An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 204 pages of information about An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy.

An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 204 pages of information about An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy.
The main principle of division is necessitated on account of the fact that some characteristics are present in the former which are absent in the latter.  It is precisely the same between Body and Mind, with one difference.  Body and Mind are indissolubly connected, but one cannot be reduced into the other.  However much the connection on one side may influence the other side, the difference between a meaning and a thing remains.  And it is this fundamental difference which makes it absolutely necessary to acknowledge a world of consciousness in contradistinction to a world of matter and its behaviour, whether such matter is to be found in the human body with its mechanical and chemical changes and transformations or in the physical universe outside our body.

It is only when the mind becomes aware of its own existence—­an existence not to be established as being in Space (or entirely in [p.40] Time) but as a reality subsisting in itself and in will-relations—­that the efforts and fruitions of the spirit of man become intelligible at all.  But such an awareness has become a permanent possession in a greater or less degree within the life of man.  Whenever he becomes conscious of the fact that in his own soul a new phenomenon has made its appearance, he begins, after the willing acknowledgment of the reality of such a phenomenon, to exercise its potency over against the external world and over against much that is present in his own psychical life.  A Higher and a Lower present themselves to him.  The two alternatives force themselves, and there is no third:  either this deeper kernel of his life must mean the possibility and, in a measure, the presence of a new land of reality; or, on the other hand, it means no more than a mere epiphenomenon and blossoming of the merely natural life.  If the latter view is adopted, the spiritual nucleus of man’s nature obtains but slight attention except on the side of its connection with the surrounding organic world, and consequently what this nucleus is in itself as an experience recedes into the background, and descriptions and explanations in scientific or philosophical form step into the foreground.  But a contradiction is imbedded in this very account.  Some kind of experience of life, apart from, and higher in its nature than, the connection of the spiritual nucleus with its [p.41] physical history, persists in the life.  The man of science is generally a good and worthy man.  He believes in the moral life, and he does not throw the values of the centuries overboard.  Such belief and valuation are not made up of the content of the explanation of life from its physical side, but are an unconscious acknowledgment of the presence of truths and values as experiences and as now subsisting in themselves, however much they are caused by physical things.

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An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.