Book Reviews

PROGRESSIVE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN AMERICA. By JOHN WRIGHT BUCKHAM, Professor of Christian Theology in the Pacific School of Religion. Houghton-Mifflin Co., Boston, 1919. Pp. IX, 340. Price $2.00.

If we are to regard our favored country as the "land of the Pilgrim's Pride"-to quote the words of the national hymn-then the book just issued from the leading New England press is particularly timely. This year there will be a celebration of the third centenary of the landing of Robinson's devoted companions at Plymouth Rock; and Dr. Buckham's pages aim at being a "Survey of the Enlarging Pilgrim Faith," which is the sub-title. No one is better fitted for the task than the genial and scholarly Berkeley divine.

He follows on the line of a Scottish treatise that came forth from old St. Andrews University when the reviewer was a student there; John Tulloch's "Religious Thought in Great Britain During the Nineteenth Century." The "Progress" described is fairly well limited to the past sixty years. There is a basis of personality in the treatment, the author having chosen seven theologians with whom he was more or less intimately connected and to whom he feels spiritual indebtedness, as themes for successive chapters. Prefacing the chapters are short biographical sketches after the manner of Who's Who in America. It is significant that the two leaders with whom he starts out are both Yale University men, Horace Bushnell and Theodore Munger. In many essential respects. Yale is the most characteristically American of our universities in the religious and political type of public men it sends forth.

None of the sketches have more of a pleasant hero-worship flavor, approaching eulogy, than that of the octogenarian divine who spent a year or more of the closing period of his busy life in the metropolis of Southern California. Indeed, after a winter in the pulpit of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, Dr. Washington Gladden went home to Columbus, Ohio, to die. This association with California is not, however, recorded as it should.

be in the biographical summary. Not so with Horace Bushnell, who spent some years in the Golden Gate when the state was still young, and was one of the founders of the College of California, at Oakland, which moved later to Berkeley and became the great State University of today, second largest of the universities of the country. Bushnell was offered the Presidency in the year 1861, but declined and returned to the East. This vigorous thinker and innovator Dr. Buckham rates as the second in chronological order of our three great American theologians: "Jonathan Edwards, Horace Bushnell, George A. Gordon-this," he states (p. 87), "is the true American theological apostolic succession. This estimate may seem at present extravagant, but I am convinced the future will confirm it. William N. Clarke has had wider influence

in the field of irenics, Borden P. Bowne in that of philosophy, but in insight and breadth and total accomplishment none has equaled Dr. Gordon," The last-named is still with us, a vigorous voice in the pulpit of the historic South Church of Boston.

To have Dr. Buckham at his best, read his tribute to Washington Gladden, "author of that immortal hymn, long ago discovered and adopted by the Christian consciousness and now illuminating every modern hymn-book worthy of the name, 'Oh, Master, Let Me Walk with Thee.' This hymn was written under the sense of loneliness caused by the author's theological isolation. It is a heretic's hymna 'heretic of yesterday' and a saint of today. Is the latter too exalted a title to fit this rugged, everyday man, companionable servant of righteousness and teacher of the people? after the order of the Pilgrim fathers."

-a saint

J. M. DIXON.

THE SELF AND NATURE, by DE WITT H. PARKER, assistant Professor of Philosophy in the University of Michigan. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1917. Pp. VII. 316.

So much of modern philosophy and especially of Radical Empiricism has been written in complete disregard of the nature and definition of the self that it is a great relief to pick up this book which though assuming to proceed on the method of Radical Empiricism frankly declares that systems must be judged by their treatment of the doctrine of the self. By this standpoint the author wishes his system to be judged.

After showing a considerable tendency to identify the self with its mere activity he proceeds to affirm that the unity of the mind is a fact of immediate experience and that "the self is primary." "The unity of the mind," he says, "consists in the first place, of the contact of self with content; and, in the second place, of the interweaving of the many activities, which are the self, one with another. The activities are interwoven among themselves and with the content, and this web is the mind" (27). This description of the self is not complete, however, as it concerns only the contemporaneous phase. Speaking of the other or sequential phase of the self, he concludes that identity must be found in the region of the mind in which identity is given, and that this region is the self.

This conclusion is impossible if the mind is to be identified with its activities. There is nothing in fleeting activites that would bind the world of experience together. Each activity would be conscious of itself unless it were some transcendent activity able to survive and understand the whole process, maintaining an enduring identity through its power of relating all other activities to itself. Such transcending self the author assumes though he has made no provision for it in his system.

This assumption appears in his definition of perception as a contact of the self with a sensuous reality, and a representation through idea of other sense elements which might be given (53).

"Perception is never, as we know, the mere existence of a sense element in the mind; it always involves, in addition, the creation of a meaning. The sense elements in perception are recognized, interpreted, employed as signs; but recognition, interpretation, the signitive function are activities which belong to the self" (55).

He recognizes the necessity of affirming personality in order to provide an adequate doctrine of time and change, because in the existence of any impersonal thing change destroys its original character and makes it something essentially different. "In the self we have the most direct knowledge of the combination of new and old, of identity and diversity, essential to change" (96).

Likewise in the discussion of causation he clearly shows the impossibility of demonstrating the causal connection outside of personality itself. "In the phenomena of will alone does there exist the possibility of making the past a law for the future" (136). To this statement he adds another most significant for philosophy and particularly for theism; "He only can hope to understand who

finds it reasonable to interpret the processes of the external world after the analogy of the inner world" (143). After declaring that there are but two known types of necessity, logical and purposive, he writes: "Is it unlikely that the same type of necessity which exists within the mind should characterize the whole from which the mind sprang and upon which it depends” (145). And again, "There is necessity and law only where there is a will seeking fulfillment" (152). This would seem to be a clear enough charter for the theist to make some assumptions regarding the reasonableness of a supreme creative intelligence, but such a conclusion the author with an odd perversity rejects as impossible.

The conclusion of the book is sadly negative. After building nobly he decides for the impossibility of immortality and theodicy. Indeed considers that he has proved the mortality of personality. The fact is, however, that it is no greater leap to assume the reasonableness of personal immortality than is his assumption that the cause of the world is personal. If that personal cause is not itself the mere plaything of matter it must in some sense transcend the material order. Such transcendence is the very essence of personality. But if there be transcendence of any kind it might well be able to survive the tools with which it works just as here and now it survives material change and passing events. While openly denying it, the author is unwittingly theistic.

THEOLOGY AS AN EMPIRICAL SCIENCE, by Douglas CLYDE MACINTOSH, Dwight professor of Theology in Yale University. MacMillan and Co., New York, 1919. Pp. XVI, 270.

Those who are acquainted with Dr. MacIntosh's Problem of Knowledge, will take up this book with large expectation and will not be disappointed. It is a book not for those who have no doubts, but rather for those who seek apart from tradition and dogma the confirmation of Christian belief. From the beginning the author aims to meet the attack of scientific doubt and to defeat it upon scientific grounds rather than by appeal to authority or dogma.

Through the volume he holds to the scientific validity and reality of religious experience and hopes to discover therein all the facts needed for a tenable working theology.

Just as William Newton Clarke brought an answer to the theo

logical questionings of fifteen years ago the author will do an undoubted service to the present time. The direct resort to religious experience for the proofs of ordinary doctrine is made because the writer believes that "Speculation can only elucidate what is involved in a hypothesis. It cannot, apart from any resort to experience provide verification. . . . And if theology is to become scientific it must be by becoming fundamentally empirical” (11).

The foundations of the discussion are laid upon the answers to the following questions:

“(1). Is there religious perception, or something in the religious realm corresponding to perception, viz., cognition of the divine as revealed within the field of human experience? (2). Is it possible to formulate, on this basis of the data made available in religious experience, theological laws, or generalizations as to what the divine Being does on the fulfilment of certain discoverable conditions? (3). Can theological theory be constructed in a scientific manner upon the basis of these laws?" (26).

Calling attention to the necessary presuppositions of all science he claims the same need for a theological science. Having done this he proposes to proceed with only such theological material as may be beyond proper scientific question or cavil to see if there is not enough to provide the necessary supports for religious theory. This method will of course be unsatisfactory to the theologian who deplores any compromise with the modern scientific spirit. The value of the volume, however lies in this, that it shows how without resort to those doctrines that give offense to many reverent thinkers, a vital and convincing theology may still be constructed.

So out of experience he draws conclusions for immortality, for the profound nature of sin, for the existence of God, and the uniqueness of Christ as the revelation of God.

His discussion of the attributes of God gains force by the settlement of the conflict of immanence with transcendence by means of personality in the divine Being (131).

With many points, the reader will find himself in disagreement, and some of these should doubtless be brought out in this review, except for the fact that the attempt made to furnish an empirical grounding for theology is so wholesome, and is here done so skillfully and with such constructive results that criticism is relatively unimportant in the face of positive advantages to be gained. It is a volume worth reading and owning for one's self.