Eucken presents in a convincing manner the danger of resting upon the external in Society and State. "We are experiencing to-day a remarkable entanglement. The older forms of Life, which had hitherto governed history and its meaning, have become too narrow, petty, and subjective for human nature. Through emancipation from an easy-going subjectivity and through the positing of life upon external things and, indeed, upon the whole of the great universe, Life, it was believed, would gain more breadth and truth; and in a noteworthy manner man undertook a struggle against the pettiness of his own nature and for the drawing out of all that was merely human and trivial. A great deal has been gained through such a change and new tendency of life. In fact we have discovered far more than we had hoped for. But, at the same time, we have lost something—a loss which at the outset occasions no anxiety, but which, however, through painful experience, proves itself to have been the 'one thing needful.' Through its own development the work has destroyed its own vehicles; it has undermined the very ground upon which it stood; it has failed, notwithstanding its infinite expansion, through its loss of a fundamental and unifying Life-process; and in the entire immersion of man into activity his deepest being has been sacrificed. Indeed, the more exclusively Life transforms itself into external work, the more it ceases to be an inner personal experience, and the more alien we become to ourselves. And yet the fact that we can be conscious of such an alienation—an alienation that we cannot accept indifferently —is a proof that more is firmly implanted in us than the modern direction of life is able to develop and satisfy. We acknowledge simultaneously that we have gained much, but that the loss is a painful one. We have gained the world, but we have lost the soul; and, along with this, the world threatens to bring us to nought, and to take away our one secure foothold in the midst of the roaring torrent of material work."[37]
Eucken shows that the individual will obtain his true place in Society and the State only when spiritual ideals have become fixed norms -norms which form the highest synthesis to be conceived of. And Society and the State will discover their vocations in precisely the same manner. It is impossible to shut our eyes to the fact that things are not well with the world to-day. The growth of the material interests of the world and of life has become a menace on a scale unknown in the previous history of civilisation. There is only one refuge in the midst of all this welter and chaos. That indestructible refuge is "an inner synthesis and spiritual elevation of life." It is this alone which can prevent the disintegration that is bound to follow in its absence. The petty human element cannot be eliminated from this; and the mere life of the hour—the life that has no substance of duration within itself—cannot be stopped on its reckless career without the presence of spiritual ideals within and without. If the world proceeds in its denial of the reality and need of spiritual life and its over-world, the negation, when it reaches its climax of disaster and despair, will "turn again home"—to the necessity of spiritual values—and out of the ruins a new humanity will emerge.
Thus, once more we are landed into the province of a religion of spiritual life as a necessity in the affairs of the world and of the State. Eucken's great plea is that the civilised nations of the world should become aware of all this before it is too late to turn back—before the boat has reached too near the rapids to avoid disaster. The remedy is in our own hands. How to create the consciousness of the situation is the problem of problems, and all individuals are called to bring the whole of their energies to its solution.
It is evident that some kind of uneasiness has to take place in the deepest recess of the human soul, but the best ways and means of doing this are not yet quite evident.[38] We know what we need and what prevents decadence of individuals and nations. "If ye know these things, blessed are ye if ye do them" (Gospel of John). The bridge between a knowledge of the Ought and its possession is difficult to construct, but its importance is necessary to be brought constantly before the people. The majority of the people have thought fit to leave almost the only place where such an obligation was presented—i.e. the Christian Church. Until they return, or some other institution higher than the Church is brought into existence, the peril will remain. No individual conviction, based on anything less than spiritual ideals, will suffice. What we are looking for is in our midst; it is and has been from the very beginning, in spite of an "existential form," largely archaic, present in the spiritual nucleus of the Christian religion.
CHAPTER VII
RELIGION AND ART
Eucken has written less on this subject than on any of those which constitute the headings of the chapters of this book. But he has treated art in precisely the same manner as he has treated all other important problems: he has shown that no great art is possible unless it is rooted in a creativeness which is spiritual. In his Main Currents of Modern Thought we get an instructive account of art and its relation to morality. His account of the development of art in modern times, from the Renaissance to the present day, shows the ebb and flow of the conception of the Beautiful. The check which the Renaissance received through the Reformation in relation to art had its good as well as its evil side. Intense scorn arose in the Protestant world for every kind of image and decoration, because these were supposed to posit life on what was purely sensuous and natural, and so bar the way to the Divine. Still, the obstruction created by Protestantism in this direction opened a door in quite another direction. Art of a higher kind than picture or statue arose, which was far removed from the sensuous level and which emerged from a deeper soil within the soul. The whole series of musical composers produced by Germany is a proof of this. The period of the Aufklärung viewed art with scant favour, but with the rise of the New Humanism a change in favour of art took place.
The origin of this change is to be found where one might least expect it—in the soul of the sage of Königsberg. Kant's Critique of Judgment is unanimously allowed to be the greatest book ever produced on the subject. Goethe and Schiller were influenced by it—the latter in a remarkable manner. We find in these writers an effort to unite the Good and the Beautiful. It is impossible to read the poetry of Goethe without finding that great moral problems are imbedded in his conceptions of the Beautiful. His poetry is an attempt to bridge the chasm between the external world and the soul. His nature was too deep to remain satisfied with the mere impressions of the senses. The union of the world without with the world within gave him a view of the universe and of human life full of originality and suggestiveness.