OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

Professor James E. Hagerty is serving as director of the division of markers of the state branch of the Council of National Defense.

PENNSYLVANIA MILITARY COLLEGE

Dr. Charles J. Bushnell has accepted the position of professor of sociology and economics.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH DAkota

In the summer session Dr. G. R. Davies is giving a course in charities which takes up the study of general relief work and home service with special emphasis upon the problems arising in connection with the war.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Professor George E. Howard, of the University of Nebraska, is offering the following courses in the summer session: "Problems in Social Psychology and Ethics" and "Biography of American Statesmanship."

Mrs. Alice Stebbins Wells, president of the International Association of Police Women, is conducting a training class for police women in the summer session.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

During the last semester Professor E. A. Ross conducted a seminar course entitled "Social Progress and Regress." During the summer session Mr. W. F. Hintzman is directing the course in Red Cross Civilian Relief.

REVIEWS

A New Basis for Social Progress. By W. C. WHITE and L. A. HEATH. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1917. Pp. 215.

$1.25.

Just a hundred years ago Thomas Chalmers, then minister of the parish of St. Johns, Glasgow, wrote:

There is an impatience on the part of many a raw and sanguine philanthropist for doing something great; and, akin to this, there is an impatience for doing that great thing speedily. They spurn the condition of drivelling among littles; and unless there be a redeeming magnificence in the whole operation of which they bear a part, there are some who could not be satisfied with a humble and detached allotment in the great vineyard of human usefulness. . . . and in by far the greater number of instances will it be seen that instead of concentrating their exertions upon one district or department of the city, they expatiate at large and over the face of its entire territory, recognizing no other boundary than that which lies indefinitely but fully beyond the final outskirts of the compact and contiguous dwelling-places. . . . .

That principle as laid down in the "Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns" is unconsciously reaffirmed (or at least unacknowledged) by the joint authors of this volume under review. They phrase it as "a unit equipment for a unit of population." The main difference is that they make the university pivotal, while in Dr. Chalmers' scheme the parish church was the hub. Chalmers was attacking waste in charity and its resultant pauperization. Dr. White attacks primarily waste and lack of real scientific vision or purpose in education, but includes eventually the whole range of community interests. His thesis in brief is that city life can thrive only by developing "autonomic units of population" each with a complete equipment for education, health, and welfare. Such units are to be determined by a perennial survey and census conducted by a municipal foundation to be located by preference in the graduate school of a local university or in the city government or a chamber of commerce, etc. These local foundations will work out the educational, health, and other agencies necessary to meet the vocational demands and peculiar bent of their communities. Since, however, certain needs of the community could only be met by combining into larger

units, a scheme of regional correlation is provided, leading ultimately to a supreme educational court of seven members "before which arguments for justice might be presented and by which the evil of autocracy— perhaps the greatest in modern university life-might be presented.

This book grew out of an abortive "survey" of the University of Pittsburgh, but it has a certain general interest for educational administration and community organizers. It does not always escape the temptation to intemperate language born in part of its local origin. It slaps hard the ecclesiastical college tradition and the wasteful competition between church-supported schools; it smites the autocracy of presidents and boards of trustees, while arguing with vigor for representation of faculties and students in university management. It tilts at educational quackery and fads, but falls into a pitfall of its own digging in the overworking of the idea that chemical analysis of human glandular products may offer us the key to understanding human psychology and proper educational procedure!

Either misprints or a faulty use of words ("numerable," p. 37; "effects," "latitudinarian," p. 45; "emitted," p. 51, etc.) mark the text here and there. The publishers through a reprehensible oversight have been advertising the authors as “engaged in making the widely known Pittsburgh Survey." This book has nothing whatever to do with the real Pittsburgh Survey.

There is much to be said for the authors' vision of a mighty progressive nation of university units, and no doubt such a social organization would promote the substance of real democracy while securing efficiency in administration. But so long as a supreme court by a margin of one vote declares it unconstitutional to regulate child labor as between states, I am not very hopeful of the immediate realization of this educational utopia.

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

ARTHUR J. TODD

The Theory and Practice of Mysticism. By CHARLES MORRIS ADDISON. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1918. Pp. viii+ 216. $1.50.

This volume presents in an untechnical and intimate manner an account of the stages of the mystic way with illustrations from the lives and writings of the great mystics. "The Longing for God," "The Way toward God," and "The Meeting Point" are the titles of the chapters

which describe the aims and the methods of mystical contemplation. A chapter on "Modern Mysticism" shows how this temper of mind is found in philosophers like Bergson and in poets like Wordsworth and Browning.

The author is an ardent advocate of this type of religion and evidently speaks out of very vivid personal experience. Like most mystics, appreciation and practice are more congenial to him than analysis, though this book is free from a certain dogmatism and zeal so native to its class. The last chapter, "Practical Mysticism," is a frank appeal and exhortation to the practice of mysticism, with some directions for the same.

The book is well suited to the general reader. It furnishes a short, reliable introduction to the subject. However, a novice might easily receive an exaggerated impression as to the extent to which modern philosophers and psychologists, such as William James, support the mystic's claims. The well-selected quotations in the text and the footnotes, with the references to books at the end of each chapter, invite one to go on from these pages to the extensive literature of the subject which is rapidly increasing at the present time.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

E. S. AMES

Man's Supreme Inheritance. By F. MATTHIAS ALEXANDER. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1918. Pp. xvii+354. $2.00. Man's Supreme Inheritance is a plea for conscious control of the human organism as opposed to current psychotherapeutic methods which make their appeal to the subconscious part of the mind, i.e., to feeling-tone instead of to reason. The latter methods, such as suggestion, hypnotism, faith healing, the author regards as "dangerous in practice and uncertain in results," since they merely substitute "one uncontrolled habit of thought for another" (p. 50). They "seek to reach the subjective mind by deadening the objective or conscious mind, and the backbone of my theory and practice, upon which I feel that I cannot insist too strongly, is that the conscious mind must be quickened" (p. 52). Instead of wholesale commands to a "supposed omniscient subconscious self" the author would appeal to peoples' intelligence (p. 54). The author is equally out of sympathy with an education based on uncritical tradition, such as the emphasis on right- or left-handedness, and with the "free expressionists" who would leave everything to the

random movements of the child (p. 124). The tendency has been to neglect "the means whereby" in our anxiety to reach the end. What is needed is conscious analysis of the former. Owing to the artificial conditions imposed by civilization, we have become victims of subconscious habits and predispositions which interfere with proper functioning. The author's "method is based firstly on the understanding of the coordinated uses of the muscular mechanisms, and secondly on the complete acceptance of the hypothesis that each and every movement can be consciously directed and controlled" (p. 199). In the necessary re-education the subject must first be taught to inhibit the wrong habits and then be guided into "the position of mechanical advantage." The author does "not believe in any concentration that calls for effort. It is the wish, the conscious desire to do a thing or think a thing, which results in adequate performance" (p. 103). The reviewer cannot go into the author's practical methods of treatment which are merely suggested in this book. With the author's personal tact and experience, they have evidently met with marked success. To copy them wholesale would be a violation of the author's fundamental appeal, viz., to "establish communication with reason" as against habit and prejudice. With the general principle of the book the reviewer is in sympathy. "It is our duty now to superimpose a new civilization founded on reason rather than on feeling-tones and debauched emotions, on conscious guidance and control rather than on instinct" (p. 242). This is as true in our group conduct as in our individual guidance.

CARLETON COLLEGE

J. E. BOODIN

Culture and Ethnology. By ROBERT H. LOWIE, PH.D. New York: Douglas C. McMurtrie. 1917. Pp. 189.

This book is designed to acquaint laymen with some of the results of ethnological work. Its thesis is that the interpretation of culture cannot be made from the standpoint of psychology, race, or geographic environment but from the standpoint of culture itself. "Culture," he says, "is a thing sui generis which can be explained only in terms of itself. This is not mysticism but sound scientific method. The biologist, whatever metaphysical speculations he may indulge in as to the ultimate origin of life, does not depart in his workaday mood from the principle that every cell is derived from some other cell. So the ethnologist will do well to postulate the principle, omnis cultura ex cultura. This means