The peculiar stamp thus acquired by our present-day mental conceptions, in which the scientific turn of thought predominates over every other, is just what makes them a mere ideology as they affect the working-class. The workers have observed, how men's thoughts acquire a certain character, arising out of the requirements of state life,--a State life that suits the interests of the ruling classes. It was a reflection of material interests, and of the war of interests, that the worker saw when he looked into his thoughts. Thus there arose in him a sense that all spiritual life whatever was ideology, a mirrored image of the economic order of affairs. Such a view of things works havoc with men's spiritual life. But its blighting effects will cease, once it becomes possible for them to feel that in the spiritual domain there reigns a reality that transcends material outward life and bears its own substance within itself. No such sense of a spiritual reality can, however, possibly arise, unless the spiritual life is free within the body social to expand and govern itself according to the impulses inherent in it. Only those, who have their part in a spiritual life thus freely expanding and freely governed, can represent it with that strength and vigour which shall ensure it its due place within the body social. Such an independent position within human society is indispensable for art, science and a philosophy of life, with all that goes with these. The freedom of one cannot prosper without the freedom of all. Although in their substance mathematics and physics may not be influenced directly by State requirements, yet how they are applied, the estimate people form of their value, the effect their pursuit has upon the rest of spiritual life, all these and many other points are determined by State requirements, whenever some of the branches of spiritual life are under State control. It is one thing, when the teacher of the lowest grade in the school follows the line along which the State impells him; it is another, when he takes his line from a spiritual life that rests on its own independent footing. Here again, social democracy has done no more than take over a habit of thought and conventions inherited from the ruling classes. Social democracy sets before itself as an ideal the incorporation of spiritual life in a social structure based on a system of industrial economy. But, were its aim attained, it would be only a further step along the same road that has led to the present depreciation of spiritual life. It was a right feeling, but a one-sided one that found expression in the socialist maxim: "Religion is a man's private affair"; for, in a healthy society, all spiritual life must in this sense be a private affair, so far as concerns the State and economic life. Only, social democracy does not relegate religion to the sphere of private affairs with any idea of thus establishing its status as spiritual wealth, and giving it a