Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/132

 VI NEW BOOKS. Studies of Good and Evil. A Series of Essays upon Problems of Philo- sophy and of Life. By JOSIAH ROYCE, Professor of the History of Philosophy in Harvard University. New York : D. Appleton & Co., 1898. Pp. xv., 384. " I HAVE called these papers Studies of Good and Evil. The title is in its nature wide. It commits the essays contained in this volume merely to one character. They are all, directly or indirectly, contributions to the comprehension of the ethical aspects of the universe. The papers are of very various relations to technical philosophical issues. Four of them are essays in literary and philosophical criticism. One is directly concerned with the effect of the ' Knowledge of Good and Evil ' upon the character of the individual man. One is a contribution to the meta- physical ' Problem of Evil ' in its most general sense. Five, while dealing with metaphysical and psychological problems connected with the nature and relationships of our human type of consciousness, are somewhat more indirect contributions to the ethical interpretation of our place in the universe. One is an historical study of a concrete conflict between good and evil tendencies in early California life " (Introduction, p. v.). The first Essay, entitled " The Problem of Job," deals with the existence of evil in the world in relation to the Divine Being. Prof. Royce's solution of this problem is by him identified with the solution given to Job himself. The answer to Job is : " When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings, not his external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. . . . The true question then is : Why does God suffer ? The sole possible, neces- sary and sufficient answer is : Because without suffering, without ill, without woe, evil, tragedy, God's life could not be perfected " (p. 14). All moral development involves the sacrifice of a lower to a higher interest, and with the necessity for this sacrifice suffering and evil are essentially connected. The same thesis is developed from the purely human point of view in the fourth Essay, on " The Knowledge of Good and Evil ". The second Essay, on " The Case of John Bunyan," is a most interest- ing piece of psychological analysis, executed with masterly ability and sympathetic insight. The third, "Tennyson and Pessimism," treats of the contrast between Tennyson's earlier and later Locksley Hall. Prof. Royce points out that the optimism of the first poem is the sort of day- dreaming which leads to disillusion and melancholy. In the later poem, Tennyson has become alive to the reality of things, and to the necessary conditions and limitations imposed by this reality. His later mood is relatively the saner and truer and, in a sense, the more optimistic, be- cause it forms a transition to an optimism which will stand wear and tear. In the fifth Essay, the ethical despair of Huxley in face of the dominance of non-ethical natural laws is shown to be founded, not in the