Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/198

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
182
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. VI.

(p. 234). But does not man always act in ways that "admit of being expressed in terms of natural causes," if also in ways that admit of being expressed in terms of moral or spiritual causation? I cannot help thinking that the view taken of miracles in this lecture is a departure from the author's deeper and more characteristic principles. Even in this lecture, he admits the possibility of what has been called "Supernatural Naturalism." "If, in the progressive development of the human mind, man's conceptions of what is natural could become so enlarged as that the whole Christian revelation of God should be seen to be a development of the ordinary course of nature—theistic faith, the most deeply Christian, would then be discovered to be the most natural religion of all, but surely would not on that account be undivine. It would rather be seen as the culmination of the normal self-manifestation of God to man, instead of being mysterious and abnormal" (p. 238). Nay, "in the deeper and wider meaning of 'natural,' all revelation of God must be in rational harmony with what is absolutely or finally natural" (p. 238); the theistic or "humanly related interpretation of the universe" ought to "assimilate the merely physical or non-moral one" (p. 245).

The last lecture contains a brief discussion of "the Mystery of Death." The conclusion is that the persistence of persons after death cannot be proved, either physically or metaphysically, but must remain the object of moral faith. Such a faith "is not, indeed, like philosophical faith or theistic trust, the indispensable postulate of all reliable intercourse with the evolving universe of things and persons; but its sceptical disintegration may disturb this final faith, and so lead indirectly to universal doubt and pessimism" (p. 264).

James Seth.

The Principles of Sociology. An Analysis of the Phenomena

of Association and of Social Organization. By Franklin Henry Giddings, M.A., Professor of Sociology in Columbia University in the City of New York. Third Edition. New York and

London, Macmillan & Co., 1896.—pp. xxvi, 476.

This work has two main points of interest to the student of philosophy. It is a new attempt to constitute an independent science of sociology, and it formulates what is deemed to be a novel theory of the basis of this science. An effort to establish a new discipline in the field of the moral sciences, and to define its relation to other branches of knowledge, is a proper theme for philosophical examina-