"The "unhappy" or "contrite" consciousness (das unglückliche Bewusstsein) is a phase or stage of consciousness which is subjectively idealistic in its interpretation of reality, but which is abstract and dualistic in its view of its relations to truth. It is therefore concerned not with external nature, but with its own private ideals, and with a search for personal perfection. It is, in brief, what Professor William James might call a "variety of religious experience." This experience is here that of a lonely devotee, whose world consists of his search for inner spiritual perfection, together with the goal of this search, namely his far-off "changeless" or divine consciousness. Both the social and the more technically theological aspects of religion play no essential part in the phase of consciousness here in question. The illustrations are obviously derived from mediaeval cloister life; but this part of the setting of the phase in question is accidental. Any lonely religious experience might present essentially the same features."