The inner structure of our life corresponds with this conviction. It is characteristic of all spiritual life that it does not pass hither and thither between individual points, but includes and develops a multiplicity within a transcendent unity; by this the spiritual life grows within itself, and more and more acquires a self-consciousness. And it is just in this way that it evolves to a reality. Reality, therefore, here is not a fixed and completed magnitude, but is of different degrees. In the first place there is a difference in the energy which maintains a union of the manifold and a transcendence of the division: according to the nature of this energy the self appears, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker; its power of changing, at one time greater, at another smaller. Again, the force of the resistance that the given condition to be appropriated offers, differs according to the amount of its positive power; and the clash of the given condition and free activity will be harder or more gentle according to this power. One man finds intolerable contradictions where to another all is plain and smooth; one believes that things are transformed in their own being where another holds that only their surface is affected: and so, that which one regards as reality may seem to another only a realm of shadows. Mere energy, however, is too subjective to be able to obtain a genuine reality from life: for that, a transformation of life in work, an elevation to full activity, is necessary; but the preceding paragraph has shown that this transformation and elevation is of different kinds and of different degrees. The system of the formation of being promises to give to life the most fundamental organisation and the most forceful reality. For into the single elements embraced by the movement of life it is able to breathe a life of their own, to confer upon them an incomparably greater independence than in those systems in which they are regarded as lifeless objects which are acted upon, and which only set isolated forces in motion. When within a comprehensive life different centres of life meet, and in their interaction the activity of the whole wins an ever richer content and a more stable nature, genuine reality must increasingly unfold itself.