therefore unimaginable and mysterious, natural succession"—says the author, "is indeed reached in its fullness when a man does what he ought to do—when he realizes the moral ideal. But this right determination, this harmony of human action with moral reason, presupposes a power in a finite agent also to act immorally or irrationally, and by so acting, power even to destroy his free agency" (p. civ). But the passage which may be taken as Professor Fraser's most important confessio fidei is found on pages xci and xcii. I can quote only the first and last sentence. "Are not Locke's three realities [God, Self and External things] tacitly assumed by all men as immanent in experience from the first, in a faith which becomes at last human reason in its highest form? ... It thus appears that the spirit in man, unconsciously, if not reflectively presupposes the antithesis which distinguishes each person from the external world with which his senses and actions bring him into contact and collision; and also presupposes God in the physical order, and in the ideals of duty which make science and morality possible." It only remains to add that the problem still remains for philosophy and theology to determine the nature of these realities which we are obliged to postulate.
Dr. Wenley's book has, perhaps, even less unity than its modest title would lead one to suppose. It consists of six essays, which, as the author says, "naturally fall into two groups." The first four, "Jewish Pessimism," "Mediaeval Mysticism," "Hamlet," and "The Pessimistic Element in Goethe," are clearly intended for the general reader; and of the last two, "Berkeley, Kant, and Schopenhauer" and "Pessimism as a System," only the latter comes to close quarters with the problem of Pessimism proper. Such a mass of material relating, for the most part, only indirectly to the main subject, consisting of essays that may be described as theological, literary, and metaphysical, as well as ethical, would of itself suggest,—what we are told in the preface,—that the author had originally intended to write a more systematic book on Pessimism, but had found himself unable to carry out the plan. The obvious excuse for a book of this
