Books

...Life, this Keyserling tells us, is the ultimate metaphysical reality...

...The Jews of Eastern Europe, by Arnold D. Margolin...

...In one sense, when Keyserling calls himself a philosopher it is by royal right as one to the manner born...

...Wherever he has traveled—in Ceylon, India, China, Japan, or the United March 31, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 583 States—his journey has lain through spiritual realms...

...She emphasizes the second since "these terms—life, aim, union—suggest its active and purposive character...

...The perfect balance of the two strains appears in Saint Paul and Saint Theresa...

...Brahmanism the most metaphysically profound of philosophies and cultures...

...The future...

...Evelyn Underbill very definitely has such a principle, and it may be summed up in a single word—service...

...the entire Jewish population huddled apart without national emblems, uniforms or service in the army or state...

...Louis de Santangel continued his influence with the King and gave from his private purse to equip the little fleet...

...In contrast to the earlier works of Evelyn Underhill—• Mysticism, The Mystic Way, The Essentials of Mysticism— which approached the subject from a more academic point of view, the present volume will appeal to all readers with an interest in the spiritual, and an appreciation of the beautiful as manifested in human life...

...There is only one group that finds employment without much trouble— musicians and singers, men as well as women—physicians and dentists...

...He deviates somewhat when he says: "Most recently on the list of contemporaries who actively identify their ancestral stock with the first days of American history are the Jews—Luis de Santangel, favorite of King Ferdinand and head of Spain's financial system, was most prominent amongst those who strove to have the Spanish monarchs facilitate the first voyage of Columbus...

...A visitor some few years ago to Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania, was astounded to find at least one-half of the city given over to the Jews...

...all walking carefully and scrutinizing the ground with much earnestness, that they might tread as nearly as possible in the very footsteps of Christ...

...Yet, each Keyserling and each part of his world is throbbing with life, expressing itself dramatically and powerfully, experiencing richly, revealing marvelous separate insights and separate values which seem to strain beyond themselves toward an unreached unity...

...Therefore, it is entirely incorrect to try and protest, as the author of the book I am reviewing, is doing, against the assertion nobody ever made, that it was Hungary who started the terrible struggle on her own responsibility...

...Vitalism is an advance on mechanism as an interpretation of this world, but it is no metaphysical principle...

...Saint Theresa...

...This ideal of altruistic service is no arbitrary standard for mysticism set up by Evelyn Underhill...

...But, all the same, the historical part of this strange work is mightily interesting and deserves to be read carefully...

...The Tragedy of Hungary, by Louis K. Birinyu Cleveland: Published by the author...

...The choice is: either believing or free determination...

...Also, every influential personage in that country was in favor of the war, with the sole exception of Count Tisza, and he was murdered...

...This attitude has its limitations, certainly—since politics and industry are not as irrelevant to the spirit as he assumes—but it leads to an unparalleled revelation of its own profounder realm...

...The Mystics of the Church, by Evelyn Underkill...

...Nevertheless, Keyserling's diary remains of inestimable value as an expression of twentieth-century thought— reflecting the many-sidedness, the lack of centre, the aspirations, the insight, and the limitations of an epoch which chooses to look upon intelligence as the impotent child of life...

...There have always been two forms of Christian mysticism, in some individuals sharply differentiated, in others almost completely merging...

...From Saint Paul to Lucie-Christine they file past us, in robes for the most part poor and without color, but radiant, none the less, with that light which never was, on sea or land...

...In us, even more than elsewhere in the white race, is to be found the struggle toward what Keyserling considers the ultimate ideal: "Instead of letting the recognition of their essential unity with Brahma, who wishes to manifest himself more and more fully in this world, develop into action by displaying initiative everywhere in accordance with the Divine will, the Indians merely watch how God helps Himself...

...After the year 1867 when Francis Joseph was crowned king of Hungary in Budapest, Hungarian influence became predominant in Vienna to such an extent that most of the Austrian diplomats and officials were Hungarians...

...I also cannot agree with the conclusions he comes to...

...In tracing the development of the mystical nature, Evelyn Underhill brings out the fact that most of those who have achieved union with God have trodden with but slight deviation the specific road that has come to be known as the mystic way...

...The overwhelming majority of them, however, are definitely lost to Jewry, like so much denationalized dust...

...Ernest Sutherland Bates...

...This is in keeping with her contention, amply proven, that the true Christian mystic is "no religious free lance independent or contemptuous of tradition...

...Szogenyi Marisch, and Count Szapary—were all Hungarians, and it was Hungary that dictated the whole policy of the Ball Platz in Vienna...

...here with a newly created language that is asserting its literature and program in face of the fact that English is the proper letter-mark of our citizenship...

...Margolin's statement regarding his private purse is entirely "a new one...

...here they are, facing new problems of exclusion, new calumnies, and new objections, not always without foundation...

...NOT often does one meet among one's contemporaries a mind of genuine distinction, for these are not given plentifully to any single generation...

...The three stages of the mystic way have had different names in different ages but, under whatever terminology, the essential forms of experience have remained the same...

...Margloin tells us: "It is obvious that this [new] class of emigrants was composed entirely of city inhabitants...

...The author of the travel diary has succeeded better than any other contemporary philosopher in giving himself the world as a background...

...Saint Ignatius Loyola...

...There is the intellectual, aristocratic Keyserling, lord of great estates in Raykiill, sensitive to the claims of authority and tradition, contemptuous of the fluidity of modern life without fixed standards, devoted for his own part to the eternal values of form and order and perfection...

...Saint Bernard of Clairvaux...

...The love of God is never idle, for it constrains us to follow the way of the Cross...

...But it has at least succeeded in this • limited aim...

...The present author adopts the generally accepted terms: purgation—"purification of character and detachment from earthly interests...

...Such a problem is, preeminently, Count Hermann Keyserling...

...These hands, as hands, are blind, and their blindness has caused much mischief...

...There are many of these, but two stand out, intertwined in perpetual struggle...

...Japan living in a real harmony with nature unknown even to western poets—all these in turn are suffered to express their deepest aspirations through the voice of Keyserling...

...It is in the life and growth which follow upon this first apprehension, the power developed, the creative work performed, that we discover its true value and its place in the economy of the spiritual world...

...Philosophy may be, as the Hindus have taught, not a theory of reality but an expression of reality, a record of the steps by which one passes from one level of thought to another, reaching at last, if successful, an immediate consciousness of ultimate meaning...

...For a philosopher, according to occidental ideas, is a master of theory, one who works by the light of reason alone, proceeding from syllogism to syllogism, buttressing his thought with logic, and rounding it out, if successful, into a coherent systematic whole...

...It seemed to the travelers that every second child was being prepared for immigration and regarded the American visitor with eyes of unreserved brotherhood and some envy...

...the high-hearted Rajputs of Jaipur still maintaining the honor of mediaeval feudalism...

...When the President of the Lithuanian republic was asked concerning this condition, he replied smoothly that the Jews are not a fighting people and that the native Lithuanians refused to serve with them in the armies...

...Let each one reflect that just so much does he advance in all spiritual things, as he goes out from self-love, self-will, and self-interest...

...The Mystics of the Church achieves a comprehensive history of Christian mysticism through the glowing pageantry of the lives of these vision-haunted men and women...

...This is made easily possible by an excellent chapter by chapter bibliography...

...What, then, is left for us...

...It is the second part of the work to which I object, first because I think it entirely Utopian...

...Thus we are more destined to action than they are...

...Our merit does not consist in enjoyment, but in work, in suffering, and in love...

...It is at once an interpretive criticism of civilizations and religions, an exposition of a philosophy, and, above all, in the last analysis, an inner autobiography...

...The assertion is false to the deepest wisdom of his Hindu masters who have always recognized being behind becoming...

...Catherine Radziwill...

...Again and again one of the Keyserlings declares that there is no necessary relation between being and becoming, between thought and action...

...Islam strong in discipline and character...

...and, second, because I find some inaccuracies in it, which are evidently intentional and, therefore, compel me to consider the entire conception of the volume as unworthy of belief...

...And then there is the expatriated, vitalistic Keyserling, who himself becomes the incarnation of this Protean fluidity, a relativist who sees religions and civilizations solely in terms of their adaptation to particular races...

...Such a declaration is not a metaphysical solution but metaphysical despair...

...The charges against them have been characterized by an excess that has fallen back on the heads of their accusers, but has left the core of their objections untouched and unanswered...

...At the end of this pageant of the Church Triumphant came the little shabby figure of Francis, barefoot and brown-robed...

...What for many has seemed the end is for her but the beginning: "That more or less vivid experience of God which may come early in the mystic's career, and always awakens a love and a longing for Him, is, so to speak, only the raw material of real mysticism...

...In this as in her other books, Evelyn Underhill has been particularly successful in recreating the mediaeval Catholic mystics in all their sincerity and naivete...

...2.00...

...The different parts and countries of the world do not mean primarily to Keyserling different places, climates, fauna or flora, but different racial cultures...

...Such a remark is sufficient in itself alone to discredit a whole book...

...There is no perfect virtue—none that bears fruit—unless it is exercised by means of our neighbor...

...Why, for instance, revive the old, exploded story, invented by the British publication called John Bull, and its discredited editor, Horace Bottomley, the sensational story of the murder of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort having been paid for by the Serbian Government, and directed by the British Secret Service connected with the Serbian Legation in London...

...She defines mysticism as "a direct intuition or experience of God," and as "the life which aims at union with God...

...He condemns the search after independent ways...

...The magic of the names of these mystical writings are an invitation in themselves: The Cloud of Unknowing, The Dark Night of the Soul, Quia Amore Langueo, The Mending of Life, The Flame of Living Love...

...China cautious, circumspect, and prudent, but saturated with morality...

...The highest type of mystic, the author finds within the Church, subordinating his will before, and interpreting his visions according to its authority...

...How can one do justice in a brief review to an author every page of whose writing is full of subtle suggestions, psychological observations and philosophical reflections, theories and facts, opinions upon this, that, and the other—all, to make the matter worse, shown in a different light, with different connotations, on some ensuing page where the author's attitude and emphasis have shifted...

...the entire male population of Lithuania was under arms...

...He is too many-sided, too vastly fertile in ideas, to be caught in a phrase...

...His title, The Jews of Eastern Europe, restricts him from discussing the intermingling of Italian, German, and French blood which is also evident in many of our American Jews...

...The thing is clearly impossible...

...We are the hands of God...

...He ends his volume with the words: "It may be that among the children of these 'new immigrants' growing up in this country there will be found good timber for future American citizenship...

...2.SO...

...The author has an unerring instinct for quotations that intrigue and lead to a desire for knowledge of the original works...

...it has produced the happiest people...

...Brahmanism and Confucianism receive the greatest attention...

...All that escapes classification remains as a disturbing problem...

...Margolin admits, through the pressure of prejudices and economic necessities...

...The embrace of divine contemplation must be often interrupted in order to give nourishment to the little ones, and none may live for himself alone, but for all...

...This is out of place in a serious book...

...The first hundred pages are calculated to teach to the outsider much he would never have learned if he had not read them...

...In rejecting the ultimate value of consistency, as he does, he leaves his universe broken into parts, and leaves himself ununified, uncertain, a group of warring Keyserlings wrestling with one another...

...To be able to realize every conceptual proposition in a direct intuitional experience, to be able to justify every intuition by universal laws of reason, such must remain for every profound thinker, the final though unattainable goal of philosophy...

...A union of intuition and reflection is manifestly more desirable than either alone...

...The first thing which strikes the reader is that it must be a propaganda work, and, of course, this does not help to make it sympathetic, at least to the reviewer, who is always inclined to look with some suspicion upon books written for the purpose of only presenting one side of a question...

...is certainly an interesting book, but at the same time it is an exasperating and puzzling one...

...All the mystics of the world were Catholics in their attitude...

...union—"perfect and self-forgetting harmony of the regenerate will with God...

...Confucianism, on the other hand, based on a moral code rather than on a philosophy, is eminently Protestant...

...The placid Buddhists of Ceylon turning the self-renunciation of Gautama into an optimistic doctrine of peace within their self-chosen limitations...

...four out of the five shops on the main streets occupied by proprietors who could speak no other language than the idiom we have come to know as Yiddish...

...This is so absurd that one cannot imagine any serious historian even mentioning it, or trying to make his readers believe that if such a plot had existed, those who had conceived it would not have taken precious good care not to leave any traces of it behind them, or used official government paper to record it on...

...and he alone was walking easily and steadily in the actual footprints of Our Lord...

...illumination—"peaceful certitude of God, and perception of the true values of existence in His light...

...TTT Thomas Walsh...

...the business of the town was suspended on numerous Hebrew holidays, and continued on the Christian festivals...

...all contemplative natures are of a Catholic trend of mind...

...Equally absurd is the suggestion that "America ought to demand the immediate payment of all the European debts due to this country, and that if payment is refused, the American government ought to proceed to confiscate all the European owned bank deposits in American banks, and all the investments made by European investors in this country, and then apply the same to the payment of the debt due to this country...

...And when by good fortune such a one is encountered, the result is baffling...

...In New York, where the race has settled in large numbers, it has taken on such an attitude of self-consciousness and reliance upon its own powers that these "apologias pro vita sua" strike the average reader as unnecessary and marked with a touch of flourish...

...The better-known saints are sketched in less fully, but a lovely legend of Saint Francis from Pierre Pettignano creeps in...

...it is equally false to the teaching of Kant, which he accepts, that that which appears in time and space is phenomenal, not ultimately real...

...Petty, indeed, seem the Nordic myth and the provincial conceit of the white races before the panorama of oriental civilizations which Keyserling unrolls before us...

...Saint Catherine of Siena...

...As for the peasants, they could not, under existing conditions, sell out their farms and flee...

...either being a Catholic or a Protestant...

...When the world war broke out, the Austrian ambassadors in Paris, Berlin, and Saint Petersburg—Count Szechen, Mr...

...In America, especially, despite our barbaric idealization of material success, despite the lowering effect of our democracy, the signs of hope are clearly discernible...

...But as one reads on, he finds oftentimes that he is, instead, seeing the world against a background of Keyserlings...

...New York: George H. Doran Company...

...In a study of old and new immigrants, Dr...

...but the teaching of Christ induces us to live unconsciously according to their knowledge...

...New York: Thomas Seltzer...

...Now this financial adviser was a Catholic, who was entrusted with the funds of the Holy Brotherhood, and Dr...

...in another sense, he is no philosopher at all and would be the first to disclaim the title...

...There are chapters on Jewish letters, the Yiddish Theatre and even the tribute to Benny Leonard and Lew Tendler, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in the interests of the Jews in London, Paris, Berlin, and Jerusalem...

...Far, indeed, is Keyserling from attaining it...

...Chinese civilization has been based actually, not merely verbally, upon ethics...

...Gladys Chandler Graham...

...One need only turn to the writings of the mystics themselves to see that the idea of giving out of their fulness was inherent in their very consciousness of that fulness...

...Equally absurd is the assertion that up to the time of the world war, Hungary was downtrodden by Austria, and had to do all that Austria commanded her to perform...

...The church in China, as in Protestantism, is a practical external organization whose sole end is the direction of conduct...

...We know nothing like as much as they do...

...584 THE COMMONWEAL March 31, 1926 It is a stern ideal of mysticism which the author presents...

...The Travel Diary of a Philosopher is quite incomparable to any other book of travels ever written...

...IN COMMENTING on James Henry Leuba's Psychology of Religious Mysticism, the Catholic World said: "The essential handicap under which the author labors is that he lacks a reliable principle by which genuine mysticism may be distinguished from the counterfeit...

...Otherwise he whirls round upon the wheel of life and like a dancing dervish moves to a meaningless rhythm...

...And this would be wrong, for there is undoubtedly much that is true in the arguments that are brought forward, arguments that would have far more authority if they were free from a bias of partiality which pervades the entire book...

...The theocentric, those "whose dominant spiritual apprehension is of the absolute being of God" may be illustrated by Saint Augustine and Saint Catherine of Genoa...

...The travel diary of a philosopher, if it is to be final, must include other journeys than those through the world and his own self, even though these be as rich as the Keyserling world and the Keyserling self...

...Where profundity is too deep to be easily plumbed, breadth too great to be easily measured, one is likely to be left stimulated, inspired perhaps, but confused...

...Where other travelers, such as John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, for example, have been content to report contemporary political and industrial conditions, Keyserling seeks the typical inner attitude, the fundamental motivation of whole peoples...

...he regards trust in authority as the primary condition of all inner progress...

...Margolin states correctly that "the Jewish people have suffered more than all other peoples from easily spreading words that fall glibly from lying tongues...

...Reason and the intelligence cannot safely be so disdained...

...But if one day they are guided by the spirit of recognition, it is they who will, in so far as it is possible at all, succeed in founding the kingdom of heaven upon earth...

...Margolin gives a very interesting statement regarding the various racial elements that compose the Jewish communities of today—descendants of the Turanians, Tartars, or Mongols, mixed with Semitic strains...

...All great religious revelations have been given to spirits of Catholic tendency, and it will be like that for all time to come...

...AMONG the numerous works and propaganda periodicals that have flooded the American presses, those of the Jews have not been wanting...

...He saw in vision "a superb procession of apostles, saints, martyrs, with the Blessed Virgin at their head...

...it has maintained itself by moral force virtually without soldiery or police...

...An adequate commentary on The Travel Diary of a Philosopher would be as long as the travel diary itself...

...Keyserling long ago paid obeisance to this method in his earliest work, The Structure of the World, but of late years he has sought the goal through other ways...

...The Christocentric, those whose inner life "is controlled by their sense of a direct personal communion with Our Lord," finds its most notable example in Saint Francis...

...The Chinese not only possess a higher culture than Europeans or Americans, they live on a higher moral level...

...We are attempting, however crudely, to spiritualize matter, to conquer nature for the well-being of humanity, and to combine prosperity with virtue...

...They are merely repetitions of old accusations now exploded, that "it was the invisible power which is now controlling Europe," that brought about the cataclysm from which the universe has not yet recovered...

...Now here they are, good citizens and bad, Bolsheviks, some of them, perforce, as Dr...

...The general temper of the former is likened to that of Catholicism: "The Indian, whatever his belief may be in particular, thinks of the path to salvation in the Catholic manner...

...If so construed, it becomes only another form of naturalism, glorfying whatever happens in a more mechanical manner than mechanism itself...

...It may be doubted if, as a matter of fact, even western philosophies have ever remained entirely satisfied with pure theory...

...Not a word does he devote to the political significance of the British naval base at Singapore, the question of foreign concessions in China, or the dangers of Bolshevism throughout the East...

...On hearing an account of the drafting of the Jews of New York* of their acceptance of the military law, their service side by side with other Americans in the ranks, and of their renewed pride and interest in the flag under which they served, the President raised his hands with a gesture of helplessness and transmitted the question...

...Throughout the United States where the Jewish communities are less numerous, such publications will find a more appropriate field...

...Angelo of Foligni...

...Yet, one must own that in the volume referred to, this propaganda is mixed up with so much that is instructive, that one can forgive the polemical tone in which it is conceived...

...It was Count Andrassy who was one of the most powerful figures in European politics and greatly responsible for the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, and where could one find a more fiery Hungarian than this statesman, who had risen to the position of prime minister of the dual monarchy, although he had been condemned to death during the rebellion of 1848...

...And he who is intent upon beholding God will always choose the first alternative...

...The two Saint Catherines, by such different paths and from such different starting-points, reach the same goal...

...Jacopone da Todi, Saint John of the Cross, and Richard Rolle kneel before the same altar against the background of their different native lands...

...He is willing to take seriously only the permanent things—nature, religion, art, and life...

...the fact that true Christian mysticism is neither a philosophic theory nor a name for delightful religious sensations, but that it is a life with an aim...

...This, however, does not make Hungary alone responsible for the catastrophe, and so far as the writer is aware, no one has attempted to do it...

...Moreover, there was nobody on board the fleet of Columbus who was not a Catholic, whatever may have been his blood...