548 CEITICAL NOTICES : incursions into the territory of general philosophy, but his pre- liminary raids give such promise of solid conquests, if ever he should find the leisure to advance in full array, that the opponents of his metaphysical views would be very ill-advised if they did not make use of the present opportunity in order to prepare them- selves betimes to resist the coming onslaught. The philosophic significance of the views sketched in Prof. James' present volume seems to me to reside chiefly in the fact that they mark a further step in the modern reaction against a one-sided and reckless rationalism a reaction which bids fair ultimately to reconcile philosophy with common sense. That re- action has generally appealed to the will for a title wherewith to check the vagaries of the " intellectus sibi permissus " . The fashion was set by Schopenhauer's Will-to-live, continued in Mainlauder's Will-to-die, travestied in Nietzsche's Will-to-power, and last but not least, albeit in a somewhat different sense, Prof. James draws our attention to the importance of the Will-to-believe. For the selection of the title of the first essay to be the title of the whole volume is significant. That believe w r e must, but that as to the content and manner of our belief we are far freer than we have been taught to believe, is the pivot upon which Prof. James' thought revolves. Thus the book becomes a declaration of the independence of the concrete W 7 hole of man, with all his passions and emotions unexpurgated, directed against the cramping rules and regulations by which the Brahmins of the academic caste are tempted to impede the free expansion of human life. The great lesson it illustrates in various forms is that wdsdom as well as dining is often a matter of great daring, and that there are not really any eternal and non-human truths to prohibit us from adopting the beliefs we need to live by, nor any infallible a priori test of truth to screen us from the consequences of our choice. Now that seems a most salutary doctrine to preach to a biped oppressed by many ' -ologies,' like modern man, and calculated to allay his growing doubts whether he has a responsible personality and a soul and conscience of his ow r n, and is not a mere phantas- magoria of abstractions, a transient complex of shadowy formulas that science calls ' the laws of nature '. As against the worship of such ' idols of the theatre,' Prof. James most opportunely reminds, us that abstractions are made by men and for men and not men for abstractions, that they become not venerable but execrable when their origin is forgotten and the function for the sake of which they were formed is neglected. ' Pure ' science in short is pure bosh, if by purity be meant abstraction from all human purposes and freedom from all emotional interest. Prof. James himself describes his attitude as a " radical em- piricism" (p. ix.) empiricism, because he is "contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypo- theses liable to be modified in the course of future experience," and radical, because he will not take anything for granted, not
