as Cavour memorably put it, “a free Church in a free State," is an American ideal. But if churches engage in purely political propaganda, in behalf of causes like the World Court and Prohibition, which, whatever their merits, certainly involve no religious principle, there would seem to be grave danger of one of two things. Either the churches will become political agencies or secular politics will dominate the churches. And either of these conditions would grossly violate the principle of separation of Church and State.

Washington's historic dictum, ostentatiously slighted and contemned by Pacifists, that it is sheer manslaughter to send untrained troops against trained, receives impressive confirmation in recent statistics of our own Government, which show the losses sustained by the various Powers in the World War. From these it appears that the twenty-two million soldiers of the Central Powers inflicted much heavier losses upon their opponents than they suffered from the forty-two million soldiers of the Allies. To be more exact, the 22,850,000 of the Central Powers killed or wounded 22,090,000 of their opponents, or very nearly one apiece; while the 42,189,444 Allied soldiers killed or wounded only 15,405,000, or little more than one to every three of them. Of course the explanation is that the Central Powers soldiers were all thoroughly trained, while the majority of the Allied troops were comparatively raw recruits. The trained soldier far surpasses the untrained-in this case, by about three to one-not only in ability to inflict losses upon the enemy but also in ability himself to avoid being injured. It is quite safe to reckon that about one half of the 22,090,000 casualties of the Allied troops must be charged against their unpreparedness.

A somewhat embarrassing though entirely logical and natural result of the progress of civilization is to be perceived in the fact that the volume of business transacted is increasing very much more rapidly than the population of the country. Thus in the first twenty years of the twentieth century the population of the United States increased by a little more than 41 per cent. That was a notably high rate of increase, attributable both to a high

birth rate and to much immigration. But in the same twenty years the amount of freight carried on the railroads of the United States increased by about 119 per cent, or nearly three times as much as the population. In view of those figures it is not at all surprising that we suffer from congestion of traffic and from inadequate means of transportation. The explanation is, of course, that our civilization is constantly growing more elaborate, more complex, more luxurious, and more exacting in its demands. The solution of the problem must be, obviously, in civilization's developing an ingenuity and a resourcefulness equal to its demands, so that it will not only increase the amount of goods carried to supply its wants, but will also increase its means of carrying them. Twentieth century demands are not to be met by nineteenth century methods and equipment.

President Harding's statesmanlike and patriotic words against the spirit and the acts of factionalism provoked from high Pacifist and Internationalist quarters the amazing retort that factionalism in this country, especially including Congressional blocs, and the Ku-Klux Klan, has its origin in the Monroe Doctrine and its pernicious development in our failure to enter the League of Nations. It is, urge these Tolstoyan pundits, this accursed crime of national patriotism that is responsible for all the evil in the world. Just because we insist upon being an independent sovereign nation, not subject to any super-State, we form ourselves into factions, and we put on pillow cases and sheets and ride about at night flogging men whom we do not like and ordering women who do not like us to leave town under pain of tar and feathers. Marvellous! I am quite titillated with anticipation of next hearing the gypsy moth and the boll weevil charged against the same fecund fons et origo of all our woes.

The often-mooted scheme of an international or universal language is again put forward in a temperate and judicious fashion and by a high authority. I should hesitate to say how many such schemes have been conceived and urged upon a reluctant world, even in the comparatively few years since the preposterous "Volapuk" enhanced the gayety of nations; and of course that

was very far from the beginning of the campaign. Cecil Rhodes was pretty nearly right when he said that the confusion of tongues at Babel was the greatest blunder mankind ever committed, and that all should have been contented for all time with a single language; though doubtless there will be wide dissent from his added remark, that of course that one language should have been the English. The fact is that there is scarcely anything to which men are more attached than their native languages. They are much more ready to change their form of government or their religion than their speech. Note the inveterate antagonisms, the persistent controversies, which have arisen over language as in South Africa, in Hungary before the World War, in Russian Poland, even for a time in Canada. The glib proposal that all men should renounce their native tongues and all jabber nothing but Volapuk was a striking example of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread. Three of the greatest languages in history have in certain periods enjoyed universal use for certain purposes, but none of them, Greek, Latin, or French, ever wholly displaced a single other tongue of importance. Dean West, of Princeton, prudently aims not at the supplanting of any languages, but at the provision of an auxiliary to supplement existing languages, especially in diplomacy and commerce. Of such an auxiliary there is unquestionable need, and there is more to be said in favour of "a simplified Latin" for filling it than of any other that has ever been proposed. Latin is one of the oldest of existing languages and not an artificial contrivance; it is not now specially identified with any one nation and is therefore exempt from jealousy; it is perhaps already more widely known than any other; and it is easy, beautiful, and particularly practical and effective. To many of us not the least of its recommendations would be that the proposed use of it would continue and increase acquaintance with the vast treasury of Latin literature which forms an essential foundation of real culture.

NEW BOOKS REVIEWED

SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH. By George Santayana. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Half way through Mr. Santayana's book, a question almost inevitably thrusts itself forward, despite the literary magic which the author has thrown around his discussion of the problem of knowledge. Is it worth while, one asks, to reassert, without any new justification, the claims of common sense in so laborious, so ingenious a manner? The motives of other philosophers we readily understand, whether or not we understand their philosophies. The older systems, and some of the newer ones, are more or less frankly compensatory. One does not need to labour this point with respect to Plato or M. Bergson. Pragmatism itself allures and comforts its devotees, and even Radical Empiricism has its ways of recommending itself. Moreover, it is not as if very many were under the bondage of false philosophies and therefore in need of a propaganda of common sense. "Animal Faith" is in no danger of extinction! Indeed, it is exactly from the limitations of common sense, or animal faith, that most philosophies have ambitiously set out to rescue us. The reader's perplexity could be more easily resolved were Mr. Santayana a modern professional philosopher a neo-realist, for example. On the contrary, he is primarily a man of letters, a great humanist. It is not merely the advancement of analysis in a certain field that he is seeking, as the optician seeks the advancement of optics; nor is he inspired by a controversial spirit-that philosophical animus which accounts for the bulk, if not for the existence, of many philosophical, as well as theological or political treatises.

Consideration of this most difficult problem, the real purpose and value of what appears on its face to be a work of genius, may be advantageously postponed until the book has been completely read and has had a chance to prove its effect upon one's thinking. One may then make a bold guess.

What immediately strikes one about the book is the extraordinary thoroughness and subtlety of its scepticism. His scepticism, Mr. Santayana has resolved, shall be not "malicious" but honest; not dogmatic and sweeping but liberal and refined to the extreme limit made possible by a mind of remarkable sensitiveness trained in introspection and in literary criticism. This book, it may be said, is the natural, the characteristic, the inevitable product of just such a sensitive, acute, and humanistic mind; and perhaps this is its sufficient justification.

Mr. Santayana doubts and doubts. He doubts so ingeniously, so sagaciously, so super-subtilely, that at last he reaches a point at which further doubt obviously means the suspension of all thinking and indeed of life itself.

Then he proceeds, methodically and carefully, to admit the assumptions of "animal faith". These he allows to enter quite honestly and with no doubt as to their real nature. True, they are mere assumptions; no belief can be proved. Every belief turns out to be dependent upon some other belief that is unproved. Thus, the confident predictions of the scientist are, after all, merely a phase of animal expectation; the uniformity of nature is but a dogma. Without animal expectation and animal purposes, thinking would be inconceivable and indeed could never have arisen: pure spirit would simply stare at the spectacle provided by intuition and would never posit any superfluous "existences". Even our faith in the possibility of change which is the fundamental faith—would have no possibility and no meaning apart from our animal nature. But these assumptions are necessary and should be admitted openly, though with due caution. If we are necessarily deceived, if we must live in a universe of uncertainty, let us be deceived as little as possible and, so to speak, with our eyes open. It is another way, one supposes, of urging us to make “a right use of imagination". We have our being, it would seem, in a world of symbols, and what we call our knowledge is certainly "vehicular". Words symbolize states of mind; states of mind symbolize existences, which we "posit"; these existences are in the last analysis symbols of our expectations, our purposes.

Clearness in the description of our human predicament is furthered by the distinction the author makes between existences and "essences". Existences are those realities which we posit in obedience to the promptings of animal faith. An "essence" is anything whatever that is presented to intuition. The number of essences is infinite; they are the materials of the "flux"; yet each of these impressions is known immediately and completely for just what it is, and is moreover by its very nature changeless and everlasting.

Just here comes in a stimulating thought. The realm of essences is not, it would seem, without its own importance. The case is not as if one essence were more existential than another. One conjectures, therefore, that in Mr. Santayana's philosophy speculation is not to be harshly snubbed. Any intuition of essences, any combination of them, may be perhaps a better guess about reality than a thinker who supposes that he has somehow got ultimate reality by the ear would be willing to admit. In short, one dimly discerns that a complete recognition of the "vehicular" (and altogether unsubstantial) character of knowledge is going to give greater scope to art and literature as contradistinguished from science, while its inherent scepticism preserves us from the excesses of romanticism. Without permitting us to be idealists, it will rid us of dogma and make us better humanists.

One feels inclined to pause at this point to admire the extraordinary literary inspiration which pervades Mr. Santayana's expression of his ideas—a quality quite distinct from his dialectical skill, which is, as has been already indicated, sufficient. To be sure, one is haunted by the feeling that the whole system of thought might have been presented more simply and in outline more clearly. Such a gain in simplicity and clearness would, however, by no means com