difficulty into the mind when face to face [p.138] with the problem of
religion. The mind has not learned how to attend to the truth in its own
self-subsistence, but posits this truth in its relation to the
conditions in the external world which brought it forth.[49] 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 reality is conceived as a substance subsisting in itself, the
passage to the Absolute is opened. This Absolute is the most universal
and complete meaning and value which the soul is capable of possessing;
its very nature forces itself upon man as being true; and its value has
revealed itself in its being the only power which will carry farther the
spiritual evolution of the soul. If such an Absolute is left out of
account, it is evident that the most universal [p.139] truth which
presents itself to life as absolutely necessary cannot enter into the
deepest recesses of the soul; it cannot be more than a subsidiary
element accompanying lower intellectual elements of life, which are more
closely allied on such a lower level with physical processes of the body
and with the physical world. And when truth is treated in this manner,
it cannot possibly make its abode and become a power in the soul.
Consciousness hesitates to create a further cleft within itself because
the evidence of truth at such a height as this does not lend itself to
the senses. The result is that the full power of the truth fails to
produce effects on the consciousness, and thus keeps it on practically