Concept and Quality, A World Hypothesis (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 127 often explored, instance of the same kind of explanation. Though examples like these encourage James to believe that a similar aetiology is at work in Persia, the Ganges valley and China, it is not made clear how the rather different cosmologies of these lands relate to differing circumstances. All James provides us is sporadic illumination. Second, the myths of Greece and the Near East are traced through their supposed philosophical and scientific offspring. Again, there is some illumination. It is profitable to see Ionian science, for example, as an outgrowth of the Orphic rather than the Olympian tradition. A much more coherent and unified picture of Greek thought emerges, in which the sharp distinction between rational Ionians and mystic Italians (Pythagoreans and Eleatics) gives way to a variety of attempts to grapple with nature in the light of Orphic monistic doctrine. This would be worth following up, but the strategy of the book, regrettably, forces James on to a re-counting of the history of ideas which is little more than a chronological sketch. By the time he reaches Darwin, Einstein, and Heisenberg one looks in vain for deep connections between myths and science. This is perhaps due to the third objective. James has a tendency toward myth creation himself. Through a rather bewildering succession of snippets of great thoughts he advances toward a Chardin-like picture of a mind-governed finite universe. Or does he simply want to suggest that this is another case of Thesis I: a cosmological myth fashioned in response to the pressures of the day, in this case the pressures including advances in biology and physics? It is hard to say. Moreover this ambiguity is compounded by an utterly lax use of the term "myth." James fails to recognize the dangers of a use that so readily swallows up all theology, metaphysics and scientific theory. The result is that where one might hope for illumination in that perplexing and crucial area in which mythical appears to give way to rational thought (granting that we need to know a little better what these mean in this context), this book tends instead to provide a somewhat syncretic mythography of its own. A. R. LoucH Claremont, California Concept and Quality, .4 World Hypothesis. By Stephen C. Pepper. (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1966. Pp. 652. $8.00) Few philosophers of this generation are likely to be aware of the fact that Stephen Pepper began teaching and philosophizing at the University of California at Berkeley in 1919. This volome is Professor Pepper's Paul Carus Lectures, Series 13, published m 1966. It is apparent that Pepper has used the opportunity to great advantage to return with commendable vigor to some of the many topics he has pursued during the past five decades. It may be no accident that the final chapter was the title of one of his early major works, Aesthetic Quality. Concept and Quality is a work in metaphysics by a purposive pragmatist. The metaphysics of the work represents an effort to read reality as an identity between concept and quality, between purpose and actuality. Though Pepper dwells at considerable length on the psychological and para-psychological grounds on which 128 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the metaphysics depend, and though it is the case that he is concerned in this work that the reality principle be kept dominant, still the major part of the work is absorbed in tracing out implications and in drawing inferences concerning related problems in linguistics, logical theory, value theory and aesthetics and others. It is a far-ranging work done in replete detail such as might satisfy his personal commanding daimonion. Most of the work is an occasion for reviewing ideas skirmished, postulated, and argued in times past. And though it is true that Pepper reminisces his intellectual pilgrimage quite often, it is also true that he has kept up in the fields closely related to his concerns. He is no philosopher of isolation and abstraction, no Troglodyte. Pepper's criticism of Ryle's linguistic analysis orientation is revelatory of Pepper's concerns as a philosopher. A linguistic analysis is clearly useful as a preliminary study of any problem. It is...