Life in the individual must have roots deeper than the immediate psychical life; for psychical life cannot itself produce and make clear that which occurs in it, for this reason at least, that it involves the antithesis of individual and environment, of subject and object, beyond which spiritual creation results. The spiritual impulse that the immediate life of the soul manifests can be based only upon deeper realities and more comprehensive relations. And so a _noölogical_ treatment is to be distinguished from the psychological, not in order to displace or limit the latter, but rather to complete it; and it is a problem to show the point of transition in the immediate life of the soul. The significance of the individual life, as far as content is concerned, will depend upon whether an independent spirituality arises within it, and constitutes it a distinctive life-centre. According to the new standards a free spiritual activity does not suffice, however extended it may be, and however sustained by subjective emotion. For all such activity may be without spiritual substance, and in spite of all external results the life that is nothing but this activity may remain spiritually destitute: how shallow many individuals are whose achievements deserve and obtain the highest appreciation! The inwardness that the spiritual life requires is not simply a reflex of work in the soul--from that little is gained--but the forming of a characteristic spiritual self-consciousness that lifts us above all mere achievement, and also by giving to activity a soul first makes it complete. We have often seen how the acknowledgment of an independent spiritual life forces us to make a sharper distinction between human history and human society and all merely natural history and merely natural co-existence of men. At the same time, in that which is called history and society, a distinction between an esoteric and an exoteric kind is also required. The value of individual epochs and of history as a whole depends upon the spiritual substance that grows up in them; everything else, to whatever extent it may, with commotion and external result, assume the air of being the chief thing, is only environment or supplement. Similarly, in the case of society, the spiritual content, if it has one at all, and human fortune and conduct must become more distinctly separated. There is far less genuine history and society than is usually assumed; but this little signifies incomparably more than both would imply without the spiritual life.