Again, the great force that has been exerted in the movement of history in the detection and the elimination of contradictions can be explained only in this context. Logic, as we saw, played an unassuming rôle in this matter, and the indolence of man always inclined to easy accommodation and compromise. It was the increased vital energy, the adoption of a particular issue as the main issue, that made movements, which had long existed in a state of harmony and peace, irreconcilable enemies, and drove them to a life-and-death struggle. With a lower level of spiritual activity the Middle Ages unsuspiciously united a religion of ecclesiastical organisation with a religion of personal feeling and disposition; and it did not feel that there was an inconsistency in their union so much as that one was the completion of the other. As soon and so far, however, as in the Modern Age spirituality won more independence and more self-consciousness, and felt itself to be the centre of the whole, it was inevitable that a dependence upon an external order should be experienced only as an intolerable oppression; and the division of life between the one and the other became an impossibility. It was necessary only that a powerful and passionate personality, like that of Luther, should take up the problem, and make it the sole object of his effort, and the hour of revolution had come. How meanly they think of the controlling forces of history who would trace back such changes to the selfishness or the vanity of individuals! Looked at from our point of view, the inner changes within the life of universal history often appear to be simplifications--cases of energetic concentration on the essential, and of fundamental separation of the subsidiary. The truly great carry on a ceaseless conflict against the chaotic confusion which the life of the majority is wont to produce ever anew--a condition in which matters of the first importance are confused with those that are subsidiary; all inner gradation is lacking; and the great is treated as something insignificant, and the insignificant as something great. There is a struggle to secure a clear differentiation and gradation; to establish a centre, and to transform life into a genuinely self-conscious life. Have not all the principal revivals of religion, of morality, of education, been simplifications?