Comparisons have often been made between Eucken and two other modern thinkers and writers on philosophy of kindred motive--Adolf Harnack and Henri Bergson. The former, who has been professor at Leipzig and Berlin, author of such stirring books as _What Is Christianity?_ and _History of Dogma_, has the German background while Bergson, in his _Creative Philosophy_ has written an epoch-making book with dissimilar but potent deductions. The two men, Eucken and Bergson, have been discussed in a discriminating essay by E. Hermann who thus summarizes the message of the Nobel prize winner in philosophy: “Eucken stands before us today as perhaps the greatest thinker of our age and the protagonist of a new idealism which satisfies our demands for moral reality as no idealistic philosophy has ever done, and as the teacher who has most fully and boldly developed the religious implications of ethical idealism. His philosophy of life is an insistence upon the supremacy of the spiritual. His defence of freedom is a doctrine of spiritual liberty rooted in the saving initiative of God and our dependence on Him. His vindication of our personality is the rescue of the free, God-centered personality from the thralldom of a self-centered individuality.”[33] Especially interesting is the Nobel Lecture, delivered at Stockholm, March 27, 1909, by Eucken, translated by Alban G. Widgery, Cambridge, 1912 (W. Heffer and Sons). As an introductory thought, Eucken emphasizes that we are living in an age when tradition has become a subject of doubt and new ideas are struggling to guide our lives. The two terms, “_Naturalism or Idealism_,” which form the title of this Nobel address, have become confused in meaning and have caused misunderstandings. To Eucken, Naturalism means “faith in man’s relation to Nature”; Idealism accepts this faith but asks if this is the whole of life or if there is not another kind of life, also. He pleads for domination of “The True, the Good and the Beautiful” in life, not merely utilitarian aspects. Life is not just a reflection of a given reality but a striving upward; it does not _find_ another world but “it may _produce_ one.” Idealism which deals with such expansion of daily life has no new aims to-day beyond that of classic times but it is emphasized, because “we have been driven beyond the standards of Naturalism.” The task before literature is coöperation in this effort to reach a higher level, “to purify and confirm, to make the fundamental problems of our spiritual existence _impressive_ to us, to raise life above the mere transient culture, by the realization of something eternal.” This, as he interprets it, was the idea of Alfred Nobel in his will and awards; this has been the life purpose of Eucken as teacher and writer. FOOTNOTES: [22] Inscription with the Nobel Prize Award in Literature, 1902. [23] _Bookman_, 18: 346. [24] _Ibid._ 346-348, December, 1903, article on Mommsen. By permission of the Editor of _The Bookman_.