Man at first appears to be part of nature, of the world of sense, subject to its laws and impulses. Dim and unreasonable instincts pervade man's soul with compelling force. Our conceptions grow out of sense impressions, and form at first the purely mechanical concatenation which we term "association," while all our efforts are directed towards individual self-preservation. In all this, man is entirely within the limitations of nature. Yet though this natural life at first predominates, it does not represent the whole of our life. We become aware of new features, which we characterise as "spiritual." We see how man grows independent of his environment, and strives to subdue it from without and within. By thought he frees himself from the shackles of his environment, and asserts himself against the whole world; at the same time he is driven back to the world, and feels impelled to fathom it and to make it his own by personal experience. His actions do not always remain a mere part of nature's concatenations. He can detach himself from all cohesion. In unbridled egoism he can subordinate every event and action to his own well-being; or he can absorb into himself all that at first existed beside him and apart from him, and that often appeared hostile, and can thus manifest boundless love and sympathy. His natural instinct of self-preservation will then appear too small and insignificant; he can even come to feel its narrow restrictions as intolerable. If we pass from the individual to the whole of mankind, we see in civilisation and culture a new form of life opposed to mere nature. For man is no longer swayed and ruled by what assails him from without, but he confronts it with new aims and ideals. He judges and weighs; he approves and rejects; he forms new complexes, like those of state organisation and of science. In all this, man is the representative of a new and specific kind of life; he manifests an independence unknown to nature. This new life differs from nature and from what may be attained on the basis of nature, not only in single characteristics, but in all its manifestations and even in its fundamental essence. Nature forms a tissue of separate elements, which come into reciprocal action but lack all inner cohesion. Great complexes are thus formed, but no combination amounts to real cohesion: there is no inner whole, and no life proceeding from such an inner entity. All life grows out of contact with the environment; therefore intellectual participation is indissolubly bound to the world of sense. In this life of nature, the intellect can create no conceptions independent of sense impressions, and action cannot free itself from the power of natural impulse. All inner values can here be nothing more than an accessory and reminiscence of what reaches us from without.