RECENT PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 978, 19 November 1910, Page 9

RECENT PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF.

PROFESSOR INGE ON EUCKEN/ _ Four papers were read on "Recent »i - l, < ? phy 111 lts Ration to Religious lielief at one of the meetings in connection with the Anglican Church Congress at Cambridge. " ■ The Bishop of Ossory said that tho problem with ■ which philosophy was now confronted was liow to hold fast to the living, moving fact—experience as wo live it, or as it lives in lis—and, so grasping it, force it to yield to us some true knowledge of its nature. I here were indications that the effort to solve this'problem would not be unfruitful in theology. Mr. C. C. J. "Webb'" criticised "ihe idealism of 1. 11. Green as leavin* l ' doubts as to whether it. allowed room lor belief m- a true personality of God, or m the. freedom.of'individual "human souls.

Dr. F. R. Teunant discussed recent movements m natural' philosophy.-He showed that scientific men are "becoming far less sure of. tho sufficiency of science to comprehend and explain" the whole of human experience. In his paper on the : philosophy of Jiucken, Professor Inge said, that it was long since an independent sneeuative thinker, quite of the first ranlc, had produced a system so indubitably .Christian as Eucken's. The centre of ins system was the idea of the n'eir birth. Eucken is modern in taking life rather than, abstract thought ;as his supreme category. What every thinker now desires is to find a coherent svstem in, and not apart from, experience. He want to unify and harmonise. onr own lives. But the truth which we desire to find cannot be merely subjective and individual. ' A merely subjective truth is no truth at ali. Wo must come into vital contact with the absolutely real, .the objectively true, before we can be satisfied; there is something in us which refuses to •be at peace on any lower terms. -But" this longing can only be granted through an inner' transformation of oiir q.wn nature. We- must win our true life, wo can enter into the thoughts and purposes of the Father of Spirits. Only the purified heart can, see God ; only tho single eye can behold reality. "The acquisition of this new life cannot be' tho work of man by himself. It must be somo magic power which surrounds him, takes held of him, and draws him 011. Christianity, as the religion of moral redemption, shows us how to break with, the natural life and:-enter upon tho spiritual. Love is the supreme world-power, according .to Christ's teaching; but -this supremacy of. love belongs not to Nature as we" know- it. but to the half-hidden world of spiritual reality, the world to which the new birth alone can admit us. The religions problem is not tho concern of Churches and sects, but of the whole human; race, and by the race it. must be steadfastly taken in hand before it can be solved. Eucken thinks ■ that neither Catholicism nor Protestantism holds the key. We must look for. some new form of Christianity corresponding to that stage of the spiritual life to which history lias brought us.