The navigation of the River Mobile up to the American Forts, and from Mobile to New Orleans by way of the Lakes, and the Bayou (Creek) St. John, is an object of much growg. importance to the U. S. Indeed is positively necessary to the welfare of the American Settlements on that fine river. I am Sir,

Most respect fully

Your very humle Servt. etc. etc.
WM E. HULINGS

The Honble

James Madison

Secry. of State

(To be continued.)

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

GENERAL BOOKS AND BOOKS OF ANCIENT HISTORY

The Spiritual Element in History. By ROBERT MCLAUghlin, (New York and Cincinnati: Abingdon Press. 1926. Pp. 312. $2.50.)

SPEAKING for the German situation Paul Tillich has said that the present engrossing theme is the metaphysic of history and that it is farther advanced than die Metaphysik des Seins. To that field properly belongs the problem which Mr. McLaughlin attempts to solve, the problem of the final meaning of history. The historian's task, he grants, is not the search for that final meaning, but, as he expresses it, to recapture the processes of the past by explaining the relation of facts that constitute events. Nevertheless he is addressing historians asking whether the historical process may not exhibit such a character as will induce them to transcend the limits of their departmental method and elicit from the movement of history conclusions consonant with faiths that are fundamental to Christianity. Modern science, he holds, tends to a spiritual view of nature; may not historical study also relate itself to this tendency? He would have us consider the past which history studies as due to the activity of three forms of energy, physical, mental, spiritual, and see these as varied forms of the expression of one Vast Mind Energy, so that the finite movement of life which the historian describes will mean an infinite in process of realization.

Inasmuch as it is normal for all men to have metaphysical faiths, however crude and awkward they may be, no historian need harden his heart to the invitation of this or kindred books, and since this is written by one who shows extensive historical reading, it merits consideration.

Mr. McLaughlin's argument seems somewhat blurred by repetitions, irrelevances, obiter dicta, but frequent summaries make the direct course of it reappear. It is an argument that historical occurrences are determined by the dominance of one or another of three conditioning factors: the action of the physical environment and economic necessity (Marx), of rational ideas (Hegel), or of constraining spiritual ideals (Augustine). These three energies" co-operate so that comparison of the resultant events will justify the inference of certain laws of history, the term law meaning "repetitive constancy of events". The laws discovered are sequence of events, unity pervading events, progress seen in events. As the ground of such relatedness, Mr. McLaughlin holds we must infer a Vast Mind Energy, a Being who in his creation is in process of becoming, though he also transcends that process. Involved in this continuing process human life has a goal-perfected personality, and that is already

historically exhibited in Christ, absolutely perfect in character and with absolute perfection of teaching. The faith which accepts the assumption of God in history is faith in Christ.

It may be questioned whether these tentative generalizations about the process of history are an adequate basis for so great a conclusion, a conclusion which utters the divinations of a religious consciousness with its own independent and valid procedure.

One may question also whether the physical, mental, and spiritual conditions found for historical events are properly termed energy. Surely, also, an historian may object to the representation of Hegel as meaning anything so trivial as that rational ideas play a part in historical events. Hegel's explanation of all history by the dialectic process of the Absolute Self is another matter. And what precisely is meant by the spiritual element? As most often expressed it seems to mean the immanent influence of human ideals, while on other pages it means an influx of transcendent spiritual energy, or what the theologians term grace. But even with such hesitating questions, a reflective historian will find useful suggestions in the work.

F. A. C.

Decline of the West. By OsWALD SPENGLER, translated by Charles F. Atkinson. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1926. Pp. xviii, 443. $6.00.)

THIS stout volume, the first of two, affords convincing evidence that its author has amassed a prodigious store of learning, incomparable to that possessed by any other living historian, save possibly Eduard Meyer. Others besides myself, in witnessing the huge volume of historical writing, have doubtless asked whither it all led, what the goal might be. A consoling thought has always been that one day a giant mind would arise endowed with power to grasp this stupendous mass of erudition, with insight to perceive the true relations between its diverse and multitudinous details; a mind endowed as well with penetration to fathom its deepest meaning and with literary power to make this meaning clear to less vigorous and perspicacious minds. To this ideal Spengler has made a close approach. He has done more than any other thinker to give logical order and coherence to the vast and perplexing mass of human happenings, to show the organic and spiritual bonds which give them unity, and to find their ultimate significance.

In expounding his conception of history Spengler contrasts two modes of knowing or apprehending the world. One mode, the scientific, shows us the world organized as nature; the other, the historical, shows us the world organized as history. Science deals with things-become, with dead forms which are mechanically defined, with forms correct once for all, which can be numbered, measured, and brought under law. Science thus creates, or synthesizes the world-as-nature.

History, on the other hand, deals with things-becoming, with human

life and development; with living nature in contrast to dead nature, with the world-as-organism in contrast to the world-as-mechanism. This changing human life, with all its manifestations in the past and present, is the world-as-history. Its components can not be measured, calculated, or reduced under law; it is not subject even to the law of cause and effect. It is, on the contrary, governed by Destiny, which fact constitutes the essence and kernel of all history.

In looking backward over human history we find that it comprises various cultures, as the Egyptian, Indian, Classical, and Western. Each of these cultures is a vast, living, human organism, endowed with an ego, a personality, with a metaphysical structure, a culture-soul. The culturesoul expresses itself in all the phenomena of its history, in peoples and nations, in language and literature, in government, science, the arts, and all other conceivable human manifestations. These are the expressionforms of the soul and together constitute the culture. Through them the soul actualizes itself and history is thus a culture-soul in process of becoming.

The visible surface of history, with its vast number of events, institutions, and phenomena generally, has the same relation to the culture-soul as do the appearance, bearing, manner, air, stride of the individual person to his soul. "In the knowledge of men these things exist and matter. The body is an expression of the soul. But henceforth 'knowledge of men' implies also knowledge of those superlative human organisms which I call Cultures and of their mien, their speech, their acts-these terms being meant as we mean them already in the case of the individual" (p. IOI). "What concerns us is not what the historical facts are which appear at this time or that, but what they signify, what they point to by appearing" (p. 6). One problem of the historian, therefore, is to study the superficies, the external and visible phenomena of a culture, in order to understand the nature of the metaphysical structure of which they are the symbol or expression. Thus to read the soul of a culture through its exterior Spengler calls the art of "Physiognomic". He states as follows the all-inclusive problem on which the historians of the future will labor: "In a hundred years all sciences that are still possible on this soil (the West) will be parts of a single, vast Physiognomic of all things human. That is what the morphology of world history means (p. 100). And for Splengler to create a morphology of world history is the supreme problem of the historians; to the present time they have done little more than accumulate the data from which the real history will be written.

As the great cultures are organisms, and as youth, maturity, and old age are fundamental to everything organic, Spengler transfers these notions to the sphere of history, though at times he designates as spring, summer, autumn, and winter the stages which all cultures must traverse in ordered and obligatory sequence. The cultures develop, however, with no more plan, aim, or goal than a group of butterflies or orchids; each grows as a plant grows, because of inward driving force, because it must fulfill its destiny. They are not even governed by the law of causality.

One complex of phenomena is no more the cause of the succeeding complex than the stem causes the leaf or the bud the blossom.

Parallel stages in the development of each culture have the same characteristics, though not revealed in the same expression-forms, because each culture is unique in its metaphysical being. This parallelism is summarized in tables at the close of the book, where the resemblances between several of the great cultures in each stage of their development may be

seen.

When a culture-soul has realized, or actualized, all its possibilities in expression-forms, as government, literature, economics, and religion, it becomes a civilization. "Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built petrifying world-city following mother earth and the spiritual childhood of the Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again" (p. 31).

This transition from culture to civilization was accomplished, for the Western world, Spengler believes, during the nineteenth century. It is marked by a civilization centring in great cities, by the extinction of spiritual creative force, by irreligion, materialism, and imperialism. Imperialism will definitely close the history of West-European mankind. The outcome is obligatory and can not be modified. As each culture has its own unique soul and as all its historical phenomena are the expressions of this soul, they possess an inner unity, are pervaded by a deep uniformity, are bound together by a morphological relationship. One of Spengler's most brilliant intellectual feats is the analysis by which he shows the resemblance between the city-state, the geometry, the drama, the music, and the funereal customs of the Greeks and between similarly diverse expression-forms of Western culture.

His book marks an epoch in the development of historical science, because it is a new revelation of the soul of Western culture. He expounds a new philosophy and conception of history, lays down new principles of methodology, envisages new purposes and goals, and posits new problems for the historian. In brief, he works a veritable revolution in historical science.

E. E. SPERRY.

Mélanges d'Histoire offerts à Henri Pirenne par ses Anciens Élèves et ses Amis à l'Occasion de sa Quarantième Année d'Enseignement à l'Université de Gand, 1886-1926. Deux tomes. (Brussels: Vromont and Company. 1926. Pp. xxxix, 678.)

As a tribute to a great scholar and a great teacher the two handsome volumes which compose this work have seldom been equalled. The committee in charge of the enterprise deserves congratulations on its successful achievement.