Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/91

75 been explicitly recognized and made the basis of our activity. This deeper basis of life is to be found in man's relation to an infinite spiritual life operative within him. A new philosophical synthesis based upon this life-principle and bringing out clearly its revolutionary significance in all departments of life would prove far more adequate to the inner need of our time than any system which we now possess.

Externally considered the book is adapted to the English taste in that chapters, paragraphs, and sentences are short. The vagueness that prevails in certain parts is due to difficulty in content rather than in form. The translation on the whole seems admirable. It preserves the atmosphere of the German text well and yet is surprisingly literal.

The first part of the book is given over to a most suggestive and stimulating critical review of the philosophies of the present day. This forms a genuine introduction in that a clear realization of the difficulties in the present situation reveals the necessity of discovering a more comprehensive life-unity. The exposition and justification for the unity which Eucken upholds forms the second and larger part of the book. Part III points out briefly the general consequences of this standpoint when applied to the different departments of life at the present time.

No one can read Eucken's vigorous and penetrating analysis of the life-organizations of the present day without realizing that it is the work of a man who possesses unusual insight into the spiritual condition of the time as to its problems and its needs, and who is able to command toward its solution a wealth of historical knowledge. His analysis, undoubtedly for the most part a result of the examination of continental conditions of life, seems however in no small measure descriptive of much of our own culture.

Life, at the present day, Eucken maintains, "displays a serious incongruity between an incalculably rich and fruitful activity, with regard to the material side of life, and a complete uncertainty and poverty in respect of its spiritual aspects" (p. xxi). Our culture lacks soul and unity. Disintegration threatens our spiritual life in consequence of the struggle between various life-tendencies. The spiritual life of the time shows clearly the influence of two cultures: an older one, which makes an invisible and transcendent world the primary center of life, and a newer one, which finds in sense-experience the only true reality. The older culture, represented in the religious system and in Immanent Idealism (although the latter is more or