W. Tudor Jones

“ We feel how limited and shallow our nature has been when we are face to face with a man who reveals to us the eternal values of the things of the spirit; and who reveals them not as they have merely been revealed by the great thinkers of the world, but as he himself has felt and lived them. We all become impressed with the fact that we are in the presence of a power above the world; and the feeling of pain is changed into a feeling of strong optimism in regard to the possibilities of our own nature. ”

“ Only half a religion can become the possession of any individual who does not at least pay as much attention to the nature and value of over-individual norms as he pays to the nature of the environment and of the ordinary life. It is always a sign that humanity is drifting to the shallows of life when it looks upon religion as the flowering of the mere natural life of good custom, earthly happiness, and ease. ”

“ Yet, through the entrance of the new life and a new world, everything is transformed from within, and the clearness of the light appears all the more by contrast with all the depth of the darkness. Indeed, in the midst of all the mysteries of existence, hope and conviction and certainty will consolidate our experience, so that ultimately evil itself must serve the development of the good. ”

“ For once again, in spite of all the contradictions which appear on the surface of things, the religious problem rises up mightily from the depth of life; from day to day it moves minds more and more; it induces endeavour and kindles the spirit of man. It becomes ever plainer to all who are willing to see that mere secular culture is empty and vain, and is powerless to grant life any real content or fill it with genuine love. Man and humanity are pressed ever more forcibly forward into a struggle for the meaning of life and the deliverance of the spiritual self. ”

“ Such an acknowledgment of life as a new kind of reality alters in an essential manner the whole view of the world. Nature now signifies not the whole of things, but only a step beyond which the cosmic process progresses. Two worlds, instead of one world, now appear—one growing out of the other, but keeping a connection still with the other. Nature consequently gains a deeper significance of meaning when we recognise that it gives birth to mind and spirit—characteristics which merge into consciousness, values, and ideals. Nature is not discarded in our new view, but it takes a secondary place. ”

“ What can it be, in the individual efforts of the soul and in the ideal constructions of science and the higher ethical and religious constructions of life, but a reality higher than sense and outside the categories of space and time? What better name can be given to it than a Spiritual Life in contradistinction to the life of Nature?
When this life of the mind and spirit of man is acknowledged, it is seen to be the beginning of a new order of existence. There appears within it a new kind of reality. It is the standpoint from which natural science itself has arisen. ”

“ A warm love towards all humanity runs through Christianity; it longs to redeem every individual; it gives man a value beyond all special achievements and on the other side of all mental and moral deeds; it has been the first to bring the pure inwardness of the soul to a clear expression. But it has also, through the linking of the human to a Divine and Eternal Order, raised life beyond all that is trivial and merely human with its civic ordinances and social interests. ”

“ And yet, this life had an energy of spirit which filled it to the brim; it had a Standard which has transformed human existence to its very root; it has made inadequate what hitherto seemed to bring entire happiness; it has set limits to all petty natural culture; it has stamped as frivolity, not only all absorption in the mere pleasures of life, but has also reduced the whole prior circle of man to the mere world of sense. Such a valuation holds us fast and refuses to be weakened by us when all the dogmas and usages of the Church are detected as merely human organisations. ”

“ The over-individual norms have planted themselves too strongly in the heart of humanity to be ever uprooted. The meaning and value of life now lie in a beyond. It is not a beyond within any physical region that was; neither is it, so far as we know, a beyond in any physical region that is to be. It is a beyond of the spirit; and as it is the most real and most requisite possession of man, how can it have anything less than a cosmic significance? ”

“ Something of value is gained when even this kind of environment is a good; but the response is quite as readily given to that which is injurious, simply because the "universally true and good" is absent as an inwardness and conviction in the soul.
Without such an inwardness and its content the deeper energy of life is not touched, and men drift with the tide of the environment. Without the ideals or syntheses which are, in their very nature, universal and absolute, progress comes to a standstill, and degeneration soon sets in. ”

“ Two modes of reality now present themselves to the life, neither of which allows itself to be conceived of as an illusion. On the one hand, we find the physical world and our own physical nature. We discover that we cannot jump out of these without destroying all we possess; we have to come to some kind of understanding with the physical world and our own physical existence. Yet, on the other hand, the consciousness of a kernel of our being, non-sensuous and spiritual in its nature, has for ever broken our satisfaction with the physical world and our own physical existence. ”

“ Eucken shows how this idea of God comes from the Life-process itself. The Godhead is present, not as an external revelation but as the ever fuller meaning and experience which have been carried along in the soul in its passage from the natural level to the highest spiritual plane. At its summit the development unfolds its true spiritual content of Love. The Highest Power—however much there still remains dark concerning it—has had communication with man, is present within his soul, has become his own life and nature, as well as his self-subsistence over against the order of the world. ”

“ Indeed, the more exclusively Life transforms itself into external work, the more it ceases to be an inner personal experience, and the more alien we become to ourselves. And yet the fact that we can be conscious of such an alienation—an alienation that we cannot accept indifferently —is a proof that more is firmly implanted in us than the modern direction of life is able to develop and satisfy. ”

“ It is a deep conviction of the reality of the deeper kernel of our being that alone constitutes the entrance to a new kind of world. But to acknowledge the presence of such a new world does not signify the possession of it simultaneously with the acknowledgment. The new world is discovered, but it is not yet possessed. There are terrible obstacles in the way; there are enemies without and within to be conquered. It is of little use entering into this struggle without an acknowledgment—born of an inward necessity—of the spiritual nucleus of our nature. ”

“ Religion holds as certain and conclusive that this new inner foundation is the greatest thing of all and the wonder of wonders, because it carries within itself the power and certainty of the overcoming of the old world and the creation of a new one; it is on account of this that religion longs for the conviction of the whole man, and brands the denial of this as pettiness and unbelief. The world may therefore remain to the external view as it appeared before—a kingdom of opposition and darkness; its hindrances within and without may seem to nullify everything else ”

“ How can any system be more than a half-truth when its final meaning is presented with but little attention to the highest aspect we know in the world —to human life in its struggles and conquests, [p.210] in its living and loving, and its forward movement towards some distant goal? The special value of Eucken's teaching lies, then, in the fact that it interprets what happens, can happen, and ought to happen within life itself. No system which leaves out the soul with its possibilities is complete. ”

“ But a movement towards a more essential and soul-stirring culture—to a progressive superiority of a complete life beyond all individual activities—cannot arise without bringing the problem of religion once more to the foreground. Our life is not able to find its bearings within this deep or to gather its treasures into a Whole unless it realises how many acute opposites it carries within itself. ”

“ For it has to be borne in mind that the values and norms farthest removed from the regions of sense and intellect appear only when man follows the drift of his own higher being; it is not when he remains effortless and satisfied with the life of the hour that such values and norms appear. They appear when the ordinary life is seen through as no more than a stage for the further evolution of the soul through the grasping of a higher kind of reality than has as yet presented itself to it. As Eucken says: "Religion proves itself a kingdom of opposites. ”

“ How is it possible to attain to a unity of interpretation where our life itself fails in the possession of a governing unity? We discover ourselves in the midst of the most fundamental transformations of life; old ideals are vanishing, and new ones are dawning on the horizon. But as yet they are all full of unrest and unreadiness; and the situation of man in the All of things is so full of uncertainty that he has to struggle anew for the meaning and value of his life. ”

“ Thus the conception of truth is made up very largely of its history on its physical side, and this history of the truth comes to possess the entire meaning of the truth itself! The road to religion, in its deepest sense, is barred to everyone who fails or refuses to grant the deeper reality which presents itself within the soul a self-subsistence. The only existence of such a reality can be its own self-subsistence. The reality is now conceived as something quite other than an existence in space; it exists for consciousness and can persist within consciousness. ”

“ When it steps out of such opposites, it destroys without a doubt the turbidity and evanescence of ordinary commonplace life, and separates clearly the lights and shadows from one another. It sets our life between the sharpest contrasts, and engenders the most powerful feelings and the most mighty movements; it shows the dark abyss in our nature, but also [p.142] shows illumined peaks; it opens out infinite tasks, and brings ever to an awakening a new life in its movement against the ordinary self. ”

“ What is the individual potency that knows the world and passes beyond it? What are the ideals and norms which revealed themselves in the co-operative movements of humanity, and only revealed themselves when humanity was at its highest attainable level? Enough has been said to show that it is more than Nature, that characteristics are found within it entirely unknown in Nature. We are bound to take this more into account, for it has constructed all the gains of mankind. ”

“ This prepared road into the kingdom of the invisible, this creation of a new reality which is no merely serene kind of play but a deep seriousness, this inversion of worlds which pushes sensuous existence down into a distance and which prepares a home for man within the kingdom of faith—all this is the greatest achievement that has ever been undertaken and that has ever worked upon human soil. ”

“ But as all this is a conception spiritual in its nature—devoid of flesh and blood as its clothing—it becomes extremely difficult for the majority of mankind to hold fast to its reality in a world where flesh and blood mean so much. Something more tangible is craved for by man as a proof of an over-world and of an over-personal life. Such proof men are able to obtain in the great religious personalities of the world without having to go through the intellectual processes of discovering the grounds of religion. Men are able to view this spiritual truth as they view a picture. ”

“ We must all work on in the direction of the highest: and the higher we mount the nearer we are to a point of convergence of all the different syntheses; and out of the union there will be born a synthesis which will include the whole family of man. We possess already such a synthesis partially realised here and there in the lives of the greatest personalities of history; but to the mass of mankind such a synthesis is little more than a name, even though that name be God or Infinite Love. ”

“ When a potency of the soul, gained in a province outside art (as is the case with morality or value) , operates, there is no danger of art degenerating into mere subjectivism; otherwise there is a very grave danger. Loosened from morality it becomes a mere play of decoration and fancy—a mere superficial embroidery of an empty life; it can look on the human world and all its struggles with an indifferent and often cynical mood. ”

“ Grace and guilt—naming only two experiences of the soul—are not remnants of a traditional theology, but essential elements which accompany the deepest experience of the soul. When they are wanting, it is most probable that the soul has not plumbed its own [p.144] existence to its very depths, but has rather chosen to be satisfied with what lies but a little way beneath the surface—with what does not cause too much uneasiness, but is sufficient for a life to persist as a good member of the society by which it is surrounded. ”

“ The dawning of a new reality has made him a new creature; he is now compelled by his own deeper nature to preserve and to reflect the light which is within him; and all this brings prominently forward the need of something other for the progress of the world than the first look of things is able to show. It is in such manner as this that we must account for all the ideals which have moved mankind from the level of animalism and greed to the level of civilisation, culture, morals, and religion. ”

“ The human which once seemed to bring the Spiritual and Divine so near to man has now become a burden and a hindrance to him. A keener analysis, a more independent development of the Spiritual and Divine, and, along with this, the truth of religion, do not succeed in reaching their full effects if religion is looked upon as merely something to protect individuals, instead of as that which furthers the whole of humanity —as that which is not merely a succour in times of trouble and sorrow but also as that which guarantees an enhancement in work and creativeness. ”

“ But the progress of mankind shows everywhere the growth of a life higher in nature than that of physical or animal existence. Some kind of total-life has been formed in which the individual can participate; and in the participation of which he can be carried far beyond physical things and beyond his own individual interests. Mankind has striven after truth, and has discovered something that is beyond the opinions of individuals, that does not serve his own petty interests, but overcomes them and reaches out after truths which are valid and good for all. ”

“ If the enterprise is to issue in anything that is great and good—into a spiritual world with an ever-growing content here and now—an insistence upon the reality of this deeper life coupled with the highest end which presents itself to the life must be made. Something is now seen in the distance as the meaning and value of life—something which our deeper nature longs for, and which has created a cleft within the soul between the ordinary things of sense and time and that which "never was on sea or land." ”

“ Something has happened within the soul which can never be obliterated. As Eucken says: "The contradiction is now removed from the centre to the periphery of life; it can therefore only touch us from without, and is not able to overthrow what is within; it will not so much weaken as strengthen the certainty, because it calls life to a perpetual renewal and brings to fruition the greatness of the conquest." ”

“ An Ought and a Will are involved in the creativeness of the individual life and of the Life-process; so that it is a mistake to conceive [p.80] of Eucken's activism as some stirring of the individual to realise merely his own needs as these present themselves to him from moment to moment. He is called and destined to do infinitely more; he is to be a creator of the Life-process and a carrier in the making of a new world; but all this can be done only from the standpoint of a vision of a spiritual life superior to history and to the individual himself. Vision and action are to be ever present. ”