The Metaphysical Society

Abstract

TO an American professor has fallen the task of laying bare, some eighty years after the event, the nature and extent of one of the most English of institutions, namely, the Metaphysical Society. Its comparatively short life of eleven years bears no relation to its importance as a factor in the intellectual development of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the reverberations of which it is clearly the origin are rumbling around to this day, faithful witnesses to its force and character. Probably a long-range view, both in time and space, has helped ; however that may be, the result is a book of sound scholarship, bearing the impress of careful investigation (nay, more, of a sensitive touch) on every page. Obviously, an examination of the kind required must have been far from easy ; it could only have been undertaken by one endowed with the capacity to throw himself back into the temper of the eighteen -seventies, and yet to assess it across the span of years embracing two world wars. So much for what the author has accomplished—no mean achievement.

The Metaphysical Society

Victorian Minds in Crises, 1869–1880. By Alan Willard Brown. Pp. xvii + 372. (New York: Columbia University Press ; London: Oxford University Press, 1947.) 25s. net.