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satirically about them mirrors his necessary opinion of Milton and his work; and how can one escape the inference that it is of the most conspicuous 'doctrine' known to him that he speaks? Notice Zeale,' one of several verbal arrows which Vaughan, following Jonson, reserves for his Puritan fellow-countrymen; he uses it invariably and solely for them. It was a word they had liked, and he catches it up everywhere (as Denham and others were doing), with an ironic inflection which is audible enough. Of 'self-worship' no psychologist will acquit the majestic mind of John Milton. As for 'self-ends,' it is a favourite idiom of the Silurist's, though not peculiar to him. It may here apply not only to the impression made upon Vaughan by Milton's career, but to some known single fact of it. After all, Milton's idealism was quite capable of 'self-ends:' witness certain weighty philippics on the charms of divorce secretly begun during the very honeymoon of poor little Mistress Mary Powell; and so on, and so forth. Then we have 'darken'd Scribes,' of course in the plural, again. Even the Scribes' 'doctrine' is darken'd' by the foul stormes' of polemics and public discord. A possible interpretation may well be that the Scribes' themselves are only mentally befogged. A habit of taking Vaughan's utterances at their full value will, however, point to a frank collating of the blind work with the blinded worker. One would prefer to carry away a doubt whether he is indeed covertly accusing and attacking once more the supreme contemporary poet, 'eyeless in Gaza.' But does it not look like real lion-baiting, kept up to the last? All these diatribes, being Vaughan's, must mean something; they cannot be passed over. Let their meanings be threshed out by some other student to whom Vaughan is also a subject of recurrent interest. He may not agree with me; and yet again, on second thought, he may.

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY.

Art. 5.-THE PHILOSOPHY OF EUCKEN.

I.

1. Prolegomena zur Forschungen über die Einheit des Geisteslebens in Bewusstsein und That der Menschheit.

Von Rudolf Eucken. Leipzig: Veit and Co., 1885.

2. Die Einheit des Geisteslebens in Bewusstsein und That der Menschheit. Untersuchungen von Rudolf Eucken. 7te Auflage. Leipzig: Veit and Co, 1888.

3. Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion. 3te Auflage. Leipzig: Veit and Co., 1912.

4. Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker, eine Entwickelungsgeschichte des Lebensproblems der Menschheit vom Plato bis zur Gegenwart. Von Rudolf Eucken. 7te Auflage. Leipzig: Veit and Co., 1907.

5. Der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt. Neue Grundlegung einer Weltanschauung. Von Rudolf Eucken. 2te neugestaltete Auflage. Leipzig: Veit, 1907. 6. Geistige Strömungen der Gegenwart. Von R. Eucken. 4te umgearbeitete Auflage. Leipzig: Veit and Co., 1913. 7. Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens. Von Rudolf Eucken. 3te umgearbeitete und erweiterte Auflage. Leipzig: Quelle and Meyer, 1913. Translated by Lucy Judge Gibson and W. R. Boyce Gibson. London: Black, 1909. 8. The Religious Philosophy of Rudolf Eucken. By Friedr. von Hügel. (Hibbert Journal,' April 1912.) 9. An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy. By W. Tudor Jones. London: Williams & Norgate, 1913. (The Appendix to this book gives a bibliography of Eucken's works, and of English translations from them.) AMONG the leaders of the general movement towards substituting life for thought as the banner of philosophy, no one, unless it were M. Bergson, is to-day more prominent than Rudolf Eucken. In his own country his writings, though exceedingly voluminous, have run through many editions; and in the Englishspeaking world he has found distinguished interpreters, and his name is better known than that of any German thinker since Haeckel and Nietzsche. It is no common thing for such a reputation to be attained by a living Professor of Philosophy; and the 'New Idealism' which he preaches is a sign of the times.

6

Eucken shares with the general mind of to-day the doctrine that life is action and not mere intelligence. This does not mean, for him, the acceptance either of Pragmatism or of Voluntarism. Pragmatism-such is his verdict-marches under the flag of utility; and the useful is ex hypothesi the inferior. Voluntarism puts Will in the centre; and, by merely reading one mental function for another, leaves us as one-sided as before. Action is life, in Eucken's activism,' neither as seeking some special goal, nor as springing from some special source, but because in it, and in it alone, life reveals itself as a complete and satisfactory experience. 'On ne peut pas s'appuyer que sur ce qui résiste.' In the full typical activity, an actual and solid fact is at the same time the utterance and expression of the self; and it is only in so far as we approach such an activity that we genuinely possess in ourselves true life and living. Our experience is in this case a fact of the most substantive order-we may think of an artist's creation or a successful reformer's enterpriseand yet it is ours, and embodies ourself; and more than that, it is something which we have created; it is a new being. Our centre of gravity, so to speak, is shifted outside our mere average and trivial existence. We are buoyed up and inspired by contact with a new order of things.

In this attitude of activism' are implied two positions which are for Eucken fundamental. Life, he contends, is a problem; and its first serious step is a negation.

Life is a problem through and through, and especially so to the modern mind. What were facts for our fathers --say morality, or space and time-are problems for us. The mind digs deeper as the ages pass. The axioms of yesterday are the paradoxes of to-day. And the paradoxes demand solution; but not from the intelligence. For solutions come not by insight but by action. A problem is a given situation; in the situation we act, and in acting we transform at once ourselves and our world. So we make a new thing; we create a solution where to mere understanding there was none. And thus we originate our world; we do not simply accept it. True originality comes second and not first in time. Out of bare nature we create a spiritual order; out of

temporal history we make a spiritual present. We concentrate into an act, a quintessential extract of the historical succession, the meaning of our generation, of our epoch, of all time. The past, active in our minds and habits, becomes a present power. Out of the linear series of occurrences, which by itself amounts to nothing, we build up the order of ethical and religious life, which is in principle one with what is eternally real.

Thus, secondly, all life worth living begins with a negation. Eucken's favourite adjective is 'new'; and to master its implications is to grasp his philosophy.

On a single page (229) of 'The Battle for a Spiritual Content in Life' (the mere title is suggestive) we find heaped together such phrases as 'the new world,' ' a new kind of life,''this new life,' 'a new creation,' 'a re-birth of life and being'; and this page is typical. Or we may turn to the book entitled 'The Truth of Religion' (p. 129) and read, 'Religion can subsist without belief in a God; the old genuine Buddhism proves that; but without a duality of worlds, without an outlook into a new being, it becomes an empty phrase.'

Hardly less frequent is the correlated substantive 'breach.' Nothing, Eucken continually reiterates, is so essential as a breach' with the normal, with the average, with current social life, with the merely human, with human pettiness, with mere nature. For the question of questions, the ultimate ‘Either . . . or,' is simply this; whether our life is a mere annexe or sequel of physical nature, or is rooted in an independent self-existent spiritual order. Into such an order, if life is to be worth living, we must be reborn. The language is that of religious conversion. By an act in which our own freedom joins with the divine grace, and which can never be replaced by a gradual growth, we must achieve and attain the spiritual world, which is in kind eternal, but, as the creature of our freedom, is a new thing. The spiritual life is a fact and reality in itself. It is not merely 'subjective'; it is sharply contrasted with the life of the natural man, the mere individual, and his trivial associative consciousness. It is the life of conscious moral endeavour, sustained by a sense of unity with something greater than ourself-in a word, by religion.

And thus what he speaks of as Intellectualism can

solve no ultimate problem. For it thinks it can explain what we find given-'the first existence,' as Eucken calls it. And, thinking it can explain, it is willing to accept; and therefore readily submits to the 'given' and respects the character of 'given-ness-that is, of what we find the world prima facie to be like. 'Intellectualism' will never take the attitude that actual existence-the world as it presents itself-may be simply intolerable and a thing that must be ended. It can never found itself upon the great disjunction, the Either . . . or,' which demands an uncompromising choice between nature and spirit.

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Now, this is what the New Idealism emphatically does. It is decidedly, if not even violently, progressist, ethical, humanist or anthropocentric. Not indeed progressist in the sense of deducing, whether with the speculative philosopher or with the scientific naturalist, an inevitable evolution from the thought or law of the universe. That it condemns as a quietist or fatalist attitude, relieving the individual from the task which it throws upon nature or an absolute being. But the New Idealism is progressist in the double sense that it holds vast changes in our existing world and society to be demanded by the very conception of spiritual life, and that it treats the de facto succession of events as a series of real possibilities-of points where it is open to personal activity to transmute the passing occurrence into a feature in a spiritual world. It would say with Goethe:

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Säume nicht, dich zu erdreisten

Wenn die Menge zaudernd schweift;

Alles kann der Edle leisten

Der versteht und rasch ergreift.'

Again, it is ethical. The distinctively ethical temper, the temper of the 'ought,' which feels constantly a flat antagonism between what is and what ought to be, colours the New Idealism through and through. The social average of conduct and culture, the merely human, the pettiness of mankind, are habitually treated with the contempt which marks the reforming moralist in every age. This is pointedly shown by Eucken's attitude to history. For the average of mankind it is a fetter, and you might almost say they would be better without it. Only for the gifted few is it a creative inspiration.

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