Studies in Canadian Disunity

118 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY solutions are possible for some of the old, hard problems of those ill-fated experiments. It is possible to see how universals are real and how there can be genuine causality. The knowledge Of Being, too, is seen to involve a double character of mind, corresponding to that of reality, an intellectual intuition of universal being and a discursive reason which "slowly builds up from experience a determinate knowledge of concrete reality" (p. 314). It is the hasty generalization of some such particular science that has always been man's great mistake in philosophizing. Man must realize that he knows reality only in such limited forms or orders, each with its own essence which is not to be taken without more ado to be the essence of anything else, much less the whole nature and compass of Being. . A metaphysics of this sort makes for "open inquiry'' and discovery. Here, indeed, is a philosophy of the wide-open Universe.. It safeguards knowledge from the fixity of totalitarian systems which cannot admit any radical novelty but must even- .tually explode and dissolve into nothing when the pressure of fresh experience becomes too great. Metaphysics has, therefore, as "its permanent duty to order and to regulate an ever wider area of scientific knowledge, and to judge ever more complex problems of human conduct . . . , to keep the old sciences in their natural limits, to assign their places, and their limits, to new sciences; last, not least, to keep all human activities, however changing their circumstances, under the sway of the same reason by which alone man remains the judge of his own works, and, after God, the master of his own destiny" (p. 319). That final note would have pleased 'William James; as it will hearten many of our conternporaries . STUDIES IN CANADIAN DISUNITY* FRANK H. UNDERHILL In 1939, if we are not in the midst of another European war, ~anadians will be celebrating the centenary of Lord Durham's Report. Canadians who are honest with themselves will then •canada Lcolr.s Abroad, by R. A. MacKay and E. B. Rogers, Oxford, 1938, $3.00. Canada Today: A Study of th~ National l ntertsls and National Policy, by F. R. Scott, Oxford, 1938, $1.25. REVIEWS 119 admit, if we are not in the midst of another European war, that the chief reason for our inferiority to our American neighbours does not lie in geography or climate or natural resources, but in the fact that they wrote their Declaration of Independence in one dear decisive document of 1776 and proceeded to act upon it immediately , whereas we have been engaged in drafting our Declaration for a hundred years. We haven't yet got it ready for publication; committees and sub-committees are still fussing over it, striking out some offensive word here and adding a qualifying clause there; and one may doubt whether the last revising committee will have a Thomas Jefferson upon it to lick the document into proper shape before it is issued to the world. The disunity which paralyses our national will to-day, in domestic as well as in external policies, is ultimately due to the fact that we have never been unified by the responsibilities of independence. In fact, it would be true to say of our one hundred years' progress to\Vards the goal that we have achieved our independence in the same way as the British are said to have won their empire, in a long fit of absence of mind. So, in mid-September, 1938, Canadians had not yet made up their minds whether they were simple colonials or whether they were a people with a mind to make up. It would have been useful in the war hysteria which threatened to sweep the country in mid-September (and I haven't the slightest idea whether it is safe to speak of war hysteria in the past tense in this way) if more Canadians had read the two admirable books on Canadian foreign policy which have been published this year under the sponsorship of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. It is, at any rate, encouraging that the Institute...