Preface 7

1.  Introduction 13

2.  Religion and Evolution 26

3.  Religion and Natural Science 57

4.  Religion and History 70

5.  Religion and Psychology 87

6.  Religion and Society 108

7.  Religion and Art 119

8.  Universal Religion 128

9.  Characteristic Religion 151

10.  The Historical Religions 166

11.  Christianity 180

12.  Present-Day Aspects of Philosophy and Religion 206

13.  Eucken’s Personality and Influence 227

14.  Conclusion 236

List of Eucken’s Works 245

Index 249

* * * * *

AN INTERPRETATION OF RUDOLF EUCKEN’S PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER I

Introduction [p.13]

Rudolf Eucken was born at Aurich, East Frisia, on the 5th of January 1846.  He lost his father when quite a child.  His mother, the daughter of a Liberal clergyman, was a woman of deep religious experience and of rich intellectual gifts.  When quite a boy he came at school under the influence of the theologian Reuter, a man of wonderful fascination to young men.  The questions of religion and the need of religious experience interested Eucken early, and these have never parted from him during the long years which have since passed away.

At an early age he entered the University of Goettingen and attended the philosophical classes of Hermann Lotze.  Lotze interested him in philosophical problems, but did not [p.14] satisfy the burning desire for religious experience which was in the young man’s soul.  Lotze looked at religion and all else from the intellectual point of view.  His main business was to discover proofs for the things of the spirit, and the value of his work in this direction cannot be over-estimated.  Hermann Lotze’s works are with us to-day; and he has probably made more important contributions to philosophy and religion from the scientific side than any other writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century.  But he seems to have been a man who was inclined to conceive of reality as something which had value only in so far as it was known, and left very largely out of account the inchoate stirrings and aspirations