MAN, GOD, AND THE UNIVERSE.* AT a time when controversy
on the practice of education is rapidly becoming eccentric, when each new theorist advocates the latest and most ingenious device for tampering with &child's mind which modern psychology has to offer, it is of the utmost value that an author who hiniself takes no part in these contro- versies should attempt a careful and reasonable return to first principles.1 Dr. Adamson, Director of Education in the Trans- vaal, asks what it is all for. He finds a quite conservative answer in the adjustment of the individual to environment : a process, he is careful to insist, " as much of active appropriation as of passive assimilation." He divides " environment " for purposes of education into the physical world, the world of civilization, and the world of morality. With nice points of the author's philosophy we are not at present concerned, but only with its application to his subject ; and it certainly seems well suited to the purpose. Knowledge, he points out, is a means to the end of adjustment ; the academics are too much inclined to regard it as an end in itself, the radicals to disregard it alto- gether. The process of adjustment to each of the three worlds must necessarily begin with discovery ; and so he starts edu- cation on the physical plane with nature-study, follows it with geography, and ultimately science, which itself paves the way for higher education by inculcating some notion of causation and other necessary habits of mind. Into such a theory as this vocational teaching fits naturally enough, and Dr. Adamson devotes a good deal of attention to it. But the exact position of literature is not so clear. He renders emphatic lip-service to its independence, it is true : it is not to be used merely to throw sidelights on history but " lights on life in eternity " as • (1) The Individual and the Environment. By J. E. Adamson. London: Longman. 114s. net.)----() The Evolsdion of Consciousness. By A. Wyatt Ionslon; T. Fisher Unwin. [15s. net.]—(3) The Theory of Mind as Ave A. By Gloviuml Gentile. London : Macmillan. [15s. net.; well. Moreover, it is useful as a stimulus to the use of language. Moreover, it is a useful anodyne. But one would have liked Dr. Adamson to go a little further, to recognize pure artistic appreciation as a most important end itself in the process of adjustment ; and he cannot surely imagine that a syllabus which suggests the Idylls of the King as the sole and supreme example of romantic poetry, and alone among moderns recom- mends the complete works of Newbolt, will do anything but starve and vitiate the pupil's aesthetic taste. In the world of morality the author takes a purely teleological view of ethics ; and be this philosophically sound or not, it is distinctly doubtful whether it will prove so effective with the adolescent pupil as the more usual method of fostering the subconscious and mysterious aspects of conscience. Dr. Adamson's style is every-where clear, his principles consistent and interesting ; the book is certainly to be recommended as a sort of mental soda- and-bitters to the educationally intoxicated.
It is impossible in a short space to give any sort of summary of Mr. Wyatt Tilby's history of the evolution of consciousness,2 to do more than comment on a few points of particular interest ; but the book as a whole is exceedingly clearly written, consistent, and exciting. One of the points on which the author lays emphasis is the necessity of sex to consciousness : no form of life, as he points out, which propagates by segmentation can attain to a brain. His theory of the origin of sex is plausible though not wholly convincing. But what he does not satis- factorily explain is the necessity of the male sex to consciousness.
Why should not every male, as in eirripedes, be no more than an obscure parasite in the body of the female ? On the other hand, the earlier history of consciousness is the history of the emancipation of the male : an emancipation which it has taken him all time to accomplish. It is noticeable that only in those forms of life whose development seems to have stopped, or even to be retrograde, that gynaecueracy is prevalent. Again, he points out that whereas the insect has developed a fairly high intelligence, it is the leas intelligent bird which shows the first signs of any emotion other than fear, and by development of the sensations of ecstasy has produced the beginnings of spontaneous music and art. But it was left to the less emotional and less intelligent mammal by combination of the two finally to outstrip both bird and insect. Characteristically, Mr. Wyatt Tilby marks three stages in the development of man by his adoption of the practices of incest, cannibalism and infanticide; but this is no mere paradox, and here, as in his short summary of the history of the idea of God, the author shows singular powers of original, reasonable and interesting thought.
Signor Gentile's book 2 is intended loathe scholastio philosopher rather than the general reader : his " actual idealism," or definition of reality as the act of thinking, presenting an almost laughable contrast to Mr. Wyatt Tilby's investigations into the processes by which that very "act of thinking" came into being. It is the old quarrel between the realist and the idealist ; but as even the author's friend Croce complains, Signor Gentile has pushed philosophic idealism to the verge of mysticism. It seems inevitable that exactness in logical language should go hand in hand with obscurity. In that respect Signor Gentile is eminently suited to the scholastic philosopher. To quote from the summary in chapter 17:—
"And so with everything thought, it is on this condition it is thought, because everything thought is thing, and in so far as it is such, incommensurable with mind. And yet, because not thinkable, the thing is thought : the thinking is the thing's very unthinkability. It is not in itself unthinkable beyond the sphere of our thinking ; but we think it as unthinkable."
Here he makes two quite simple statements, and makes them exactly ; but at what a cost ! On the other hand, it does not seem likely that his theories will prove so acceptable to the English as to the Italian schools of philosophy, who have a hereditary predisposition towards idealism of this kind ; and the present writer is inclined to doubt whether Dr. Wildon Carr, his translator, will find it so easy to popularize the Italian as his earlier French love, M. Bergson.
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