414 NEW BOOKS. among the benefits of this playful construction were, according to Dr. Hall, the industrial training in Woodwork which was involved, and the valuable civic training which arose out of the discussion amongst the boys of various problems of government. It is interesting to find that. like children of a larger growth, they inflated their currency to meet difficulties, that " prices were affected, and that a few sales were made at prices so high as to cause embarrassment later ". Railroads were proposed, but never constructed, one reason being that they would inter- fere with teaming. The " theory of an annual year of jubilee and a release from last year's debts " was only upheld by the poorer boys and was not adopted. Speaking generally, the author thinks that this is education according to Nature in its best form, and that here we have " perfect mental sanity and unity ; but with more variety than in the most hetero- geneous and soul-disintegrating school curriculum". All this is interesting, but is not its value somewhat overrated ? An opportunity is given tc some boys (the little girls, we read, were most destructive) to work oul some of their primitive conceptions of society in plastic material and the^ avail themselves of it. But I do not believe thereby that educational problems receive easy solution, though I arn quite prepared to admit that the study of such natural experiments may be of much service tc pedagogy in enabling it to get a real grip of the spontaneous working oJ young minds. W. H. WINCH. Kunst und Moral : eine dsthetische Untersuchung. Von Dr. EMIL REICH. Privat docent an der Universitat Wien. Wien, 1901. Manz'sche k.u.k. Hof-Verlags- u. Universitats-Buchhandlung. The writer guards anxiously against the anticipation that his book will contain a theory of the relationship of art to morals. Not theories, as be repeatedly warns us, but facts are his aim. We seek in vain to con- trol the artist's practice by decree or dogma : the important thing is tc know what this practice is and does, the influence which art actually exercises as a factor in life. The book is, somewhat roughly, divided into three parts. In a short introduction Dr. Reich points out how the fallacious tendency to reduce all phenomena to a single principle has been detrimental to a right under- standing of the problem in question. Instead of regarding either of these functions (the artistic and ethical) as merely a form of the other, we must conceive the relation between them as one of reciprocal action. We shall then see that neither the moral, nor the artistic value of any object provides the highest standard of estimation, but that both must be subordinated to its general value for human life. Equally fallacious is a complete divorcing of the two functions : the dogma of Vart pour Vart can only be maintained by an aesthetic of form, to which the nature of the content is a matter of perfect indifference. Before pursuing further this point of view, Dr. Reich passes to an historical development of the problem. One cannot but feel somewhat surprised, seeing how averse Dr. Reich is to theorising himself, that he should devote more than half of his book to the theories of others. As the actual practice of art is the theme of main interest for him, we should rather have expected this to be the subject of his historical survey. At least one cannot help regretting the decision which led him to omit the more popular writers, save such as are less well known, and to confine himself to ' Fachphilosophen '. For if speculations about art have any vital influence either on artist or public, this influence is surely greater
