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604 serious examination and tentative solution of the recognized technical problems of metaphysics. Not that technicalities are by any means unduly emphasized, but they certainly are not evaded, and a sufficient number of references help the reader to keep his bearings in the more abstract discussions. Professor Santayana's treatment is quite different, and not easy to define in few words. To call his method of treatment predominantly literary might be misleading,—at any rate, if such a statement were made without qualification. Certainly he cannot be accused of 'fine writing,' in the objectionable sense; for his admirable style never intrudes itself upon the reader, but is always duly subordinated to the author's meaning. Nor is Professor Santayana more readily satisfied with merely conventional solutions of philosophical problems than the other writers mentioned. It would be most unjust to characterize his book as a mere popularization of current philosophy. He is always sufficiently independent without being in the least eccentric, and has much to say that is highly suggestive; but, in his praiseworthy attempt to avoid both dogmatism and polemics, on the one hand, and a too schematic and rationalistic method, on the other, he seems to the present reviewer constantly to run the risk of treating in a very general and somewhat superficial way some of the fundamental problems of philosophy.

But although this seems a real and even serious defect of method in the book, one must mention in the same connection an excellence not often found in philosophical works of this general and literary character. If Professor Santayana is, perhaps, unduly anxious to avoid the dangers of abstract rationalism, and is always ready to emphasize the complexity of concrete experience and the importance of the affective side of our experience, he wholly avoids the opposite mistake, so often made, of opposing to reason apart from feeling the other equally abstract conception of feeling apart from reason, and attempting to adjust their respective hypothetical claims. If pure thought is an unmeaning abstraction, mere feeling, baffling all attempts at ideal organization, is something that we do not meet with in our undoubtedly perplexing human experience. On the contrary, morality, art, and religion, in spite of all conventionalities and even superstitions, seem to be regarded by the author as embodying rational ideals not less significant than those of science itself, and by no means separated from those of science by an impassable gulf.

For the true problem is, after all, the relation between the ideal as such and what we often too hastily term the real. And Professor Santayana rightly insists that reality, in order to be such, must always