This uncertainty cannot be removed by turning our attention to history, by taking an interest in past ages. For, with whatever clearness a highly developed science of history may present the whole course of the ages to us, to believe that our own life is enriched and made more stable by this, we must confuse knowledge and life, the mere present representation of earlier times and the appropriation of them by our own activity--a danger into which the purely academic mode of thought easily falls. The power and the tendency of life in the present determine the nature of our appropriation of the past and of its transformation in self-determining activity. If this life stagnates, then we are helpless in face of the stream of earlier systems of thought. Even if these systems attract us to themselves, and carry us with them for a time, finally they will manifest their antitheses and throw us back again upon ourselves: we cannot escape from ourselves; we can never find a substitute from outside for want of conviction and power of our own. It is a fundamental error, not, indeed, of historical research but of a feeble historical relativism, to expect us to form a conviction of our own by concerning ourselves with the past; and to think that the later stage in history proceeds from the earlier as a self-evident final result. By taking such an attitude to the past we should only fall into the half-will and half-life common to an age of decadence. If the present is thus uncertain in the heart of its spiritual nature, and it is not possible to escape from this uncertainty by resorting to the past, it may appear to be essential that we should be completely delivered from the tyranny of time, and that we should take up an attitude of entire unconcern of its affirmation and its negation of spiritual endeavour. But a rejection of the immediate relation to time by no means settles the matter. If spiritual work were completely dissociated from the temporal environment and the historical movement, it would be dependent solely upon the capacity of the mere individual and upon the passing moment; all relation, all community of work, would thus be given up, and the performance of others could not be anything to us, nor our achievement anything to others; there would be no inner building up of life, and no hope of reaching greater depths. Not only is it impossible to abandon such aims, but our experience of spiritual work itself contradicts the disintegration of life into nothing but isolated points. If all spiritual creation is effected in contradiction to time, what is denied in this contradiction is rather that which lies upon the surface of time than that which is deeper; rather human accommodation to than the spiritual content of time. All who believe that distinctive human history is sustained by the activity of a spiritual life will attribute to time such a spiritual content.