NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
Mr. Whittaker tells us that his present book is "the result of long reflections, but was actually called forth by Professor Juvalta's Old and New Problem of Morality," which has convinced him that the a priori in some sense cannot be avoided and that "English Experientialism, largely justified though it was and is, must inevitably be modified in the end by the Continental Rationalism that found its most powerful expression in Kant." He declares that he has always held that liberty and justice furnish the link between ethics and politics, but that the study of Juvalta's book has led him to recognize in them an ethically a priori element. Perhaps the great world-war and the ethical questions it has brought to the front have had the greatest influence in changing his point of view, as indeed they have led other thinkers to revise their theories of morality. The ruthless violation of liberty and justice has revived the conviction in many souls that some things are absolutely wrong whether they succeed or not, whether they lead to survival in evolution or not, whether they make the particular State that does them prosperous or not. At any rate, our author seems to be expressing a natural moral reaction to the conditions of the present when he writes: "If by reflective thought, without reference to ends egoistic or altruistic, we recognize in ourselves and others rights which it is ethically wrong that any force should suppress, then, even in the hour of the defeat supposed final in the universe, the idea of right would still affirm itself: 'Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni.'" I do not mean to imply that Mr. Whittaker has been swayed by temporary moral indignation and that he has allowed his feelings to get the better of his judgment; I merely wish to suggest that the great experiences of the last three years may have given him a deeper insight into the true ethical values than the reflections of a life-time and the reading of Juvalta's book.
Mr. Whittaker has come to recognize an a priori or transcendental element {in the Kantian sense) in human knowledge and in human morality. The moral law is not a deduction from any end but is valid simply as law. The general expression for it is justice, to which actions prompted by egoistic and altruistic motives are alike under the obligation of submitting. The obligation is imposed by the rational will of the individual person, who imposes the law upon himself. "The choice of good may be largely an affair of rational preference; we may think that persons who choose differently fail in rationality; but, till the question of justice comes in, there does not seem to be that which characterizes strictly moral approval or disapproval. This is really unique; and it is here, I hold, that the a priori element in ethics is inexpugn-
