And if man wins a glorious personality, he may gain immortality too. Unfortunately, Eucken has not yet dealt fully with this question, but he is evidently of the opinion that the spiritual personalities are immortal. As concentration points or foci of the spiritual life, he believes that the developed personalities are at present and in prospect possessors of a spiritual realm. But there will be no essential or sudden change at death. That which is immortal is involved in our present experience. Those who have developed into spiritual personalities, who have worked in fellowship with the great Universal Life, and become centre-points of spirituality, have thus risen supreme over time and pass to their inheritance. Those who have not done so, but have lived their lives on the plane of nature, will have nothing that can persist. Hence it is that the negative movement leads to freedom, personality, and immortality; the neglect to make the movement consigns the individual to slavery, makes a real "self" impossible, and at death he has nought that a spiritual realm can claim. The choice is an all-important one; for, as a recent writer puts it, "In this choice, the personality chooses or rejects itself, takes itself for its life-task, or dies of inanition and inertia." CHAPTER VII THE PERSONAL AND THE UNIVERSAL In the last chapter the ascent of the human being from serfdom to freedom and personality was traced. In doing so it was necessary to make frequent reference to the Universal Spiritual Life. When we turn to consider the characteristics of the Universal Spiritual Life, many problems present themselves. How can we reconcile freedom and personality with the existence of an Absolute? What is the nature of this Absolute, and in what way is the human related to it? What place should religion play in the life of the spiritual personality? These are, of course, some of the greatest and most difficult problems that ever perplexed the mind of man, and we can only deal briefly with Eucken's contribution to their solution.