a cause that has a supernatural, or, as Professor Münsterberg loves to say, an over-individual, type of reality. Mankind is not a mere collection of detached individuals, or man could possess no knowledge of any unity of scientific truth.

No person ever lives unto himself or is sufficient to himself. He is inextricably woven into the tissue of the social group. His privileges, his responsibilities, his obligations are forever over-individual and come from beyond his narrow isolated life. If he is to be a rational being at all he must relate his life to others and share in some measure their triumphs and their tragedies.

The reality of spiritual life is not discovered in anything which is external to life; it is to be found in life itself. The reality is revealed and, indeed, created by an act of the spirit of man. But although such a new reality is not to be found in anything external to life, yet the very revelation points, as we have already observed, to something which is over-individual.

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 reality of the over-individual norms and the conception of the Divine as Infinite Love thus induce in us a conviction of the possibility of an evolution of the spirit and of a reality beyond sense and time. The Eternal thus enters into Time and overcomes Time. This is Eucken's final conclusion in regard to the Christian religion and the destiny of man.

Only half a religion can become the possession of any individual who does not at least pay as much attention to the nature and value of over-individual norms as he pays to the nature of the environment and of the ordinary life.

But the danger arises when there is not present a Standard sufficiently high and powerful to govern these, and to make them serve the higher interests of the soul. In other words, they must be melted in the contents and values of the over-individual ideals; they must be sanctified to subserve the higher, absolute ends and demands of the spirit.

I believe that a sound critical philosophy justifies the view that the loyal, precisely in so far as they view their cause as real, as a personal, but also as an over-individual, realm of genuine spiritual life, are comprehending, as far as they go, the deepest nature of things.

It is worth while to dwell somewhat on this point, because the traditional view of the relation of the aesthetic of Kant, Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel is otherwise. Kant's starting-point was the discovery of the normative, "over-individual" nature of Beauty, which we have just found to be the secret of the contradictions of empirical aesthetics.