Accordingly, life-developments of various and related kinds arise: with their manifold experiences they strive to attain to a harmony and a union with one another. They can seek these only on the basis of a self-consciousness of reality; find them only through their unification in a universal life, to which each individual tendency leads. Representations of the whole are attempted at the highest points of creative activity by philosophy, religion, and art; these representations accompany, indeed govern, the work in these spheres of life through history. But the limitations of our capacity, through which we are unable to give a suitable form to necessary contents, and through which we attribute and must attribute human traits to that which should lead us beyond the human, are of particular force in this matter of forming a representation of the whole; and, indeed, this is the more so the further we remove ourselves from that which may be immediately transformed in work. These representations of the whole are, therefore, inadequate; their content of truth is clothed in a wrapping of myth, and humanity lies under the danger of taking the myth for the chief thing and thus of obscuring the truth, and this must produce an incalculable amount of error and strife. Still, it is impossible to give up all claim to these representations of the whole; for they alone make the fact of our belonging to the whole and of the presence of the whole in our life quite clear and enable it to exert a far-reaching influence. Only with their help can the degeneration of life to the intolerable insignificance of the narrowly human be resisted; only with their help can a movement from whole to whole begin. Thus it is a matter not so much of abandoning these representations of the whole as of referring them continually to their essence; to those unfoldings of life which are experienced by us; to test them by these and to renew them from these. It was the error of the earlier position--much too indulgent to Intellectualism-that it did not sufficiently maintain the relation with these living sources, and so fell into the danger of having no definite tendency, or even of failing to recognise the relativity of the myth. If a more energetic direction of life upon its own content and experiences teaches us to preserve these connections better and to develop them more forcefully, a new type of representation of the whole is yielded in contrast to the old, and far more different from it than may appear at the first glance. We may hope that with its development the truth will be seen more clearly through the myth, and that the striving, which we cannot give up, to win a universal life may not lead us astray into a world of dreams. (c) THE MOVEMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE IN MAN