Such recognition necessarily brings us to the question whether the hypothesis held by the Determinists is unassailable. Do we really appertain absolutely to a given and distinctly limited existence? From the point of view of a new plane of reality manifested by the spiritual life, our reply must be a decided negative. As we have seen, this new phase does not embrace us from the beginning, but must be grasped, appropriated, and developed by us; our own decision and action are here indispensable. Our life must indeed reckon with certain given factors; we must recognise the powerful influence of heredity and environment. Our individuality is determined for us by nature; we cannot in all things remould ourselves as we would wish to do; we are on all sides encompassed by fate. But man is not entirely at the mercy of this fate. The spiritual life which can grow up in him gives him a new, spontaneous source of life; he can originate something new, something entirely his own, and can oppose his own action to fate. Our life thus becomes a struggle between freedom and fate; and to this struggle it chiefly owes its expansion and greatness. The idea of development is therefore not applicable to the progression of human life. There is no inevitable sequence on a well established basis and in one definite direction; later results are not simply determined by what has gone before; one thing does not follow another naturally and easily, but various elements meet and clash. Time after time, we are in danger of losing what we seemed to have won; over and over again, we must climb to the summit of life. But this struggle constantly calls forth new powers. We see that there is much more in us than appeared at first sight, or than we ourselves were wont to believe. Great shocks and strong emotions often produce new convictions or set free new forces within us. It is, above all, suffering which rouses and regenerates, which teaches us to see and cultivate the deepest that is in us. What hitherto seemed to constitute our whole being, now proves to be but a single stratum, which it is quite possible to transcend.