Eucken touches on this subject in an extremely interesting chapter in his _Truth of Religion_. "This is a question of fact, and not of argument.... Because we convinced ourselves that things were so, we gained the standpoint of spiritual experience over against a merely psychological standpoint. For the [p.107] latter standpoint occupies itself with purely psychic processes, and in the province of religion especially it occupies itself with the conditions of the stimulations of will and feeling, which are not able to prove anything beyond themselves. The spiritual experience, on the contrary, has to do with life's contents and with the construction of reality; it need not trouble itself concerning the connections of the world except in a subsidiary manner, because it stands in the midst of such connections, and without these it cannot possibly exist. Man never succeeds in reaching the Divine unless the Divine works and is acknowledged in his own life; what is omitted here in the first step is never again recovered and becomes more and more impossible as life proceeds on its merely natural course. If, however, the standpoint of spiritual experience is gained, then religion succeeds in attaining entire certainty and immediacy; then the struggles in which it was involved turn into a similar result, and its own inner movements become a testimony to the reality of the new world which it represents."[35] * * * * * CHAPTER VI [p.108] RELIGION AND SOCIETY Eucken shows that the problems of history are closely allied with those of society. The best accounts of the meaning he attaches to human society are to be found in _The Main Currents of Modern Thought, Der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt_, and _Life Basis and Life Ideal_. The conclusions reached in these three books are the same--they are an insistence on the need of spiritual life as a creative power in the utilisation of norms and ideals as well as in the creation of further norms and ideals. He points out the devious paths which human society has travelled over: all these, in the case of society and of the individual, are shown to lead to disaster when they depend merely upon the environment or upon the ideals of a utilitarian mode of a historico-social construction.