upon our success in showing the limitation and insufficiency of the external ones of science. Reason must be reconciled with intuition. Here is a major philosophical problem and it is discussed in a novel and brilliant manner by the author. The argument is cumulative and persuasive. Part III elaborates the idea of growth as the process of realizing potentialities. In order to conceive these potentialities as other than external, recourse must be had to the idea of interpenetration of the individual and the universal. At this point in the argument some form of the 'concrete universal' makes its appearance. "When we say that the true life of man is 'buried' we mean that what is real in the individual life is the life beyond individuality, the life of nature in her unity and totality, the life of the All. To realize that life, to realize his oneness with the eternal, changeless soul of Nature, to realize that his inmost soul is her soul, that his true self is her self—to realize this supreme truth, not as a formula, nor as a proposition, nor even as the central idea in a system, but as the central fact of his own being—to realize it by living it, by growing into oneness with it, by being embraced by it, by being absorbed into it this (if he could but know it) is the ideal end of man's existence and the central purpose of his life" (p. 215). Part IV examines in greater psychological detail what it means to grow in feeling, thought and conduct, and inferences are drawn concerning the aims and practices of education. Part V concludes the book with the author's description of the happy man. He who would find happiness must seek it through the self-effacement of love. Selfish desire must be burned away in cosmic passion.
The meaning of the book is familiar to lovers of Plato, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. The detail is modern, interesting and persuasive. The age-old questions recur at the end: Why seek to be happy? Is self-denial an insincere mask of self-assertion? How may one save his life by losing it? Is the individual lost in the universal? Is the author's formula for happiness universal i.e., may all men be happy through absorption in cosmic love, or are there individual differences that make some men most happy in hate and malice?
H. G. Townsend.
Smith College.
This work is a critical study in contrasts within the field of present-day idealistic metaphysics. Idealists are divided into two groups: (1) 'psychological' and (2) 'logical'. The psychological group, represented by the writings of Ward, Royce and A. E. Taylor, endeavors to interpret the world in terms of mind on its presentative side—i.e., in terms of sensation, feeling and impulse, with a marked tendency to treat the individual center of subjective consciousness as ultimate. For this group, reality consists