a more comprehensive life, which extends further and further to infinity. Our life, therefore, is a conflict between fate and freedom, between being "given" and spontaneity; and this conflict may be followed through all life's divisions. The conflict appears primarily in the individual in the development towards personality and spiritual individuality. For, as personality, unless life has a spontaneous source, is an empty word, so also spiritual individuality does not come to anyone, but has first to be won by the work of life essentially elevating that which destiny brings: so far, it is our own work; but it is not entirely our own work, because that which comes to us from nature, and the condition of life gives us fixed points of support and points out a certain course. Similarly, peoples have in their nature, environment, and history definite conditions of their being, from which they cannot withdraw. But spiritual creation and inward greatness do not grow simply out of these conditions, however favourable they may be, but out of a spontaneous activity which takes up that which has been presented to it, gives it a central point, and from this develops it. The deciding question is always whether and how far individuals and peoples attain to and preserve such a self-determining activity. This activity alone makes it possible for life to be unified inwardly; for its elements to be distinguished and separated, and for some to be brought into prominence and others relegated to the background; for life to be made secure and elevated, and as the result of all for a spiritual individuality to be formed. The same thing holds good of the condition of a particular time, and man's relation to it. At first man appears to be a child of his age, a slave of his age. But by the spiritual life he is able to win an independence of the age, and to make himself its lord. Again, he cannot free himself from the problems of the age; he cannot alter them just as he likes, cannot divert into an opposite direction the power which they exert upon him. But there is always an "either--or," either submission to the succession of experience, or the beginning of an opposition from spiritual self-determining activity: in this, also, the possibility of calling new powers to life presents itself. From this spiritual point of view activity centred upon the concerns of the particular age is no longer regarded as the whole life; the particular age with its work is comprehended in an infinite life. As through all its different stages and constituents, so ultimately humanity as a whole also carries on a struggle for a spiritual being, an advance to a new level. Humanity may not be regarded as something finished; it must evolve to a nature other than its present one, bring about a transformation of its life, and win a spiritual individuality: the life of humanity is in a state of motion and it must become self-determined.