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Updated: June 5, 2025
The "next step" has to be taken whereby a reality is revealed beyond the confines of the best collective experiences of the human race. Once more, we are landed in the conception of the Godhead. During the past few years Eucken has devoted much attention to the Life-system presented in Pragmatism.
It is not difficult to see why the small nations of the North feel that in Eucken they possess a true friend who sees clearly what they feel instinctively, and who points out to them the path of their spiritual deliverance. It is impossible, also, to understand Eucken's system of philosophy without taking into account his religious experience.
Eucken sees no hope for a "revival" of religion in the soul until an inverted order of conceiving reality takes place. The religious synthesis from the intellectual side is to be obtained by passing through the grades of reality explicit in the various Life-systems, and by abstaining from the imposition of barriers which forbid anyone roaming and "ruminating" within these.
And the object of the following chapters will be to show this from various points of view. Eucken accepts gladly the theory of descent in Darwinism, but insists that the theory of selection must be clearly distinguished from it. He agrees with Edward von Hartmann that the doctrine of selection is inadequate to explain the phenomena of life.
Thus, in the very act of knowing anything at all, something greater than the physical object known is present. And Eucken would insist, therefore, that the mental and spiritual are present from the very beginning and bring to a mental focus the impressions of the senses.
The Past has rolled its meaning down to the Present: the Past mingled with the content of the Present is at each point of its course something other than it was before. But in any case this aspect of the Past as presented by Eucken shows that human life requires a great span of time which has already run in order to create its ideals and to be raised from the triviality of the mere moment.
This, Eucken affirms, is only true in the most primitive societies. As civilisation progresses, man becomes conscious of himself, and an inner life, which in its interests is independent of, and often opposed to society, develops. His own thought becomes important to man, and as his life deepens, religion, science, art, work &c., become more and more a personal matter.
When emphasis is laid on such a fact as this, Christianity will again become a religion of the spirit a religion which will unite all mankind at a point of unity beneath all close intellectual determinations and differences. And Eucken points out that it is not in the life of Jesus alone that we can obtain such a vision. But we do not gain the vision by merely saying this.
At this source man is in possession of a power of a new kind of creativeness in any field of knowledge or life he may be obliged to work. Nothing blossoms or bears fruit without the presence and the power of spiritual life in the deepest inwardness of the soul. In The Truth of Religion Eucken roams in a vast territory.
It has been shown how Eucken establishes a new world with its own laws and values within the spiritual life. Such a reality is created within the total activity of the soul; but it is not mere subjectivism by virtue of the fact that its material comes to it from without. And Eucken shows that it is thus a life partly given to man, and partly created by him.
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