HENEY STUBT, Personal Idealism. 97 quietism and renunciation preferred by Greek naturalism and by Oriental pantheistic thought. In his emphasis upon the ' single life,' as against the requirements of a universal principle, he, like Mr. Marett, seems to show a sense for ethical reality. He rein- states personality, and makes of history a reality and no ' appear- ance ' ; and leaves the individual a co-creator, by his acts, of the collective order upon the possibility of which he casts his faith at least so I interpret Mr. Marett's conclusions. The final essay of the book, ' Personality : Human and Divine,' by Mr. Rashdall, has for its purpose to defend, against 'the Absolute,' the notion of an individual personal God who may con- ceivably be finite, and whose relation to created persons may not be that of includer to included. The Absolute, if we are to talk of such a thing at all, can only be the totality of Reality, the com- munity of Persons, one of whom is God. Such is the abbreviated indication of the contents of a work rich in style and exceptionally rich in ideas. I add no criticism although I think that every essay calls for some objection of detail because I think that the important thing to recognise is that we have here a distinct new departure in contemporary thought, the combination, namely, of a teleological and spiritual inspiration with the same kind of conviction that the particulars of experience constitute the stronghold of reality as has usually characterised the materialistic type of mind. If empiricism is to be radical it must indeed admit the concrete data of experience in their full completeness. The only fully complete concrete data are, however, the successive moments of our own several histories, taken with their subjective personal aspect, as well as with their ' objective ' deliverance or ' content '. After the analogy of these moments of experiences must all complete reality be conceived. Radical empiricism thus leads to the assumption of a collectivism of personal lives (which may be of any grade of complication, and superhuman or infrahuman as well as human), variously cognitive of each other, variously conative and impulsive, genuinely evolving and changing by effort and trial, and by their interaction and cumulative achievements making up the world. Beginnings of a sincere Empirical Evolutionism like this have been made already I need only point to Fechner, Lotze, Paulsen, C. S. Peirce (in the Monist), and to a certain extent to Wundt and Royce. But most of these authors spoil the scheme entirely by the arbitrary way in which they clap on to it an absolute monism with which it has nothing to do. Mr. Schiller, in his Riddles of the Sphinx, and more acutely still in various essays, has given to it a more consistent form. It is to be hoped that the publication of the present volume will give it a more mature self-consciousness, and that a systematic all-round statement of it may erelong appear. I know of no more urgent philosophic desideratum at the present day. WILLIAM JAMES.
