This points the path for the discovery in its true form of one factor in the modern labour movement. And having travelled it to the end, the worker's soul utters this cry of conviction: "I am striving after spiritual life. Yet this spiritual life is ideology, is merely man's own reflection of what is going on in the world outside, it does not come to us from a spiritual world of its own." In the transition to the new age, the old spiritual life had turned to something which, for the working-class sense of life, is ideology. If one wants to understand the mood of soul amongst the workers, as it finds vent in the social demands of the present day, one must be able to grasp the full possible effects of the theory that spiritual life is ideology. It may be retorted: "What does the average working-man know of any such theory? it is only a will-o'-the-wisp in the brains of their more or less educated leaders." But anyone who says so is talking wide of life, and his doings in actual life will be wide of it too. He simply does not know, what has been going on in the life of the working-class during the last half century. He does not know the threads that are woven from the theory, that spiritual life is ideology, to the demands and actions of the out-and-out socialist, whom he thinks so "ignorant";--yes, and to the deeds too of those who "hatch revolution" out of the blind promptings of the life within them. Herein lies the tragedy overshadowing all our interpretations of the social demands of the day, that in so many circles there is no sense of what is forcing its way up to the surface out of the souls of the great masses of mankind,--that people cannot turn their eyes to what is actually taking place in men's inner life. The non-worker listens with dismay to the worker setting forth his demands; and this is what he hears:--"Nothing short of communalising the means of production will make it possible for me to have a life worthy of a human being." But the non-worker is unable to form the faintest conception, of how his own class, in the transition from the old age to the new, not only summoned the worker to labour at means of production that were not his, but failed even to give him anything to satisfy and sustain his soul in his labour. People, who see and act wide of the mark in this way, may say:--"But, after all, the working-man only wants to better his position in life and put himself on a level with the upper classes; where do the needs of his soul come in?" The working-man himself may even declare:--"I am not asking the other classes for anything for my soul; all I want, is to prevent them exploiting me any longer. I mean to put an end to existing class distinctions." Talk of this kind does not touch the essence of the social question. It reveals nothing of its true form. For, had the working population inherited from the leading classes a genuine spiritual substance, then they would have had a different consciousness within their souls, one