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REVIEWS humiliation. Lord French's intervention behind the back of the Prime Minister will remain a permanent blot on his record. As to the second crisis, the story with the parts of the main actors, including Lord Beaverbrook, is now familiar, and judgment will be passed on them in the light of the verdict ultimately formed as to the conduct of tlle war, including the Nivelle offensive. On this Mr. Lloyd George's third volume must be awaited to set beside Sir William Robertson's and other records. One thing is clear: Mr. Asquith trusted the soldiers and the soldiers (other than French) trusted him. On the last years ofAsquith's life, the best commentary is the sheet of notepaper in Asquith's handwriting on which we read: And more true joy Marcellus exiled feels Than Caesar with a Senate at his heels: He retained his dignity, his composure, and his reserve to the last. But that he was a man without feelings is belied by the very effort which his biographers have made not to betray them. They burn their way through their armour ofAsquithian reserve. "This was the noblest Roman of them all." THE DEAN AND THE ASTRONOMERS* G. S. BRETT The Warburton Lectures, which this book is said to contain, are given in Lincoln's Inn Chapel, and the prescribed subjects are "Old Testament propheey and the errors of the Church of Rome." Dean Inge agreed to give the lectures on condition that he migh t choose·God and the Astronomers, by W. R. lnge, Longrnans, Green and Company. THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY his subject without regard to the trust deed; in excuse he hints darkly at the arbitrary proceedings of the Gifford lecturers who have established a similar freedom by consistent transgression. In both cases we are forcibly reminded that thought and interest no longer run in the grooves which made obvious to the divines of the eighteenth century the possibility of reconciling God and Nature, religion and science. Old axioms have become postulates; old truths have become obstructions ; only here and there do we catch glimpses of the old controversies, and even then the panoply of war seems about as modern and efficient as a buckler and a breastplate in the crisis of a gas attack. Things have changed, undoubtedly. But whether the change is more apparent than real, whether we have given up the old words without giving up the old ideas,this is virtually the subject of the book. The Dean can speak for himself: "My subject in this book is cosmology," he says, "and I have approached it from the side of the 'phenomenal world and the concepts of science, based ultimately on the observation of phenomena : But I have insisted that the absolute values, and the mystical experience which is the core of religion, are among the facts which philosophy, even a philosophy of science, must take into account." This is a plain and honest statement; it has all the candour and firm assurance which we have come to associate with the Dean's piety and scholarship. But if the philosopher prides himself too much on his high calling, he may be reminded that "philosophy is little more than the theoretical interpretation" of religion. We note that the Dean has "insisted," which is more obviously a statement about the author's method than a proof of his thesis. Also, an uncharitable critic might say that REVIEWS mystical experience has been taken into account more than once, and the result has been an additional chapter on the pathology of the human mind. This is not a result} which we should approve, but the point to be noticed is that the Dean has an interesting way of makingltacit assumptions at critical moments. A good example occurs in the discussion of Time: "If it is asked how we are aware of non-spatial and non-temporal value, the answer is that we perceive them and know them with as much right and as much certainty as we perceive and know the things of sense." These are brave words; but what we really wanted to know was whether we, who perceive these values, are...

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