the spiritual condition of the time. Now, as scarcely anything else in life is more called upon to co-operate in the renewing of culture than philosophy, so the system here concisely presented is placed in the service of this task; it attempts a construction chiefly by the union of three demands and points of attack: it requires a more energetic development and a complete unification of the life-process; it requires the acknowledgment and development of a spiritual life of independent nature present to us; and lastly, it requires that this life shall be understood and treated as the world's consciousness of itself and thus as the only reality. All these demands must tend towards an essential alteration of the existent state of culture; they make much inadequate that previously sufficed; but they also reveal an abundance of new prospects and the possibility of a thorough inner elevation. It is a leading idea of our whole investigation that only from the life-process itself are we able to orientate ourselves in relation to ourselves and the world; and this idea is in agreement with the present mode of thought in science. But to apply to our own time that which is already acknowledged in general ideas is by no means simple. To give the life-process such a position in our thought and to estimate it so highly is possible only when life is distinctly distinguished from the states of the mere subject, from the mere reflex of the environment in the individual. This detachment cannot be accomplished unless we comprehend as a whole that which exists in individual manifestations of life; distinguish different levels in life, indicate relations and movements within them, and thus advance to new experiences of life; reveal a union of fact, a distinctive synthesis in life, which from a transcendent unity shapes the multiplicity that it contains. But if in general it is difficult to free ourselves so much from the condition of life in which we find ourselves, to be able to illuminate this condition in this way, and to throw its inner framework into relief; for us there is also to be added the immeasurable expansion that directs the interests and the vision to the outside, and is accustomed to treat, as a mere supplement, a mere means and instrument, the life that in reality sustains all infinity. A culture that has made the attainment of results the chief thing has been detrimental to the spiritual, which no longer trusts itself to encompass these achievements and to change them in a development of life, to take up the conflict for dominion over reality. It willingly flees to the passivity of the subject, where sooner or later it expires in complete destitution.