upon it from without, and a mere play of subjective inclination; if it were not able to become the self-assertion and self-development of a life transcending that opposition. At this point also the acknowledgment of an independent spiritual life teaches us to comprehend as a whole that which, in a many-sided development, the different departments of life show to be real. The obscurity in which the conception of inwardness was hitherto involved begins to disappear when the spiritual life is no longer regarded as supplementary but as an independent life. It cannot be denied that, within humanity, there is an endeavour to develop the life of the soul to a state of self-determining activity and, at the same time, to free that life from the bondage to sense in which it remains at the level of nature. Yet, definite affirmation that shall correspond to the negation of sense has been lacking; it has not been clear how inwardness might find content and characteristic forms; there has been no advance from the subjective to the substantial. But since a universal activity is operative within the multiplicity and through the division, and since it sets itself in the division and from this returns to itself, a self-conscious inwardness becomes conceivable which has a life of its own with new experiences. Since within this life "to receive" presupposes the comprehending power and the self-determining activity of a vital whole, something other than sense is able to evolve and through all the persistence of sense to become the chief matter. The spiritual life is not directed to a reality adjacent to it, but evolves a reality out of itself; or rather, it evolves as a reality, a kingdom, a world; and so it advances from vague outline to more complete development; it struggles for itself, for its own perfection, not for anything external. It is directly implied in the above conception that the spiritual life is something different from single psychical functions, such as cognition, volition, and the like; and that man, so far as he shares in it, is more than one such function or a sum of such functions. For these functions come under the antithesis of subject and object, while the spiritual life transcends it. It is also clear that the spiritual life does not change this or that in a life which already exists, or add this or that to it, but that it introduces a new kind of life--a life by which man is distinguished clearly from everything inferior to him.