Every age, therefore, in virtue of the presence of this spiritual life, will contain characteristic spiritual motives, movements, and demands, and will be especially qualified to convey certain contents to man, to open up certain experiences to him, and to point out certain directions. All these must be appropriated by anyone who wishes to transcend the original state of emptiness, and to advance to spiritual creation and to a spiritual fashioning of life. In consequence of this a more friendly attitude may be taken up towards time; and we shall be far more grateful to it--though perhaps not with explicit consciousness, perhaps even in contradiction to definite purpose--than we could ever be with regard to the experiences on the surface of time. However low, for example, the estimate Plato may have formed of "the many" around him; and though with the whole passion of his soul he may have insisted upon a transformation of the immediate condition of life, what he offered of his own and the new that he required, with all its originality and uniqueness, contradicts neither the natural spirit of the Greek nor the contemporary Greek culture: Plato can be regarded only as a Greek of a particular time. His conflict with the time is not the conflict of an incomparable individuality with his environment, but a selection and a unification of the possibilities existing in time; it is an arousing to life of the deeper realities of time against its superficialities, of spiritual necessities in opposition to the conduct and interests of men. In this manner the great man also is a child of his age, and is unintelligible out of relation to it. Could one think of Goethe as living in the Middle Ages, or of Augustine as living in the age of the Enlightenment? Indeed, we may carry our contention further, and say that the great has been just that which has had the closest relation with the time; and that it has reached a permanent significance, just because it expressed the unique nature and the inner longing of the time, that which was incomparable and inderivable in it. That which has been able to work permanently beyond the time in which it made its appearance was born not from a timeless consideration of things, but from the deepest feeling of the needs of the time; only thus can we escape from the feeling of unreality which otherwise accompanies the striving after spirituality. This consideration must commend to spiritual work the closest possible relation with the time, and the spiritual life may hope for an essential advance of its own striving as a result of this relation.