the" (p. 613). But what is our imagining? Are we to take it as given in unreflective self-consciousness and merely to analyze out so many of its principles as relate to the thesis in hand? This seems to be the author's method, resulting in attention to creative activity and a-logical or superlogical quality as the chief characteristics of imaginative thought. But again the question presses, is this procedure adequate? Is concrete human imagination creative in the literal sense of the term? And if we are to emphasize its a-logical character, are we not obligated, as an essential preliminary, to discuss the belief common to psychologists that even its vagaries are subject to psychical laws?
Similar difficulties manifest themselves in connection with other phases of the argument. Sometimes definition is lacking, sometimes proof, the establishment of essential principles being taken in an extraordinarily easy way. In epistemology, the author rightly notes the presence in perceptive and imaginative experience of connective relational elements, but with many other thinkers, especially the empiricists of the day, he fails to see that this view voids the concept of reason as a function exclusively abstract. As a meta- physician, he finds idealism or ideal-realism so obvious a doctrine and so conclusive that he spends little effort in its defence. In the philosophy of nature, it is held sufficient to bring forward conservative and creative tendencies in the C.I. as an explanation of the mingling of stability and change among the phases of the world. The facts of relative permanence and real change are recognized in a way for which one may well be grateful: their deduction is another matter; it will appeal chiefly to those who are in a priori agreement with the author's cosmic scheme.
Finally, the literary character of this treatise is remarkable. On the side of clearness the writer rarely leaves much to be desired. At times his style rises to a high level of expressive statement. But the diction is often strained, or, with the grammar, definitely at fault: supposal, imaginal, appulse, to adequate are examples of the former tendency; under the second head, the reader is constantly confronted by the use of aware as a verb active, or even in the passive mood.
A. C. Armstrong.
Wesleyan University.
This book is composed of seven articles and lectures written at different times and for different occasions. All of them converge, however, on the general problem of the nature of philosophy and its relation to religion; consequently there is a decided thread of unity running through them. In fact, the religious drift of the whole series is so marked that the spirit of the book might perhaps have been better expressed by some such title as Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. All of the essays, with the exception of the two devoted to a consideration of the religious implications of the views of Boutroux and Renouvier, have been published elsewhere.
The first study, "Morality and Religion," is an exposition and criticism of
