the title was found, and when it was finally decided upon, numerous alterations MIRIAM MICHELSON Author of The Madigans " "Father," she asked finally, "didn't you write that song?" "Yes," was the reply. "Well, it seems to me you should know and corrections were rendered necessary. the tune better." The Voice of Nature Charles Wagner The new genius who gives old truth a new dress begins in unconscious simplicity. The attention he arouses leads to some immediate personal application of his new method to human needs. He turns in due season to the conscious use of his powers and in his work feels the pressure and attention of his audience. Unconsciousness, is no longer for him. In “The Simple Life" and its companions, Mr. Wagner passed through the first period. "By the Fireside" with its high note of peace and reconciliation in bereavement gave the second. In "The Voice of Nature" a man aware of a wider attention speaks. He is simple still. It is almost as easy to underestimate him as to overestimate. Preacher and writer have read his books and "seen nothing in them." No word or line is new. The old lesson is here. This is its power. He has gone back to final and fundamental principles which other men overlay with creed, confession and symbol. It is himself he has in mind when in this book he writes: "People who guard a tradition, they do not understand, allow it to become moth-eaten and covered with dust. There comes a clearer mind which draws the tradition from forgetfulness, cleanses it of impurities, completes it in a primitive spirit and makes it shine like new and actual things. What do the narrow-spirited guardians? Start a hue and cry against the restorer and try him for heresy." It is in the spirit he outlines that in this volume Mr. Wagner turns to the earlier teaching of nature. Again he comes near the great heart of the mother of us all, listens to its ancient beat, without haste or rest, and feels again the benignant peace of those great processes which work their beauty in silent, unconscious power. Metaphysics George He In metaphysics, there are those who disprove and those who seek to prove or hope A System of to prove. Between these two there is the great gulf fixed of treatment and temperament. Professor George Stuart Fullerton is of the men who disprove. was for years the centre of the intellectual life of the University of Pennsylvania. One of those who make men think. Two years ago Mr. Fullerton went to Columbia. After 20 years of incubation, he publishes his final work, "A System of Metaphysics." Much has already appeared in separate articles. These have made this subtle, searching, penetrating method clear. No great system escapes the destructive acid of this analytic logic. One by one, from Spinoza and Des Cartes down, they are neatly dissected and left lifeless and dismembered fragments. Berkeley and Kingdon Clifford, Kant and Spencer, James and Royce, are each slowly sliced,— put through the process Our Chinese friends call "ling chih," "cut into 10,000 pieces." I foresee that the book is to have a constant use by the ingenious postgraduate who likes to puzzle his instructor in the Seminar with awkward queries. No system is erected for other men to mince into meat for their volumes. "We are in complete ignorance of the immediate physical basis of any psychical fact." "Our knowledge of the relations of mental phenomena and physical phenomena is an extremely vague and indefinite knowledge.” "If the world impresses us as a world of purposes and ends, a world in which God is revealed, we may cherish the hope that in the Divine plan there is room for the fulfilment of the aspirations of man.” “In cherishing this hope, we walk by faith." If one ask, Why write 608 pages to ask an unanswered question, one can only say, To be taught to think. Any thing neater than the unkind illumination of Karl Pearson's "Metaphysics of the 'Telephone Exchange'" or Clifford's "Parallelism" you will hunt far to find. When all is over this is left that the acceptance of God has fewer difficulties than any other hypothesis. Of that content of confidence in the inner light which redeems the lacking logic of a man like Royce by a touch of inspiration, there is naught. * * * If you really care to learn how unstable a foundation for metaphysics exists in psychology, read this careful Multiple Personality examination by Dr. Boris Sidis & Good- Sidis, of Harvard, and Dr. hart Simon P. Goodhart, of Yale, into the "Nature of human individuality.' Nearly everyone now knows of the cases in which the same person has two distinct and separate personalities, neither known to the other. In this work these are recorded, analyzed and connoted with hypnotism, catalepsy, etc. A gruesome book which suddenly shows how complex is that "ego" on whose unity all the assumptions and desumptions of psychology are based. Some little explication is adventured, but the work is mostly a case of note-book, accurate and graphic. Moral Education Edward Howard Griggs It is a mistake for a man who speaks as does Mr. Griggs to expose the burning thoughts of the platform on the chill printed page. It gives people time to find out what he is saying. To some speakers this is an advantage. They are the originals. Mr. Griggs is not one of them. But he has a prodigious capacity for saying a thing exactly as it should be said from the platform. For a vast number of readers this is also the best way for them to read it. The current view of education has in this work had the exposition it demands for that large number of readers to whom thinking only becomes effective when it is put in terms of emotion and feeling. A fine fervor fills this volume; but the best thing in it is the admirably annotated bibliography, whose notes are sometimes narrow but, as far as I have read the books, almost uniformly accurate. Classical Echoes in Tennyson Wilfred P. Mustard This most charming volume, destined long to find constant use, draws together in a a series assorted by authors, the adaptations of classic authors by Tennyson. How numerous these are few know but those who have read much and loved much. For them the English poet becomes one long herbal from the gathered past. For myself, I regret that Prof. Mustard has not always given the original; but his work. should some day be the foundation of a scholiast Tennyson, his origins carried on the page in notes. With unwearied industry and a nice taste, the professor of Latin in Haverford has accomplished his grateful task, which garners a wide reading until one feels of Tennyson, in the words. of an anonymous Greek eclogue: "Four the Graces, the Paphians twain and the Muses ten, but thou in all, Muse, Grace and Paphian." Poems William B. Yeats * * * The Celtic singing charm lits its lay through all these lines. Through them all I doubt if there is a line which becomes a popular quotation or which cuts like a double-edged sword, hewing asunder life's inner weaving; but there is also no line. which cannot be read and reread with intoxicated pleasure. In fact, Mr. Yeats's muse is like a nice girl-she looks becoming in any subject and moves like a goddess in any gait. He will pass as Moore passed. Perhaps more completely. But while he is passing all his garments are thick-sewn with silver bells jangling in tune. I do not wonder that the Bryn Mawr girls read every line he writes. |