Page:Philosophical Review Volume 12.djvu/458

442 situation fairly and frankly, and, with the pugnacious confidence of an abounding vitality, resolves to play the game well and without grumbling, striving always to make of life a work of art, and remembering that not he who knows most and thinks most is happiest, but rather he that lives most. The prosaic conclusion of good sense is, we are told, "that as everybody has to play the part set for him by nature and circumstances in a drama of mixed tragedy and comedy, of which he neither knows the beginning nor can foresee the end, and has done with it and is himself done with when his part is played, he ought not to take himself and the business too seriously, but should make up his mind quietly to act it to the best of his ability with all the goodwill and good humor he can command. Bad humor or overmuch self-consciousness will only fret and hurt himself and spoil the play," as will also too much insistence upon austere duty and that unbalanced view which regards ideals as patterns to which actual conduct may conform.

To criticize the underlying philosophy of this book is not the purpose of this review. Such criticism would itself be largely the expression of another system of philosophic opinion. Nor can any review pretend to do adequate justice to the many-sided aspects of the author's reflections, to the vigor and incisiveness of his thought and statement, and to his unflinching utterance of the truth as he sees it. As a thoroughgoing and consistent application of the naturalistic point of view to the manifold facts of life, the volume is to be heartily welcomed and commended. Every one who loves to reflect upon life should dip into its pages. The cynically inclined will find there much to please him, the cut-and-dried idealist will be irritratedirritated [sic] at every turn, and only he who does no thinking at all will remain cold and untouched.

The theory of evolution enjoys the unique distinction of being at once the most important and the most ambiguous of modern scientific hypotheses. To doubt that slow ancestral evolution is in some way responsible for the various forms of organic life which we see about us, has long been to put oneself outside the pale of conventional scientific respectability. But when the interested inquirer seeks for some precise account of the manner in which organisms undergo modifications in their structure, and much more when he attempts to ascertain the