NATURE AND GOD.* WE wish that it were possible to
devote more space than we have at our command to this remarkable book, which combines
a depth of philosophic thought and religious feeling with a
lucidity and felicity of style all too uncommon on both sides of the Atlantic. Professor Blewitt is indeed a writer who well may become a classic, for he illuminates subjects of intense intel- lectual obeCurity with the force and freedom of his prose. He not only knows what he Means, but his knowledge and mean- ing are brought within his reader's vision. His reduction of the field of metaphysical thought to "a central and catholic region of philosophy" is admirably done. The materialistic and the agnostic views of the world "are premature, uncritical, dog- matic," for they leave uninvestigated the fundamental problem of the metaphysical relationship of the facts of experience. But in true philosophy we remember that "reality is the seat and home of the soul," and that "truth and life are one." We have, in fact, to apprehend the true nature of reality. Two great historic methods have been employed in approaching this problem—this "movement from the world to God "- mysticism and idealism. The first would leave the world to find God ; the second "does not forget the world from which it started. When it finds the explanation of the world in a vision of God, it returns to the world, and seeks to give to the facts of the world their true interpretation in the light of that vision of God." This latter method falls into two divisions. Mysticism with some minds fails of success, and these minds adopt 'a modified or abstract idealism, imagine a "world of abstract pure reason," and try to live in it. But this is some- thing very different from the absolute idealism which sprang from Plato and was formulated once more by Kant. Idealism is " the positive or synthetic method which insists that the true universal is at once the home and the explanation of the particulars, and which, therefore, when it has gained a vision of God, seeks to use that vision as the light which gives the true vision of the world." Professor Blewitt's volume consists of a series of studies of mysticism and the two forms of idealism : "It is with this central and catholic region of philosophy, and with this twofold opposition of fundamental tendencies within it, that the following papers are in the main concerned." The long essay entitled "The Study of Nature and the Vision of God" opens with a very remarkable comparison between Newman and Wordsworth. The latter be regards as "perhaps the greatest name in the spiritual history of the
English race in the nineteenth century He sought, in the most genuine sense of the term, to know nature; sought to penetrate to its real character and to grasp its ultimate meaning"; the former, "with no particle of submission to the spirit of the age, was a pilgrim of eternity and a prophet of eternity These two men stand, then, each in his own way, as the representatives of one great principle— that a divine presence is the reality of the world, and that the consciousness of that presence is tbe supreme illumination for a man's soul." Newman the prophet and Wordsworth the poet seem to Professor Blewitt to represent the true order of advance in the gradual realisation of God by man. Newman bad an incomplete vision, for his eyes were dimmed to that unity of man with Nature and of Nature with God that Wordsworth saw. But it may be pointed out that both the prophet and the poet had closed to them another field,— the unity of man. with man that Maurice saw with so prophetic a vision. Professor Blewitt realises this. "Philosophy, in its greater and clearer forms, leads us to see that the love of God should be the supreme principle of life." But such philosophy is for the few. The life of Christ can give "the simplest and the weakest" more than philosophy gave to Plato.
* The Study of Nature and the Vision of God : with other Essays in Philosophy. By George John Blewitt, Ryerson Professor of iMoral Philosophy in Victoria College, Toronto ; sometime Rogers Memorial Fellow of Harvard University. 'Toronto: William Brigis.
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