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576 strongly than the scientific tradition to the characteristically Greek conviction that the world must be rational, expresses its deepest purpose in such concepts as 'God' and 'Soul.' But both points of view give evidence of an origin in an earlier and primitive religious attitude to the world. "Behind Anaximander stands the Ionian Homer, with his troop of luminous Olympians; behind Pythagoras we discern the troubled shapes of Orpheus and Dionysus" (p. ix). But there is a real continuity between the earliest rational speculation and the religious representation that lay behind it. The book contains six interesting chapters, and the author's manner of treatment is scholarly and clear, and throws much light on the concepts of early Greek thought. In the first chapter, the Greek notion of Destiny (Moira) is analyzed, showing the persistence of this conception from its earliest formulation in Hesiod and Homer and Anaximander, on through Greek science, to its final formulation in modern science as Natural Law. The second chapter records the author's "rash excursion" into a hypothetical reconstruction of the pre-Homeric Greek world. As a guide here is taken the principle laid down by the new French school of sociologists, "that the key to religious representation lies in the social structure of the community which elaborates it" (p. x). A discussion of the concept of 'the nature of things,' or Physis, occupies the third chapter. Here Physis is shown to be a representation of the social consciousness (p. 191), out of which, regarded as a material continuum, and with the attributes living and divine, are progressively but unconsciously carved the concepts of individuality, God, and Soul. The same concept regarded as the Datum of Philosophy, furnishes the subject matter of the fourth chapter. The fifth and sixth chapters deal respectively with the two dominant traditions of Greek philosophy, the scientific and the religious. The work as a whole is an extremely interesting and suggestive account of early Greek conceptions. The relations between the religious and the philosophical significance of these conceptions are worked out in a way which is thoroughly ingenious and which attempts to show that the philosophical interpretation of the relation of ultimate reality to the world of sense experience is determined by the older religious conception of the relation of God to the human group or Nature (p. 135). The discussions of the early Greek philosophical systems are instructive.

The two lectures comprising this volume are written in a style at once clear and vivid (the qualities are by no means always united); and the strains of thought are admirably differentiated, the points of criticism and exposition expressed with clearness and frequently with wit. The illustrations from literature, ranging from Dante to Bernard Shaw, are unusually suggestive. The point of view which the author takes is that of neither disciple nor