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to the student by the instructor, the two share a technique for handling all ideas. Recognizing that ideas are simply tools for organizing experience, the class proceeds to find out what experiences have produced the traditional ideas and to discover what changes in experience have occurred. This gives a method of handling all sets of beliefs or practices and makes the student critical even of the teacher's rationalizations, and hence on his guard against any superimposition of ideas foreign to his experience. We have here a definite development of attitude. The student becomes empirical, experimental, in his religious thinking, and hence tolerant of all facts—not forgetting that any man's opinions are facts in that man's life! Thus equipped to tackle new problems objectively, he comes to think in terms of life, and not merely ideas; and to him the confusion of theology with religion is no longer possible. This is what religious education should be: not the implanting of ideas as authorities for life, but the nurturing of attitudes as technique for the business of living.

BOOK REVIEWS

EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

Dr. John Dewey's latest volume1 is noteworthy for two things: it is a systematic presentation of Dewey's philosophy of nature, and it is the first series of lectures on the Paul Carus Foundation. And upon both of these points remark is justified.

The Paul Carus Foundation offers the possibility of a long series of important statements by leading American philosophers of their mature convictions. There are several lectureships in America, but these with scarcely an exception--have been connected with theological schools or with small colleges having a similar attitude and bias. We welcome this new lectureship as genuinely scientific in its aims and atmosphere. If the lecturers are wisely selected, America may have a series of books which may be put on the same shelf with the products of the Gifford Foundation.

John Dewey is now the dean of productive American thinkers. Santayana is, perhaps, the only other thinker with American antecedents whose books are as much welcomed. In the strict sense both have disciples. But Dewey is of interest because his thought is more indigenous. There is almost the trace of homespun in his writings. He strikes us as a self-made thinker to a degree that does not hold true of Santayana. This latter draws deeply from classic culture and reflects an old tradition in a unique and personal way. Dewey, on the contrary, gives one the sense of persistent reflection on the problems and movements of the present. While he has learned from history, he is concerned with its contrast with the present rather than with its agreements.

The present volume consists of ten lectures. The first defends his own type of denotative empiricism. Empiricism means for him faithfulness to experience in all its crudity and rawness. If we are not so faithful, we run the danger of lapsing into dialectic. "Professed scientific philosophers have been wont to employ the remoter and refinished products of science in ways which deny, discount, or pervert the obvious and immediate facts of gross experience, unmindful that thereby philosophy itself commits suicide." The remaining lectures develop his historical view of 1 Experience and Nature. By John Dewey. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1925. xi+443 pages. $3.00.

reality under such topics as the following: "Existence as Precarious and as Stable," "Nature, Ends, and Histories," "Nature, Communication, and Meaning," etc. Let me say frankly that I found the middle five lectures by far the most interesting and suggestive. I would recommend particularly Lecture 5, which deals with the profound effect of communication upon the human mind, really making it human and capable of developing meanings of a logical sort.

So much in this brief review in the way of description and indication of content. Like all of Dewey's books, Experience and Nature is solid reading. This book, in particular, covers a large field, and none of the difficulties are trifled with..

But a reviewer has another task than mere description. What shall we say of the doctrines set forth? Is there here an adequate philosophy of nature? And has man been properly seen in his physical setting?

The weakness of pragmatism has been in its treatment of nature. It has been a biological philosophy, and not a philosophy which has grappled with the structure and categories of the exact sciences. Can we say that Dewey has here made this usual criticism no longer true? I fear not. We must still go to Alexander, Russell, Whitehead, and Poincare for suggestive analyses of inorganic nature. Dewey's strength still lies in biology and psychology. Why is this? To a certain degree, I suppose, it expresses a difference of training. Let us be thankful that Dewey is so decidedly good in his own special field. Thus I would expect more from Dewey in the psychological domain than from Russell. But I do think that there is another reason, and that epistemological. It is this term "experience" which makes me shudder. I quite agree with Perry and Lovejoy that it is a "weasel word." Is there not in it always an implication of an experiencer? Of a conscious organism? I think that there is. If so, it is not a satisfactory cosmological term.

As I see it, Dewey has been moving steadily toward realism of the frankest, most naturalistic kind. But, while partially sympathetic with the new realism, he cannot accept the Platonism involved in it. And he finds the same flaw in the Santayana type of critical realism. Much of Lecture 8 is motivated by this opposition. And with it I have sympathy, as do many of the critical realists. Ideas are discriminated meanings given in consciousness and made possible by language and communication. There is no separate realm of eternal essences. It is my own personal opinion that it would require small change in Dewey's outlook to make him a critical realist of the type I, for instance, represent. As it is, his epistemology seems to the majority of contemporary thinkers vague

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and ambiguous. But Dewey has shown such capacity for growth all through his career that we all have hope that some new development will

occur.

In his treatment of the body-mind and life problem he comes near what has come to be called the emergence theory, as he himself recognizes. "The distinction between physical, psycho-physical, and mental is thus one of levels of increasing complexity and intimacy of interaction among natural events." Just why he thinks that his present doctrine is not identical with such a theory of levels in nature as I put forth in my Evolutionary Naturalism I do not see. Obviously his is a theory of evolutionary naturalism.

And this brings me to the statement of one of the weaknesses-as I see it of Dewey's philosophy, viz., his neglect of the problem of localization. Just where are feelings, sense-qualities, and ideas? He admits the central importance of the organism for all these affairs and yet, because the events with which these are connected are more inclusive than the organism, he refuses to locate feelings and ideas in the organism. In this way he escapes from the problems of epistemology and remains in the fog of "experience."

I have said these things rather sharply because they need sharp saying. And yet I wish again to register my admiration for the manner in which he has handled the psycho-physical problem. I know that it has heartened me in my fight against traditional dualism.

There is less that is novel in the concluding lectures. Dewey is not an aesthetician, and his remarks on art strike me as rather flat. His treatment of the value question is good because he is here at home with his intimate knowledge of morality and education.

I have been critical of this book because it deserves that attitude. I mean this in the way of a compliment. I believe that Dewey is on the right track and that something of the nature of a humanistic naturalism has come upon the modern world to stay. Let those who are working in the field of religion take note.

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

ROY WOOD SELLARS

A JEWISH INTERPRETATION OF JESUS1

We are reminded by this book that a Jewish state has not only come into being, but has begun to make its own contribution to the world's cul1Jesus of Nazareth. By Joseph Klausner, Ph.D., Jerusalem. Translated by Herbert Danby, D.D. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925. 434 pages. $4.50.

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