Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/98

82 virtues he examines, and gives rare glimpses into their inmost essence. The supplementary section on the State is too brief for so large a subject, but the author shows the moral basis of property and discloses the moral barriers to the nationalization of individual possessions.

Part III. deals with the subjects of Freedom, God, and Immortality as implications of the moral life. Professor Seth had already written on the former subject, and his views have not materially changed. Only a few pages are given to the problem of immortality. In the longer chapter devoted to the problem of God, Professor Seth gives his own view as follows:— "If Philosophy finds itself precluded from going the whole length of the Christian doctrine of divine Providence, yet it seems to me that Christianity puts into the hands of philosophy a clue which it would do well to follow up, especially since the conception is not altogether new, but is the complement and development of the Aristotelian and Stoic theology which I have just sketched. All that I am concerned at this point to maintain is the speculative legitimacy and necessity of the demand for a Moral Order somehow pervading and using (in however strange and unexpected wise) the order of Nature, and thus making possible for the moral being the fulfillment of his moral task, the perfect realization of all his moral capacities."

That Professor Seth faces the theological issue seems to me one of the best features of his book. We may put theology out of our laboratories and libraries; but since man, though a product of nature, is also a revelation of God, the moral and spiritual life in which his being flowers must always be a book closed with seven seals to every merely naturalistic theory of Ethics.

Prior to the appearance of the present book Mr. Kidd had published, so far as I am aware, only a few essays on biological subjects, e.g., Birds of London, Aphides, Origin of Flowers. Their themes may throw light on his previous lines of work and explain the biological leaning noticeable in his Social Evolution. The author conceives of social progress as governed by biological laws. There are "certain elementary biological laws of which it is the result and which have controlled and directed it as rigidly as the law of gravity