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Updated: May 16, 2025
This concession, and the attempt to live according to it, constitute a proof of the presence in some form of a non-sensuous reality and value in the constructions of materialistic monism itself. Hence, Eucken's conception of spiritual life cannot be got rid of after all. It will remain so long as men live above the animal level and strive to ascend to something higher still.
Eucken's smaller books, such as The Life of the Spirit, Christianity and the New Idealism, Können wir noch Christen sein?, and The Meaning and Value of Life, present certain aspects of the larger volumes in a simpler form. His system has been stated to be in need of this important corner-stone, and he has hastened to meet the demand.
Eucken's personality is rooted in a deep love for humanity and its spiritual qualities; and herein lies the essential reason of his championing of weak nations and pleading for the preservation of their original spiritual characteristics. These qualities are pearls of too great a price to be lost in a world where so much tinsel passes as what possesses the highest value.
I read the other day, in a book of Professor Eucken's, a phrase, 'Die erhohung des vorgefundenen daseins, which seems to be pertinent here. Why may not thought's mission be to increase and elevate, rather than simply to imitate and reduplicate, existence?
As values and norms mean so much when a reality is granted them by the truest of the neo-Kantians, they come to mean infinitely more when they are acknowledged as somehow constituting the foundation and the acme of all existence. Eucken's main desire is to establish such norms and values beyond the possibility of dispute and beyond the constant changes of Life-systems.
The same may be said of Professor Wundt's works in so far as they present a constructive system. But the ground was fallow twenty-five years ago when some of Eucken's important works made their appearance. He states that his standpoint is different from that of the conventional and official idealism then in vogue.
If we can find what it is that makes all this possible, then surely we have found the greatest thing in the world the reality. And Eucken's answer is clear and definite. It must be something that persists, is eternal and independent of time, and it must extend beyond the individual to a universal whole.
Men are more and more feeling the necessity of conceding a validity and objectivity to the concepts of History. The work of the late Professor Dilthey in this respect is of great importance, and has strong affinities with Eucken's teaching on the same subject. But Dilthey's objectivity and validity stopped short of religion in the sense in which religion is presented by Eucken.
The ordinary situation, apart from the presence of the content of the over-world within the life of the soul, swings like a pendulum between a shallow optimism and a blind pessimism. Eucken's only solution for our present-day troubles is a return to our own deeper nature as this was depicted in previous chapters.
To realise intensely such a fact is to realise the fact that all this can happen again in a more concentrated form than is actually presented in the slow and toilsome effects of the results of the collective life of the community. It may be well to refer here to Eucken's classification of the religions of the world.
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