Much more is it well-nigh insuperably difficult to worship, in the sense of holding worthy, those whose characteristic traits directly offend us, or are perpetual thorns in our side. We must somehow learn to regard the empirical traits, odious, harmful or merely commonplace and vulgar as they may be, as the mask, the screen interposed between our eyes and the real self of others. We must acquire the faculty of second sight, of seeing the lovable self as the true self. And how without self deception we can possibly succeed in doing so is the question. In the first place, it is my own craving for resurrection out of that death in life to which I seem doomed that must impel me to penetrate to the essential life in others. My own spiritual nature is in fetters, and to burst the fetters, to escape from the prison, there is but one way. The unique personality, which is the real life in me, I cannot gain, nor even approximate to, unless I search and go on searching for the spiritual _numen_ in others.[67] The force which incites me to penetrate beyond the empirical traits of others, to surmount the walls which surround the shrine in them, is the consciousness that unless I do so I am myself spiritually lost, I remain myself spiritually dead. For it is only face to face with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other that the god hidden in me will consent to appear. The expression “death in life” means living, even living passionately and in a way efficiently, with a sense, nevertheless, underneath of the hollowness, the futility of the objects of pursuit. The death in life is the state of discontent that slowly gathers and augments in a man’s mind as he pursues his customary ends, as he reviews his intellectual achievement, the books he has written, the pictures he has painted, the meager outcome of his schemes of social reform, the uncertain result of his efforts at moral self-development. It is the ensuing distaste for what he has actually accomplished, the disallowance of it as in any way ultimately satisfying. And yet this death in life is itself the well-spring of resurrection, out of which is engendered an irrepressible yearning of the mind to attach itself to something greater than all ephemeral interests, to something that has eternal worth, and is of such a kind as to communicate of its eternal nature to him who touches it. The god in the other, the eternal personality in the inner sanctuary of the other, is that object which must be sought and touched. The cry of my own soul for salvation is the impulse that leads me on to search for that object. Without the previous discontent, I shall not seek; without the appraisement of the temporal ends and interests of man as in the last analysis unsatisfying, I shall not set out on my quest. Enmeshed in the jungle of the empirical world, I shall find no exit. I shall remain the victim of the illusion that the peace I need can be found in the realm of temporal desire. I shall commit