and sexagesimal systems (the sexagesimal place system of recording numbers appears as early as 3000 B. C.), and the interest on the part of the Babylonians in arithmetical and geometrical series as early as 700 B. C. and in square and cubic numbers. "This brief survey of algebraical developments among the Egyptians and Babylonians shows that much of the material which was developed and extended by Greek mathematicians originated, both in methods and substance, with the scientists of the Orient." Φ BOOK REVIEWS. RELIGION AND SCIENCE: a philosophical essay. By John Theodore Merz. Edinburgh and London, Blackwood and Sons, 1915. Pages, xi, 192. Price, 5s. net. Clearly, this book belongs to a type. To be in love with emotion has been our affliction since Rousseau; to believe in belief is a form of the same malady. Mr. Merz knows Schleiermacher; he may or may not have read Maeterlinck, or Bergson, or Jean Jacques; but he cannot have escaped Goethe. As for romanticism in theology, we find one fundamental assumption: there is something called religion, independent of articulate creeds; there is the conviction that religion is so valuable that it must be “true”; and there is the prejudice that science is hostile to religion. Strong passions do not need explanation; but just as a man who is not very much in love excuses the follies which he has committed for the purpose of appearing passionate, so the philosophical Christian apologizes for the religion in which he would like to believe, and interprets the weakness of his opponents as evidence of his own strength. Maeterlinck exulted in the "banqueroute de la science" because it made religion again possible. In this book the learned historian of European thought expounds three ideas (1) Science deals only with an "external" world, which is a development of the world of common sense "with a still greater restriction of fundamental data" (p. 107) out of an earlier and larger reality. (2) Science describes and explains, its terms consist of "spatial data and their connections." Interpretation, i. e., the assignment (or the discovery?) of value and meaning, is reserved for religion. (3) Personality is that which is most real. The highest experience which we can have is the feeling of absolute dependence (Schleiermacher) which we trace to the influence of a higher power. Mr. Merz decides, first, that the external world is a construction, that conceptual thought abstracts and selects. The products of this selection are subject and object, "an altered and fuller conception of reality," space, time, causality. These entities are carved out of a "primordial stream of thought" which apparently antedates thinking, which is a reality wider (though it is said to be less "full") than the external world. This internal possession is the earlier and truer aspect of our personality—a period (as well as an aspect) when we looked upon everything merely as "internal happenings." We entertained this hypothesis in our infancy, and our age sees the belief justified. Although this is the earlier and truer aspect of our personality, yet contact with other personality leads us out of it. The first external object that the baby apprehends is its mother, not perhaps in her earlier and truer aspect, but as an influence, a spiritual pressure. Nothing else that we experience is so real as personality. The awareness of a group gives us law and morality. The awareness of a supreme spiritual pressure gives us religion. Mr. Merz holds that mind is as much an abstraction as is matter. "The totality of experience....is of more importance, being more real, than the particles into which we dissect it" (p. 72). Whether personality is equivalent to this total experience, or is one of the particles, is not made clear. The phrases "stream of thought" and "firmament of consciousness" recur many times. The account of description, explanation, and interpretation is the best part of the book (pp. 110-120). OUTLINES OF JAINISM. By Jagmanderlal Jaini, M.A. Edited with preliminary note by F. W. Thomas. Cambridge: University Press, 1916. Pp. xl, 156. 4s. net. A compact little treatise by a distinguished Jain. The author divides his exposition into Theology, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Ritual, and appends a number of Jain texts. The book is a compendium, not an interpretation into terms of western philosophy-which is to its credit. It will appeal chiefly to the student of Sanskrit and Pali who has some acquaintance with Indian and Buddhist philosophy, and perhaps is ignorant in this less explored field; but it should interest others as well. We regret that the author did not find space for a comparative account; we learn nothing of borrowings, analogies, or common sources. There is an historical narrative of the teachings of Jainism, but none of the development of its philosophy. Jainism is dualistic, and one would like to know what relation it bears to the dualism of early Sankhya. From Mr. Jaini's statement of the three cardinal principles (karma, relativism, and ahimsa or non-injury of living beings) we do not discern any fundamental difference from some forms of Buddhism. One is glad to see that honor is paid to the labors of that greatest of orientalists, Jacobi. The book is published under the auspices of the Jain Literature Society. We hope that it will spread the interest in a noble religion and ethics and an important philosophy. THE MONIST MORS MORTIS.* ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος. -1 Cor. xv. 26 E read in Ivanhoe, if any one now ever reads Ivanhoe, that in the single combat between De Bois Guilad the Disinherited Knight, the latter, as their steeds together, first leveled his lance at the corslet of the ion, but almost at the very moment of collision he ed his aim to the visor, a mark much more difficult in but where the shock would be irresistible. Slightly has been the procedure of your speaker. It was pose long cherished to address you under some sufy cryptic title on the general mission of philosophy guide of life and the guardian of the higher ideas and that dignify humanity and vindicate the claim of man he head of creation. However, regarding the subject ind more nearly, he grew appalled at its magnitude nvinced of the impossibility of any adequate discusithin the limits of your patience. Then it was that oice of the narrower mark was finally made, a mark lifficult to attain, but yet most certainly well worth ng. Even now he fears that the barrel is too big e hoop, that it will be impossible to compress any ay sufficient presentation within the time allowed. it may be that the necessary directness of statement Idress before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Tulane University, June, 5, will often take on the appearance of dogmatism. fails for establishing in detail every position assumed. things will have to be taken for granted, but only su it seems certain can be proved beyond reasonable Now as the hour contracts, and the way, though broa smooth, is also exceeding long and exceeding steep, without further preliminaries go straight for the he the matter. The basis of all that follows is a strictly spiritua chical, or idealistic conception of the universe. Whe look round you upon the stars, the sky, the sun, the : the earth, the sea, the land, the walls of the hous bodies of animals and plants, the bodies of your fe yea, your own body, the impulse is almost irresisti declare that these things are the world, or at least its elements, that they are precisely what they are quite pendently of you and your thought or your existence you do not make them at all or in any sense, but that own every-day experience is shaped and determine them in all its details. You rise in the morning be the sun has arisen and poured its light upon you an pelled the dark and revealed the smiling countenan creation. "Awake! for morning in the bowl of night But the stars and the great stone of the sun and the of heaven and the light itself all seem to be just what are, no matter what you are, objects independent of existing before you and after you, and moulding you activity at every step, and all in apparent indifferer you as to a puny pygmy. You seem to be but the v mote in the sunbeam, dancing there for a moment and shaken out and falling asunder forever, re-swallow the infinite ocean swifter and surer than even Goethe dreamed of when he wrote: "We by a billow Are lifted, a billow And are heard of no more." Such, apparently, is the tremendous pronouncement of common sense, and it receives daily more and more solemnly the sanction of science, particularly of the grand science of life, with all of her handmaids, zoology, and botany, and physiology, and chemistry, and mechanics, the chiefest of them all. Against this awful oracle of science and of common sense it is in vain that authority and tradition in any and all of their forms raise an empty protest and appeal to creeds outworn and to dogmas whose origin is only too well understood. What Coleridge declared a century ago of the fair humanities of old religion may now be declared with added emphasis concerning the whole body of extrarational doctrines that for millenniums have swayed the minds and inspired the hearts of the European. All these have vanished, they live no longer in the faith of reason. The common-sense and quasi-scientific view of man and the universe moves on daily with firmer and surer and haughtier tread, reminding us of Homer's description of Discord: "Small indeed when at first her front she uplifteth, but later Holding her head up in heaven, the while on earth she is treading." There is only one name given under heaven whose magic may arrest the march of this conception, which now rushes over the earth like the shadow of a dim eclipse shedding disastrous twilight over the soul. And that name is philosophy, not any visionary and unreal speculation, but philosophy more scientific than science herself, philosophy that is the equator and Venus-girdle of the whole |