become in reality your cudgel boys and cudgel girls, and will have to suffer for what wrong you committed. If all human beings who are injured by our wrongdoing could cry out at the same time, there would be such a screaming and a shrieking that you would think this was the last of the world. And, besides, there are all those who will suffer from our faults and misdoing, long after we have departed from this life, etc. Thus you clearly see how important it is for you to acquire good manners and to watch over your behavior."

Most of the examples may be used in the home as well as in the church. This is probably one of the reasons why, though the book deals for the main part with the moral training of the young in school, the author calls it a book for parents, teachers, and preachers. It is certainly well worth not only reading but meditating upon. It is a real storehouse of common-sense-knowledge and wisdom, and can be of great help to all those who have anything to do with the moral training of the young.

Fortunate is he who receives his moral training under the influence of such a master mind as the author shows; twice blessed is he who, endowed with such gifts, puts them to such a noble use.

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA.

CHARLES VUILLEUMIER.

LEBENSKUNDE: EIN BUCH FÜR KNABEN UND MÄDCHEN. Von Dr. Fr. W. Foerster. Berlin: Druck and Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1904. Pp. vi, 375.

The title of this book is sufficient to indicate the nature of its contents. The author has here compiled a series of talks which were given in Zurich to classes of boys and girls ranging from eleven to fifteen years of age. These discourses are arranged under nineteen separate chapters, which comprise one hundred and twenty sub-heads. Among the subjects discussed are: Selfcontrol, Habit, the Power of the Mite, Parents and Children, the Consequences of an Act, the Struggle with Misfortune, Humility,

etc.

Americans, especially, who feel the need of more literature of this kind to help to strengthen the moral side of the child's life, will find that this book generously supplies their want. The author does not attempt to teach virtue by insisting on the memorizing of moral maxims; these, however good in themselves, are ineffectual unless supplemented with concrete material.

This is just what Dr. Foerster does. He invariably begins with familiar concrete examples, and by means of these proceeds to develop some important ethical truth. By his illustrations and examples he calls into activity the child's imagination. This gives rise to proper feelings which, in turn, affect the will and thus become the stimulus for right action. Not a single discourse is beyond the comprehension of the average boy or girl from eleven to fifteen years of age. The subjects are sufficiently numerous to present most of the human virtues. The method of approach varies with each topic in order to prevent morfotony. The topics are so well chosen that it is difficult to mention any as more appropriate than the others. One need only mention that Dr. Foerster discusses such subjects; as, Reverence, How Theft Begins, How One Becomes a Slave, How One Recognizes Culture, Cleanliness as a Virtue, to impress even the casual reader with the practical importance of the book. It compares favorably with Edmonds De Amicis' "Heart." If it were translated into English, it would supply a most valuable and a much needed volume which should be in every boy's and in every girl's private library. The translator would experience little difficulty in adapting the stories to American life. The book is free of religious bias or prejudice. The author is not opposed to religion, but he realizes the danger that accompanies every attempt to unite ethical instruction with religious instruction. There is nothing in any of the examples used which would give offense to any particular creed or faith. "For all those who desire to increase their power of will and of love, may this book show the way. . . . Since some have not heard these talks, I have written them for their benefit," says Dr. Foerster in the preface.

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA.

S. E. WEBER.

THE ART OF CREATION: Essays on the Self and its Powers. By Edward Carpenter, author of Towards Democracy, Civilization, etc., etc. London: George Allen, 56 Charing Cross Road, 1904. Pp. xi, 253.

It is rare nowadays in the realm of philosophy to meet with a book written in so beautiful a style as this, embodying a conception so freshly-felt and so far-reaching. This conception, outlined at once in the first and, to my mind, the most valuable part of the book, is indicated in its title, "The Art of Creation." Mr. Carpen

ter's concern is with the children's question, How is the world made? and his answer would seem to be as follows: There is an inner urge in every natural object which prompts it to attain a definite character. This urge is of the nature of desire, and its operations are manifested alike in the growth of the plant, the invention of the mechanician, the persistence of the martyr, the picture of the artist. So much of intelligence and even so much of "self" as is involved in such desire must therefore be granted to every natural thing.

"What is it that before all convinces us that there is an intelligent Self in our fellow-man? It is that he has a Will and Purpose, a Character, which, do what you will, tends to push outwards towards Expression. You put George Fox in prison, you flog and persecute him, but the moment he has a chance he goes and preaches just as before. And so with all of us. Our lives, despite all the blows of fortune and misfortune, spring again and again from a mental root which we recognize as our real selves, which we want to express, which we must express, and to express which is our very life. But take a Tree, and you notice exactly the same thing. A dominant idea informs the life of the tree; persisting, it forms the tree. You may snip the leaves as much as you like to a certain pattern, but they will only grow in their own shape. You may cut the tree down root and branch, and burn it, but if there is left a single seed, within that seed in an almost invisible point lurks the formative ideal, which under proper conditions will again spring into life and expression" (pp. 28-29).

Readers of Aristotle will be struck with the close similiarity of this conception to his,-all the more striking because Mr. Carpenter is apparently unconscious of any resemblance. This unconsciousness has both advantages and drawbacks. Thought-out, as it were, quite independently, the idea comes with a sincerity that seems to give it new value for the modern world. On the other hand the study of Aristotle might have helped Mr. Carpenter to a clearer understanding of his own thought. For instance, he seems vaguely conscious that man as an artist and thinker cannot create with the same fullness as Nature (p. 32); but he does not in any way indicate the precise difference. Would not Aristotle help us here with his definition of "natural objects" as "those things that have a principle of motion in themselves?" Is it not a significant fact that man cannot produce such things existing apart from himself, things, namely,

which possess this originating nisus in and for themselves, except only in the act which he shares with other animals, the act of begetting offspring? It may be perfectly true that there is a real analogy between the painter impressing his conception on the canvas and the tree expressing its conception of itself in boughs and leaves and fruit, but there is also a difference, and the difference is surely just here that the picture has no force in itself to make it persist qua picture and the tree has. If we planted a bed, Aristotle says, and if the wood could grow, it would come up, not a bed, but a tree. The character, in short, is imposed on an artificial thing from without and does not express its nature, but the nature of the man who was handling it. Mr. Carpenter himself has a quaintly suggestive account of the Platonic idea of Bed, every individual bed being a concrete manifestation of the human desire for sleep and rest, the human need of Bedness (pp. 113 and 114). The suggestion springs up: was Plato always feeling after a conception of "reality" as something in which the character, as it were, flowed out of the thing itself, something in which the "what" and the "that" of it were indissolubly united; and was this why he gave up ideas of artificial objects, (as Aristotle tells us he did and as the Timæus indicates,) because such objects could never be "real" in this full sense, depending as they did entirely on others for their character?

Another question is of far-reaching interest. Mr. Carpenter speaks of the indwelling urge as a formative ideal; would he be prepared to take "ideal" in its ethical sense and join hands with Plato and Aristotle in maintaining that what all things sought after was some form of the Absolute Good? The whole drift of his book suggests this, but I do not recall a passage in which the great assertion is explicitly made. Again if this "ideal" is what helps to make the world, must it not in some sense "exist" before the making; "be," as Plato said, "beyond and behind existence"?

To ask and follow up these questions might perhaps lead to something nearing the elucidation of the relation between the individual selves and the cosmic self. Like most poets and mystics, our author has a strong sense of such a universal self somehow uniting and embracing all the others. But how? "How can the great self also be millions of selves?" (p. 71). We get no satisfactory answer, as he would himself admit. He gives us once more the comparison, so often made, to the organism and its cells. Now certainly it is abundantly remarkable that we do have before our

eyes, commoner than anything else in the world, instance after instance of such physical enlacement of organism within organism. Perhaps this is indeed a symbol of the psychical conception we want, still it remains a cryptic symbol, and there is no hint how to translate it into terms of spirit. But it does seem as though the relation of the struggling self to its ideal might be made intelligible in such terms. If so, and if this ideal which is the source of actuality must itself be in some sense real, it might be possible to discover along these lines one element at least that would help to satisfy those who are haunted by the desire for a valid conception of God. To such Mr. Carpenter's other suggestion that the gods are embodiments of the Race Memory will seem an excursionirrelevant, if interesting-into the by-ways of psychology. The search for God is above all the search for a source of Perfection, more than ever yet appeared on sea or land. Perfection that draws us on further and further by the passion it implants in us to embody it in ourselves and to stamp its likeness on everything we can. It is not to be identified with the traces the desire for it has produced in our ancestors and reflected on to ourselves. This would be to offer us the cup when we are thirsty for the fountain. Very possibly, Mr. Carpenter would accept this statement (see pp. 160 and 161), but his language is not free from obscurity (e. g., p. 137).

Again the desire for God has always seemed to involve a desire for something more than communion with individual human beings. In this connection the Wordsworthian sense of union with Nature (pp. 31, 216, and 251) opens a wide door to speculation. Nature, if it stands for anything, stands for something other than

man.

That the book pricks and urges to such speculations is one of its great merits and outweighs much that seems haziness of expression and perhaps of thought. Its appearance, too, is timely in more ways than one; the doctrine of the formative urge is in the air, at the base, for instance, of what is valuable in Pragmatism and Christian Science, if pragmatists will allow the connection. Moreover it might form a bridge between the conceptions of physics and biology on one side and of metaphysics on the other. the physicist's fundamental idea of "matter" is that which tends to persist in its present state, and the biologist can only define "a living thing" as that which uses the environment for its own advantage.

LONDON.

F. MELIAN STAWELL,