Page:Philosophical Review Volume 30.djvu/315

No. 3.] not mean the deep and inward expansion of personal life, but rather an insurance against discontent, a nepenthe to drown the monotony and dullness of industrial life. In this sense religion, to quote an appeal in a recent religious campaign, "should pay dividends." Morality, like other interests of life, has, we are told, suffered from the process of socialization. The "old duty" was imposed by the individual "who swung the yoke over his own shoulders"; the new "duty" has been placed upon the individual by society. Such a social morality lacks humanistic content. It results inevitably in an ideal of mediocrity, "the morals of the middle class," since to attain its universality, it can not be "pitched too high or too low." The antidote for the vicious nationalism and sociality of the last generation is found in the decadent individualists, who, if they have been "extreme and perverse," have at least maintained their independence.

It is not easy to do full justice in a brief statement to Professor Shaw's Higher Synthesis, which occupies more than two hundred pages of the text. Yet with his problem clearly in mind, it is possible to see at least the outlines of his solution. Individualism, for which he has so stoutly contended as a corrective of "scientism " and "sociality," and which was right "in a temporary and relative sense," cannot be the goal. Nor can this be found in "anti-naturalism or anti-social idealism," or in any view that would divorce the self from "the exterior orders of nature and humanity." Professor Shaw, however, contends that there must come a deepened and renewed "sense of inner life," and that it can perhaps be realized only by such a heightened personal consciousness as would "threaten our absurd ideals." "Our greatest need," he says, "at the present hour is a touch of solipsistic egoism." In keeping with this same temper of revolt he shows that the path of moral and spiritual progress may lead, as it has always led in the past, to the violation of social standards which have assumed a false absolutism.

More specifically, Professor Shaw's humanism is expanded in three directions, the æsthetic, the moral, and the intellectual. The æsthetic synthesis is concerned with The Joy of Life in the World-Whole. Now nature has not been exhausted by scientific method, which, however valid within its own field, proves helpless to interpret the world as a whole. A more "liberal and fluid" conception is possible, and in such an ideal of æsthetic interpretation the individualistic and the cosmic meet in "one synthesis." The æsthetic may thus overcome the opposition between the two values, and realize its "major possibilities as a form of human culture." Disinterested æsthetic appreciation not