and a firmer grounding in the independent spiritual life. (c) ART AND LITERATURE Nowhere does modern life throb more violently and more strongly than in art and literature. That which in this department has a claim to permanence acquires especial power from the fact that this department had to establish itself anew in opposition to an attempt to curtail it. For who could deny that a culture of work and of utility had a tendency to reduce artistic literary creation to the position of an accompaniment and a fringe of another kind of life, to a diversion for idle hours? The more we feel the limitations of the life of work and utility the more do art and literature become independent tasks. From art and literature we expect more lightness, more agility, and more joy in life; they should conduct life from too great an attention to externals to self-consciousness, and in this way give life a soul. They should strengthen individuality in opposition to the levelling tendency of the culture of the masses, wrest simple fundamentals from chaotic confusion of life, and aid the time in reaching a comprehensive vital-feeling and a synthesis transcending its inconsistencies. In opposition to that which oppresses us and degrades us to instruments of a meaningless machinery, we desire some kind of province where life rests in itself and purposes nothing else but itself; where it springs up with complete spontaneity; and where it can express itself with complete freedom, and in this expression find its highest joy. From such a longing a new art that permeates our life has arisen. Art must seek new means of expression for the new situation; it cannot serve the development of a new life-content without bringing about liberation from all conventional statutes; it cannot prevent a threatened tendency of life to become stagnant without desiring a fully free place for the subject, and for the development of his individuality. He who sees chiefly the dangers in everything forgets that nothing new and great can arise without bringing dangers with it. From the point of view of the system that we champion, we can quite well understand the significance of the æsthetic movement of the present, acknowledge the deliverance of life which it has accomplished, and in general we can go a good distance with it. But there comes a point where the courses diverge; not because we think less of the capacity of art, but we believe that we think more highly of its task. This deliverance from the culture of work, this turning to individuality, promises an essential elevation of life only if a new kind of being, a new world, is able to break forth in the soul that depends upon itself; if the individual in his conflicts aids the development of the infinite life; if, through all transformations and prostrations, man wins an inner relation to the whole and to things, and by this grows beyond the narrowly human.