latest situation leading to interaction of character with environment. By a process of cancelling one situation at a time, we get back to the very first one. first one. There we find two factors: an inherited nature and a situation, over neither of which the individual has any control. He is the product of two factors, neither of which he chooses. And what is more for it may be held that that is a description of the infant's first act, under any theory—that same inability to inaugurate any choice that can be uncaused or creative continues through life. The inevitable conclusion is that man is a product with no power in himself to rebel or make it otherwise than these inexorable, mechanistic factors decree. If the determinist insists on speaking of "freedom", "responsibility", "choice", etc., they are empty words. For our consciousness of such powers is an illusion.

It is a theory which also empties justice of its content. It makes approval and disapproval a cruel but essential lash, because the lash must be applied to those who are at any moment the best they could possibly have been, that the next moment may find them better. It reduces itself to just that: no one could possibly have made himself anything else than he is. The manufacturing factors have worked inexorably. Some reap the heights of joy, and ease, and honor; others live an existence that is truly a hell. But it is not that the latter have themselves to thank in the sense that they could have escaped their lot. That was not possible! Justice is a mockery! But like responsibility, it is a useful one that we must continue.

On the other hand, the philosophy that recognizes the genuine existence of a soul in man is free from these objections. Then, while every choice records itself in the character and makes choice a truly moral matter thereby, the choice is nevertheless not inevitably assured by the character. It is the very essence and demonstration of free will that the self can choose otherwise as our own consciousness and common sense tell us every time we make a choice. The soul is creative, to use a word made familiar by the vitalists. By the determinist

theory the self is an automaton, a catspaw in the hand of factors which it could not possibly make different. By the theory here defended, man is a personality; he is a conscious, free, creative builder of a personality, the noblest, most precious, most significant thing in the world. He is the captain of his fate.

Before turning away from these considerations growing out of the instrumentalist psychology, let us make one observation. The real service of Dewey's philosophy is not lost by departure from his too narrow psychology, and from his ontological indifference. We have tried to show, on the contrary, that his philosophy would be made more potent and valuable by giving to the individual the value and significance of a personality in the true sense of that term. And we have also sought to indicate that this is a position to which the individual is entitled, not through an act of philosophical charity, but in his own right by virtue of what he is.

In conclusion we would utter a word of warning against the false inference that, because our treatment has here been negative, we are unconscious of the tremendous positive value of Dewey's contribution to philosophy. We are convinced that, especially in those practical fields which are his greatest interest, he has applied a method that is as fruitful as it is original and interesting-in ethics, government, education, social science, etc.

But we object that he has achieved his results by a one-sided emphasis. Such distortion is peculiarly apt to characterize a philosophy that has been developed as a protest, as Dewey has developed his. We blame the distortion of emphasis. But we hail the value of the protest. We really feel that we have more faith in protest than has Professor Dewey himself. For he would call it preaching. And as the little son of a theological professor inquired-"What is worse than preaching?"

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SYMPATHY

A Scottish Contribution to French Thought.

JAMES MAIN DIXON

The reproach so often hurled at Puritanism, that it has been inimical to art in all its forms, has been cold to live poetry, and has had a generally harsh and unfriendly attitude to human sensibilities, is singularly without historical justification. The Puritan Scotland of the eighteenth century was the home. of gardens; and of dogs and sheep and horses and other animals who came closer to their human owners than anywhere else in the habitable world. And it was from Presbyterian Scotland that there came the philosophy of sympathy which was to warm up the coldly material and too mathematical philosophy of France.

The wide-reaching political and social power enjoyed by the Gallican church in the days of the monarchy, and the hard bargains they drove with the last three Louises as the price of their fidelity to the crown, are topics that have been discussed at length by the able historian Lanfrey in his "L'Eglise en France au XVIII e siecle". The harsh treatment meted out to the Jansenists is well remembered-orthodox thinkers as we should consider them to-day. The lesson was impressed upon her priesthood, her teachers and friends, that it was safer to leave theology severely alone in discussing philosophical questions. From Malebranche on, philosophy in France is either negative on questions of theological import, "wearing a mask" -to use the words of Turgot, or intensely hostile to theology. The conciliatory elements, as we shall see, were to come either from Protestant Germany, Switzerland, or Scotland.

A few words regarding Malebranche, who may be termed the last theological philosopher in French literature; his conception of the animal world as ruled by mechanism, is the very antithe

sis of the close-to-nature school of the XIXth centruy. Such a conception made a fatal break in the chain of universal sympathetic life. Just as there is, and must be, a common life of sympathy between man and God, so there must be, and is, a common life of sympathy between man and the lower animals. A philosophy or theology which severs the possibility of such connection and sympathy has no future-no power of develop

ment.

The first of the post-Cartesians in France to make a distinct move in a pragmatic "back-to-nature" direction was the German Leibniz, who, however, as he wrote in French and lived much in France, has always been regarded as in the direct line of French writers. It was but natural that the native of a Protestant country, where philosophy blends with theology, and hymnology enters into popular poetry, should interpret his philosophy in an ethical and practical way, giving a theory of life which has the same horizon as religion, and connects itself with conduct in its larger aspects.

Leibniz recognized the narrowness of the mathematical method; he regarded mathematics as a subject which can not be made to cover the whole field of life, but is self-limited. Being based upon abstractions which can easily be manipulated by the mind which conceived them, it never really touches life and the essentials of things, but stops short at their mere manifestations.

Substance, according to Leibniz, involves the notion of unity, while the science of extension or space-in other words, the science of the physical world-tells us nothing of what substance is. The essence of bodies cannot be extension, for substances are not passive, but active. Etre c'est agir-to be is to act he declares; this is surely a sufficiently experimental utterance. A being absolutely passive would be sheer nothing, which implies a contradiction; for, seeing that it receives all from without, and has nothing in itself, it would have no attribute, and would be pure negation.

In many respects Leibniz was before his time. This was eminently the case in his psychology, where he recognized that the mathematical methods so dear to Cartesians failed to cover an essential part of the philosophic field. It was the vain hope of Abbe Condillac to give a theory of the human mind and its development that would have all the clearness of mathematical proof, and none of the disadvantages of an artificial and seemingly arbitrary system like the monadology of Leibniz. But in seeking to make life all rational, and proceed from a tabula rasa in a chain of unfolding equations, he failed to "catch his hare". The manner and methods are excellent, but it is cookery without the nourishing food. In one of his "Conversations," Sainte-Beuve compares Condillac with La Motte. You get, he remarks, the same kind of paradox in each, neat, scrupulous, artificial and thin. In his treatment of literature, La Motte reasons so nicely and elegantly, and yet so aside from the truth, that the reader is thrown back on the true in poetry. Condillac has the same merits of form and manner, but in a kind of despair you cry out for the living in human nature. Saint-Martin calls his statue, endowed bit by bit with the senses, the very "derision of nature." The great Buffon had the same criticism to make upon the statue, as leaving out the very important thing in a living being, the animating life. When Condillac came to ask the baron for his vote for the vacant place in the French Academy, Buffon received the Abbe cordially, and willingly gave the promise. "You have made a statue speak", he said as he embraced his visitor, “and I, a man, enbrace you because you have still some warmth, but, my dear Abbe, your statue has none."

Condillac, who died in 1780 at the age of sixty-five, is an interesting, and in many ways typical XVIIIth century French philosopher.

The intellectual alliance between France and Scotland was particularly close in the middle of the eighteenth century, and writers like Hume and Adam Smith were as well known in Paris