Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/331

315 are natural products. Neither rank among their remoter causes any which share their essence. And as it is easy to trace back our scientific beliefs to sources which have about them nothing which is rational, so it is easy to trace back our ethical beliefs to sources which have about them nothing which is ethical. Both require us, therefore, to seek behind these phenomenal sources for some ultimate ground with which they shall be congruous; and as we have been moved to postulate a rational God in the interests of science, so we can scarcely decline to postulate a moral God in the interests of morality" (pp. 332-3). And, lastly, we are led to suppose that "in the thrill of some deep emotion we have for an instant caught a far-off reflection of Divine beauty" (p. 335). Where a reviewer is in thorough general agreement with the author, there is little need of criticism; his chief duty is to signalize and to define the importance of the book. That importance seems to me to lie in the articulate and striking expression which it gives to the current reaction from intellectualism or rationalism, whether of the scientific or of the metaphysical type, from Naturalism on the one hand and Pan-logism on the other; in its insistence upon the higher human "needs"—ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual; in its strenuous endeavor to unify the practical with the theoretical interests. Had space permitted, I should have liked to offer some defense of the philosophic systems of the past, in view of Mr. Balfour's criticism (pp. 164-5). I cannot think that Platonism and Spinozism, for example, have lost or will ever lose their "effectual vitality," and it could easily be shown that the author himself owes much, in spite of his damaging criticism of it, to Hegelian Idealism. I should have also liked to call attention to many individual passages in the book, brilliant in statement and rich in suggestion, as, e.g., the comparison of the metaphysician and the poet (p. 168), the characterization of Spinozism (pp. 251-3), and the description of Naturalism as the "poor relation" of Science (p. 135).

This volume was briefly noticed in the last number of the (No. 20, p. 229). Its aim and content, as well as the author's