Book Description

Books, as well as men, may have taking or repelling ways, which cannot be subjected to any further analysis, but must be accepted as an ultimate fact. We are sympathetically inclined toward a book if, irrespective of the drift of its contents, it gives evidence of a sincere striving after the truth and shows a freedom from cant, though we may be compelled to reject both its fundamental assumptions and final conclusions. A case in point is the present publication which, though antagonistic to all our philosophical tenets, yet arouses a sympathetic interest, largely due to the author's candor and manifest devotion to the truth. His enthusiasm betrays itself in the eloquent and exalted diction, verging sometimes on poetry and a trifle too rhapsodic for a sober treatise on metaphysics. His style recalls the cultural breadth of the lamented Professor Royce and the genial warmth of William James, both of whom the author claims as his teachers and whom he emulates as his highest models. Even when coming to close grips with an opposing system, the author never loses his scholarly placidity and the air of superior tolerance; the modern philosopher is not sufficiently concerned about the claims of objective truth, which at best he regards as an elusive ideal or an unattainable goal, to allow it to ruffle his temper or to make him indulge in violent controversy. It would not be easy to designate the author's system by one clear-cut epithet, though we may not be far from the truth when we state that it seems to tend in the direction of realism, as the title of the book would suggest. That the author has reached a bona-fide realism, however, we dare not maintain. The old-fashioned theory of substances, at all events, he rejects. He speaks, moreover, in terms which possess a strong subjective flavor. Things are to him "individual blocks," "thought contexts," "embodiments of purpose"; they "are individual by the purposes which select them and which they fulfil"; their reality depends on whether "they make a difference to a perceiving subject." Their value is determined by the experiential background out of which they roll. A primary law of things is interpenetration; hence, they appear in more than one conceptual context, they overlap and have rough edges and a fringe. --The American Ecclesiastical Review, Volume 57