The Search for an Ideal: Six Canadian Intellectuals and their Convictions in an Age of Transition, 1890–1930 by S.E.D. Shortt (review)

HUMANITIES 467 of the denomination ... and an increasingly effective instrument for the building of the Kingdom and leavening of the nation.' Johnston must concern himself with long and protracted theological disputations, and elaborate offensive and defensive campaigns conducted by the university authorities and the forces of fundamentalism. Much of this today seems trivial and tedious, but Johnston enlivens the account with vivid portraits - of, for instance,Senator McMaster, whose benefaction of $9"0,000 to the infant university, a huge sum for the day, casts doubts on the common declaration that Canadian wealth, unlike American, was unresponsive to the needs of universities; of the Reverend Thomas Todhunter Shields, the leaderof the extreme fundamentalists , who emerges as the redoubtable and implacable foe of the McMaster idea; and of a gallery of chancellors and academics, of whom Howard Whidden is the most vividly portrayed. To an emphasis on individuals Johnston adds an historian's awareness of a larger context. Thus the move of the centre of Baptist education from Montreal to Woodstock and then to Toronto is seen as a process of Americanization by which Canadian Baptists became part of the American religiOUS scene. (An offshoot of this is the movement of McMaster graduate students - Harold Innis is the most famous example - to the University of Chicago, which had begun as a Baptist institution, but rapidly acquired a reputation for worldly modernism.) As a result McMaster developed in 'the spirit and structure of the American college or Seminary,' whereas Toronto sought to reproduce 'the English Collegiate experience.' This helps to explain why federation with Toronto, constantly under discussion while McMaster remained on Bloor Street, never reached a stage of active negotiation. Generalizations such as these, carefully enunciated and supported, make Johnston's book an important contribution to Canadian cultural history. (CLAUDE T. BISSELL) S.E.D. Shortt, The Search for an Ideal: Six Canadian Intellectuals and their Convictions in an Age.of Transition, 1890-193°. University of Toronto Press. 216. $15.00, cloth, $5.95 paper As the second and longer part of its title suggests, this book is an attempt to fill a gap in Canadian intellectual history. The author does this by examining the thought of six Canadian academics who were Widely known in the first quarter of the twentiety century: Andrew Macphail, professor ofMedical History at McGill; Archibald MacMechan, professor of English at Dalhousie; James Cappon, professor of English at Queen's; Maurice Hutton, professor of Classics at Univeristy College, Toronto; Adam Shortt, professor of Political Science at Queen's; and James Mavor, professor of Political Economy at the University of Toronto. The author 468 LETIERS IN CANADA 1976 provides a short biographical sketch of each man, an exposition of the man's philosophical position, and an account of how this philosophical position was reflected in views on culture and society in Canada. As one would expect of a book which is an outgrowth of a doctoral thesis, it is carefully documented and footnoted; it has an extensive bibliography and a useful index. The University of Toronto Press should be faulted for an excessive number of typographical errors. The first four of the author's subjects espoused a position of philosophical idealism in descent from Kant, Hegel, and Edward Caird, although mediated to them through various sources. Macphail joined the doctrine of biological evolution to orthodox Christianity, apprehending not by reason but by emotion that the motivating force of evolution is divine. MacMechan derived his Christian idealism from Ruskin, Carlyle , and Tennyson. Cappon accepted Caird's synthesis of German and Platonic idealism with traditional Christianity and added a flavour of Matthew Arnold and R.W. Emerson. Hutton combined Greek philosophy and orthodox Christianity; he accepted the intellectualism of classical Greece but tempered it with Christian ethics based on an intuitive religious faith. All four were conservative, British, and imperialist in their views of culture and society. They recoiled from the business world, they found an advancing industrialism distasteful, and they distrusted popular democracy. They believed in a hierarchical and laissez-faire society in which government was to be in the benevolent hands of superior people, who would be the products of an elitist education, mainly literary and designed to...