28 OCTOBER 1916, Page 20

Egotism in German Philosophy. By Professor G. Santayana. (J. M.

Dent and Sons. 5s. net.)—This witty little book, by a former Harvard Professor, is a destructive analysis of the very un-Platonic " idealism " which is the essence of German philosophy, and which has helped to make the Germans as a nation such hopeless, self-centred egotists. He traces its evolution through Luther and Goethe, Kant and Fichte, Nietzsche and Sohopenhauer, and its gradual breaking with Christianity. " In their tentative, ma ny-sided, indomitable way, the Germans have been groping for four hundred years towards a restoration of their primitive heathenism "—the worship of their " old god," who was, presumably, Thor.