REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
This is the mature work of a man who has labored honestly and unceasingly to sound the depths of the moral life, who has faithfully served the nation as an ethical teacher, who has endeavored to make his faith a living practice and has succeeded, to some extent, in translating it into the body of our social existence. We have here not a closet-philosopher who constructs Utopias "under the shelter of a wall" nor a scorner of theory who follows the fads of the day, but a thinker who keeps his eye steadily fixed upon the world as it is and strives to discover what a "worth-producing" rational human being must will it to be. As Professor Adler himself says, the book "records a philosophy of life growing out of the experience of a lifetime." What it offers "is a system of thought and points of view as to conduct, as they have jointly grown out of personal experience." He does not presume to lay down the law for anyone; he finds that he can set forth the better standards which in the course of trial and error he has come to recognize. The volume gives us an insight into the evolution of a practical idealist in whom the deeply rooted ethical strain is supported always by a clear intelligence which seeks a rational justification of the faith that is in him, prevents him from ignoring the hard facts of life, and saves him from indulging in shallow and sentimental theorizing. Kant has had a telling influence upon him; in spite of his antagonism to the German whose disciple he remained for many years, his conception is essentially Kantian:[1] respect and reverence are writ large in his vocabulary; indeed, maudlin sentimentality is as distasteful to him as were the eighteenth century "volunteers of duty" to his former master. The holiness conception of Kant, Professor Adler tells us, formed the starting-point of his own system; he was attracted to him because he affirmed it, and he "broke with him because he does not make good his affirmation." And it was because of his never-changing faith in this ideal that he rejected Marxian socialism, with
- ↑ I refer the reader to the discussion in another part of the number in which I have endeavored to show that much of Professor Adler 's opposition to Kant is based upon what seems to me to be a failure to do justice to that philosopher's basal thought.
