relation to Allah; but as Allah is generally conceived as an arbitrary despot, no moral significance attaches to the relation. In Christianity morality acquires its deepest foundation. The conception of a divine love embracing all humanity, taken along with the love of one's neighbor, gives every moral act a religious character.
The religious impediments to morality the author finds in superstition, asceticism, cult, and dogma. The work as a whole shows little originality, but it is an orderly and useful summary of the facts.
This is a thesis for the doctor's degree in the University of Freiburg. The author's first result is: "Feeling is the universal basis and form of all judgments of worth. This applies, first, to sense, then to higher intellectual and moral activities. The feeling of our own worth (man's worth) is the basis of all judgments of worth, and this worth is primarily in the will (man's central activity)." It is then shown that the moral judgment is of social origin. The first unconscious standard of judgment is one's own pleasure. Other standards are custom and religious rites, but the moral judgment ultimately implies an internal standard; and this, it is asserted, is not pleasure, but character. This leads to a discussion of utilitarian and evolutionary ethics, in which there is nothing very new or striking. The remainder of the thesis (pp. 38-51) contains an inquiry into the relation of the conception of ethical worth to virtue, duty, and the good, besides some reflections on self-sacrifice and self-assertion and on ethical methods. The work suffers from scrappiness, too many problems having been touched to admit of any one being sounded within the limits prescribed.
It seems a misfortune that such books as this one of Mr. Sidgwick on The Elements of Politics are not more generally read. The great body of our voters, even of our most intelligent citizens who are to a considerable extent students of politics, read, in the main, what things have been done and are doing in politics. They get their ideas of what ought to be done, only with reference to specific measures. In these cases, they are compelled usually to accept the short-sighted view of
