Our whole spiritual life, therefore, constitutes a problem; it is an indefatigable seeking and pressing forward. In self-consciousness the framework is given which has to be filled; in it we have acquired only the basis upon which the superstructure has to be raised. We have to find experiences in life itself, to reveal something new, to develop life, to increase its range and its depth. The endeavour to advance in spirituality, to win itself through struggle, is the soul of the life of the individual and of the work of universal history: where there is no endeavour of this kind, there is no true life and no genuine history; our activity in relation to the world as a whole assumes a different form, and the world is represented differently and presents to us different problems according to that which is attained here in the basal structure of life. Life's struggle for itself, for its own content, its own truth, is the greatest and most intense of all struggles. The passion which animates all the endeavour after a revelation of life and to win life itself is no other than the desire for a genuine reality: for a being within the activity, for a full as opposed to an empty life. If the formation of reality from within once begins, and the desire for a substantial inwardness gains the day over the merely subjective, then the intolerable inadequacy of all that is usually called life is bound to be strongly felt. The growth of intelligence has led man beyond the life of nature and its blind actuality. In intelligence, the inner life already proves far too independent to be satisfied with being a mere appearance accompanying nature. With this evolution the psychical powers win a greater freedom, and man is able to face his environment more boldly: indeed, in his thought he can grasp an infinity; and in arousing and using all his powers he may hope from his own position, in the interaction of subject and environment, to give to life a content, and thus to make it a genuine life. But here the limitation of man and the contradictory character of life as it is immediately experienced soon come to be felt. All the rousing of forces, all the passing backwards and forwards between subject and object that we experience in the immediate condition of life, does not lead beyond interaction, and yields no content: it does not raise life to a self-conscious and self-determining life; so that, in spite of all its activity, our life in this condition remains inwardly alien. There is thus an enormous disparity between the means that are offered and the aims that are reached; an inward unrest; an incessant conflict, without any prospect of victory, against the ever-recurring tendency to become spiritually destitute; a state of dissatisfaction in the midst of all results of an external kind. Only the revelation of a self-conscious life, a life which itself evolves as a reality, can be the source of progress, and lead from appearances and shadows to a genuine life.