(1) The Ways of Life: A Study in Ethics (2) Symbiosis: A Socio-physiological Study of Evolution (3) Free Will and Destiny (4) Beauty and the Beast: An Essay in Evolutionary Aesthetic

Abstract

THE solution of the problems of life and mind, to which George Henry Lewes addressed himself in mid-Victorian times, still exercises the thought of to-day. It is noteworthy that, although he did not make full use of the concept, Lewes, following Mill, urged that the kind of effect he called “emergent” (and Mill “hetero-pathic”) is qualitative, new, or, as it is sometimes termed, “constitutive,” and cannot, like “resultant” effects, be quantitatively deduced from given antecedents by a process of algebraical summation. On this, much modern interpretation turns. It does not, of course, follow that there are not laws of qualitative emergents, just as there are quantitative laws of resultants. Nor does it follow that, in life and mind, there is no hereditary transmission of emergent qualities. Nay, rather it may be said that the laws and the history of evolution are founded on emergence as, in the long run, the keynote of progress. In the system of philosophy which Prof. Alexander has recently laid before us the stages of emergence from the bosom of space-time are fully discussed.

(1) The Ways of Life: A Study in Ethics.

By Stephen Ward. Pp. 127. (London: Oxford University Press; Humphrey Milford, 1920.) 6s. 6d. net.

(2) Symbiosis: A Socio-physiological Study of Evolution.

By H. Reinheimer. Pp. xii+295. (London: Headley Bros., 1920.) 15s. net.

(3) Free Will and Destiny.

By St. George Lane-Fox Pitt. With Open Letter on the International Moral Education Congress and League of Nations. By the Rt. Hon. Sir Frederick Pollock, and appendix by Frederick J. Gould. Pp. xix+100. (London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1920.) 5s.

(4) Beauty and the Beast: An Essay in Evolutionary Aesthetic.

By Stewart A. McDowall. Pp. vii+93. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1920.) 7s. 6d. net.