In the gloomy year of 1943, when Finland was fi ghting against the Soviet Union in the turmoil of World War II, Finnish philosopher Eino Kaila published a highly personal book Syvähenkinen elämä ("The Depths of Spiritual Life" or "Deep- Mental Life"), with the subtitle Keskusteluja perimmäisistä kysymyksistä ("Discussions on ultimate questions"). An extended version in Swedish, Tankens oro ("The Disquietude of Thought" or "Restless Thought") appeared one year later.² Kaila's Syvähenkinen elämä mixes discussions on the meaning of life with considerations on philosophical topics that occupied its author as a proponent of logical empiricism. The main part of the book is written in the form of dialogues between two characters: Aristofi los and Eubulos. The painter Aristofi los eloquently presents a colourful pantheist vision of the world: reality is a process where Life with a capital L presses against the surface of space-matter and fl ows through its holes; human minds constituted by this process are the Eyes of Life through which Life looks around at the surrounding space-matter. Eubulos, who represents the scientifi c world conception, points out that the ideas of Aristofi los resemble the vitalism of Bergson and Driesch (Kaila, 1986, p. 146). Eubulos asserts that the real content of the doctrine of Life with a capital L is nothing but an expression of a personality transformed by religious conversion (ibid., p. 184). As a metaphysical explanation, it appeals to superfi cial pseudo-concepts (ibid., p. 204), and at the same time goes beyond experience in an unacceptable manner (ibid., p. 186).