age, his education. By collecting all data of this sort one can account for the works of a writer as a natural product, or at least can satisfy the scientific curiosity for a knowledge of all ascertainable facts. The modern eugenists limit the field of the operation of the casual principle, and try to explain the individual as the product mainly of heredity. The socialists as a class seem to be agreed on the general principle that the individual is determined by some phase of his environment. On the other hand, an orthodox Christian might look on each personality as a new expression of the creative power of God. Although not belonging to any of these classes, Mr. More recognizes the value of historical studies, as is indicated by his own essays on Carlyle, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe; but he finds in the individual an element that is unaccountable and unpredicable. After showing how Carlyle exhibits the paradoxical temperament inherent in the Scotch character, he remarked: "But beyond such inheritance lies the genius of the man himself, the mystery of his brain, which no study of tradition or acquisition will explain." This idea of the mystery of the individual genius is a central one in Mr. More's critcism; and it implies what may well be a prudent skepticism; for although the average man may be more nearly the product of his antecedents and circumstances, the genius seems to stand apart in greater measure from both the forces of heredity and environment. The facts about Shakespeare, for instance, in no way account for him as our greatest poet. Most brothers of famous men are undistinguished; Milton, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Burns-can not we say that most men of rare distinction?—are set apart by their genius from both ancestors and descendants. The law of scientific causality seems to a great extent inoperative in the field of literary critcism; so that there is opportunity here for the work of the cultivated intuition which forms the basis of Mr. More's critical method.

This criticism of Mr. More's is predominantly judicial; it consists in applying his own philosophy or his own view of life to the works of a writer, and in approving or condemning them by this standard, or by portioning out the proper balance of praise or blame. The central problem in the exposition of his criticism is the explanation of his philosophy.

III

The philosophy of Mr. More may be called the philosophy of dualism or of superrational intuition. It is based on intuition and the humanities rather than upon scientific laws and hypothesis or metaphysical speculation. The most important single source of this philosophy is Plato. In The Drift of Romanticism, the eighth volume of the series, Mr. More wrote: "Plato is at times merely the perplexing metaphysician; oftener he speaks from the depth of unexampled self-knowledge. All that is essential to the dualistic philosophy may be gathered from his dialogues, as hints and fragments of it may be found scattered through innumerable other writers, especially the inspired poets and philosophers of life." Again, in the preface to the same volume: "If I have hearkened to this voice, it is because with this key alone I have been able to find any meaning in my own experience of life, and still more because its admonition seems to me to correspond with the inner core of truth which, however diversified in terms and overlaid with extraneous matter, has been handed down unchanged by that long line of seers and sages from Plato and Aristotle to the present day, who form what may be called the church universal of the spirit."

The test that is to distinguish Plato the seer from Plato the perplexing metaphysician, and that is to separate the inspired poets from the uninspired, Mr. More finds in psychological introspection. Consciousness, when we look deeply into ourselves, tells us that we are ceaselessly changing, yet also tells us that we are ever the same. The changing element of our nature is called the flux. It is made up of impressions from the outer world and of impulses to action. The changeless element, which exerts itself intermittently as an inhibition upon this or that impulse, Mr. More calls the inner check. These terms, the flux and the inner check, obviously correspond to the distinction made in books of psychology between the Me and the I. Mr. More's idea of the relation of reason to these terms may be best indicated in his own words: "Reason, which is our instrument of analysis and definition, is itself an organ of the flux. In endeavoring, therefore, to define the element of our being contrary to its sphere, it can

only employ terms which express difference from the qualities of the flux and which must end in mere negation. . . The error of the reason is to deny the existence of this absolute element because it must be defined in terms of negation. By the use of the term inner check we accept the inability of the reason to define positively this element of our being, but imply also that it may be the cause of quite positive and definable effects within the flux." By starting from this conception of the dualism of consciousness, one can account for the antinomies that confront the thinker on all sides: the problem of the one and the many, being and becoming, good and evil, freedom and determinism. Mr. More's objection to all rationalistic philosophy is due to its tendency to reason things into some sort of unity. "Reason denies this contradictory dualism, and, starting with the elimination of one element of consciousness, proceeds, with the imagination, to build up a theory of life and the world based on the other element of consciousness. Thus two schools of pure metaphysics, under various names and disguises, have always existed side by side in irreconcilable hostility." On the side of the flux there is the philosophy of Heraclitus, mediæval nominalism, modern evolutionary philosophy, pragmatism, and the philosophy of Bergson. The philosophy of the one is pantheism, monism, or idealism. The error of idealism, according to this method, is that is denies the reality of the flux, and then defines the unifying force as a category of the reason instead of a spiritual experience and insight. On the other hand, the limitation of Mr. More's philosophy seems to be that it does not reconcile nature and the soul of man; it simply persists in being true to the facts of experience as far as it goes. Perhaps it is only a preliminary survey to a more penetrating synthesis, or perhaps no human insight can ever arrive at ultimate unity. In one passage Mr. More observed that "in this persistent opposition of the two schools of pure metaphysics, we have at once confirmation of the dualism of consciousness and evidence that no metaphysical theory will ever unriddle the secret. of the world."

When applied to scientific theory the philosophy of dualism is as destructive as when dealing with pure metaphysics. In dis

cussing science, Mr. More recognizes three classes: positive science, hypothetical science, and philosophical science. By positive science he means "the observation and classification of facts and the constant sequences in phenomena which may be expressed in mathematical formulæ or in the generalized language of law." By hypothetical science he means "the attempt to express in language borrowed from our sensuous experience the nature of a cause or reality which transcends such experience." Thus he points to Darwin's law of evolution that plants and animals develop from the simplest to the most complex forms of animate existence, as an example of achievement in the field of positive science. But he cites Darwin's theory of natural selection or the survival of the fit as a case of the transition from positive to hypothetical science. The union of hypothetical science with rationalistic philosophy produces what is considered the false philosophy of naturalism. Rationalism he defines as "the attempt to erect reason into an independent power within the soul, taking the place of the inner check or intuitive insight. Thus the conception of the world as the product of an endless series of mechanical causes and effects, or the vitalistic conception of the world as produced by self-evolution or self-creation, he cites as examples of this rationalistic materialism which he classifies under the general head of naturalism. In conclusion, legitimate science, according to Mr. More, is positive or experimental science; and the proper goal of scientific endeavor is the practical and the useful; thus carrying the field of the higher spiritual problems, and questions of the value and significance of life beyond the range of the bona-fide scientist.

With theology the philosophy of dualism is as incompatible as with rationalistic philosophy or philosophical science. Theology is based on mythology. "Mythology is the act of the imagination by which we people the world with dæmonic beings made in the likeness of our own souls." "Theology is an attempt to superimpose the abstracting activity of metaphysics upon the personal dualism of spontaneous mythology." Theology is thus a union of mythology and rationalism. The end of mythology is either rationalism or insight. "For most men the consequence of

theology is a state of fluctuation between rationalism and superstition." Christianity is one particular form of mythology.

An interesting example of Mr. More's sweeping syntheses is his identification in one essential particular of science and theology. "In my essay on Newman," he wrote, "I found it convenient to classify the minds of men figuratively in an inner and an outer group. In the outer group I placed the extremes of the mystic and the skeptic, and in the inner group the non-mystical religious mind and the non-skeptical scientific mind. These two classes of the inner group differ in their field of interest, the one being concerned with the observation of spiritual states, the other with the observation of material phenomena; but they agree in so far as the former passes from the facts of his spiritual consciousness to the belief in certain causes conceived as mythological beings and known by revelation, while the latter passes from the facts of his material observations to the belief in certain causes conceived as hypotheses and known by inference. Hypotheses, in other words, are merely the mythology, the deus ex machina of science, and they are eradicated from the scientific mind only by the severest discipline of skepticism, just as mythology is eradicated from the religious mind by genuine mysticism." Later, in the same volume Mr. More maintains again that insight and skepticism are the positive and negative aspects of truth. Insight is due to a clear consciousness of dualism; and skepticism is a denial to the faculties of the right to supplant this dualism by their own abstractions and combinations.

Although the philosophy of dualism is antagonistic to theology, Mr. More, by employing his own definitions of terms, brings it into essential harmony with religion. Pure religion is the life of spirituality. Of spirituality the positive and negative aspects are faith and disillusion. Faith is a force by which "the heart of man is brought to recognize the inner check as the constantly in-dwelling spirit." In the first book of the series he defined faith as "that faculty of the mind or soul which instinctively turns to the things of the spirit." The noteworthy fact about these definitions is the absence of any reference to a supernatural or superhuman mind or God, and the identification of the divine with man's own higher