hose who have developed into spiritual
personalities, who have worked in fellowship with the great Universal
Life, and become centre-points of spirituality, have thus risen supreme
over time and pass to their inheritance. Those who have not done so, but
have lived their lives on the plane of nature, will have nothing that
can persist.

Hence it is that the negative movement leads to freedom, personality,
and immortality; the neglect to make the movement consigns the
individual to slavery, makes a real "self" impossible, and at death he
has nought that a spiritual realm can claim. The choice is an
all-important one; for, as a recent writer puts it, "In this choice, the
personality chooses or rejects itself, takes itself for its life-task,
or dies of inanition and inertia."

CHAPTER VII

THE PERSONAL AND THE UNIVERSAL

In the last chapter the ascent of the human being from serfdom to
freedom and personality was traced. In doing so it was necessary to make
frequent reference to the Universal Spiritual Life.

When we turn to consider the characteristics of the Universal Spiritual
Life, many problems present themselves. How can we reconcile freedom and
personality with the existence of an Absolute? What is the nature of
this Absolute, and in what way is the human related to it? What place
should religion play in the life of the spiritual personality? These
are, of course, some of the greatest and most difficult problems that
ever perplexed the mind of man, and we can only deal briefly with
Eucken's contribution to their solution.

Can a man choose the highest? This is the form in which Eucken would
state the problem of freedom. His answer, as already seen, is an
affirmative one. The personality chooses the spiritual life, and
continually reaffirms the decision. This being so, it is now no longer
possible to consider the human and the divine to be entirely in
opposition. And the more the spiritual personality develops, so much the
less does the opposition obtain, until a state of spirituality is
arrived at when all opposition of will ceases--then we attain perfect
freedom. "We are most free, when we are most deeply pledged--pledged
irrevocably to the spiritual presence, with which our own being is so
radically and so finally implicated." Thus freedom is obtained in a
sense through self-surrender, but it is through this same self-surrender
that we realise spiritual absoluteness. Hence it is that perfect freedom