reduced life and all its values to their lowest denominator. A naive
realism is a relic of past ancestry; it is a failure to conceive
anything as reality unless it lends itself to the senses. Had men not
grasped a higher order of reality than that of the external object, none
of the mental and moral gains of the world would ever have been
realised. Hence, man has to insist that the mental or spiritual life is
the possessor of a reality of its own, although much of the material
comprising that reality has been drawn from the physical world through
the senses. But the spiritual life has proceeded far beyond these
initial stages of knowing the world. Material of a kind other than the
physical has presented itself to it. Thus, in will-relations we find the
material itself belonging to a higher order of existence than the
material of the physical world. It is then what might be expected when
the spiritual life, within the domain of events of human history, forms
a Life-system higher in its nature than the natural process.

Eucken then concludes that Nature and History require for their
interpretation the presence of a spiritual life. Nature involves the
spiritual in the very power of mind in knowing external things. He would
not state that the physical course of things is enough in itself to
prove the existence of spiritual life. We are uncertain of any working
towards [p.90] definite ends in Nature. The whole matter belongs to the
region of speculation; and speculation based on something other than
observation and experiment has greatly retarded progress in connection
with the truest interpretation of the highest things. Eucken would
really agree here with the physical scientist pure and simple that,
however far back the investigations of the physical world are carried,
the scientist does not seem to come to anything at the furthest point
which bears more affinity to what is mental than was to be discovered at
the point from which he set out.