Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/731

Rh lives depends almost entirely upon the influences, the nutrition, the environment which the authority of the parents and guardians provides." He begins by pointing out and presenting the differences in the constitution of the child and the adult, so as to show "that an infant's development is not a rigidly immovable process, that it progresses slowly and irregularly, and that during its course the child is in so unstable a condition that no strain should be put upon his faculties." The comparative importance of heredity and environment is next considered, with the result that we have already indicated. The methods of the primary school are sharply criticised, and the rule is prescribed that "every subject should, in its claim for a place in the curriculum, be judged by its adaptability to the child's growth," and hints are offered toward a better method. Reasons are adduced and enforced with illustrations from children's words, why religious instruction, as usually applied, is not adapted to the child's mind and can hardly convey correct ideas. In a similar spirit the author discusses The Value of the Child as a Witness in Suits at Law; The Development of the Child Criminal; The Genius and the Defective; and Institutional Life in the Development of the Child. In the final chapter, The Profession of Maternity, the importance is emphasized of making training for the duties of motherhood a predominant feature in the education of women.

The twelve essays constituting Prof. Josiah Royce's volume of Studies of Good and Evil though seemingly varied in topic and as to the occasions on which they were first presented, represent together what the author calls a type of post-Kantian idealism. Their appeal is to those readers to whom studies of more familiar issues in the light of philosophical considerations are more enlightening than fundamental metaphysical arguments. Believing that the student should be relatively independent as to the manner in which he reaches his conclusions and as regards the kind of insight he seeks to impart to his readers. Professor Royce hopes that his papers may serve to indicate in what sense the philosophical theses he has to maintain possess a genuinely individual character. They are all, directly or indirectly, contributions to the comprehension of the ethical aspects of the universe, and are of various relations to technical philosophical issues. Four of them are essays in literary and philosophical criticism; one is directly concerned with the effect of the knowledge of good and evil upon the character of the individual man; one is a contribution to the metaphysical problem of evil in its most general sense; five, while dealing with metaphysical and psychological problems connected with the nature and relationships of our human type of consciousness, are somewhat more indirect contributions to the ethical interpretation of our place in the universe. One is a historical study of a concrete conflict between good and evil tendencies in early California life. The first paper. The Problem of Job, presents the author's theory of evil, The second is a psychological study of a personal experience of John Bunyan. The third paper, on Tennyson and Pessimism, bears on a theory of the relation between good and evil; and another general aspect of that relation is discussed in the fourth paper. These studies prepare the way for the metaphysical issue of the ethical interpretation of reality; and the problem of the general relation between natural law and the demands of ethics is stated in the fifth essay; while the sixth states the general case for an idealistic interpretation of the universe in its relations to self-consciousness. The question of what finite consciousness with all its burdens of good and evil may be and mean is treated in the seventh and eighth essays; and the discussion of consciousness is continued in the ninth. The last three papers concern more special issues, and relate to Meister Eckhart, the German mystic of the thirteenth century; the squatter riot of 1850 in Sacramento; and the late French philosophical critic, Jean Marie Guyau.

Mr. MacEwan's Essentials of Argumentation is the outgrowth of a dozen years' experience with classes in an agricultural