128

9. Characteristic Religion 151

10. The Historical Religions 166

11. Christianity 180

12. Present-Day Aspects of Philosophy and Religion 206

13. Eucken's Personality and Influence 227

14. Conclusion 236

List of Eucken's Works 245

Index 249

* * * * *

AN INTERPRETATION OF RUDOLF EUCKEN'S PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION [p.13]

Rudolf Eucken was born at Aurich, East Frisia, on the 5th of January
1846. He lost his father when quite a child. His mother, the daughter of
a Liberal clergyman, was a woman of deep religious experience and of
rich intellectual gifts. When quite a boy he came at school under the
influence of the theologian Reuter, a man of wonderful fascination to
young men. The questions of religion and the need of religious
experience interested Eucken early, and these have never parted from him
during the long years which have since passed away.

At an early age he entered the University of Goettingen and attended the
philosophical classes of Hermann Lotze. Lotze interested him in
philosophical problems, but did not [p.14] satisfy the burning desire
for religious experience which was in the young man's soul. Lotze looked
at religion and all else from the intellectual point of view. His main
business was to discover proofs for the things of the spirit, and the
value of his work in this direction cannot be over-estimated. Hermann
Lotze's works are with us to-day; and he has probably made more
important contributions to philosophy and religion from the scientific
side than any other writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
But he seems to have been a man who was inclined to conceive of reality
as something which had value only in so far as it was _known_, and left
very largely out of account the inchoate stirrings and aspirations which
are found at a deeper level within the human soul than the _knowing_
level. Life is larger and deeper than logic, and is something, despite
all our efforts, which resists being reduced to logical propositions. It
is quite easy to understand how a young man of Eucken's temperament and
training should acquiesce in all the logical