Publications in French

LETTERS IN CANADA, 1953 305 ville and radio, every second sentence having its punch-phrase, after which we hear in silence the whinneying and handclapping of the enraptured audience. Mr. Nicol is a wit, no doubt, but too much of this fun, as when we read through the whole volume without a rest, can be numbing. It may seem to be an apt transition from Mr. Nicol's occasional leering witticisms to Sex and the Nature of Things (Dodd, Mead, xiv, 256 pp., $4) by N. J. Berrill. But Professor Berrill has not published a Kinsey report. This is a biologist's description and history of life on our planet, addressed to the adequately intelligent but nonscientific reader, and written with admirable liveliness and lucidity. The author is particularly skilful in marshalling vast amounts of scientific observation and interpenetrating it with speCUlation on the history of life. Some of the speculations may appear very bold to the layman, as for exa~ple the suggestion that colour-blindness in the sub-anthropoid mammals may indicate that the ancient mammalian ancestors of man in the age of reptiles survived extinction by becoming furtive nocturnal creatures for millions of years and so lost the sense of colour, until their simian descendants took to the tree-tops and the sunlight and eventually recovered it. This volume is not as attractive from a literary point of view as the author's Journey into Wonder of the year before where he was able to draw on the great stories of exploration and discovery, but as a work of popular scientific exposition it is even better than the other book. VI. PUBLICATIONS IN FRENCH W. E. COLLIN A word familiar to French ears, inquietude, signifies the sickness of the age, spiritual restlessness. There is a way of treating it serenely, hopefully, in the knowledge that restlessness is an attribute of the human soul which cannot rest until it rests in God. This is the attitude we find in L'Inquietude humaine (Paris, Edns Montaigne, 230 pp., 660 fr.) by Jacques Lavigne, a young philosopher, professor in the University of Montreal. At the core of M. Lavigne'S meditations is the notion of a beyond, a transcendant, an ideal. If we seek fulfilment through OUf senses, OUf science, art, or social life, we meet difficulties , we reach a limit, we feel impotent, we realize that there is a beyond. The author explores all these ways in order to say: this is not the end. Art is a means through which existence seeks its end. It makes us see an ideal world. It transfigures things so that they cease to be obstacles to our ascent. There is social inquietude, a lack of balance 306 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY between society and the individual, because man comes to society with an ideal which transcends the world. Society has its limits which make us look higher, pass beyond it. Here we have no abiding peace; we borrow from an infinite the justice, charity, and light which we painfully miss in our various social activities. M. Lavigne's treatise contains critiques of capitalism, communism, and the doctrine of the common good. Certain notions are unusual in his thought: the notion of limit, of factors which are extrinsic to the essence of man (race, power, money, birth), the idea of Herring if we do not return to ourselves and listen to our spirits"; but on the whole M. Lavigne's thought belongs to a tradition which extends from St. Augustine through St. Thomas and Pascal to Maurice Blondel. II Certain novelists use traditional patterns of thought to resolve restlessness into peace. Andre Bruge!'s Serge Fromentin (Montreal, Edns Chantecler, 189 pp., $1.75) is a case in point. It is the story of a French singer and music teacher who settled in Montreal. He was then a man of sixty; he knew that his operatic career was at an end; he felt lonely and would like to have returned to Europe. But many young students flocked to his studio and his presence in Montreal had a purpose. At the beginning of the story we learn that he is an unbeliever and the secret...