than "Honest John" Morley. He was a great editor, in a time when editorship was a greater profession than it is today. He was a great biographer, critic and man of letters. He was a great ethical leader and teacher-witness his address, nearly fifty years ago, at the opening of the Midland Institute; which for what I may call sheer spiritual eloquence is scarcely surpassed in all the treasure-house of English classics. And at least in intellect, and above all in an integrity that was always sans peur et sans reproche, he was a great statesman in a time of greater average statesmanship than the present. If late he faltered once, he was the one man of all to whom that faltering of the will, not of the soul-can be forgiven.

Probably nothing filled the closing days of John Morley's life with more serene satisfaction than the status of Ireland. He was the one commanding figure among the Gladstonian-Parnellite Home Rulers that invariably commanded the respect of even the most aggressive and truculent Unionists. The business was incongruous and distasteful to him, but he carried it on in the true spirit of noblesse oblige. He lived to see Ireland invested with a far greater degree of Home Rule than even he, with all his idealism, had ever conceived for her. He saw the Free State established, its first Parliament run its fruitful course, and its second Parliament elected. Perhaps most notable of all, he saw the land question finally settled in a far more radical manner than he would ever have ventured to propose. That question was as much the crux of the Irish problem in Parnell's time as emancipation was in O'Connell's; the original Nationalist party was called the Land League. The Land Leaguers then demanded nothing more than fair rents and perhaps a chance for tenants to purchase the holdings they occupied. But the first Dail Eireann of the Free State enacted a measure making it compulsory upon landlords to sell their land, and compulsory upon the tenants to purchase it. John Morley in 1885 would probably have disapproved such a proposal, as too extreme; as would pretty much everybody else. Doubtless in 1923 he regarded it with approval, just as everybody else acquiesces in it as quite the right thing.

The adoption of the Gregorian Calendar instead of the Julian by the Greek Orthodox Church meant the elimination from its annals of all dates between September 30 and October 14, and the nominal loss of two weeks of time to all the millions of that faith. It also meant the final unification of the entire civilized world in a common system of time reckoning. For nearly three and a half centuries two calendars had prevailed. It was in October, 1582, that the Gregorian was adopted by the Roman Catholic Church, the days from the fifth to the fifteenth of that month being dropped. It was not until after the middle of the eighteenth century that England and America made the change from the Julian to the Gregorian. It was not until after the World War that the countries of Eastern Europe began to make it; Russia in 1918, and Roumania and Serbia in 1919. Bulgaria and Greece, and the Greek Orthodox Church, waited until the present year; oddly enough making the change in the same month in which it was originally begun, three hundred and forty-one years before.

NEW BOOKS REVIEWED

CHANCE, LOVE, AND LOGIC. By Charles S. Peirce. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, Inc.

Despite the essential difficulty of the subject matter, despite the strain involved in attempting to follow reasoning presented in the strictest logical and mathematical forms, despite the fact that Peirce was in no sense of the word (like William James) a popular writer, every intellectual reader will find the philosophy of Peirce as presented in Chance, Love, and Logic intensely interesting because genuinely original. It is not merely that the ideas may be new to the reader; this, in fact, is not likely to be altogether the case. It was William James who popularized "Pragmatism” and it was Josiah Royce who developed (in his own way, of course) Peirce's idealism. But in reading Peirce himself, one has irresistibly the feeling of being at the source-where ideas rush out with all their original heat and impetus. Peirce is not merely (like William Kingdon Clifford) heroically logical. Indeed, there was in Clifford's logical heroism a something Puritanical which has not failed to offend, in a mild degree, others besides James. But Peirce is impetuously logical. He exhibits a willingness to be, if necessary, suicidally logical. One feels that he has the courage to emulate Empedocles. "Let the consequences be as dire as they may, one thing is certain: that the state of the facts, whatever it may be, will surely get found out, and no human prudence can long arrest the triumphal car of truth-no, not if the discovery were such as to drive every individual of our race to suicide." There is thus in Peirce a somewhat terrifying willingness to go to extremes-to conceive of truth, for example, as possibly a Juggernaut; and there is also an equally daunting readiness to state and to meet objections that may seem to reduce his arguments to absurdity—a readiness far exceeding the "fairness" of the controversialist or the conventional detachment of the ordinary philosophic mind. It all seems a part of a temper that does not shrink from carrying logic to the point of selfdestruction. But this kind of logical "frightfulness" in fact explains the fascination of Peirce's thinking. It appeals to something deep in human experience to one's "tragic sense of life," perhaps; and this appeal is operative both when one does and when one does not feel irresistibly constrained to accept the philosopher's conclusions.

Two specimens of Peirce's reasoning may here be given as illustrative of the manner in which a singularly original and drastic method of thought may result for the reader either in extraordinary lucidity or in bewilderment.

The first of these explications has to do with the problem of free will. The problem, says Peirce, has no meaning except what is represented in some such

question as this: Suppose that I have done something that I am ashamed of, could I, by an effort of "will" have done otherwise? This question is capable of two answers which, though verbally inconsistent, are both true. Arranging the facts so as to bring forward the truth that I now ought to blame myself for my shortcoming, "it is perfectly true to say that if I had willed to do otherwise than I did, I should have done otherwise. On the other hand, arranging the facts so as to exhibit another important consideration, it is equally true that when a temptation has once been allowed to work, it will, if it has a certain force, produce its effect, let me struggle how I may." The point is that "there is no objection to a contradiction in what would result from a false supposition"-the supposition, in this case, implied in the words "by an effort of will." In other words, the function of a reductio ad absurdum is to show that contradictory results would follow from a hypothesis which is consequently judged to be false. Here the hypothesis was false to begin with! Such questions, says Peirce, are not questions of fact, but of the arrangement of facts.

Is this not strikingly clear? Is it not an unexpected improvement upon any previous analysis of the free will perplexity? And it all comes from a rigorous application of Peirce's Pragmatism and his logic.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that when we are confronted with some of the consequences of Peirce's doctrine of chance, we are likely to balk. The inferences, though they are strictly logical, appear more fantastic than those of Relativity. To Peirce as a Pragmatist it seems clear that probability is simply the frequency with which a certain result occurs when an experiment is repeated. There is no sense, therefore, in speaking of the probability of a single event. This conception, to be sure, leads to some quite satisfactory conclusions. It negatives the idea that the chances of a totally unknown event are even; it leads to the pregnant remark that "the relative probability of this or that arrangement of Nature is something that we should have a right to talk about if universes were as plentiful as blackberries." But the philosopher does not shrink from presenting an absolutely critical case. Suppose, says he, a man had to choose a card from either of two packs, one of which contained twenty-five red cards and one black card, while the other contained twenty-five black cards and one red. The conditions are that if he chooses a red card he will go straight to Heaven, but that if he gets a black card he will be condemned to eternal punishment. Thus, in the nature of the case, the experiment cannot be repeated. True to his principle, Peirce argues that, though it cannot be doubted that the man ought to choose from the pack having the greater number of red cards, still, as an individual, he can have no logical reason for doing so a single event has no probability. His only logical reason for choosing as he does arises from a consideration of what would follow if other men subsequently followed his example. Therefore, in order to be logical, one must be unselfish! Q. E. D.

In this, as in the preceding instance, one has the feeling of being landed

somewhere with great force. But where? Is it perhaps in a verbalism? It is hard to say: one has so little experience, outside of mathematics, of this logical ruthlessness-this adherence to logic in the face of everything, this apparent unconsciousness of any necessity for reconciling logic with "common sense"! The author is merciless to that human weakness which makes us distrustful of conclusions arrived at in ways that we cannot readily conceive or relate to ordinary experience.

To outline the philosophy of Peirce and to relate it in any degree that would be at all worth while to other philosophies, would require a book at least as long as the one under review. Even Peirce's editor, Mr. Cohen, and Professor Dewey, seem not to have added much by their respective commentaries to the clearness of a series of discussions which were probably not originally intended to form one rhetorical whole, and in which the reader must make all sorts of connections and reconcilements for himself. Only a few leading points may here be suggested.

Peirce was a Pragmatist in the sense of believing that "the meaning of a concept is to be found in all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of the concept could imply". The truth, however, is independent of what any one may think about it. This doctrine does not set out to test truth on the principle that the truth is "whatever works in practice", and it appears to leave no room for a Will to Believe. The truth is whatever conclusion would be arrived at by sufficient inquiry. "The reality of that which is real [depends] on the real fact that investigation is destined to lead at last, if continued long enough, to a belief in it."

The pragmatic conception of truth necessitated, as has been already suggested, a revision of ideas about the nature of probability. At the same time the doctrine that the whole meaning of an idea is contained in all its conceivable consequences would seem to enhance immensely the significance of probability itself as a factor in logic. The mathematical conception of probability was applied to logic, and to probability the idea of continuity, drawn from certain modes of scientific reasoning. Peirce thus constructed for himself a powerful engine of investigation. It brought him to a conclusion perfectly consistent with his original conception of truth. Since all knowledge rests on induction, and since all induction is, strictly speaking, imperfect, all knowledge depends upon probability. But the probability of an induction can never be exactly known. We must therefore infer that "all human certainty consists merely in our knowing that the processes by which our knowledge are derived are such as must generally have led to true conclusions."

The special applications of this philosophy are often remarkable, not to say astounding. To accept them all does not, however, appear necessary in the sense that a denial of any part implies a rejection of the whole; for what Peirce presents is not a creed or concatenated system, but rather a series of methods or working ideas. To compare and assimilate all the ideas set forth even in this segment of Peirce's work with the rest of one's active ideas would