seems to be something mean and base: and yet without these man cannot possibly preserve his life; he has not conferred sensuous needs and desires upon himself by an act of will, but finds himself endowed with them from the beginning. Spiritual life with its formation from within banishes from itself all mechanism; all compulsion of blind actuality: without a mechanism in thought and in conduct, without habits and methods determined by custom, human life cannot attain to an enduring stability either in the case of the individual or in that of society. Thus, through the ever-present necessity of self-preservation and self-renewal, human life is compulsorily related to something, bound to something, that not only is not adequate to fulfil the tasks of an independent spiritual life, but is directly opposed to them. There is something in our life which we cannot dispense with, yet which, from the spiritual point of view, it is an imperative duty to shake off. We see clearly enough that it is not merely our will that is in play, but that two worlds conflict within us, and that the world to which we primarily belong, according to the testimony of experience, holds us fixed with superior power, and draws back to itself all movement which strives upward. If, in particular, the dimness and the weakness of the spiritual life in man; its severance from its source; its disintegration into isolated powers; and, finally, the moral perversity which human existence exhibits, and the debasement of spiritual power to a mere means for natural or social self-preservation, become clear to us, then it is evident that a compromise between such a pitiable and shallow confusion and a genuine spiritual life is absolutely impossible. The acknowledgment of an independent spiritual world tends only to increase the contradiction and make us more clearly conscious of it.