That is what really happened; the main tendency of life is now directed just as much upon the world as earlier it went beyond it; it has been transferred from the invisible to the visible, from the supernatural to the natural. We see this most clearly in the case of religion, which, as though with immanent necessity, runs through the sequence of a predominant transcendent Theism, a Panentheism, a Pantheism--gradually becoming colourless--an Agnosticism, and a Positivism. Everything supernatural disappears from thought, and life is concerned solely with sense experience. Thus, finally, we appear to have arrived at the same point as that from which the Greeks started out: the Monism of the most modern coining, for example, is hardly to be distinguished from the Hylozoism of the ancient Ionian thinkers. But is the whole result of the movement of universal history really only a deception? Has it simply brought us back again, from the false paths that we have tried, without according us any kind of positive profit whatever? We have become men of another kind; we think and feel differently; we have built up a rich culture, have transformed the world, have created a spiritual atmosphere; and we are capable of striving after infinite life and ultimate truth. Could all of this spring out of mere error? If that were so, should we not be compelled to reject the whole of this as phantasy and deception? But if the error was a means and an instrument in the attainment of truth, and if mankind in its going out from itself and in its return to itself is inwardly developed, where does the boundary between truth and error lie, and what is the meaning of the whole? So here again we lapse into uncertainty; history, to other ages a secure support, leads us into still greater doubt.
Finally, we must add to this crisis of culture the onward march of the social movement, which continually increases in power; the passionate longing of ever-growing groups of men for immediate participation in culture and the joys of life. Such movements may accomplish themselves within a fixed and acknowledged sphere of culture and of life; what changes they then bring lie within this sphere; they do not place the whole in question. Thus, the democratic movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries left certain principles of religious conviction untouched; they left the conception of the world entirely unchanged. But the matter is quite otherwise when a movement of this kind comes in contact with a culture which is inwardly unstable and which is growing uncertain concerning its final aims. We cannot fail to recognise what a great danger of degeneration there is under such circumstances. The masses, thus struggling upward, then seek their own way of life, and in so doing they naturally concentrate their attention upon that which lies immediately before their eyes and affects their immediate well-being. From this position they will advance all the more quickly to a certain conclusion, in that they are unconcerned with the experiences and perplexities of the work of universal history, and therefore, with unclouded enthusiasm, expect complete truth and pure happiness from freer exercise of their powers and the rejection of all authority. If we wish to ignore the dangers to culture which thus grow up, we must either estimate man as he is too highly, or spiritual tasks too meanly. Until the present, an independent spiritual life, making man more comprehensive in being, raising and freeing him, has manifested itself only at individual points; in the first place in chosen individuals, from whom it has been conveyed to the common life. The spiritual world made its appearance as a power superior to the interests and the opinions of individuals and of the masses. Only in such transcendence of the merely human did it develop any characteristic content, find an inner unity, arouse respect, and lead man beyond mere nature. If all this should now become different, if man in the mass should come to feel himself to be the measure of all things, and should relate all to his perception as the centre of infinity, would not a severe contradiction arise between human enterprise and spiritual necessity, and would not the full development of this opposition threaten the whole state of culture with a violent convulsion? Ultimately the inner necessities of our being would certainly win the day against all errors of superficiality, but what severe conflicts and losses the division must cost!