Eucken’s only solution for our present-day troubles is a return to our own deeper nature as this was depicted in previous chapters.  The signs of the times, he tells us, are encouraging; the utilitarian mode of life is wearing itself out; the tastes of material comforts have been with us long enough to experience the poverty of their quality; and the mad gamble for the “things which perish” is gradually weeding out its devotees.  Eucken’s solution to the problems of society is a religious one.  Where is the conception of religion as the solution of the momentous and intricate problems of our day to be found in the teachings and writings of our economists?  It is not to be found.  These deal either with petty details or with laws which have no spiritual content whatever in them.  Society may proceed with various Life-systems—­individualism, socialism, or any other, but until it gets into touch with its deepest soul, each such system of life is hastening towards its own destruction and towards the injury of progress.

The conception of the State is presented by Eucken in a similar manner.  He points out how we stop short in our politics of dealing with the universally true and good.  Party strives against party, and nation against nation. [p.115] Groups of all hues and cries propound their own particular ideals as the all-important ones.  Higher ideals are left out of account, so that we find the world to-day spending its energies in warfare concerning many things of minor importance.  How can we expect fruition and bliss to follow on such lines?

Eucken presents in a convincing manner the danger of resting upon the external in Society and State.  “We are experiencing to-day a remarkable entanglement.  The older forms of Life, which had hitherto governed history and its meaning, have become too narrow, petty, and subjective for human nature.  Through emancipation from an easy-going subjectivity and through the positing of life upon external things and, indeed, upon the whole of the great universe, Life, it was believed, would gain more breadth and truth; and in a noteworthy manner man undertook a struggle against the pettiness of his own nature and for the drawing out of all that was merely human and trivial.  A great deal has been gained through such a change and new tendency of life.  In fact we have discovered far more than we had hoped for.  But, at the same time, we have lost something—­a loss which at the outset occasions no anxiety, but which, however, through painful experience, proves itself to have been the ’one thing needful.’  Through its own development the work has destroyed its own vehicles; it has [p.116] undermined the very ground upon which it stood; it has failed, notwithstanding its infinite expansion, through its loss of a fundamental and unifying Life-process; and in the entire immersion of man into activity his deepest being has been sacrificed.  Indeed, the more exclusively Life transforms itself