again to limit the meaning of spirit and to denote by the word, “mind (or self) in its higher reaches.” In either of these uses, however, the spiritual is roughly speaking the personal and, as such, sharply distinguished from the material.[1] Dr. Loewenberg’s essential conclusions are, of course, unaffected by this criticism of his use of terms. But, stripped of its paradoxical and unhistorical identification of “spiritual” and “material,” this portion of his paper, it would seem, reduces to a dispute ”where there is no difference of opinion.”
Wellesley College.
Book Reviews
The Nature of Existence. Volume I. J. M. E. McTaggart. Cambridge University Press. 1921. Pp. xxi + 309.
There are some systematic works, even works of philosophy, that may be read as a sort of austere recreation. They may be read for the sheer pleasure of watching the thought sprout and grow in this direction and in the other. We are saying a great deal about Dr. McTaggart’s new work when we say that it can not be included in this class. If there is any one who has the gift of making crooked paths straight and reducing an obscure or complex argument to absolute lucidity, it is the author of this work. Nevertheless, there are passages, whole chapters indeed, in The Nature of Existence, where the reading is about as fluent as the middle chapter of a Symbolic Logic. All has been done, one feels, that language can do; yet the thought itself is so involved that, as Professor Broad has said, “it is a remarkable achievement for a writer to have kept his head among all these complexities without the help of an elaborate symbolism.”
That this difficulty may not be found in the forthcoming second volume of the work is suggested by the author’s statement of his plan. In the first volume he considers “what can be determined as to the characteristics which belong to all that exists, or, again, which belong to existence as a whole.” In the second volume he proposes to consider “what consequences of theoretical and practical interest can be drawn from this general nature of the existent with respect to various parts of the existent which are empirically known to us.” Throughout this first book the reasoning is rigorously a priori, There are only two occasions on which Dr. McTaggart makes any appeal to perception: once to prove that something exists, and again to prove
- ↑ Since Hume wrote, the term “spiritual” has served also to differentiate the personalistic from the ideistic form of idealism.
