meet the situation. Our course today is two-fold: to wake up the older lawyers, and to educate the young ones, to the claims of science; and then to let the New Era Lawyer work out the final solution for himself. Mr. Arnold's book ought to help greatly in this task.
Northwestern University.
This volume, by Professor Wright, amply justifies itself as a text-book on Ethics. Though not without merit as an attempt at independent construction, it is valuable chiefly for its adaptability to the needs of college students. It is comprehensive, well-arranged, fair for the most part in its criticisms, and generally clear and forceful in style. The argument is built upon the thesis that man's highest good is Self-realization, interpreted as the organization and development of all his capacities. This one principle correlates all our moral judgments, and establishes the supreme authority of moral obligation. As the summum bonum, Self-realization harmonizes Hedonism and Rationalism, Intuitionism and Empiricism, Egoism and Altruism, self-assertion and self-sacrifice; it provides for the permanence of moral distinctions, whatever the possible development of the moral life; and it furnishes the only principle for a satisfactory classification of the virtues.
Without any historical preliminaries, the treatise opens at once with an exposition of the nature and scope of Ethics. This has the spirit, if not altogether the manner, of Professor Seth in his Ethical Principles. Indeed, the reader is constantly reminded of Seth, to whom fitting acknowledgment is made in the preface. But we have not a mere rearrangement of Seth's material. The book gives evidence that Professor Wright is not only a close student of ethical literature, but a thinker of considerable insight, both critical and constructive. This discussion of the nature and scope of Ethics constitutes Part I, under the title, "Ethics as the Science of Good Conduct." Conduct includes "all of the activity by which man's personality gains expression." As against Herbert Spencer and Professor Dewey, the author contends that no conduct is ethically indifferent, since all ends and activities are expressions of a unitary personality. In this part of the book the usual definitions and explanations are given. The moral ideal is the problem of Ethics. The good that completely satisfies the will (= the self) can be none other than the will itself in its fullest realization. The moral ideal must be "an expression of what is latent
