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 one word More constitutes all the difference.  This More, with Eucken, is the beginning of a new order of existence and of value where the physical order ends.  His work consists in interpreting this More, and we have already seen whither the More leads us:  it leads us into spiritual norms and their values, and these in their turn led us into Infinite Love in the Godhead.  The failure to see the value of all this is due to the inattention of the advocates of Naturalism in regard to the non-sensuous structure of mind:  the Thing and its relations monopolise them so completely that they are blind to every reality non-sensuous in its nature, although they possess some amount of such reality in their very knowledge and adoration of the Thing.  Our troubles will continue to accumulate, and the prospect of the future will grow extremely dark, if the grip which physical things have on the world to-day be not relaxed.  The very physical powers which we have helped to create, and which hitherto have proved of service to men, will mean our destruction unless something of the More which is beyond them be found as a possession and an activity within the governing centre of life.  This is Eucken’s [p.214] plea over against the various forms of the Naturalism and Materalism of our day.  These are not enough for man.  But man is so slow in recognising this fact.  The appeal of Spiritual Idealism is considered to be something which is vague and useless.  Our deepest reality and the source of all true energy have been robbed of their efficacy by our absorption in scraping together physical elements of chaff and dust.  How often does Eucken show our dire poverty in the midst of all this external plenty!  The all-sufficiency of all forms of Naturalism condemns itself through its failure to pass beyond itself.  Had there not been some who did pass beyond the Thing and its relations the spiritual values of the race would have been annihilated.  “As soon as we demand to pass beyond mere awareness to a genuine knowledge, we discover our deplorable poverty, and must confess that what is termed certain seems on clearer investigation to rest upon a totally insecure foundation."[75] “It is not natural science itself which leads to naturalism, for, indeed, no natural science could arise if reality exhausted itself in the measurements of naturalism; but it is rather the weakness of the conviction of the spiritual life; it is the failure of certitude in regard to the presence of a spiritual existence; it is the unclearness concerning the inner conditions of all mental and spiritual activity which a shallow and popular philosophy [p.215] presents—­it is all this which turns natural science into a materialistic naturalism."[76] The strength of materialistic monism does not lie in any proof of there being nothing but mechanism in this wide universe, but in its energetic propaganda against certain traditional theological forms of ecclesiastical

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