REVIEWS 137
made upon the basis of personal experience and wide acquaintance with the best literature of charity and education. The authors are too close to the sad reality to be easily optimistic ; but they believe that with vigorous and timely effort, all the evil forces can be kept under control and the beneficent forces can be made dominant.
C. R. HENDERSON.
The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus. By JOHN DEWEY. Ann Arbor, 1894. Pp. 151. Si. 15.
APART from any specific ethical deductions which may be drawn from it, this book is of great interest to the student of society. "The aim is not to discover the ideal at which all conduct aims, nor the law which it should follow : the aim, once more, is not to find precepts or rules, but to analyze conduct" (p. 12). The book "undertakes a thorough psychological examination of the process of active experi- ence, and a derivation from this analysis of the chief ethical types and crises."
Professor Dewey holds that individual psychology, and social psy- chology or sociology, have the same content, looked at but from different points of view. The former deals with the process, the mechanism, of spirit, and therefore turns to the individual ; the latter deals with the concrete filling up of the individual minds at different times and places, and therefore must have the social standpoint.
Ethics is a systematical and critical discussion of the value of con- duct. Conduct, however, cannot be studied when one considers only the aims and interest of the agent. It is just as important to take the situation into account. " While conduct proceeds from an agent, the agent himself acts with reference to the conditions as they present themselves." Conduct is on one side the organizing of the concrete powers, the impulses and habits <>f an individual agent; on the other, it is bringing the different elements of a complex situation to a unity of aim and interest. Conduct is therefore consciously the same thing that a biological function is un< onsciously. On this basis an ethical postulate can be formulated, analogous to the scientific postulate of uniformity of nature. This postulate is that "tin conduct required truly to express an agent is, at the same tune, the conduct required to maintain the situation in which lie is placed : while conversely, the conduct that truly meets the situation is that which furthers the agent."
