We shall consider the question of the possibility of this almost immediately: so much, however, is certain--that this necessity of a decision by man himself makes the matter far more complex and of far greater risk. The establishment of an independent spiritual life in man finds its chief enemy not in nature, but in the limitation and perversion of spiritual impulse through man's subordinating it to his own ends. The chief conflict is not between spirit and nature, but between real and false spirituality. Thus thought emerges in man, seeks a representation of the world and would in this attain to truth; but when this striving first appears, man is wont to treat himself as the central point of the whole, to measure the whole of infinity according to what it achieves in relation to him, and to see reflections of himself throughout its whole extent. And so we have the anthropomorphic way of thinking, the nature of which we have become aware of only through toil during the progress of the work of culture; a way of thinking from which it has needed even more toil to protect ourselves, and which, in forms often hardly noticeable, is ever ready to appear again and to draw the spiritual movement into its paths. With the emergence of the spiritual life, man becomes more free in relation to his environment; more free also in relation to the necessities of mere nature: his activity can exert itself more independently, concern itself with lofty aims, strive towards the infinite. But all this capacity becomes drawn into the service of the human; the wishes and the desires of the individual grow to an enormous extent. Since out of the struggle for existence, with its natural limitation, an interminable struggle for more existence arises, naïve self-preservation becomes transformed into an unrestricted egoism. That the more-than-human which appears in the domain of man should be employed to the advancement of the merely human is a danger that is present even at the highest stages of development: at one time man would prove his own power in the more-than-human; at another, and this more especially, he treats it as a means to attain his material welfare. Religion, for example, would reveal to man a new depth of reality, and so create a new life for him; and yet, how often even this new reality is degraded to a means for the preservation of his insignificant personality, and regarded as something which on his behalf guides the whole world aright!