Page:Philosophical Review Volume 30.djvu/317

No. 3.] concept nature is deep and rich enough to include both man and nature" (p. 576). Similarly, Professor Babbitt announces his own position as a "complete positivism," by which he means that man as well as nature is to be studied by the same careful and critical methods as have been applied to external nature. Such a view might with equal propriety be designated as a complete or higher naturalism. Each of these writers, too, announces himself as a humanist. But the individualism of Professor Shaw is far more pronounced. This difference appears sharply in their attitudes to classicism in one of its most characteristic features. Professor Babbitt's humanism exalts the Socratic method because it was able to furnish the key to what is typical and representative in human nature; and for him, the typical is the significant, furnishing, as it does, the norms and ideals for imitation. Professor Shaw, on the contrary, leans towards nominalism because he emphasizes the uniqueness of the individual. He regards the likenesses as superficial, the differences as fundamental, whereas Professor Babbitt would emphasize the likenesses and minimize the differences.

In the work as a whole, one feels that science hardly receives due recognition at the hands of Professor Shaw, despite his distinction between genuine science and what he terms "scientism." Why should we not, for example, recognize the creative joy of the scientific worker as well as of the artist? The tendency to overestimate the value of the æsthete, in comparison with that of the genuine scientist, may be illustrated by a concrete case. "Was Darwin," Professor Shaw asks, "of greater value to the spiritual life of humanity than Baudelaire?" (p. 300). The answer to this question does not seem to me to admit of doubt. Many would be inclined to go much further in such a comparison, and to accept the verdict of Professor Babbitt when he says: "An Edison, we may suppose, who is drawn ever onward by the lure of wonder and curiosity and power, has little time to be bored. It is surely better to escape from the boredom of life after the fashion of Edison than after the fashion of Baudelaire " (Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 350). As for Baudelaire, I can not escape the conviction that he stood in sore need of a wholesome naturalism. Certainly he never escaped from mediaevalism. Lacking both the insight and the courage to escape, and divided in his own breast, he became the prey of a morbid and distorted view of life. His pronounced sadism is a point in evidence. He believed in "the necessity for beating women," and was astonished that "people permit women to enter churches."