During the past few years Eucken has devoted much attention to the Life-system presented in Pragmatism.  He is alive to the value of much of the work of the late Professor William James and of Dr F.C.S.  Schiller.  He feels that Absolute Idealism is too abstract and too remote from life to move the human will.  It is too much like placing a man before a mountain, and asking him to remove it.  The very magnitude of the object weakens instead of strengthening the will.  Pragmatism has the merit of insisting that the task be done piecemeal, so that man may not lose heart at the very outset.  And some kind of goal is present in Pragmatism.  But Eucken’s main objection to Pragmatism is that, however adequate it may be at the beginning of the enterprise, it will tend, as time passes, to turn man in the direction of the line of least resistance, and so be degraded to the level of the ordinary life and its petty demands.[80] His Activism is entirely different from James’s Pragmatism.  James depended too much upon the “span of the moment” and its immediate experience.  There is in this “span” often no cosmic conviction present in consciousness to proclaim that the action is [p.221] “worth while” at all costs.  While constantly demanding the need of effort in order to experience the deeper potencies of spiritual life, Eucken insists that such effort can enter into a current only in so far as norms and values are clearly perceived as the meaning and goal of spiritual life.  A universal of meaning and value must be perceived, however imperfectly it may be, before the individual can call his deepest nature into activity.  And what is such a universal but something beyond the flow of the moment and beyond the realm of ordinary daily life?  Such a universal, too, must have an existence of its own—­an existence and a value which are beyond the opinions of any individual or of any group of individuals, even if such a group were to include the whole human race.  It is clear, then, why Eucken parts company with Pragmatism.

If, finally, we view his attitude towards the Religious Life-systems of our generation, we find words of warning and of encouragement.  His whole work culminates in religion.  But he teaches us that we have to learn from the sides of knowledge already presented in this chapter.  And it may be said that the Christian Church (or any other Church) has yet to learn this lesson.  It still seeks to find its revelation in what was, and in modes which come constantly into direct conflict with the results of the various Life-systems already referred to.  It wants the fruits of religion without tilling [p.222] the ground and nurturing its plants.  Its insistence on placing the basis of religion in myth and miracle dooms it to a greater disaster in the future than even in the past.  Eucken sees no hope for a “revival” of religion in the soul until an inverted order of conceiving reality takes place.  The religious