compose ecstatically ballet after ballet with no hope of ever seeing designers, composers, dancers and dressmakers combine to materialise them? And is not this art, by its elaboration, far nearer the cinema than any of the older ones of Mr. Drinkwater's contrast? Poets and composers use only pen and ink to embody their inspiration; scenario-writers need more, for the screen has a larger grasp of material, and this perhaps makes it less easy of comprehension than samplers in and frosted wools." warm and Mr. Newton's kindly book of reminiscences is one of those without which I have come to feel that no chronicle of Dramatic Literature would be complete. The matter is the familar matter, Tree and Irving, and the style has room for the word " sanguifulminous." The author says in his prologue: However these Stories of the Stage may be regarded from the angle of meritoriousness they can certainly bespeak consideration from the veracity angle. That is the language of an age withdrawn. It is impossible to believe that quite such stories, so obviously enjoyed, will issue from the new stage-door of the Vaudeville. Les lauriers sont coupés-but though it is useless going to the woods any more, the wreaths can be handled and dwelt on. These books, tired as one may be of them, have a period interest. They are another side of the life which produced the motherof-pearl inkstand I find myself using, and I dearly wish I had velvet frames in which to put the photo of Fechter as Hamlet, of Laurence Irving in a cycling suit, or of E. S. Willard, moustached and monocled, in a quilted smoking-jacket, as the Spider in The Silver King. The interest of Mr. Agate's volume is also period, but the period is future-perfect. Time will give these annual collections a value which (as with my inkstand) their original owners never saw in them. It will be interesting, one day, to see what the ordinary man thought of the ordinary plays of his time; it is so now, to see what he makes of the extraordinary ones. Mr. Agate is usually sound (that is the word) as far as he goes, and they, then, when the perpetuating of these weekly criticisms seems very valiant, will have forgotten he never went very far-whilst we at present find him a relief among critics who persist in going too far. ROBERT HERRING 552 PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST: AN OUTLINE OF EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY SINCE 1860. By RALPH BARTON PERRY. Scribner. IOS. 6d. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AND OTHER ESSAYS. By BERNARD BOSANQUET. Allen & Unwin. 16s. HOLISM AND EVOLUTION. By General the Right Hon. J. C. SMUTS. Macmillan. 18s. TOWARDS THE OPEN: A PREFACE TO SCIENTIFIC HUMANISM. By HENRY CHESTER TRACY, with an Introduction by JULIAN HUXLEY. Chatto & Windus. 12s. 6d. AN ADVENTURE IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY. BY WARNER FITE. Methuen. 10s. 6d. NOTES ON THE ORIGINALITY OF THOUGHT: THE CONCEPT OF INTERNAL NECESSITY: POETIC THOUGHT AND CONSTRUCTIVE THOUGHT. BY LEONE VIVANTE, translated by Professor BRODRICK-BULLOCK. Lane. 75. 6d. THE MEANING OF MEANING: A STUDY OF THE INFLUENCE OF LANGUAGE UPON THOUGHT AND OF THE SCIENCE OF SYMBOLISM. By C. K. OGDEN and I. A. RICHARDS, with Supplementary Essays by B. MALINOWSKI and F. G. CROOKSHANK. Second edition revised. Kegan Paul. 12s. 6d. HOSE who seek some general information as to the currents of recent philosophical thought and their interrelation will be well advised to turn to Philosophy of the Recent Past, by Professor R. B. Perry, of Harvard. His range in time is from 1860 to the present day, and in space embraces all Europe and English-speaking America. In the surprisingly short space of 223 pages he contrives to give a lively, accurate, and thorough description of the main features of the philosophical scene. He is worth reading as well as valuable for reference; but the book will fail of its aim unless it sends readers to the authors themselves. Professor Perry's book, if read intelligently, will be found a real help to understanding in any part of the field covered. The characteristic weakness of such a survey is excessive attention to novelties and new departures. One might have cited Bernard Bosanquet as a typical case. The one paragraph devoted to him concedes by way of amends that his work is "rich in incidental insight." How true in general this is, a volume of Bosanquet's collected papers comes aptly to remind us. The papers deal with the most various subjects, but are all philosophical and most have already appeared in philosophical periodicals. When they are controversial, they are nearly always engaged in defending some classic philosophical position, or some belief of common sense, against a novelty. A good example is the criticism of Croce's Aesthetic with which the volume closes. As a whole and they make more of a whole than such volumes commonly do-they are a fine record of a life of active and penetrating thought, enriched by an easy and unassuming mastery of the best that the past has given us and held together in the unity of a finished and gracious personality. But Bosanquet never took out a patent for anything he said; never ran one hare to death (as Royce did his "loyalty"); and never labelled himself or his teaching. Hence he is of little use to the surveyor in the triangulation by which his work proceeds. General Smuts, on the other hand, has chosen himself a label like any American. His fundamental idea is " Holism"; and this term is to stand, he tells us, for" both a concept and a factor." As a concept it stands for all wholes, and wholes are "the ultimate creative centres of reality." It is also a factor, because the universe is not a whole of wholes: there is another factor (or factors) with which holism is at issue. Further, thirdly, “holism” may stand for the philosophic attitude which gives this emphasis to wholes and whole-making; and in this sense General Smuts is a holist and his philosophy holism. These are, roughly, the author's own definitions, but in the actual development of his thesis he seems never to use the word for the totality o wholes a use for which its termination really disqualifies it--but either for the doctrine, or for a factor in a relative whole which tends to make it more of a whole and controls the parts in that sense. It is not quite clear whether General Smuts' message is addressed primarily to scientists or philosophers. He deplores the divorce of the two lines of thought. "The pursuit of the separate paths of science and philosophy will not bring us to our goal. Their roads must be made to converge." Probably he conceived himself to be addressing both. In endorsing Dr. Haldane's plea for new categories in physiology, he seems to suggest that physics also requires such a readjustment. Philosophy, on the other hand, must give up its preoccupation with generalities, and make a more determined effort to master the material presented by the sciences. In the sciences everywhere mechanism is now breaking, if not broken, down: in nature at every level wholes are found; and a whole, in its character as a whole, is self-determined. The situation requires a more philosophic science and a more scientific philosophy. General Smuts develops this thesis on a wide front with power and tenacity. It is likely that both scientists and philosophers will accuse him of a certain lack of subtlety which is apt to leave the application of his idea somewhat vague at critical points in his argument. But he writes always with force and vigour, not seldom with real eloquence, and his book should attract a wide circle of readers. It will be interesting to see what fate his idea has. For in essence what he advocates is a return to the Aristotelian point of view, modified inevitably by the concession of the reality of Time and Evolution. The Form as immanent end of every created thing; soul as form of body; a world of formed matter, which is not in its aggregate the matter of a single dominant form; but within that world form superimposed on form to make beings of higher complexity and perfection-these are Aristotle's characteristic ideas. Every one of them is prominent in General Smuts' pages; but the conception of form and the name of Aristotle are not mentioned. Will the scientist who fears the gifts of the Greeks follow the Boer general? Mr. Henry Chester Tracy is, as Professor Julian Huxley's introduction tells us, a biologist for whom biology is but a foundation." His declared aim is to show "how far the verifiable facts of organic life shed light on human relations." But it is often difficult to detect the biological basis of his thought. His speculations are essentially ethical; and many writers who are not biologists have made more use of biology in this context than he has. Like most scientists, when they turn to ethics and politics, Mr. Tracy is an individualist and an aristocrat at heart; but unlike many he has a positive content for his individualism. For him everything turns on the creation of “significant persons" from "the unforced leisure of the Earth." Such a product our standardised education and our democratic machines will never yield: they are a hindrance, not a help. To get the fullness and the riches of life a man must rise above utilities and cultivate what may be called in the widest sense the artistic intuition, the attitude which finds things and persons significant for themselves. "Artistic insight is the only mode by which the content of experience may be grasped as a unity and a value apart from its relation to want and will." Mr. Tracy is impressionist, unsystematic, a little too much inclined, like all American free-thinkers, to rail at his time; but he has a synthesis of his own which gives weight and solidity to his writing. Mr. Warner Fite, who is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, writes his Adventure in Moral Philosophy from a very different background and starting-point, but represents a very similar ethical tendency. He too is an individualist and likes to call himself a humanist. His defence of the old Greek heresy, " virtue is knowledge," taken in conjunction with his refusal to separate the values of truth, beauty and goodness, brings him close to Mr. Tracy's central idea. In temper, however, they are far apart. Mr. Fite's academic elegance contracts sharply with Mr. Tracy's fervour; and his "self-conscious living of life" (surely a very inadequate definition of morality) is a long way from Mr. Tracy's dash for the open. It is Mr. Tracy, not Mr. Fite, that is the adventurer. Mr. Fite's pleasant and discursive essay plays prettily with a number of ideas, but does not master any of them. His paradoxes are pointed enough perhaps to stimulate the general reader, but will hardly pierce the thick hide of the philosopher. Signor Vivante's Notes on the Originality of Thought is essentially a contribution to aesthetic. In obedience to a theory that in this way the spontaneity of thought is best preserved, he gives us a series of observations rather than a connected treatise. The degree of sequence varies. Thus thirty pages or so are given to a series of elaborate comments on passages in Professor M'Dougall's recent Outline of Psychology; and another twenty pages embody a continuous paper on Art and Dreams previously printed in the New Criterion. The central thesis, on which these controversies with the psychologists turn, is the freedom of thought—a thesis quite as necessary and important as that of the freedom of will, though much less prominent in philosophical writing. The necessity of thought is an internal necessity, and this inner necessity, which is what "logic" ought to mean, is more fully realised in poetry, where thought is at its highest power, than in prose. Some of his observations are hard to follow: but he is full of good remarks. Messrs. Ogden and Richards' perverse, but acute and stimulating discussion of symbolism, entitled The Meaning of Meaning, thoroughly deserved to go into a second edition; and now that after three years a second edition is called for, we hope this means that it is beginning to attract the attention of those who are responsible for the teaching of elementary logic in our academies. The authors prefer to regard themselves as psychologists rather than as philosophers, and profess themselves the heralds of a new science of symbolism. But the logician need not be deterred by these professions. His discipline is sadly in need of new life; and perhaps the most promising direction in which a new basis for the preliminary stages may be sought is by of systematic attention to the forms of word-symbolism. But the book is by no means only for logicians. Any reader who does not mind being put through from time to time a rather severe exercise in mental gymnastic will derive both profit and entertainment from these pages. way J. L. STOCKS TOPOGRAPHY E. V. LUCAS'S LONDON. Methuen. 20s. LOST LONDON. By E. BERESFORD CHANCELLOR. Pictured by J. CROWTHER. Constable. 63s. THE LONDON SCENE. By LEWIS MELVILLE and AUBREY HAMMOND. Faber & Gwyer. 12s. 6d. WHERE LONDON SLEEPS. By WALTER GEORGE BELL. The Bodley Head. 7s. 6d. THE FRINGES OF EDINBURGH. By JOHN GEDDIE. Chambers. 7s. 6d. MR R. LUCAS has woven his two books on London-The Wanderer in London and London Re-visited—with the addition of some new matter, into a complete whole, which will probably rank for some time as the best guide book of its kind for London. It is indeed too large to carry about with you-the main use of a guide book; on the other hand it is quite satisfactory for the armchair; for it is very readable, with those graceful turns of expression, those humorous asides and that happy choice of adjectives which we are accustomed to look for in Mr. Lucas's work, and with that thorough appreciation of the many sides of Cockney life which he is so successful in communicating to the reader. True, the welding of the two books is not always complete ; the joins are distinctly visible in places; and in the next edition the number of passages in which matters and places not yet dealt with are alluded to as having gone before (and vice versa) must be reduced. And, when he is preparing that second edition, he will no doubt note that he has made the erection of Temple Bar too early and that he has mistakenly placed London University still in Burlington Gardens. Perhaps, too, he will make further enquiries into the authenticity of the attribution of the house at the corner of Friday Street and Cheapside to a pre-Fire era. Of course it is difficult to keep pace with demolitions; the sixteenth-century houses in Cloth Fair are gone, and Birch's shop is gone too. Mr. Lucas's delight in London is infectious. He finds it all very good, even the Albert Memorial, and with this book should be read Mr. Beresford Chancellor's letterpress to a series of charming drawings made by J. Crowther between 1879 and 1887 to the commission of Sir Gerald Chadwyck-Henley of such places as seemed then likely shortly to disappear. Sixty of these drawings are reproduced, and in turning them over old memories are stirred in every Londoner who has entered his sixth decade. Wych Street with its sagging roofs and overhanging storeys, those galleried inns, the Gun House in Spring Gardens, the Almonry in Whitehall, those quaint little squares and inoffensive alleys tucked away behind the Strand in the vain hope o being overlooked, those comfortable suburban mansions in Stockwell and Vauxhalldid they really exist in my youth? Crowther was prescient, for, of all the houses |