CHAPTER V
RELIGION AND PSYCHOLOGY
It has been noticed in the two previous chapters how Eucken discovered the presence of a mental or spiritual life in the very act of knowing any object in the physical world. And the presence of such a life enables the percept to turn into a concept. Such a concept is something far removed from the level of the sensuous object or of its mere perception. We are in this very act in a world of meaning. When such a meaning comes to be acknowledged, it forms a kind of standard which interprets any future facts that enter into it. The further the progress of the knowledge of physical objects advances the more the concepts become removed from the level of the sensuous; as is witnessed, for instance, in the forms of laws and hypotheses, which constitute the very groundwork of physical science. The physical scientist, whether he is conscious of it or not, has constructed an ideal world of meaning which constitutes the explanation of the external world. This is a fact so familiar that it needs no further elucidation here. But there is great need for calling attention to the power which does all this as well as to the reality of the interpretation which that power, in its contact with physical phenomena, has brought forth. That such a power of the mind is connected with physical existence does not in the least explain its nature. It is not physical now; it is meaning and value, and there is no such thing as meaning or value in the nature of physical objects in themselves. Their meaning and value come into being when they serve a purpose which the mind has framed concerning them. Eucken insists that a reality must be ascribed to so much as all this—to that which knows and interprets Nature. However much Nature and Spirit resemble one another, however much the latter is dependent on the former, Nature must be conceived as exhibiting a lower grade of reality than mind. Indeed, Nature could not exist for mind unless there were a mind to know it; and this fact inevitably leads us to ask the question, whether Nature could exist at all.[25]
Eucken maintains that the insufficient attention paid to this priority of the subject is the defect of all the systems which have reduced life and all its values to their lowest denominator. A naive realism is a relic of past ancestry; it is a failure to conceive anything as reality unless it lends itself to the senses. Had men not grasped a higher order of reality than that of the external object, none of the mental and moral gains of the world would ever have been realised. Hence, man has to insist that the mental or spiritual life is the possessor of a reality of its own, although much of the material comprising that reality has been drawn from the physical world through the senses. But the spiritual life has proceeded far beyond these initial stages of knowing the world. Material of a kind other than the physical has presented itself to it. Thus, in will-relations we find the material itself belonging to a higher order of existence than the material of the physical world. It is then what might be expected when the spiritual life, within the domain of events of human history, forms a Life-system higher in its nature than the natural process.
Eucken then concludes that Nature and History require for their interpretation the presence of a spiritual life. Nature involves the spiritual in the very power of mind in knowing external things. He would not state that the physical course of things is enough in itself to prove the existence of spiritual life. We are uncertain of any working towards definite ends in Nature. The whole matter belongs to the region of speculation; and speculation based on something other than observation and experiment has greatly retarded progress in connection with the truest interpretation of the highest things. Eucken would really agree here with the physical scientist pure and simple that, however far back the investigations of the physical world are carried, the scientist does not seem to come to anything at the furthest point which bears more affinity to what is mental than was to be discovered at the point from which he set out.
But in History it is different. We are here dealing with material which is not in space, and which has not resulted through any mere succession in time. The material, in fact, is timeless, because it is a synthesis of factors which cannot be reckoned mechanically, and which requires a great span of time in order to be constructed by the spirit of man. At this level the spiritual life has gained a reality which is over-personal as well as personal. It is true that this over-personal reality is in the mind of the individual; but that does not mean that the reality is no more than a private experience. Its content is clearly now higher and more significant than the individual's own life. That we cannot locate in space this over-personal aspect of the ideal is probably a disadvantage. But this cannot be helped; and it cannot possibly be otherwise, simply because the over-personal reality is not a spatial thing. The same may be said of the content of individual experience, even when it does not for the time being hold before itself any ideal. But such over-personal elements mean more than was to be found on the level of knowing the world. A further development of spiritual life has taken place; and reality has become objective in its nature and subjective in its apprehension and appropriation by the individual. Reality has, through the over-personal which has evolved in history, obtained a cosmic significance; and it is out of this region that a Lebensanschauung as well as a true Weltanschauung have developed.
This digression from the subject of this chapter has probably prepared us to see that the potentiality of consciousness and the presence of over-personal elements presenting themselves to consciousness are the two main elements in the construction of the several grades of reality which present themselves on the lower level of Nature and on the higher level of History.
But our question now is, Does the nature of man himself confirm such statements as have already been made? And it is to man's own nature and its content we now turn, as these are presented in Eucken's teaching.