Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/684

666 biology," the law of finality: or, as the author again expresses it, they merely give voice to the faith which biology too is grounded upon, that, namely, "every biological function has a correlative in reality." This is a book that, whatever may be its value for the unscientific and uncritical reader, the serious student of philosophy can well afford to pass by. It casts no new light upon the problem which it discusses. What there is of value in the doctrine of immortality as a postulate has been frequently stated, and with much greater force. The book is reliable enough; but one is slightly amused to find Loie Fuller and her terpsichorean transformations serving as an illustration in a serious work, written by an abbe, on the immortality of the soul. Accurate scholarship is wanting. Note, for example, to take one of many instances, the discussion of James' theory of the emotions (pp. 38 ff) a theory that M. L'Abbe has not precisely seized, and with which his acquaintance was obviously not made at first hand.

It is a significant fact that the scientific evolutionists of the present time are coming to see more and more clearly that the affiliations of their own theory are with philosophical idealism, and not with the materialism of the eighteenth century. It has not always been evident, I think, either to scientific workers or to philosophers, that the establishment of relationships and laws of connection everywhere in the material world is but the concrete proof—the fulfilling of what the idealistic prophets, from Leibniz to Hegel, had proclaimed. But whatever may be the faults of these philosophical systems, it is now not difficult to perceive that the great truth which they had to deliver was that the world is all of a piece, that it is not a patchwork of discordant elements joined together by chance or arbitrary decree, but a real whole whose parts are organically and essentially united. And one who has eyes to see cannot fail to recognize that the evolutionary theories of to-day, rightly understood, present us with this same view of the world. The evolutionist of to-day, if he is true to his principles, believes as firmly as the Hegelian that the real is thoroughly intelligible, and that there is a system, a unity of law, which explains all seeming dualisms, and 'shuts us together with things.'

Such a type of evolutionist is Mr. John Fiske. That there is one God and no devil, that there is no principle of 'radical evil' in the universe, no antagonism between the cosmic process and man's moral nature, is the fundamental thesis of the volume before us. "When we have once thoroughly grasped the monotheistic conception of the universe as an organic whole, animated by the omnipresent spirit of God," he says, "we have at once taken" leave of that materialism to which the universe was merely an