Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/92

76 less of a via media between the old and the new) was right in emphasizing the primary character of spiritual reality but not in rejecting the world of sense-experience altogether; for to do this is to fail to comprehend the fullness of reality. We can never go back to this older view of life. The strength of the newer culture lies in its reaction against this narrow kind of transcendence and in its demand for a more forceful reality, for the recognition of the importance of sense-experience. This movement has brought about an elevation of the material aspect of life; but in all its forms, viz., Naturalism, Socialism, and Æsthetic Individualism, it makes the fundamental mistake of trying to derive the whole of life from relations either to the environment or to subjective states of consciousness, thus reducing the spiritual life to the position of a derived product and denying it an original and independent existence. If sense-experience is the only reality, if nothing can transcend it, then there can be no universal which unites the manifold, and meaning must disappear. We have here, of course, the familiar and valid contention that mere succession does not produce experience of succession, that meaning does not arise our of mere existence. Eucken's contention is that the naturalistic standpoint implies a view which regards life as consisting entirely in a series of individual points, and he believes that this conception is still exerting an influence in large circles today. The individual is allowing himself to be reduced to a mere point in an infinite process which reflects no content back into his life. All work madly toward the furtherance of no one knows what end, since it will never be experienced by any one. The hopelessness of this view of life as an impersonal process is clear. To be sure, alleviation from material anxiety may be furthered but this, of itself, will never bring content into life, nor will it in the end make man less a slave. Naturalistic systems forget, moreover, that the reality of sense-experience has undergone so much transformation through spiritual endeavor in the form of science that what is left is hardly other than a spatially conditioned spirituality. Moreover, they are never able to explain in terms of their ideal of material self-preservation, and consequent utilitarian conception of activity, the evolution of an independent spiritual experience, such as manifests itself both in the individual and in universal history. They can never explain the attitude of dying to live (Stirbe und Werde), of activity proceeding solely from inner spiritual compulsion and often standing in opposition to material self-preservation. There must, therefore, be a higher reality in life than the sense-experience of naturalism.