the way of the old Southern life still lingering in Cincinnati, is considerable. But to most readers the characteristic feature of the book will be its satire on the social aspirations involved in the current quest for family portraits, coats of arms and genealogies. John Lane.

Robert W. Chambers is using Revolutionary New York as a background for his fiction almost as successfully as Mary Johnston uses Colonial Virginia, and his books are crowding hers close in the race for popular favor. This season's is a story of the year 1777, with the battle of Oriskany for its central event; Tryon County is again the scene; and Sir John Johnson with his Royal Rangers, Brant and his Indians, Jack Mount the outlaw, and other characters from "Cardigan" reappear. But, although the "The Maidat-Arms" shows the same rapidity of action joined to exuberance of detail which marked its predecessor, the feminine influence is in the ascendant now, and romance gains on adventure. The writer's historical information, too, with which "Cardigan" was a trifle over-burdened, is here held more in reserve, so that the second of the pair is even more readable than the first. Harper & Bros.

Professor George E. Woodberry's volume on "Nathaniel Hawthorne" in the "American Men of Letters" series, (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) is a biography, a character study and a literary appreciation, all in one. It is written sympathetically, yet with critical acumen; and it presents an admirable picture of the man and the romancer. Hawthorne's shy but fascinating personality has now receded far enough to admit of a more just estimate of his literary qualities than was possible to his immediate contemporaries. Such biographical memorials or studies of

Hawthorne as we have had hitherto have come almost wholly from within the family circle, from the pens of his son, his daughter and his son-in-law. Professor Woodberry writes at a distance of time and with a freedom from personal feeling which, if they make his sketch less vivid, also give it a less partial coloring. Just enough is given of Hawthorne's external life, in Salem, in Concord, among the Berkshire hills, and abroad to form a setting for an extremely well-considered study of those subtle but enduring qualities which ensure for him a permanent place in literature.

Two women and the man whom they both love-one secretly, out of deference to the schemes of a match-making aunt, the other openly, in spite of his obvious preference for her friendthese are the central figures in Henry James's new novel, "The Wings of a Dove." Not a study in race types, though one heroine is English and the other American; not especially rich in local color, though London is the scene of the first volume and Venice of the second; not a social satire, though Milly Theale's wealth is really the pivot of the plot-the book is from beginning to end a masterly, merciless analysis of human temperaments and wills, interacting under the impulse of ambition, pity, passion or love. The difficulties of Mr. James's style once taken for granted, the story becomes one of intense and tragic interest, the entire absence of incident making the power of the portraiture the more overwhelming; and the reader pays to the author the final tribute of believing in characters whose motives he is sometimes far enough himself from fathoming. By creative work of this order Mr. James again reaffirms his right to a leadership almost unrivalled among living English novelists. Charles Scribner's Sons.

SEVENTH SERIES VOLUME XVII.

NO. 3041.

We have now to approach the question of Immortality from the philosophic standpoint. Our aim, accepting as correct the scientific presentation of natural facts, is to penetrate if possible their inner significance. But here, as ever, we must tread cautiously. As we saw in a previous essay, there can be no reliable metaphysics without reliable physics, and under the latter head our knowledge is constantly growing, our mental standpoint shifting, old theories making way for new. This is all in the line of progress and development, but it means that the difficulties of interpretation are great. The last word of Science has not been said, never will be said while man continues to enquire and to learn; and so long as it has not been said the last word of philosophy cannot be said either. The latter, moreover, covers an enormously wide field, which we cannot here attempt even to delimit. Our efforts must be strictly circumscribed. Our aim is to arrive at the metaphysical significance with regard to man of certain recognized facts in the physical universe, to ascertain what relation they bear not to the scientific aspect of that universe, to space and time and the intellect of man, but to the Ground and Source of his being

FROM BEGINNING Vol. CCXXXV.

and of theirs. This is the work of that branch of Metaphysics known as Religious Philosophy. To enter upon it as we are doing directly from scientific considerations, is to necessitate certain initial assumptions:

(1) That the universe of being, as Science knows it, has a Ground and Source beyond itself, transcending therefore Space and Time;

(2) That the human mind is so constituted that it is able to some extent to apprehend this Ground and Source, consequently itself also partially to transcend Space and Time.

Under the second head we may remark that this capacity in man for transcending Space and Time is a matter of common, every-day experience. Memory oversteps these limits; Imagination does so; Sympathy does so; Abstract thought does so. The old man who "lives in the past," the young man who "lives in the future," the mother who lives in the lives of her (perhaps absent) children, the scholar or the mathematician who in abstruse study or calculation loses the sense of duration and of material surroundings, these each and all mentally transcend Time and Space. Physically they are bound-in mind they are free.

There is another and more funda

mental illustration of the same truth. Man's power of blending his experience into a whole implies the power of transcending Time. Were he indeed altogether limited by it, he could be conscious only of succession, one thing after another, one event after another, one experience after another; he could not unite all those events and experiences into one, and make of them "My life." That he can and does do so is evidence that he is greater than Time, and not altogether under its compulsions. Nor is this the case with regard to individual man alone. That he can be conscious of a whole in history, in the history of his own race and in that of the Cosmos, is due to the same timetranscending power. Similar remarks apply in their measure to Space. That man can perceive not the mere fact of juxtaposition, but the blending of many juxtapositions into a whole, that Space is to him unifying, shows that he bends it (mentally) to his own purposes. It is not his master. And for our present purpose it matters nothing how, through what stages of temporal development, man acquires this unifying peculiarity of his mental constitution. The central fact for Philosophy is that he possesses it: that whatever physical and psychological processes, discovered and classified by Science, have from her point of view brought about this result, the result is there and is significant.

A further important point to notice in the present connection is that in unifying we also distinguish, as is shown by our always setting our present life, the life which we are living at the moment, over against a larger and more comprehensive life, in which that moment is included, yet from which it is distinct. We do this in four ways:

(1) In regard of any present moment in our individual life, such moment standing out over against, yet as part

of, the whole into which the past, present and future of that individual life are combined;

(2) In regard of our whole individual life, as contrasted with the life of our social environment and the life of mankind in general;

(3) In regard of the life of mankind in general (of which our own is a constituent part,) as contrasted with the whole cosmic process as we know it;

(4) In regard of that cosmic process itself, the whole visible temporal order of things, (more or less crudely conceived according to the stage of intellectual culture and development attained), as contrasted with an eternal invisible order which conditions and transcends, while it includes, the temporal.

uncon

It is hardly necessary to observe that we are not always giving attention to these contrasts. They are often outside the actual field of consciousness, lying as it were latent in our minds, yet ever there, ready at any moment to spring into full view, always more or less affecting, though it may be sciously, our mental attitude at any given moment. The very fact, so often insisted upon by ethical and religious teachers, of the transitory nature of all earthly experience, is only intelligible to them and to us because contrasted with a sense of abidingness equally present. We should not know that "the world passeth away" unless we were conscious that something, not the world, "abideth forever."

The time-transcending capacity in man has been thus insisted upon, because the conception we form of our relation to Time and to Eternity must very largely affect our idea of individual human life. If we regard the latter as being now wholly subordinated to temporal conditions, we place an enormous difficulty in the way of any reasonable belief in its persistence after death, a difficulty which, were it real, would need to be candidly allowed and seriously confronted. Since a little re

flection shows us, on the contrary, that our time-limitation is but partial, this fact must equally be taken into account in our effort to probe the meaning of human individuality. To this effort we now address ourselves. When considering the subject from the scientific point of view, we saw that though individuality is far more emphasized in man than elsewhere in Nature, yet it is characteristic not only of all organic beings but of the inorganic universe as well, that in fact the whole Cosmos bears the stamp of individuality, i.e., of uniqueness. It is such that it is completely and definitely distinguished from all possible or conceivable other orders that might have come into existence. Its very possibilities are conditioned by the kind of universe which it is: they could not be otherwise unless it were otherwise. When, leaving the inorganic universe, we turn to organic life, we find that individuality tends to become what we may perhaps term increasingly spontaneous. Instead of being as it were stamped upon each organism, as a hall-mark upon silver, the organism appears rather to develop its own individuality in its own way, strictly limited, of course, by the organic division to which it belongs, yet within these limits having so much of free play as to enable it (very markedly among the higher animals) to develop certain idiosyncrasies of its own, difficult if not impossible to define, which yet distinguish it from all members of the same species. Among the higher animals at any rate there is the further power of each individual knowing itself to be such. A dog is not at all confused about his own individuality. How far down the scale of animal life this capacity extends it would be very difficult to say. Possibly it exists in a rudimentary form wherever there is sentiency, but it increases with the approach of selfconsciousness, and reaches its culmina

tion in man, in whom alone that consciousness is so fully developed as to confer upon him the dignity of personality. And here for the first time the full scope of individual being appears to dawn upon us. It is such that no other characteristic can obscure or diminish its reach, which on the contrary widens from the apparently superficial distinction between one stone and another, or one blade of grass and another, to include all the vast yet delicate differences between one human being and another of the same age, nationality, social status and culture. Individuality is not swamped in, but extraordinarily enhanced by personality. The importance of this fact in connection with our present subject becomes apparent when we recall the tendency of much modern Philosophic thought to regard finite persons as evanescent manifestations of an Infinite Personality which at the same time transcends and includes them: in which they so entirely live and move and have their being that they are to it as waves upon the surface of a boundless deep, momentarily appearing only to disappear again.

The recognition of self-conscious mind as the ground of being is characteristic of that form of Philosophy known as Idealism. Without going into an argument which to specialists would be superfluous, and to the general reader essentially tedious and difficult of comprehension, we may perhaps observe that it becomes increasingly hard to look upon any other ground as adequate.

We have seen that even in man mind is able to some extent to transcend temporal limits. But man is finite, that is, partial: he is under restriction. Essential mind, mind unlimited, mind apart from any finite manifestation of it, would be above all time-limitations; would be what we mean by eternal, infinite. Time and the temporal would