Page:Philosophical Review Volume 7.djvu/227

213 of probable or possible fictions. The Gospels are discredited by being attributed to a period vaguely designated as "long after" the events that they profess to describe (p. 398). Jahweh, as the Christian God, the Father, is, according to convenience, either "the local and national deity of the Jewish people" (p. 5), or "a single supreme God, the creator and upholder of all things" (p. 14). Finally, hearsay science plays its oracular part: "We now know that consciousness is a function of the brain.… We also know that consciousness ceases altogether at death " (p. 46).

This criticism of the method of the book detracts nothing from the value of the facts which it collects together. When these facts are supplemented by others drawn from other fields, they will be capable of playing an important part in the construction of a theory of the origins of religion. But we shall never understand the origin of religion by studying merely its primitive forms. Not only are we unable to observe any such primitive form, but even if we were, we should have to interpret it by the outcome of religious evolution as we find this in ourselves and about ourselves.

This is a timely and well-executed piece of work. In the form of some ten short, luminous lectures it applies the results of the best 'English' and 'foreign' psychology of to-day to the problems of ethical science. While for this reason a 'modern' book, it is also for other reasons a classical book. The difficulties that are partly solved by this fresh psychology are precisely those in which the ethical student ought to feel interested. And the question of how the traditional and current philosophy is affected by the accredited facts of psycho-physical science, is also dealt with.

Psychology is defined as the science of "physical events," of the "facts experienced within a soul;" as the theory of "everything that goes to make up" the world of the 'soul.' Mr. Bosanquet goes as far as any recent psychologist (Professor Titchener, e.g., in his Outline) could wish in the way of distrust and avoidance of any initial hypothesis or assumption about the nature or activity of the self. The self, the moral self, is for him built up out of "presentative" elements, and the "mere mass of feeling which is the undeveloped soul." The soul is "not a ready-made machine "working on a certain material, but a growth of material more like a process of crystallization, the material moulding itself according to its own affinities and cohesions. (It is really just this 'moulding' that, e.g., Külpe and Titchener describe in their psychologies.) The "operative content," the "actual being" of the soul, "comes from the environment." Man's environment, however, it must be remembered, is spiritual, according to true philosophy and to evolutionary science. It