If, with this achievement, modern culture may have the feeling of being the fulfilment of the strivings of the ages, yet its own course has produced oppositions, and engendered perplexities that culminate in a dangerous crisis. Culture, as it was represented at the height of German spiritual life, was directed chiefly towards the inner development of man; it was called with especial satisfaction "spiritual culture." Its adherents were concerned not so much with finding a better relation to the environment as with growing in the realm of their own soul, and with employing whatever the experience of life brought in the development of a self-conscious personality, of pure inwardness. Only in this way did they seem to advance from the previous state of limitation to the complete breadth of existence, and the exercise of all their powers. A joy in life, a firm confidence in the rationality of reality gave this inner culture a soul; and a bold flight bore it far above the narrowness and heaviness of daily life; æsthetic literary creation became the chief sphere of its work, and the chief means for the development and self-perfecting of personality. Inner culture has by no means vanished from our life; effects of many kinds are felt from it in the present. But it has been forced to resign its supremacy in favour of a realistic culture, which makes the relation to the environment the chief matter, and removes the centre of life to the intellectual and practical control of this environment. In realistic culture the inner development of work, of work in the direction of natural science and technical art, as well as in politics and social endeavour, is less occupied with the acquiring of a powerful individuality than with the establishment of an agreeable condition of society as a whole. Since activity is related more and more closely with things, and receives laws and directions from them, culture is freed from dependence upon man and his subjectivity. Culture is an impersonal power in contrast with man; it does not lead ultimately to a good to him so much as make him simply a means and an instrument of its progressive movement. An immeasurable structure of life, a ceaseless self-assertion and self-advancement, an arousing and an exertion of all powers that can bring man into relation with the environment, are manifest in this culture: but at the same time there is an increasing transformation of our life into a mere life of relation and mediation, a deprivation and a vanishing of self-consciousness. In the midst of the magnificent triumphs in external matters there is an increasingly perceptible contrast between an astonishing development of the technical, and a pitiful neglect of the personal side of life: in regard to the former we surpass all other times, as much as we fall below most in regard to the latter. Along with a ceaseless increase of technical capacity, there is a rapid degeneration of personal life, a pauperising of the soul. Where