Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/314

Rh Der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt, 1896) has elaborated the religious problem of our age in his work on Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion (1901).

The aim of this work is to show that religion harmonizes with the innermost ground of our being. If this is true, it must follow that every attack and every criticism will serve only to bring out the eternal principle of religion with increasing clearness.

The civilization of the ancients over-estimated the form and culminate in the barrenness of plastic art; the civilization introduced by the renaissance over-estimated the energy and culminated in a restless striving without any absolute aim. The Church, as a matter of course, furnishes a total view of the useful life in its perfection, but it over-estimates the historical forms, in which the total view was once expressed, and it therefore regards all truth as imitation and repetition, whilst on the other hand it isolates the highest realities from actual, every-day life. Critical philosophy has contrasted the realm of value with the realm of reality. But there still remains the task of construing the valuable as the most truly real. A new metaphysic will avail nothing at this point. The only way to attain the goal is through living experience. Eucken applies the term Noōlogy to the effort to affirm the absolute reality of the spiritual world, on the ground that it would otherwise be impossible to maintain the absolute obligations and the superiority of spiritual values. The noōlogical view would direct its attention to the permanent, the free and the rational, as manifested in experience. Particularly in the case of the beginning of a new form of experience—organic, psychical and the higher spiritual life,—noōlogy will discover profound motives. The noōlogical view cannot justify itself