BOOKS.
THE MEANING OF GOOD.*
THE " Dedication" in verse of this book is perhaps the best thing in the whole volume. We do not mean to say that there is not much else which is very good. These fourteen lines, besides striking the keynote of the dialogues, and putting the reader in the right frame of mind to appreciate them, seem to us exceptionally graceful, thoughtful, and poetic. We quote them at length, for, hidden as they are behind a preface and an " argument," they may easily be overlooked:— " How do the waves along the level shore
Follow and fly in hurrying sheets of foam, For ever doing what they did before, For ever climbing what is never clomb !
Is there an end to their perpetual haste—
Their iterated round of low and high ?
Or is it one monotony of waste Under the vision of a vacant sky ? And thou who on the ocean of thy days
Dost like a swimmer patiently contend,
And though thou steerest with a shoreward gase, Misdoubtest of a harbour or an end, What would the threat and what the promise be Could I but read the riddle of the sea ? "
The author begins by apologising for having "made an attempt at philosophic dialogue." Dialogue is, he admits, a • The Meaning of Good: a Dialogue. By O. Lowey Dickinson Glasgow James Maclehose and Sons. [Ss. Bd. net.]
literary form exceedingly difficult to handle ; but desiring to treat the problem, he discusses it in a manner which may " appeal to some readers who are not professed students of philosophy," and dealing as he does with a subject not without practical issues which " belongs to the sphere of right opinion and perception rather than to that of logic and demonstra- tion," he feels it to be the form best suited to his purpose. Accordingly, he lays the scene of his discussions in an upland valley in Switzerland, where, as the guests of a certain Philip Audubon, a number of old college friends meet together and talk in the intervals of climbing. The host is described as having just returned from the East, "where a life laborious and monotonous in the extreme had confirmed him in a melancholy to which he .was constitutionally inclined, and which appeared to be rather heightened than diminished by exceptional success in a difficult career." The party consists of about half-a-dozen men. Conspicuous among them is a much-travelled newspaper correspondent whose experience of divers Oriental countries has led him to appreciate the extra- ordinary diversity of men's ideals, and to doubt if there be any good and bad common to East and West. Knowing the East, he realises " how profound and intelligent is their con- tempt for our civilisation, how worthless they hold our aims and activities, how illusory our progress, how futile our intelligence." On the whole, he and Audubon agree that it is an illusion of " the canting moralist" that there is any fixed and final standard of good. To balance these two sceptics we have an enthusiastic visionary and rather high-falutin' under- graduate, a barrister, a professor of biology, and a man of busi- ness. An argument started by the journalist on the subject of a common good is discussed over many pages by all the talkers, the author, speaking as "I," always endeavouring to build up a"theoty which the others persistently, but never quite suc- cessfully, endeavour to knock down. His point of view all through the book is this : without certain hypotheses life is not worth having. If, for instance, there is no common good, " we deny all worth to any public and social institution, to religion, law, government, the family; all activities, in a word, which contribute to make up what we call society." He con- siders the fact that most civilised men, if pressed, would admit such a good—on account of the " passion they have to find worth in their lives "—though having no actual proof of its exist- ence, is a good and sufficient reason for acting as if it existed.
When the arguments become too involved and tax the reader's attention to the point of weariness, Mr. Dickinson introduces with much adroitness the barrister and the man of }tininess, who respectively declare that all the speakers are looking for good " instead of simply seeing it," that " it is clear and distinct enough for all practical purposes," that "the difficulty is not to know but to do it," and finally, that the habit of such discussions as the one proceeding serves only to amuse the cultured, and would be unfortunate were it to spread among the mass of men. We hope the reader will not be convinced by the last speakers, but will press on through the somewhat over-subtle arguments concerning The Good— which fill the middle of the book, comprising "an attempt to examine some kinds of gobd,:tO point out their defects and limitations, and suggest the character of a good which we might hold to be perfect "—to the last part, wherein the author declares his own " faith," guarding, however, his position as an inquirer by a definition of what the biologist calls " that dangerous word." To have faith in a proposition, he says, is " not to affirm that it is true, but to live as we should do if it were." Taking for granted, first, " that good has some meaning," and, secondly, " that we know something about that meaning," he believes that "among our experiences the one which comes nearest to good is that one which we call love." " Love " we understand in its most spiritual, we might almost say in its coolest, sense, for the writer fears that what love gains in intensity it often loses in extension. " The relation of affection, however im- perfect it may be, gives us at least something which comes nearer to what we might conceive to be the absolutely good than anything else we have yet hit upon"; but however defined, the search after good is, he thinks, hardly worth undertaking unless we presuppose a personal immortality. Most of his hearers are scornful of what appears to them a religious dogma as effete as witchcraft, and want to know if he has nothing but an imaginary heaven to land them in after all. To th'3 the author replies that he is powerless to land them there, but adds, "I believe there is that dwelling within you which will not let you rest in anything short." This faith in good. ness, love, and eternal life is apparently the minimum which our author considers will enable us to " find significance " in this life. What is usually called happiness he evidently does not look for, and believes to be seldom found here. " It would be hard," he says, " to maintain that we do most of us realise good enough to make it seem worth while to have lived at all, if indeed we are simply extinguished at death." With the atti- tude of the biologist who would rather believe that death in- volves the extinction of the individual, regarding such a view of life as " more sound and manly," he has no sympathy, but believes that the majority of men who regard annihilation as their fate look forward to it " as a deliverance from an intolerable evil," while those who take a more hopeful view find there—i.e., beyond death—" the reason and justification for existence which they have never been able to discover here." Theology, properly so called, is never discussed in these pages. Some skill is necessary in avoiding the subject, for the conversation often sails very near it. The whole book is worth reading, and much weight is given to Mr. Dickinson's arguments by the extraordinarily fair way in which he, as it were, plays chess against himself sometimes seriously damaging the theory he is upholding by putting some brilliant remark in the mouth of its opponent. The author's tone throughout is rather sad, though his solution to the riddle he sets before his readers is optimistic,—more optimistic, perhaps, than the suggestion contained in the verse quoted above, to whose poetic quality we again pay a tribute of admiration.
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