The Middle Ages handed down to us a system of culture that may be described as a hierarchy, in the widest sense of that term. The multiplicity of life was united into a whole; but this whole was dominated by distinctive religious and philosophic convictions, which assigned to each individual department its place in the whole and set it its task; these departments attained to a complete independence as little as that system had an independence for individual forms. The Modern Age has evolved and has realised a system of freedom in increasing opposition to the earlier system. How this everywhere effects an emancipation is demonstrated by our problem of the increasing development to independence by the individual departments of life. The state and society, science and art, find their tasks more and more within themselves, in their own development; they engender distinctive laws and methods of their own; they seem to be able to reach their aims of their own capacity. Effort is directed more and more into individual departments, and there is a feeling of complete satisfaction in this tendency. Our life has gained immensely in comprehensiveness and breadth by the transition to this modern system: it comes more closely into touch with the realm of fact; it produces a greater diversity of movement, since the different departments have their own starting-points, enter upon distinctive paths, and direct their powers into these paths. The attainment of independence by the individual departments of life constitutes one of the chief gains of modern culture, and it cannot again be given up. But the attainment of independence by the individual departments brings great perplexities with it, which make a definite counter-movement necessary. At first the tendencies characteristic of the individual departments directly contradict one another; indeed, this is inevitable, if they are not systematised in some way. For, particular experiences of human life are present in each department: one feels our greatness more, another our weakness; one is moved more by the harmony of existence, another more by the antitheses; one tends rather to exert power upon the environment, the other to concentration in itself; from these experiences there must originate different modes of life and different representations of the world. In this condition of life it is impossible for the different tendencies not to cross one another and to clash together; and this threatens to divide our life, and to rob it of all its inner unity. A glance at the condition of life in the present is sufficient to convince us that such dangers are more than fancies.