Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/334

322 Neoplatonic theory of emanation than with either science or evolution. It is unfortunate that he does not allude in this connection to the idealist philosophy of nature which flourished in Germany while the German notion of the State was taking form.

The remainder of the book is devoted to a more detailed analysis of biological facts bearing upon the relation between intraspecific selection and the survival of species. The author takes the position that such selection plays only an accessory part in evolution. He rightly urges that an intraspecific struggle (such as war) might give rise to forms which would be less well adapted in competition with other species, and he shows that there is at least some positive evidence that this is the case. His grounds for the conclusion are, first, the well-known paleontological generalization that groups often show extraordinary variability and specialization shortly before they become extinct,—specialization being accompanied by decreased plasticity in the face of new conditions,—and second, the probability that intraspecific struggle is especially likely to further specialization. The second point seems to be less well developed than its importance in the author's case requires.

M. Anthony does not deal with the more controversial questions about natural selection raised by theories of discontinuous variation and the factorial theory of inheritance. Indeed, he does not make entirely clear what factors in evolution he regards as proved, an omission which gives the biological parts of the book an air of being somewhat provisional. The problem of the biological significance of war can hardly be treated constructively without a complete theory of evolution and in particular a theory of heredity. The immediate purpose of showing the pseudo-scientific nature of the defense of war as a means of progress based upon natural selection is admirably carried out.

This is not a book which is to be dismissed lightly as the amateurish by-product of a successful novelist. To be sure, the greater part of the book is concerned with the recent, the fashionable, the popular. Samuel Butler, Psycho-analysis, Bergson, Pragmatism and the New Realism, Evelyn Underhill, Tagore and the New Mysticism—discussions of these topics fill up the bulk of the pages. One wonders not infrequently whether the cult of the new and the contemporary has not distorted the perspective of the past—and the present too. Here is a "defence of Idealism" which mentions Plato and Aristotle but incidentally, and in order to bring out what it is that they contributed to mysticism, i.e., "Those people who will have it that Monism is the offshoot of Mysticism, a disease of thought reverting to a savage ancestry, should really read their Plato all over again, and Aristotle on the top of him ... when it may become clear to them that Mysticism owes more to philosophy than philosophy could ever owe to it " (p. 245). One will rightly judge