is concerned. We are 'ever learning,' as it were, about morality, but never able to come to a "knowledge of the truth" of our tendency to dogmatize about right and wrong in ourselves and others. ... To "growth," and "liberation," and the balance between intention and result, and to "fruitfulness" of apprehension on the part of the student, everything as it were is sacrificed. Is it not all, we might say, just too "modernistic," too aggressively "vital," and "practical," and too merely illuminating from a pædagogical standpoint? And would it not be better for the youth to learn that not everything practical and formative and liberative is really moral, that his needs as a student are not everything from the standpoint of existing or discovered theory, and that morality stands for something on its own account? Are there not important omissions too in the book? One might reasonably demand the systematic treatment just desiderated, in some one place, either of the fundamental conceptions of ethical theory, or of the unification of the various illuminating points of view actually adopted in this book. And with this there should go a clear differentiation of ethical science from the sociology, and the morality as a personal effort, that bulk so largely in it, and also from the point of view of the natural and the descriptive sciences and from that of philosophy itself. Then there is the whole (actual or supposed) Evolutionary or Development theory of morals; much of it to be sure is not ethics at all, but this might have been indicated in a book which makes so much of personal and social development. And are not the psychological aspects of ethics made unduly subservient to the sociological? And lastly is it not—even upon any theory or any assemblage of fruitful points of view about conduct—somewhat unfortunate that a text-book upon ethics in an important series, by important philosophers, should leave the student without some sections upon ethical ideals as leading out of the realm of the so-called actual into philosophy as the supreme synthesis of facts and ideals.
If space permitted, attention might instructively be drawn to more than one illustration of the many conspicuous merits or results that are due to its clearly conceived and definitely instructive (or practical) point of view—its power, e.g., to surprise and delight the reader with the most valuable kind of corollaries or suggestions regarding many of the tendencies in our present personal or social endeavors. The average reader will find it in fact a mine of acute reflection and information in this connection, and it will therefore have an influence outside the sphere of the mere university class-room. Still this relevancy to present fact and present tendencies is just the very thing we would
