This is what Tauler felt, when he said: “Man is just as if he were three men--his animal man as he is according to the senses; then his rational man and lastly, his highest, godlike man.... The one is the outer, animal, sensuous man; the other is the inner, understanding man, with his understanding and reasoning powers; the third man is spirit, (_Gemüth_--lit. emotional, feeling nature), the very highest part of the soul.”[1] How far this third man is above the first and second, Eckhart has expressed in the words: “The eye through which I see God, that is the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye, that is one eye and one knowing and one feeling.” [1] _Cp._ W. Preger: _Geschichte der Deutschen Mystik_, vol. iii, p. 161. But in Tauler another feeling is active as well as this. He has fought his way through to a real vision of the spiritual, and does not constantly confuse, as do the false materialists and the false idealists, the sensibly-natural with the spiritual. If, with his disposition, Tauler had become a scientist, he would have insisted upon explaining all that is natural, including the _whole_ of man, both the first and the second, purely upon natural lines. He would never have transferred purely spiritual forces into nature itself. He would never have talked of a “purposefulness” in nature conceived of according to men’s notions. He knew that there, where we perceive with our senses, no “creative ideas” are to be found. Far rather he was most keenly conscious of the fact that man is a purely natural being. And as he felt himself to be, not a scientist, but a devotee of moral life, he therefore felt most keenly the contrast which reveals itself between this natural being of man and that vision of God which arises naturally and within nature, but as spirituality. And just in that very contrast the meaning of life presented itself to his eyes. Man finds himself as a single being, a creature of nature. And no science can reveal to him anything else about this life than that he is such a creature of nature. As a creature of nature he cannot get outside of the sphere of natural creation. In it he must remain. And yet his inner life leads him outside and beyond it. He must have confidence in that which no science of outer nature can give him or show to him.