pure sacrifice to truth and justice, proves his sense of solidarity with a Spirit whose claims are absolute and imperative.

Following in the steps of Volkelt's searching criticism of Kant's epistemology, Baron von Hügel insists that to invalidate the mystic's constructions on the score of subjectivity alone would be to invalidate the very simplest forms of our knowledge into which a subjective contribution enters of necessity. From first to last, from the most rudimentary perception up to the highest philosophical synthesis, reality or truth is never retired as a passive impression, but is produced and created by the subject in response to such impression. Acertain instinctive faith, which a reflex scepticism can sist only by refusing to deny it, enters into our simplest firmations and accompanies every step of our inferential processes. The God-idea of the mystic is neither more nor less a natural response to certain stimulations than those elementary judgments on which the whole fabric of our knowledge rests. It is, then, in its emphasis and its interest, not in its process, that mystical differs from ordinary thought.

An exceedingly abstruse question, treated by Baron wn Hügel with astonishing erudition and insight, is the problem of human and divine personality suggested by the mystic's consciousness of union with and absorption in God. It is impossible to enlarge upon it here. To me it seems best to insist on the constitutional inability of the human mind to find any category for the divine, and for our relation to it, that does not involve some antimy. Error consists in asserting the adequacy and mplete validity of any such category. This recognised, acknowledging the great practical superiority of human category of theism, which is also that of the Cristian revelation, there is no reason why philosophy ould not hold them altogether as imperfectly complementing one another-deism, theism, pantheism, panentheism, polytheism, immanence, transcendence, identity, duality. Each stands for some aspect of an inaccessible truth that determines our feeling and practical attitude towards the divine, and contributes to the fullness and richness of our spiritual life. The most carefully guarded theism cannot escape anthropomorphism; however ethe

realised and sublimated, the human form is there. Pantheism dehumanises, but takes as much as it gives; deism emphasises transcendence at the expense of immanence; and so on. The mystic is one to whom the unitive, pantheistic, or at least the panentheistic, aspects of the divinity are as congenial as the deistic, polytheistic, and anthropomorphic aspects are to the institutional mind. But here again, on either side, an exclusive emphasis is impoverishing to the soul and a dogmatic assertion to the understanding. We need to balance ourselves both in thought and action between the partly lawful, partly unlawful, claims of gnosticism and agnosticism. 'He They, One, All, within, without'-God cannot be all these at once in himself, nor even for us, at the same moment or in the same thought and feeling. Yet it is by the alternating influence of such conflicting aspects that our attitude towards him is best adjusted.

Though directly occupied with mysticism, Baron von Hügel is necessarily drawn into the philosophy of religion in general, and in particular of the Christian religion, that has grown out of what was originally a Jewish revival, and has incorporated what is best (and a good deal that is only second-best) in the religious tradition of the whole world-a religion whose thought is occupied with the four invariable problems, God, Man, the World, Redemption; a religion that is institutional, mystical, and rational, as tense as it is multiple, optimistic yet pessimistic, transcendent yet immanent, of this world yet of the other world, a dualism yet a unification, whose ethic is at once human and religious; and yet a religion that began in a violent one-sided reaction against the interests that may be trusted to look after themselves.

The present crisis of Christianity, due to the intensified conflict between the rational on one side and the institutional and mystical on the other, is carefully handled. It is shown to be the tardy but inevitable fruit of that Platonic contempt for the contingent and particular, that mystico-ascetical search for God away from and not through the historical and positive, which dominated medieval Catholicism to the prejudice not only of science, but of religion itself, from which it took away the subject-matter of its conflict and the instrument of its service. Poor and unsatisfying in itself, the world

of determinism as constructed by science gives a point of view, a cast of feeling, that are necessary as a discipline to religion. Its perfect synthesis with the religious aim and outlook will always be an unattained ideal. But the painful quest of it remains an indispensable duty that cannot be shirked without grave loss.

On no one soul can the burden of all these difficult syntheses be laid-of rational, mystical, and institutional; of immanence and transcendence; of ethical ends and religious ends. It is only in the bosom of the community and through the course of generations that the process is efected. Yet the total result is reached through individual contributions; and what one might call the athetic and comprehensive effort is a duty for each as fir all. To each some particular aspect of the collective problem presents itself, some special trait, with its attendant temptation to some special one-sidedness. Solidarity with a community, with a system, is the only safeguard against that sort of impoverishing individualism which is the extremest form of provincialism.

In St Catherine of Genoa Baron von Hügel finds an excellent illustration of many of his principles. The mitations of her mystical life are mainly those of the Ne-Platonic tradition, whose influences reached her, directly or indirectly, through pseudo-Dionysius. She is also indebted to the Paulo-Johannine writings and to Jacopone da Todi. Her religion is but slightly, if at all, Synoptic or incarnational, scarcely affected by the humanity and passion of Christ. Her conceptions of God re static, spatial, abstract. Her communions seem most her only debt to the institutional Church. Yet she is singularly sane and broad, one might say singularly dern. Her preoccupation with practical matters, with ings, preserved and developed her common-sense and brought her into close relation with other minds and Terage ways of thinking and feeling. Unlike her igraphers, she attaches no spiritual importance to the psycho-physical irregularities consequent on her exhausting spiritual concentration. They are ill-health for her, and nothing more. She is chiefly interesting on account of her doctrine, which is here studied as illustrating the forms and categories of her mystical thought. Her Treatise on Purgatory' supplied the

foundation of Newman's Dream of Gerontius To make Love the purgatorial fire, to believe in a moral and spiritual amelioration of the soul in purgatory, has erased to be orthodox. Purgatory is now a place of purely vindictive and non-medicinal punishment which can be expiated vicariously by the sacrifices, indulgente and masses of the living. The souls in purgatory "piritually and morally as ready for heaven as they w ever be; but till the score of pain is wiped out there no admittance.

This unlovely development is a triumph of the ins tutional over the mystical-let us hope, only a tempora triumph. The whole of her eschatology, her doctrine Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, is carefully studied in t light of history, philosophy, and theology. It is high 'interpretative' as judged by standard orthodoxy. Sh lived at a time before the dogmatic moulds were as firm) set as they have since become; and, were she not t canonised saint, she would hardly escape condemnation In spite of all that is truly great and deep in her, one sometimes regrets that Baron von Hügel did not select for his illustration some of the richer and less monotonou mystics. Even at the end, her personality seems thi and shadowy beside that of a St Teresa, a St Franci of Assisi, a St John of the Cross, or, little or nothing as we know of her history, Mother Juliana of Norwich We are also tempted to wonder how he would hav treated religion from its rational side, exemplified in St Athanasius or a St Thomas of Aquin; or from it institutional side, illustrated by a St Charles Borromeo 0 a St. Ignatius of Loyola.

However necessarily difficult in parts, these two volumes, into which a scholar and student has com pressed the learning and reflections of a lifetime, deserve their place as a classical treatise, not merely on mysticism but on the whole philosophy of religion.

G. TYRRELL.

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t. 6.-RECENT FRENCH POETRY; AND RACINE. Anthologie des Poètes français contemporains (18661906). By G. Walch. Three vols. Paris: Delagrave,

1907.

The Claims of French Poetry. By John C. Bailey. London: Constable, 1907.

3. Jean Racine. By Jules Lemaître. Paris: Lévy, 1908. 4. Auguste Angellier. Pages choisies (prose et vers). Edited by Emile Legouis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908. 5. Pleasant Land of France. By R. E. Prothero. London: Murray, 1908.

And other works.

his but a few generations after all since writers and solars of authority among us began to neglect the French poetical achievement, and to doubt solemnly whether the race and the language were not radically incapable of any excellence that way. An Englishman seeking to revive his countrymen's interest in the poets of France may appeal from an almost recent indifference to a tradition of appreciative intercourse far older than say English verse that most of us can read without a tionary. French poetry, indeed, came into England with the chanting of the Song of Roland before the Conqueror's host at Hastings; and for two centuries and ire England was, 'for literary purposes, a French province. Not a little excellent French verse was made bere; but later, and for hundreds of years after the English Court learned English, all that was cultivated in this island still delighted in French tale and song, and no reign influence upon our literature was so fruitful or constant. Our poets using our speech long owned, th all Western Europe, a real dependence both upon themes grown illustrious with the spreading of the d'oil and upon the formal invention of their fellows across the Channel.

The emancipating genius of Chaucer himself was notoriously their debtor, not only for great part of his matter but for the basis of a prosody farther refined by Italian example, and cunningly adapted to the habits of the native ear. The great Scotsman Dunbar was not ashamed to borrow from the poetical treasury of the