Page:Philosophical Review Volume 31.djvu/635

No. 6.] field within which congruous desires may come to its reinforcement while conflicting desires have an opportunity to array themselves in opposition until one group has established its supremacy by vanquishing the other? And if this represents the role of reason why speak of the outcome as rational instead of as an index of the relative strength of desires? These difficulties suggest the need of an interpretation of reason left unmentioned by the author, an interpretation in which reason is less sharply sundered from desire. The book is attractive in form and has been carefully edited. The reference on p. 357 to the author's own The World We Live In should read xvi instead of vi; and as the text stands James's Varieties of Religious Experience is referred to as a later work than his Pragmatism.

"Even now, after two thousand years of slow emergence from barbarism," Professor Ellwood writes, "the world seems about to relapse back into it. ... From the first so-called Christian civilization has been a very mixed affair. Much even in the Christian church has been non-Christian, or rather stark paganism" (p. 98). In recent decades new forces have arisen which have stimulated selfishness while they have at the same time weakened external authority. Hence there has been a trend away from genuinely social and humanitarian, that is to say Christian, ideals. The quest for power or for pleasure has determined the character of the present political, economical and social life; and these ideals have found championship in literature, science and philosophy. Just prior to the Great War this was conspicuously the case. Therefore the terrible calamities that befell the world and the dissentions and disasters which today threaten to destroy Western civilization.

Where lies the salvation? In vital, humanitarian religion, and this, the author affirms rather than demonstrates, is represented by Christianity alone. But the Christian church, he contends, has quite generally been kept by its strong infusion of paganism from discerning the fundamental teaching of its founder or from estimating aright its real mission; indeed, it has often manifested a serious social, even moral, insensibility the pre-war trend away from humanitarianism "was appreciated by practically all careful students of Western civilization yet the Christian church as a whole, and especially its leaders, remained strangely blind in the matter" (p. 94). Thus, while civilization cannot be preserved without the power of Christianity, the latter must itself be reconstructed. More particularly,