very first but for the disturbing influences which our authors seek to explain. The wealth of references makes an index of names desirable; luckily, this feature, so often wanting in French publications, has not been neglected. There is also a Bibliography, in two sections, of 354 titles; if one may judge from the 209 entries under 'Littérature,' the authorities employed are generally excellent.
The main interest of the authors, as shown in the concluding chapters, is in the relation of the sexual impulse to literary genius and artistic production: given the native ability, mens sana in corpore sano is the prime condition of literary excellence. The underlying thought is nothing new, being at least as old as Plato; but it is presented in a new light, with all the emphasis of modern Continental writers, Freud and the rest, upon the identification of human impulse as a whole with one particular form of it. So long as we remember that such an identification is metaphorical, perhaps we are safe enough. Yet, one may think, a more tasteful and philosophic way of representing the problem of genius would be to label it, 'the artistic impulse and its regulation.'
Lane Cooper.
Cornell University.
The practical philosophy expounded in this work is an application of the general principles developed in the author's Philosophie de l'Esprit. The general standpoint is that of an immanent or objective idealism of the Hegelian order. Reality is conceived not as absolute or eternal reason, however, but as a universal life, unfolding its possibilities in time. This idealism is divested of all theistic or religious implications and interpreted altogether in terms of evolution, reality being identified with the process of development in which infinite possibility is continually being transformed into infinite actuality, and unity is being achieved through the overcoming of multiplicity, a unity which directly resolves itself into multiplicity again in order to attain a higher and more perfect unity.
The dialectic of universal evolution finds conscious expression in the activity of volition, which is the ground and source of man's practical life. The human will is both determined and free—determined in so far as it is the product of definite historic conditions which constitute the situation of a given individual, and free in so far as the action of the individual not merely repeats or reproduces its historic antecedents but adds, or may add, something new, an original contribution, to the given situation. Thus necessity and freedom reciprocally condition one another—freedom is the necessary outcome of actual existence while this in its turn represents the products of previous achievements of will. But freedom may fail of expression, a prey either to the resistance of brute fact or the waywardness of arbitrary caprice. These two hindrances to freedom are really the same and, being the negation of will and therefore of
