CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
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 Göttingen and attended the philosophical classes of Hermann Lotze. Lotze interested him in philosophical problems, but did not 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 treatment of Lotze's philosophy, and still find that more was to be obtained from other sources which had quenched the thirst of the great men of the past.
When Eucken entered the University of Berlin he came into contact with a teacher who helped him immensely in the quest for religion, and in the interpretation of religion as the issue of that quest. Adolf Trendelenburg was a great teacher as well as a noble idealist, and his influence upon young Eucken was very great. Indeed, it seems that Trendelenburg's influence was great on the life of every young man who was fortunate enough to come into contact with him. The late Professor Paulsen, in his beautiful autobiography, Aus meinem Leben (1909), presents us with a vivid picture of Trendelenburg and his work. Under him the pupils came into close touch not only with the meaning but also with the spirit of Plato and Aristotle. The pupils were made to see the ideal life in all its charm and glory. The great Professor had all his lifetime lived and meditated in this pure atmosphere, and possessed the gift of infusing something of his own enthusiasm into the minds and spirits of his hearers. Eucken has stated on several occasions his indebtedness to Trendelenburg. The young student entered the temple of philosophy through the gateways of philology and history. This was a great gain, for the barricading of these two gateways against philosophy has produced untold mischief in the past. At present men are beginning to see this mistake, and we are witnessing to-day the phenomenon of the indissoluble connection of language and history with philosophy. In fact, the new meanings given to language and history are meanings of things which happened in the culture and civilisations of individuals and of nations, and such a material casts light on the processes, meaning, and significance of the human mind and spirit.
Eucken learnt this truth in Berlin at a very early age, and his life and teaching ever since have been a further development of it. This fact has to be borne in mind in order that we may understand the prominence he gives to religion, religious idealism, spiritual life, and other similar concepts—concepts which are largely foreign to ordinary philosophy and which are only to be found in that mysterious, all-important borderland of philosophy and religion.
After graduating as Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Göttingen, we find him preparing himself as a High School teacher, in which position he remained for five years.
In 1871 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy in the University of Basel. In 1874 he received a "call" to succeed the late Kuno Fischer as Professor of Philosophy in the renowned University of Jena. It is here, in the "little nest" of Goethe and Schiller, that Eucken has remained in spite of "calls" to universities situated in larger towns and carrying with them larger salaries. It is fortunate for Jena that Eucken has thus decided. He, along with his late colleague Otto Liebmann, has kept up the philosophical tradition of Jena. In spite of modern developments and the presence of new university buildings, Jena still remains an old-world place. To read the tablets on the walls of the old houses has a fascination, and brings home the fact that in this small out-of-the-way town large numbers of the most creative minds of Europe have studied and taught. The traditions of Goethe and Schiller still linger around the old buildings and in the historical consciousness of the people. Here Fichte taught his great idealism—an idealism which has meant so much in the evolution of the Germany of the nineteenth century; here Hegel was engaged on his great Phenomenology of Spirit when Napoleon's army entered the town; here Schopenhauer sent his great dissertation and received his doctor's degree in absentia; here too, the Kantian philosophy found friends who started it on its "grand triumphant march"—a philosophy which raised new problems which have been with us ever since, and which gave a new method of approaching philosophical questions; here Schelling revived modern mysticism and attempted the construction of a great Weltanschauung. But only a small portion of the greatness of Jena can be touched on. Eucken has nobly upheld the great traditions of the place, not only as a philosophical thinker but also as a personality.