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The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation 239of individual, of national and of international life. But such anattempt, though well enough as a first step, cannot be the realand final solution; if our effort ends there, we shall not arrive.The solution lies, we have said, in an awakening to our real,because our highest self and nature, — that hidden self whichwe are not yet, but have to become and which is not the strongand enlightened vital Will hymned by Nietzsche, but a spiritualself and spiritual nature that will use the mental being whichwe already are, but the mental being spiritualised, and transformby a spiritual ideality the aim and action of our vital andphysical nature. For this is the formula of man in his highestpotentiality, and safety lies in tending towards our highest andnot in resting content with an inferior potentiality. To followafter the highest in us may seem to be to live dangerously, touse again one of Nietzsche’s inspired expressions, but by thatdanger comes victory and security. To rest in or follow after aninferior potentiality may seem safe, rational, comfortable, easy,but it ends badly, in some futility or in a mere circling, downthe abyss or in a stagnant morass. Our right and natural road istowards the summits.We have then to return to the pursuit of an ancient secretwhich man, as a race, has seen only obscurely and followed afterlamely, has indeed understood only with his surface mind andnot in its heart of meaning, — and yet in following it lies hissocial no less than his individual salvation, — the ideal of thekingdom of God, the secret of the reign of the Spirit over mindand life and body. It is because they have never quite lost hold ofthis secret, never disowned it in impatience for a lesser victory,that the older Asiatic nations have survived so persistently andcan now, as if immortal, raise their faces towards a new dawn;for they have fallen asleep, but they have not perished. It istrue that they have for a time failed in life, where the Europeannations who trusted to the flesh and the intellect have succeeded;but that success, speciously complete but only for a time, hasalways turned into a catastrophe. Still Asia had failed in life,she had fallen in the dust, and even if the dust in which she waslying was sacred, as the modern poet of Asia has declared, —