This is the way life itself may reveal its secrets. Although Bergson expressly denies that his philosophy connects with art rather than with science, his presentation of the doctrine leaves no doubt as to what are its affiliations.

This scanty survey of a large field cannot do justice to the skill in dialectic, the lucidity in exposition and the warmth of sympathetic insight with which the philosophy is conveyed. Nor does it indicate how many illuminating turns the new thought is made to take, how many vital problems it touches. Obviously, then, any critical estimate must be even more unsatisfactory. But since we are rather more interested in Bergsonism than in Bergson, we may point out that it is this last, positive side of the philosophy which gives most comfort to those who are finding comfort in these speculations. For as intuitions are peculiarly irresponsible and respond to all kinds of environment, the neo-orthodox of every faith can accept the illumination of intuition in the way they most prefer, including subliminal senses and sixth senses, along with the more sober illumination that does not shock the Bergson's own illumination is of this more restricted kind; and this, combined with the rather negative, polemic use he makes of it in the Creative Evolution, has apparently blinded some of us to its possibilities when once let loose in a society loaded to the brim with intuitions of another sort-the heritage of untold centuries of sentient adjustment.

common sense.

It was surely a triumph of dialectic to have forced such a matter as intuition to the foreground of philosophic discussion; but it was an even greater triumph to proceed to argue from it and still give the impression that the argument was an induction. If intuitions are valid we have reached the truth of things before the reason has time to get started. It can only manufacture justifications for what is already in our possession. The intuitions, moreover, so far as they serve as bases of knowledge, can justify themselves only by other intuitions. For instance, Bergson criticizes our mental inability to conceive of the process of nature as one of flux. But science has already given us much reason to suspect that the flux which his intuition calls for does not really exist. The only radiation we know is wave motion, the nature of which has been apprehended not by intuition but by reason, as any of us will recall from our earliest experiments in physics. When, therefore, Bergson berates our rational processes for their failure to conceive of flux, he postulates a difficulty which reason has a right to deny at the start. It must not be supposed that Bergson himself has failed to notice the bearing of such facts. He confesses at present

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that he tends toward a belief in the pluralistic character of change, although, from his analysis of rest as the complex, secondary state built out of change itself, it is hard to see how he can do so. But, in any case, it is the caution of that criticism which he tends to disqualify from its office, the criticism of scientific rationalism, which forces the admission of uncertainty. Without that caution, the intuitive process of his philosophical method seems to be much the same thing as we have long been familiar with. Sharpened perception," left to itself, can develop as with neo-Platonists or Gnostics into an illumination whose fitful glare distorts the phenomena it lightens. It was such intuitionism that furnished to theologian and scholastic, from Alexandria to Monte Cassino, a "truth" which the profane intellect could never attain. Isidore of Seville, the encyclopædist of the dark ages, registered his ignorance with complacency, falling back upon a sixthcentury intuition of the vanity of the intellectual effort to compass reality. Profane knowledge was to St. Bernard, as later to Calvin, a "welter of error," because it did not fit the intuitions springing from his monastic vital impulses. It is, in a way, quite unfair to Bergson to classify him with such obscurantists, for his own intuitions are under closest rational control; nor can he fairly be held accountable for the vagaries of his followers. But Bergsonism has already gone pretty far in this direction, and it is time the trend was pointed out.

In this connection one of the most interesting developments is the adjustment forced upon pragmatism by Bergson. Nowhere is the practical character of scientific thought more successfully criticized than in the Creative Evolution, the first treatise on philosophy to catch the full significance of the Industrial Revolution. But if practicality gives a warp to thinking which distorts concepts and falsifies reality, how can value, which is practicality incarnate, be the test of truth? It is, surely, rather the test of untruth. The paradox should not be forced; but it suggests itself. It is by clarification of perception, directed upon its problem with virginal aloofness and without preoccupation that one may reach an appreciation of reality, says Bergson. Rational thought deludes us because it is the continuation of biological adjustments. It follows that the values which are apprehended in its grapple with reality are but the shadows of distortions. It is a singular illustration of the mystical character of much recent philosophy to find pragmatism and Bergsonism frequently under the same roof.

Of the books before us, Time and Free Will is a translation of Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), Matter and Memory is a translation of Matière et Mémoire (1896). In these books

one has already the fundamental contributions of the new philosophy, especially the most original and satisfactory proposition, that of the reality of duration. Creative Evolution, which is separated from the first of Bergson's treatises by an interval of eighteen years, is now too well known to need description. But only those who come to it prepared by the earlier works can quite catch the drift of the closely-knit argument with which it opens, where the author almost takes for granted the acceptance of his theory as to the nature of time. It is interesting to see how the whole Bergsonian scheme is embedded in the little essay on Laughter-for laughter, in a word, is the reaction of life when it runs upon mechanistic situations in contrast with it. The Introduction to a New Philosophy and the Introduction to Metaphysics are different translations of an article which appeared in a review in 1903, the former being a rendering of the original article, the latter an enlargement and revision by the author. The rather misleading title given to the unauthorized translation of the unrevised essay was apparently chosen to suggest its claim to be regarded as the primary introductory statement of Bergson's philosophy, but this title is one that the author never sanctioned. The book summarizes and develops the idea that concepts are static and so envelop objects as to conceal that essential changeful character which intuition may reveal. Metaphysics is the scope of this active curiosity.

According to the bibliography just published by the Columbia University Press, some 417 books and articles have already appeared concerning this new philosophy. Among these two only can be characterized. Mr. Stewart's exposition of Bergson's philosophy as a whole is thorough, presenting a careful and detailed analysis before attempting to criticize. He rejects intuitionism and elaborates the question of method. It is a well written and helpful criticism. Mr. Elliot's book, on the other hand, is as red within as the cover outside, as one may surmise from the title. It is too impatient to be just, although there is a fairly good summary of Bergsonism in the opening part. Hostile scientists attack mainly a section of the new philosophy which we cannot develop here, the frank rejection of mechanism. They also query the treatment of instinct and the evolutionary apparatus. Undoubtedly this is a field where new knowledge is more needed than speculation. But, as has already been intimated, something more is involved than a metaphysical or scientific problem.

J. T. SHOTWELL.

REVIEWS.

The Golden Bough. By J. G. FRAZER. Part I: The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (two volumes). Part II: Taboo and the Perils of the Soul. Part III: The Dying God. Part IV: Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Part V: Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild (two volumes). London, Macmillan and Company, 1907-12.— Seven volumes: xxxii, 426; xi, 417; xv, 446; xii, 305; xix, 452; xvii, 319; xii, 371 pp.

The London Times, commenting upon the importance of Dr. Frazer's work, says: "The verdict of posterity will probably be that The Golden Bough has influenced the attitude of the human mind towards supernatural belief and symbolical rituals more profoundly than any other books published in the nineteenth century except those of Darwin and Herbert Spencer." If along with The Golden Bough the reviewer had grouped Tylor's Primitive Culture and Robertson Smith's Religion of the Semites-the three fitting into one common setting-the justice of this appraisal could not be disputed. The study of comparative religion has done as definite service in breaking down the barriers of old dogma and taboo among us as the discoveries of science. Between the first and third editions of The Golden Bough twenty-two years have elapsed, and in that time the outlook of religious thought has changed fundamentally. The readers of the third edition are not startled theologians, such as filled the pages of church periodicals with bitter protest against Dr. Frazer's earlier works, but men of more scientific temper, familiar with the main conclusions of the comparative method. Dogma has by no means yielded, but it has been obliged to learn the facts adduced by investigation in order to make them its own. Hence there is no longer a sense of sacrilege in the discovery, in all sorts of religions, of traces of the dying god and of sacrament and sacrifice in forms analogous to the Christian. Dogma is giving place to criticism, and the only question which the anthropologist need fear now is whether his method is sound and his results reliable.

This changed attitude is so largely due to Dr. Frazer's own work that it seems ungracious for the science to which he has so splendidly contributed to turn upon him in critical dissent, or turn away altogether and ignore him, just when the achievement of a life-time is appearing

in these volumes. Yet that is what is happening. In spite of his prodigious scholarship, his unrivaled power of presentation, his penetrating analysis of data, former disciples are now leaving him and fellow-workers reject his main conclusions. There is admiration on every side for his productivity. In the last two years four huge volumes on Totemism and Exogamy have been followed by seven more of this third edition of The Golden Bough. The manual labor alone of handling these thousands of pages, each with its rich offering of references and its careful analysis, would seem in itself a sufficient task for so relatively short a time. the work is still going on, and the author has already more volumes well on the way to the public. In one of his prefaces-which he uses so aptly for confidences with the reader-Dr. Frazer speaks of the "westering sun" warning him to finish his task; but this strenuous activity gives little hint of anything but vitality at the full. Yet admiration for a great achievement must not check frank criticism of its ultimate validity.

But

The criticism of Frazer's work is, unfortunately, not a question of details. It is a challenge of fundamentals, mainly directed on the one hand against the method of analysis and on the other against the synthetic plan. As for the method of assemblage of data, it is practically the same as that of Spencer and Tylor-what has sometimes, though none too justly, been termed "the English method." It is the comparative method in its extreme form, the massing of facts that bear on their face similarities or contrasts, with little regard for their environment, which however may reveal an entirely different significance. Frazer is no such sinner in this regard as was Spencer; but still he too inserts his references to primitive customs with somewhat the same ease with which one moves a card in an index catalogue. Such a method offers constant invitation to strain a point and to construe the data so as to fit the scheme; and, in spite of Dr. Frazer's vast erudition, he has already been accused of accepting the invitation. One meets already the delicate chiding by Dr. Fowler, for misappropriation of funds for Roman cults, and the divergence in treatment by Miss Harrison, Professor Farnell and others, while anthropologists enter a still franker protest concerning the handling of primitive material.

The plan of the book is therefore an element in the method itself. Indeed it is practically the whole thing, the method being so readily adaptable to any scheme. As a matter of fact, the data have been grouped around a single theme—the problem of the killing of the priest of the sacred wood of Diana in the old Arician cult, which turns out to be the problem of the dying god in nearly all societies. This theme is almost lost sight of in the long voyage of discovery, as Frazer terms