only offers a substitute for vulgar pleasures, but provides a norm for the right judgment of legitimate pleasures, so that, as the author well says, one would "touch pleasure with the skill and lightness which is possible to him who has a consistent sense of the joy of life" (p. 408). The ethical discussion is concerned with the Worth of Life in the World-Whole, and asks how the "immoralistic pessimism" into which individualism has been forced may be overcome; how, in other words, the individual may find his true work in the world. One cannot idealize the present-day industrialism. Talk of the "dignity of labor" is but a "high-sounding phrase" which is always refuted by "the brutality and dullness" of the laboring class. And if there is "some joy attributable to human work," there is "a great deal more sorrow." The "unexpressed and perhaps unconscious logic of capitalism" reduces to a kind of "philosophical cruelty" to the effect that, "for weal or woe, the work of the world shall go on." In place, then, of work done from necessity, with its mechanical and joyless tasks, there must be substituted the ideal of intelligible and creative activity which shall give to the individual a sense of sharing "the august-work which the world seems to be carrying on." The goal must also include knowledge as "the participation of intellectual life in the world." This statement is presented in opposition to traditional treatments of the problem of knowledge which have been dualistic after the manner of "thought and thing," "subject and object," "mind and matter." But intellectual life has gone on, the author says, "in delightful ignorance of the great decisions of the authoritarian epistemologists." As thought becomes more "liberal" and "versatile" the reunion of the self with the world may be effected. The old individualism which ignored the objective gives way to the new individualism which recognizes that the "subjective realizes itself in the objective." To such an individualism, knowledge, as participation in the world, is "the means to the end of life."
Professor Shaw's book, both in its historical and critical dicusssions, suggests a comparison with Professor Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism, which was noticed in an earlier issue of the Review. To Professor Babbitt, Romanticism and all its works are an abomination, whereas to Professor Shaw it has been a useful and even necessary protest, however exaggerated and fantastic, against the forces of "scientism" and "sociality." Both writers agree in their opposition to naturalism, which they interpret in its lowest and most indefensible form. In his final synthesis, however, Professor Shaw indicates the possibility of a higher type of naturalism, as when he says: "The
