Attempts to attribute the responsibility of all limitation to man and his will, to find the root of all evil in the moral failings of humanity, have not been wanting. Universal religions have given these attempts an embodiment. It has seemed as though the harmony of reality is only disturbed by man, and as though his moral restoration were the only thing necessary to lead to all good. To be sure, such a way of thinking manifests a disposition of great seriousness, and it may appeal to the fact that the perplexity of our existence is nowhere more real than in reference to the ethical problem. Still, there is no possibility of doubt for the man of the Modern Age that this conception is too narrow; that it not only contradicts indisputable impressions and experiences, but also takes the question much too subjectively and too anthropomorphically, and thus falls into the danger of doing harm to the cause that it wishes to serve. It is not simply our disposition, it is our being as a whole and the circumstances that we are in, which obstinately oppose the emergence and the development of an independent spiritual world. It is the most elementary forms of life themselves that prevent the elevation of our existence to the level of a genuine spiritual life. We cannot blind ourselves to the fact that the greater part of our life is bound up with a form of existence in which it is not able to embrace the spiritual life. Any kind of appropriation of the spiritual--if it is at all possible--can be effected therefore only in opposition to that form of existence. In genuine spiritual life all movement should proceed from the whole and should be sustained by the whole, even when it is concentrated in the individual departments and tendencies. Human existence presents the spectacle of individuals ranged side by side; and if a movement to overcome the original inertia is to begin at all, their impulses, their desire for happiness, and their conflicts are necessary. The spiritual life knows no limits; it works and creates from the infinite whole: the individual is narrowly limited, and with all his activity and work constitutes but a tiny point in the infinite whole. The spiritual life presents its content as transcending time; even if for us it is only gradually revealed, time is in this a mere means to the presentation of an eternal and immutable truth: man, however, drifts with time; is dependent upon the momentary situation, and experiences himself in an incessant change: how can he comprehend the eternal? Spiritual creation is effected in the transcending of the antithesis of subject and object: human endeavour is conditioned by this antithesis. The former with its self-determining activity overcomes from within the attachment to sense: man even in the highest flight of his endeavour cannot withdraw himself from it. From the altitudes occupied by the spiritual life submission to the impulses and the goods of sense