Books
Radziwill, Catherine & Reilly, Joseph J. & Crowley, Paul & Chase, Mary Ellen & Fiske, A. Longfellow & Herzfeld, Karl F. & Maxwell, Cliff
82 THE COMMONWEAL May 21, 1930 BOOKS Science and Faith The Sceptical Biologist, by Joseph Needham. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. $3.00. THIS very stimulating book contains ten...
...It is educated Christianity...
...Neither Newman's name nor his influence can be forgotten as long as the sons of Eve are plagued by spiritual questions...
...TO SAY that this book is up to Connolly's standard ought to be sufficient...
...He is never taken in by Viennese or Florentine sham piety...
...The only thing one can say against Mr...
...The story of the taking of Jerusalem itself is a painful one...
...Why college...
...Therein lies one answer to the occasionally posed question: "Who bothers about Newman now...
...Perhaps yet another is afforded by her allusion, which she makes more than once, to the familiar Saxon story of the sparrow, flying into the lighted hall and then into the darkness without...
...He insists that he is talking of the latter but every reference he makes to it applies—and applies only—to the former...
...5-00...
...Conscious or unconscious as this may be, conceived and executed by the thought of the author or only resultant from her own feeling for her story, it nevertheless provides a perfect atmosphere for the sweetly appealing personality and the behavior, with its tragic consequences, of Mistress Anne Hambridge, or Nancy Pretty...
...To each artist Berenson brings a definite Einfiihlung, pertinent and hugely instructive...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...One point remains...
...With the hokum and bunk contained in so many alleged "sea stories," it is doubly welcome to get hold of a book written by a man who knows the sea and writes of it with a distinction that is above question...
...It spread slowly, for winter now imprisoned the land...
...Objections from philosophy would not hit the mark, because in doing so science would not claim that the mechanistic hypothesis gives the whole of the world, but only the whole of the scientific aspect of the world...
...Lamb has drawn this last-named personage especially well, and made him stand out in his book among all the other knights who together with him, had rushed to snatch the grave of Christ from the infidels...
...Comparatively, he stresses his "campaign in Ireland" and his relations with Manning, and passes lightly over his Anglican friendships, the influence of his sermons and his duel with Gladstone over infallibility...
...Every collection of religious books ought to include this life, which is at once a monument of erudition and a great handbook of counsel...
...Is it worth while or is it a waste of time, a humbug...
...but there is a detailed review of the Saint's manifold activities—the career of one who was both scholar and prelate, mystic and logician, active spirit and founder of a contemplative order...
...May not unnaturally reapportions the emphasis...
...The warfare of sense against the unseen realities is unending...
...New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons...
...adapted from the Abbe Hamon by Harold Burton...
...There are distinct echoes of Bergson and his "creative evolution," and he accepts the testimony of the soul as of higher validity than that of the test-tube or laboratory, at least in the realm of the spirit...
...Needham is, in the distinctions which he makes, strongly influenced by the newer development of physics which indeed is the fundamental natural science because of its dealing with matter present everywhere...
...3.50...
...the sheep grew like skeletons...
...May has taken for the subject of his book not a name but a man, not a tradition but one of the great living forces of today, no less than of countless tomorrows...
...but it is a messenger from Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives...
...May's vivid portraiture and contagious sympathy a quickened sense of Newman the man, his aims, his sufferings, his exhaustless efforts to make truth and the will of God prevail among men...
...The girl, Nancy Pretty, or "None So Pretty," who takes her name from the flower, London Pride, lives as airily as the blossoms for which she is called...
...The other seven deal with a subject of great interest to philosophers and scientists, which is still very controversial...
...Fool's Pilgrimage, by Herbert J. Scheibl...
...But according to him, this is so because they have different viewpoints concerning the same world, as explained before in the case of science and aesthetics...
...Godfrey understood then, what others before him had known—that Jerusalem is a city shared among many men, hallowed by old customs that no new masters may alter...
...He emphasizes, to repeat it, this as a methodological, not a metaphysical procedure, which should not be subject to philosophical objections, which in his opinion are not to the point, as they have nothing to do with the aim of the scientist...
...The terrible slaughter which marked it is anything but edifying, and one can only regret that among those crusaders supposed to have been actuated by the noblest and holiest motives, when they took up the Red Cross and sewed it on their garments, there were so many bandits...
...uO MANY American groups have become familiar to us in novel and story that the presentation of a type in a non-fiction book which is interesting and vivid, is refreshing...
...Tales of Gloucester Gloucestermen, by James B. Connolly...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...Love is usually more staccato than this...
...He lives on the higher plane of faith...
...The value of the complete record abides nevertheless...
...In particular, Pope Urban II, who conceived the First Crusade and sent it forth, and Godfrey of Bouillon, baron of Jerusalem and Defender of the Sepulchre as he called himself, refusing the title of king...
...Which words explain why all through past ages, and in ages to come, this city will unite all nations and all creeds in worship of the one Being Whose death made it what it is...
...Perhaps, indeed, the most vivid picture is that of Lady Ingleby, her coach wedged in the mud, she herself sitting in a damp ditch for two hours and meditating with exasperation on the good roads she would make if she, or some other woman, were king or protector...
...Apart from philosophy we can only get partial glimpses of the totality of the world by approaching it from different sides and with different methods, all of which are autonomous and cannot contradict each other because they look at different aspects of the same entity...
...Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press...
...THIS very stimulating book contains ten independent articles, of which three short ones on Coleridge, de la Mattrie and Harvey treat certain aspects of the lives of these three men interested in biology...
...It finds in personality the clew to the meaning of God and His world...
...Early in the book Mr...
...And when the mercury is threatening to run out through the top of its calibrated glass tube this summer, it will be a wholesome relief for those who have to stay at home to take this book, retire to the coolest part of the veranda and enjoy, vicariously, the stinging gales which it so admirably describes...
...An attitude of reverence, essential to a work of this kind, neecssarily takes the emphasis off dramatic inner conflicts, glimpses of which are afforded by the Abbe Bremond...
...4.00...
...A great deal more time was spent in bed since that was the warmest place, and long stories were told round the kitchen fire...
...When he discusses, briefly, Catholic ideas and principles he is apt to reveal sorry misconceptions, as when he decides that Catholic "sacramentalism" is essentially "magic...
...The Red Hills, by Cornelius Weygandt...
...13.00...
...He takes his physics mainly in the form of the views proposed by Eddington in his Nature of the Physical World, perhaps too seriously, because Eddington is of necessity overemphasizing the new side of the picture...
...Everything is here: resignation to the Divine Will that is at the same time an act of love...
...This is the single serious blemish on an excellent study...
...Joseph J. Reilly...
...Needham stresses correctly that the historical development has subjected ever-increasing fields of chemistry and biology to the mechanistic view (with which expression he means the view that in the particular fields the laws are the same that we know from physics and that the method of description is best a quantitative one, looking for "effective causes" or for present conditions as determining what must happen...
...Vaughan lets us into the secret that he is a "personalist" and believes that all life should be studied from the angle of "personalism...
...LAMB is one of the few writers of history who succeed in making it attractive, even to those who are frank enough to say they do not care for it...
...As an illustration of this the reader may take the letter to Madame de Charmoisy, written upon receipt of the news of her husband's death...
...Cliff Maxwell...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...How far may professors exploit subversive personal opinions...
...Without the aid of carefully delineated characters Professor Weygandt has made a whole people come alive...
...Still, he writes, "We must, however, acknowledge the vast truth in the idea that the common judgment of the Church universal, the spiritual Church if not the visible Church, illumined by the Gospel, instructed by prophetic leaders, guided by the Divine Spirit, is our nearest human approach to a knowledge of the mind and will of God...
...1 HIS is a well-constructed novel, with a sound sense of values implicit in its unfolding...
...So many insights into the spirit of the time are afforded by a book of this character that it is well-nigh indispensable to the student of the period...
...We see some of these things a little differently now...
...Unfortunately enough attention has not been paid to the fact that Connolly is really a fine artist, not uncomparable, in his way, to Conrad who ranged the wide world for his stories, while Connolly has contented himself with a watery bit of geography that lies off the coast of Gloucester and Cape Cod...
...Mary Ellen Chase...
...Such books as this might well be placed in the hands of many young students who now prefer Watson to Thomas Aquinas and Fosdick to Augustine...
...Catherine Radziwill...
...And now comes, to the reviewer's mind, the most important step, namely, the assertion that science should be entitled to use the mechanistic concept as a "heuristic hypothesis" and press it as far as possible everywhere...
...But he has made Newman an appealing and vital figure, he has paid fine tribute to his mastery of the written word, and he has put before the reader either in Newman's eloquent words or in his own some of the utterances which were electric with significance to his own generation and are no less meaningful to ours...
...In English, the word science is sometimes used synonymous with "wissenschaft" in general, sometimes only as meaning one of the sub-groups and therefore it tends to convey the impression that the historian has either to use the method of physics or is not "scientific...
...OERENSON'S famous lectures on the painters of the Italian renaissance have aged since their first appearance, but it was a happy idea to reissue them...
...There seems to be an unfortunate situation due to the use of certain words in the English language...
...That means that it is thinkable— although it is not so, fortunately, as the reviewer, as a scientist, would say—that revelation would f.e...
...The reviewer does not quite agree with Needham when he asserts that the mechanistic view is the only scientific view possible...
...Always he writes from the position of the thinker who believes in God, in a divine Christ, and who therefore grants the supernatural...
...Writing of Christ he exhibits the clarity of Harnack with an added spiritual insight—he even gives us flashes of the sublime mysticism of Augustine...
...To read the first pages of this study is to read the entire book and to gain from Mr...
...He keeps his readers' attention concentrated on them until he takes leave of them, and this without infringing on those rules of history which forbid turning stern reality into poems...
...What has all this to do with Mr...
...The author writes, "Personality is the loftiest reality of which we have any knowledge, and we may boldly claim that there will never appear upon earth a higher value...
...THIS is the sixth book to be published on Newman within the last four and a half years, with French, English and American scholarship represented...
...Newman has an answer in the form of a philosophy of education so sound, so complete, so fool-proof that a generation which believes that the quest is better than discovery fails to see it...
...The seven articles are kept together through a consequent answer to the question: what should the scientific attitude of the biologist be...
...It goes back to the early theologians, and indeed to Christ Himself...
...In addition, he has added three stories never before published...
...Perhaps the old songs and superstitions which Miss Irwin includes add another cubit to its stature...
...May's Newman...
...Indeed, it is worthier of study and emulation, in many respects, than the middle-ages...
...Who has put the case and restated the answer so eloquently, so patiently, so convincingly as Newman...
...And if he takes a sly dig now and then at Catholic ideas he is still harder on Calvinistic theology...
...give the exact age of the earth, while for Needham religion is confined exclusively to giving a quite different type of experience...
...Even more important to us of the present, however, is the character of Salesian mysticism...
...On the other hand as an offset to the description of the horrors performed by these "men of iron," as Mr...
...accordingly the reviewer can give only his personal opinion...
...Prayer, worship, religion, are the prerogatives of man alone because he alone possesses reason in the higher sense of the term...
...But it is often prosaic and its dialogue is often pompous...
...Though one might becomingly desire to change a phrase here and there, the integrity of the whole is admirable...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...HERE is a charming story, and, more than that, a big and a wise one...
...In German we use "wissenschaft" which includes theology, law, the humanities and natural science, etc., and subdivide it into "geistes-" and "natur-wissenschaft" which latter is again subdivided into "beschreibende" (descriptive) and "exakte naturwissenschaften...
...the ground was too hard to dig...
...Though the words themselves cannot reveal the intensity of the emotion which compels me to set them down thus flatly and without ornament, I ask you to accept my assurance that the hand which wrote them is not nearly so firm as the will to make you see that what my statement implies is not actually the impossible thing it may appear to be at first glance...
...May's talent lies rather in the concrete than in the abstract...
...Laid in the last half of the seventeenth century upon the restoration of Charles II, it is no slight chronicle of those years, easy and uneasy, that followed the Great Fire of 1666...
...It avoids reading things into the narrative which are not really there...
...Louis: B. Herder Book Company...
...but the second half is rather tedious to anyone not vitally interested in the making of earthenware...
...When a given saint is so verily the index to spirituality in his age as was Saint Francis de Sales, a book which enables one to follow him step by step is of inestimable value...
...Throughout the book a beautiful unity is preserved by the skilful adaptation of style to material and attitude...
...Geneva's Saint The Life of Saint Francis de Sales...
...May brings no new facts to light nor does he differ essentially from previously rendered judgments on Newman...
...Ex Umbris Cardinal Newman, by J. Lewis May...
...People known and unknown flit in and out among its pages—John Evelyn, Samuel Pepys, Aphra Behn, Buckingham, Prince Rupert, Sir Roger L'Estrange, Sir Thomas Browne—as well as mistresses, pedlers, fortune-tellers, a nurse, who is an echo of her in Romeo and Juliet, and a chaplain who exemplifies the type described by Macaulay in his chapter on England in 1685...
...I love you," runs a love letter...
...In a sense, however much the Christian may regret the fact, Berenson's own lack of sensitiveness to religious values is to his advantage...
...I cannot refrain from quoting these lines, which contain so much humanity ought to take to heart for ever and ever...
...The era of the counter-reformation is replete with counsel for the present time...
...The cavalcade passed on its way, leaving behind a trail of gossip that spread over the countryside and furnished light refreshment for many months...
...Pertinent too, and with ever-widening implications, is the question of education...
...He emphasizes that every success has been connected with this view and that, considered as a method, it is the only one that suggests new experiments leading to new results...
...IT IS desirable that popular interest in the saints should increase, and so fashions in hagiography have been judiciously altered...
...There is certainly nothing new in this for it has always been basic in the teachings of the Church...
...These respectable Dutch people, in their love of the land, give a muchneeded stability to American life of today...
...4.50...
...There is the sweet, clean smell of newly-plowed earth over the first half of the book...
...Briefer Mention The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, by Bernhard Berenson...
...In like manner we can arrive at the thought of God as the supreme and invisible spirit...
...Lamb calls them, we have some pages after the seizure of the sacred city, that strike one's heart as well as one's imagination with the poetry of an unfinished hymn of praise to the Lord, especially the lines dealing with the celebration of Easter in Jerusalem, the first Easter of the year 1200...
...The Ultimate Reality The Significance of Personality, by Richard M. Vaughan...
...In recounting Newman's story, Mr...
...2.50...
...The singular sweetness of his personality, so representative of the best in seventeenth-century Christian humanism, was a blend of elan and self-restraint...
...A. Longfellow Fiske...
...Where has a subtler or more insistent psychology been employed to acclaim duty as still the "stern daughter of the voice of God," whose mandate cannot be fulfilled vicariously because it is direct, personal, individual, inescapable...
...Needham's standpoint amounts to this: the world in its wholeness can only be treated by philosophy (or perhaps not even by this ?) Naturalism, as the philosophy which assumes that only mechanism ("motions and atoms") exists, is dead forever...
...It is alike ironic and cruel, fanciful and poetic...
...The present two-volume biography is excellent in almost every particular, Father Burton's version being a real improvement over the French original...
...Nevertheless this book has the advantage of untiring and affectionate realism...
...New York: The Oxford University Press...
...The admirable reasonableness of such a doctrine offers no barrier to the most enthusiastic fervor...
...One year is given to her in which to fulfil all the desires and dreams of her childhood, in which to experience that which her creative nature demands...
...The author's chapters on The Humanity of God, and The Spirituality of Nature are especially strong...
...The renaissance was a naturalistic age, and even Raphael was a Greek...
...Connolly has collected all of his stories of the Gloucester fishing fleet that were formerly scattered through seven volumes...
...He concedes the crying need in the world today of "authority" but regards it as presumptive for the Pope, the Head of the Visible Church, to speak "ex cathedra" on matters of faith and morals...
...This, he declares, is the key to the mysteries of existence—as Henry van Dyke once expressed it, "the ultimate of reality is personality...
...2.00...
...The author has from the first line imbued himself with the spirit of the crusades, and his explanation of how they were started, as well as the story of the march of the crusaders to Jerusalem, and of the various incidents which accompanied and delayed it, is most interesting and instructive to read...
...This is admitting a lot...
...May strangely confuses two entirely different works, the Lectures to Anglicans and the Sermons to Mixed Congregations...
...Who pleaded against intolerance as brilliantly as Newman or exposed its pitilessness so relentlessly, or stripped it of its protean disguises so adroitly...
...This: that Mr...
...Then she is buried in Dorchester Abbey beneath the weighty epitaph which itself gave Miss Irwin her story...
...To Needham—if the reviewer understands it right —religion is exclusively religious experience, in the same sense as beauty is aesthetic experience, which means that religion as well as science does not conflict because both give only partial, non-overlapping treatment of the same object, while the reviewer believes that—at least as far as dogmatics is concerned— the difference lies often not in the difference of aspect, but in the difference of the object...
...Christianity has dared to believe in the kinship of man to the power which is the source and goal of all things...
...It bristles with problems, challenges, dangers, questions, higher education perhaps most of all...
...Spirited Romance None So Pretty, by Margaret Irwin...
...VAUGHAN'S book is "humanistic" in tone, making man central, and "personality" the key to the universe and its mysteries, but it voices none of the sad plaintiveness of Walter Lippmann or other prophets of his type, for the author writes from a different point of view...
...His figure greatens steadily with the years, not because he has become a tradition but because as a personality, thinker, writer, and as the preeminent spiritual force produced by the English-speaking world in three centuries, he has seized upon the imaginations, the intellects and the hearts of men...
...Mechanism is surely the appropriate method for the latter group...
...and it deserves the widest possible reading and appreciation...
...May has given us a charming and brilliant restatement of the facts of Newman's life and though not a sharer in the Cardinal's faith, he is to be numbered among his most ardent admirers...
...Unanimity exists nowhere—except in the statement that higher education in America, at least, is like a cone trying to stand on its apex...
...Personalism" gives man a satisfactory orientation to the universe, as he accepts himself as an undying personality, and God too as personal, ourselves coexistent with Him yet separate, personal entities...
...The rule and measure of duty," Newman wrote nearly a century ago, "is not utility, nor expedience, nor the happiness of the greatest number, nor state convenience, nor fitness, order and the pulchrum," and "Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself...
...Here is Mr...
...Paganism is with us, naked and unashamed, and as we see the disintegration of beliefs, the breakdown of the supports of faith and of faith itself, Newman's dictum comes back upon the memory with the power and truth of prophecy: "There are but two alternatives, the way to Rome, and the way to atheism...
...The idea of the 'self as a spiritual entity is possible only to man...
...A light and yet minor tone pervades throughout, accomplished by a curious, rhythmic drop of the sentences in final phrases and clauses...
...Indeed, this style with its haunting tones and lingering echoes certainly lends to a bigness which the book unquestionably possesses and which makes it much more than the life of Mistress Anne who died at eighteen...
...It is a splendid record of splendid deeds, and for a lover and student of history, its perusal constitutes a very real delight...
...Snow and frost made the roads impassable...
...Chapter XXVI (The Poet) is comparatively weak, although most students of Newman will probably admit that he was incomparably a greater poet in his prose than in his verse...
...Vaughan's view exactly, and he is so enamored of the idea that it makes him an evangel...
...The seventeenth-century English country itself is depicted, its seasons, its pastimes, its roads...
...In his present volume, Mr...
...tender human affection ; and recognition of the fact that one can do little for oneself, that He must do all...
...2.50...
...Thus Chapter XXIV (The Prince of the Church) is a singularly beautiful one...
...it should not be necessary to add that it is marvelous in its depiction of ships and the sea...
...the houses were too dark for much indoor work or reading, even supposing their inhabitants could read...
...To the reviewer that seems to be partly true, in the sense that a scientific investigation and an aesthetic appreciation of the same thing cannot interfere with each other and are entitled to their own methods but he does not agree with all the consequences...
...There is a description of a barn that itself has almost a personality...
...Do educators agree in their answers...
...At all events, None So Pretty is, as we contended at the start, charming, big and wise...
...Toward Jerusalem The Crusades, by Harold Lamb: New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company...
...Karl F. Herzfeld...
...All his books read like romance, and their heroes, even when they belong to the scourges of the earth, like Tamerlaine and Genghis Khan, are transformed under his brilliant pen into fascinating beings...
...Needham next says, that the new attitude—in opposition to the Victorian attitude—considers science as giving one, not as giving the all-embracing aspect of the world...
...Intolerance has always stood as a spectre terrifying little minds into cruelty and driving great ones into revolt, and its blighting shadow has not yet been withdrawn...
...The strongest objection of the reviewer, however, has to be leveled against the standpoint of Needham concerning religion...
...While accordingly the reviewer, as a physicist, believes and hopes that the methods of physics will explain more and more in biology and should be pushed as far as possible, without despairing of it because it cannot explain many things yet, he believes it perfectly possible that it is not the only possible method in intellectual research, but that—at least for the next few hundred years—different fields might have to use different concepts without losing the dignity of a science...
...St...
...2.50...
...He has a thesis, and it is never lost sight of, although in the course of the book he discusses religion, theology, metaphysics, the Church, marriage, the family, women, and Mussolini...
...Are its effects constructive or destructive...
...To be sure, Needham emphasizes that there is no possible contradiction between science and religion...
...But, valuable as it is from that point of view, Miss Irwin's story is far more than a chronicle...
...It is a tragedy of circumstance as well as a romance of situation...
...Their love of beauty seems like a survival of the mediaeval, in that they make decorative even the commonest utensils...
...As a matter of fact Newman is more than holding his own...
...People could not meet for sport...
...Historians have unearthed this, that and the other affiliation which draws the picture together more tightly than could have been the case twenty years ago...
...The characters are drawn with a fine hand...
...Lamb's Crusaders is that it is too long...
...What, if anything, are its aims...
...Paul Crowley...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 3
