Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/249

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
No. 2.]
NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
237

tion: that the standard of nature is of necessity "absolutely individualistic" (p. 8). In particular, the sacrifice of one's own life seems to him beyond justification in any such scheme. For the individual, he says, thereby effaces "all possibility of further realizing his spiritual and bodily powers" (p. 43). Two possibilities are here overlooked, which the ethics of naturalism has by no means overlooked: first, that the nature of man may be essentially social, so that it is only in self-forgetful endeavor that its noblest possibilities are realized; and, secondly, that it may belong to the nature of man to die, and to die after a certain fashion. Is it, after all, so great a paradox: that it is possible in dying to realize humanity in its fulness?

So much for disagreements, which—it will be understood—are a measure of the stimulating and provocative charm that the essay has had for me. It is a fine piece of scholarly work in a field from which we, as philosophers, have much to learn, and in which, unfortunately, few of us are competent to labor for ourselves.

Theodore de Lacuna.

Bryn Mawr College.

The following books also have been received:

A Realistic Universe. By John Elof Boodin. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1916.—pp. xxii, 412.
The World as Imagination. By Edward Douglas Fawcett. London, Macmillan and Co., 1916.—pp. xiii, 623. 15/- net.
Psychic Phenomena, Science and Immortality. By Henry Frank. Boston, Sherman, French & Company, 1916.—pp. 556. $2.50 net.
Galen on the Natural Faculties. With an English Translation By Arthur John Brock. The Loeb Classical Library. New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1916.—pp. iv, 339.
The Order of Nature. By Lawrence J. Henderson. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1917.—pp. v, 234.
The Continuum and other Types of Serial Order. By Edward V. Huntington. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1917.—pp. vii, 82.
L'Église. Par A.-D. Sertillanges

. Paris, Librairie Victor Lecoffre, 1917.—2 vols., pp. viii, 318, 358. }}