The intellectual snobbery which stands so often like a ghost
at a reviewer's elbow urged us to close Mr. Lothrop Stoddard's Scientific Humanism- (Seribners, 7s. 6d.) when we reached the following footnote : "Roger Bacon, one of the outstanding figures of the Middle Ages, lived during the thirteenth cen- tury." But the book is not for the lower forms of schools as we might suppose frail certain passages. . Far from it. Mr. Stoddard has written powerfully and imaginatively, and if he has not given his readers credit for much education this is a fault on the right side in these days. Realism or scientific humanism, he- tells us, is the hope of the world, but the genuine realist must jettison Utopias, for Utopias always tend to become static, whereas science has shown us that all life exists as a rhythmic tension. We must therefore aim at social plasticity and not at set forms..
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