FOR A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 



63 



an external basis : it can only be helped and encouraged by the 

 removal of traditional hindrances to vindicate its inherent 

 rationality on its own basis. 



It may be well to make a few comments upon a type of 

 religious thought, broad and spiritual, and in every way 

 deserving of the most respectful handling, which claims to 

 transcend the one-sidedness of these opposing methods. Eudolf 

 Eucken, who is now becoming known in England, is the author 

 of a philosophy distinguished, not perhaps by much thoroughness 

 or depth of analysis, but by breadth of range, loftiness of tone, 

 sympathy, and spirituality. He is a decided anti-intellectualist 

 — though not, I think, free from all intellectualistic limitations 

 — and yet on the other hand his outlook is cosmological and 

 the tendency of his thought monistic. His key-thought is not 

 any variety of the Hegelian Absolute, but the spirit-life or 

 Geisteslehen. If you read such a book as his Geistige Strdmungen, 

 you find it recurring like a sort of Gloria at the ends of 

 chapters, as the positive complement of his various criticisms. 

 Subjective and Objective, Eealism and Idealism, History, 

 Culture, and so forth — all these conceptions, for him, run up 

 ultimately into the Geisteslehen. Life, not mere animal or mere 

 mundane life, but the life of that larger and deeper self which 

 unites us with God and the cosmic Whole — this is the broad 

 idea that is continually called in to correct the narrowness 

 and one-sidedness of warring creeds. But it enters the field, 

 I cannot but think, somewhat as a deus ex viacJmid. It does 

 not so much conciliate, as overtop, the antitheses : it does not 

 solve, so much as cover, the difficulties. 



One-sided aspects of truth are such, for Eucken, because they 

 are one-sided aspects of life. But then, of course, the 

 Geisteslehen itself must make good its reality. This it does by 

 its own self-evidence, if we set ourselves to live up to it. The 

 spiritual side of our nature, if put into active exercise, will 

 vindicate itself to itself. And so it is really a datum, while 

 at the same time it is a standard for the reconciliation of 

 essentially intellectual oppositions. But this can only yield 

 fruitful results if the Geisteslehen possesses in itself a standard 

 of intellectual truth. And where are we to look for this ? 

 Surely only in concrete religious doctrines, interpreted by 

 our own religious intuitions. For such a standard of truth, 

 if really available for general philosophical purposes, must 

 be social and not merely individual. And this is in fact 

 involved in what I have contended for. But Eucken does not 

 allow this. He does not seem to see that if religious truth 



