talization of corporations, unearned increment, and the minutiæ of social legislation for wage earners. It will likely, therefore, be of service to students of the social questions of to-day, and it shows only too clearly how pressing these are upon the attention and the leisure of academic teachers in America. I am inclined, however, to doubt whether the impression it tends to create, that it is the business either of ethical science or of morality to furnish independent and formulated solutions of burning questions, is not calculated, after all, to rob morality of much of its interest, and the moral man of something of his very responsibility. There is for him no predetermined or formulated solution of any concrete difficulty apart from the precedent he may himself create, or apart from the attitude of his own will and the attitude to which it may lead on the part of others.
The reader will find in this part, however, the same cogency of argumentation, the same stimulating 'teaching' at which the authors successfully aim, the same closeness of grip on the realities of life and conduct, the same strong sense for concrete moral situations, the same power of shrewd moral observation, and the same acute perception of the drift of modern tendencies that characterizes the central theoretical portions of the volume, but at the same time,—I venture to suggest,—the same lack of definite characterization of the essential point of view, so far as right and wrong and the moral judgment are concerned, and the same Pragmatist tendency to regard that which 'works best' as the desideratum in the matter of a standard of conduct. It has too, I think, a somewhat disappointing and partial character, if we go to it (why should we not?) looking for not one or two but several more or less definite applications of moral theory. Economic and political questions, pressing although they may be, are not the chief or the only field for the application of ethical principles; and even if they were, the mere "setting free" of individual capacities in such a way as to make them available for the development of the general happiness or the "common good" does not seem to be anything very definite in the way of the application of ethical norms and ideas to contemporary economic and social efforts, especially when we remember the comparative absence from the theoretical portions of the work of a definite criterion of "consequences" and "good" apart from the very "voluntary " and "formative" tendencies of the individual to which reference is again made here.
The "more deliberate analysis and experiment" [?], what is claimed to be the "need of the hour" [it is surely something deeper than this] "against the a priori claims of both individualism and social-
