A deliverance of life from the mere _ego_ is effected in another direction in work. Of course, work also stands in close relation to the preservation of life; it must demonstrate itself to be in some way useful. But work would never fill the soul and attain to anything great if it did not also become an aim in itself; if it were not carried on in complete submission to the object and according to its requirements. How low all educational endeavour, personal guardianship, all work for humanity would sink; how humanity would lack all self-forgetting devotion to it, all bold pressing forward; and how unintelligible the joy in a life's vocation would be, if the idea of utility solely and entirely determined conduct, if the chief concern were always how the work paid! Should we not sink, in such a case, into a slavery which would enthral man far more oppressively than any command which a tyrant could be capable of? It is true that on the average level of existence much is turned to the service of the merely useful which was produced from love and work, and this reversal of spiritual goods may be the first thing which comes definitely under our notice. In order, however, even to be so applied and reversed, they must originally have been generated in some manner, and this original generation can never proceed from the useful, but only out of the inner force and compulsion of the object, as, for example, in the case of the great transitions of thought, of artistic creation, and of religious conviction. And, as these have proceeded from inner movements, so they have also brought about powerful inner changes. They have not altered this or that in a given world in order to make it more comfortable to man, but with an energetic revolution have transformed our world from its very foundations, and have constructed a new world in contrast to that which immediately surrounds us. How much or how little individual men, or indeed even mankind as a whole, have appropriated of this; how far man has corresponded and still corresponds to the necessities of his own nature, is a matter and a question in itself: in the spiritual life of humanity the new magnitudes are extant, and they operate here as norms for testing all achievement. At the same time, they show that our life and our nature are of a kind different from what Naturalism represents them to be. However much Naturalism may boast that it is possible for even the highest to be drawn into the service of the merely human, with all its boasting it has not explained the origin of the highest: can a thing proceed from its own shadow? The naturalistic attempt to trace everything back to the useful really reverses the condition of affairs and results in inner destruction wherever disposition stands first. For conduct changes its character completely according as it is regarded as a mere means, or as an end in itself; according as its aim is striven for directly or only indirectly. Do such