philosophy. A philosophy, therefore, is to be judged by the system of life it represents and by its spiritual fruitfulness. As the roots of the differences between philosophies are in the systems of life from which the philosophies arise, the conflict is primarily not between theories, but between systems of life. The ground of the author’s general appeal thus becomes apparent. The problem is a vital one; in one form or another, at one time or another, everyone is faced with it: how shall I mould my life? And it is here that we must insist upon the importance of Professor Eucken’s contention that we have to make our decision for one system of life as a whole, and thus for one philosophy of life as a whole, as against other systems and other philosophies taken as wholes.

Life as experienced is a process, a growth; and in this growth it oversteps the bounds of the philosophy in which at an earlier stage it expressed itself, and according to which it strove to fashion itself. The need for a new philosophy is then felt. Generally, the need is for a philosophy more comprehensive and more clearly defined than any of the previous philosophies. Now, Professor Eucken contends that none of the philosophies of life which are common among us in the present time are adequate to represent and guide our life at this stage of its development. He calls us to turn for a few moments from the rush and turmoil of modern life to “come and reason together” as to life’s basis and ideal. In justification of his view, and in accordance with his own principle that we must start with life as we experience it, he considers in the first place the common philosophies of life of the present time in relation to the systems of life from which they spring. Few will disagree with his negative view that Religion—at least as ecclesiastically presented—Immanent Idealism, Naturalism, Socialism, and Individualism involve limitations, and sometimes unjustifiable tendencies and claims, and are inadequate to satisfy the age. His next and chief endeavour is to indicate the direction in which a new philosophy is to be sought, and also tentatively to sketch the outlines of such a philosophy. In the nature of the case—as life is a process—no such philosophy can be regarded as complete. It can and should strive to take up into itself all that is of value in the discarded philosophies. Any attempt to outline a “new” philosophy will be judged by how far, with the incompleteness on all hands, it takes the different threads of life, and blending them into a unity aids their growth individually and as a whole.

Brief reference maybe made here to an attitude, common in the present time especially among English-speaking peoples, which the author does not explicitly mention. I mean the attitude of Agnosticism. This, he would contend and it would seem rightly, is in the main theoretical and does not, as such, correspond to or represent a system of life. The agnostic’s system of life is formed of aspects of the systems discussed, with a strong tendency to Naturalism. The case of Huxley, who coined the term Agnosticism, is an excellent example: notwithstanding his frequently insisting with considerable force upon truths essentially idealistic, no one can doubt the predominant naturalistic tendency of his thought. As a rule the adoption of the attitude of Agnosticism is an attempt, as Dr. Ward has so clearly and forcibly argued in his “Naturalism and Agnosticism,”1 to escape from the difficulties of Naturalism, which in the end it betrays. Agnosticism is, in fact, only an assumed absence of a theory of life. Professor Eucken would insist that the instability of the position is intolerable in actual life. Life’s demand for unification, for consciousness of a meaning and a value, drives us beyond it. “Mere research,” he writes, p. 272, “can tolerate a state of hesitation between affirmation and negation; it must often refrain from a decision in the case of special problems. Life, however, cannot endure any such intermediary position; for life, such hesitation in arriving at a decision must result in complete stagnation, and this would help the mere negation to victory.”

The great objection to all the systems of life mentioned is that they are too narrow, and in some aspects superficial. The new system must unite comprehensiveness with depth. The insufficiency of intellectualism is now generally recognised: the desire of the age is to do justice to the content of experience. Though the new system of life is to include all that is of value of earlier systems, it is by no means an eclecticism, for it has its integrating principle. This we shall best see by considering the method and the result of the philosophy. Life as experienced has already been referred to as the starting-point. To whatever extent we may seem, on the surface of experience, to be under the antithesis of subject and object, when we probe deeper we recognise that both are within life: they are a duality in unity. Here again reference may be made to the above-mentioned work2 of Dr. Ward, in which probably the best exposition in English of this same truth is to be found. Life as experienced is not simply the empirical states of consciousness: its basis lies deeper. The method of the philosophy is in consequence described as noölogical in distinction from the psychological method, which treats of man out of relation to a world, and ends with the examination of psychical states; and from the cosmological method, which treats the world out of relation to man and aims chiefly at comprehension in universals of thought. Expressed in another way, life is fundamentally spiritual. Self-consciousness is the unifying principle: it is only by relation to life as self-conscious that we can predicate meaning or value. All that is regarded as true and valuable in all the above-mentioned systems presupposes this relation. The self-conscious life is not to be confused with the subjective life of the “mere” individual. In fact, there is no “mere” individual, for in all there are tendencies which transcend the limits of individual experience. For example, life includes the relation of man and world; and the life of society is more than a mere sum of the lives of the individuals. Perhaps a more correct way to state the author’s position is to say that the individual shares the self-conscious, or, otherwise expressed, the spiritual life which transcends nature, the individual, and society. This world-pervading and world-transcending self-conscious life—the Independent Spiritual Life—may be regarded as an absolute or universal life. The pursuit of the ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty carries us far beyond considerations of the welfare of the individual, or the society, or even humanity as a whole. In our activities we often attain something quite different from and far better than that at which we aim. Nevertheless, unless truth, goodness, beauty, and all tendencies leading to them are self-consciously experienced they have neither meaning nor value: viewed universally, they presuppose the Independent Spiritual Life. The highest development of the spiritual life known to us is personality, our “being-for-self,” which is not to be identified with subjective individuality. We are not personalities to begin with, but have the potentiality to become such through our own effort. Personality is our highest ideal: in it, as self-conscious experience all other values for us are included. The author calls us, therefore, from that excessive occupation with the environment in which we forget ourselves, to spiritual concentration and the pursuit of spiritual ideals. The spirit of his message may be