Rudolf Christoph Eucken won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1908, making him one of the few philosophers ever to receive the award and one of the most thoroughly forgotten today. Born on January 5, 1846, in Aurich, East Frisia, he studied philosophy and classical philology at Göttingen before accepting a professorship at the University of Basel at age 25, and then at the University of Jena, where he taught for nearly five decades. Eucken advocated what he called "activism," a spiritual philosophy centered on the primacy of the inner life over materialism and scientific determinism. He argued that human beings possessed a capacity for spiritual transcendence that could not be reduced to biological or economic forces, a position that placed him in direct opposition to both Marxism and the scientific positivism dominant in German universities. His books were bestsellers in Germany and widely translated into English, French, and Japanese. He lectured across Europe and the United States to packed halls. The Nobel committee praised his "earnest search for truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life." Then World War I happened. Eucken publicly supported the German war effort, signing the notorious Manifesto of the Ninety-Three intellectuals in 1914. His philosophical idealism seemed naive against the backdrop of industrialized slaughter. His reputation never recovered. He died in 1926 in Jena, largely forgotten even in his own country. His son Walter became a far more famous economist.