fascinate it, they draw hidden energies into activity, they give inklings of immortality. Is it not far more conceivable that such a vision of meaning, of beauty, and of enchantment is a new kind of reality--cosmic in its nature and eternal in its duration? Man has to [p.51] come to a decision concerning this. There is no half-way house here possible without the deepest potencies of human nature suffering and failing to transform themselves from bud to blossom and fruit. At a later stage in our inquiry this question will recur in connection with the conception of the Godhead. But here it may be observed that to decide on the affirmative side that somehow such norms and ideals which mean so much are cosmic realities, is simply to state no more than that an evolutionary process is taking place towards a new kind of world as well as a new kind of existence. No outsider is competent to pronounce judgment on the validity of the proofs possessed within this spiritual realm. The qualifications here are beyond the range of knowledge, although knowledge does not cease to act within such a realm. The experiences here cannot be measured or weighed; and that a certain obscurity is present in them is only what may be expected, considering that the spiritual nature is farther removed from the region of nature with its physical existence than when it deals with problems on the intellectual level. But such spiritual proofs are found in the fact that these realities present themselves only at the height of spiritual development, and in the fact that they produce an _inversion_ of the nature of man, and change the centre of gravity of his life to a more inward recess of his being [p.52] than is open on the natural or intellectual side. Thus, once more, the soul is driven forward by its own necessities to a religious reality. What can it do but grant cosmic origin and validity to such ideals? If these ideals are not this, then, as Eucken points out, they are the most tragic illusions conceivable. When they are acknowledged as cosmic realities, man is in the midst of a religion of a _universal_ kind. But the acknowledgment of these as cosmic realities is something more than a concept. The men who have come to this conclusion required something more than logical arguments in order to establish this truth. The conclusions were based upon a _specific (characteristic)_ religious experience of their own. And such a religious experience was larger and more real than anything that could be established in the form of concepts concerning it. As we shall notice in a later chapter, it is somewhat on this account that Eucken differentiates between _universal_ and _specific (characteristic)_ religion.