Rudolph Eucken | Page 6

they will. Eucken refuses to close his eyes to, or to explain away, opposition, pain, and evil--the world is far from being wholly reasonable and harmonious, and idealists must acknowledge this fact. The natural sciences, too, by emphasising the reign of law, tend to limit more and more the possibilities of the human being, ultimately robbing him of all freedom--hence of all possibility of creation. And how can one be an enthusiastic devotee of idealism if he is led to doubt man's power to aim at, fight towards, or even choose the highest?
Idealism was at its height in those red-letter days when a high state of culture had been attained, and great personalities produced masterpieces in art, music, and literature. The progress of the sciences and of man's natural activity has directed the spirit of the age towards material progress; the ideals of mankind tend to become external and superficial, and the interest in the invisible world falls to a minimum.
To some extent, too, idealism breathes of aristocracy--a most unpopular characteristic in a democratic age. Experience shows that man is raised above himself only in rare cases, and that the great things in the realms of art, music, and literature are very largely the monopoly of the few, and these mainly of the leisured classes. Hence the appeal of idealism to certain types of men and women must necessarily be a feeble one.
Then, again, there is the general indifference of mankind to lofty aims; this militates against the power of idealism even more than in the case of religion, for while in the latter there is the idea of a personal God who is pleased or displeased urging men to renewed effort, the teachings of idealism may appear to be mere abstractions, and can, as such, possess little driving-power for the ordinary mind.
Idealism, too, seems to be a mere compromise between religion and a life devoted to sense experience, and like most compromises it lacks the enthusing power of the original ideas.
Finally, the whole theory leaves us in uncertainty--"that which was intended to give a firm support, and to point out a clear course to our life, has itself become a difficult problem."
But Eucken has more to say concerning idealism, even though in a different form from the theories of the past. Indeed, his philosophy is generally classed amongst the idealisms. Eucken makes a great endeavour, however, to avoid the difficulties and objections to the idealistic position; later we shall see that a great measure of success has crowned his efforts.
Having discussed the two solutions that place special stress on the invisible world, he proceeds to deal with the theories which emphasise the relation of the life of man to the material world.
He first treats of Naturalism, that solution of the problem that makes the sense experience of surrounding nature the basis of life, subordinating even the life of the soul to the level of the natural, material world.
Nature in the early ages had been superficially explained, often in the light of religious doctrine. Man gave to nature a variety of explanations and of colouring, depending largely upon his ideas of the place of nature in relation to himself and to the invisible world. But such anthropomorphic explanations could not long survive the progress of the sciences, for a scientific comprehension of nature could only be attained by getting rid of all human colouring, and by investigating nature entirely by itself, out of all relation to the human soul. Man then investigated nature more and more as an object apart from himself.
The first result of these investigations was to impress upon him the reality of nature as something independent, and to increase on a very large scale his knowledge of, and control over nature. When man began to formulate and understand nature, he began, too, to invent machines to profit from the knowledge he gained. Hence followed a marvellously fruitful period of human activity, an activity which at first strengthened man in his own soul, and gave him increased consciousness of independence and power. While he was compelled to admit the greatness of the natural world, he became more and more convinced that he himself was far greater, for could he not put the laws of nature to his own use and profit? Hence the gain to man at this stage of the development of the sciences was very great, for he had come to appreciate more than before the superiority of the human soul over the material world. Hence resulted a more robust type of life, "a life energetic, masculine, pressing forward unceasingly." Matters, however, were not destined to remain long at this stage. As man's knowledge of the processes of nature increased further, a twofold result followed. On the one hand, the sense world of nature became increasingly