than modern art becomes a capitalistic movement because the artists are frequently employed by the beneficiaries of capitalism. became no more a Christian movement from being confounded with art. The purpose of art is to refine and ennoble the sentiments, the purpose of religion to refine and ennoble conduct. Any confusion of these aims has a tendency to make religion theoretical; to make unnecessary the transmutation of noble sentiments into deeds." "He who thinks that wine or bread or cups or altars or buildings are Christianity or any part of Christianity is, without knowing it, inside a cathedral, and his ideas of Christianity are derived from the paraphernalia which he sees about him, and his conception of the man of Nazareth from the dead figure which hangs in the window. Art has a place of its own, and has nothing to gain from being confounded with religion. On the other hand, religion has much to lose W While the Protestant Reformation assaulted Roman Church imperial authority here and hereafter, Mr. Schoonmaker sees it, too, falling short of divorcement of Christianity and Caesarism. It did not perceive that organization itself, even without such centralized authority, is no part of Chris tianity, and has substituted the authority of various creeds, in order to maintain churches, for inner spiritual perception. "Is it any wonder," he says, "that the tide has gone out and left the Church utterly powerless; that the whole vesture of Caesarism with which she once overawed the millions has been stripped off piece by piece; that art has become art, still capable of arousing men to its defense; that philosophy has become philosophy, honorably installed in our educational system; that organization is still active in politics and industry; and that the Church is nothing?" A PSYCHOLOGIST ON THE RETURN OF THE HEN a psychologist like ternatives open. We understand mental psy ries is about over, perhaps the layman who thought all the while that he had a soul may feel a little surer of his ground. The professor does not mean to say, of course, that the scientific laboratory methods of the psychologists are either fruitless or improper. They have produced a causal psychology, a description and explanation of the mechanism of mental life, from which the idea of the soul is excluded, whereas the more important thing is to get some conception of the meaning and purpose of inner experience. Purposive psychology or soul psychology is coming to the front, according to Münsterberg, and "the stubborn, onesided, causal psychology which does not admit a soul psychology at its side will be 'dead as a door-nail.'” This predicted "Return of the Soul" appears in The North American Review. Physicians and students of abnormal mental life have seen it in what they have called subconscious mind. Professor Münsterberg considers this an obscure hypothesis for the explanation of conscious facts, and he seeks to show that the same facts can be explained better by another agency which we really know, namely, the brain. "Even if we prefer the subconscious for our explanations," he says, "we remain completely in that psychological world in which everything results from foregoing causes and must be explained from elementary processes. There is no freedom and no unity, and only in the valley of complete confusion some have provided such a hysteric subconscious mind with an attachment for wireless telephony to the absolute." "May there not be a fundamental error at the bottom of this whole discussion? It seems as if there were only two al without a soul. But is there not an en tirely different, third possibility—namely, that we understand inner life without trying to explain it? Is it not possible that human experience allows an entirely different approach? . . . "Surely, if there is anything [that is] an actual fact in our mental experience it is that it has meaning for us who live through it and for those with whom we are in contact. To have a meaning and purpose and inner reference and aim is the most fundamental reality of our inner world. We do not propose it by fancy of our imagination, but it is the rockbed of our inner life. Every idea and volition and emotion means something and points to some purpose, and if we leave this out we omit just the concrete fact. We may be doubtful whether our mental life has causes, but we can not possibly doubt that it has a meaning. Even if we were doubt. ful about it, this doubt of ours would be such an act with meaning and purpose.” This much-neglected meaning aspect of our self, more important than the explanatory aspect, is the only real one. The other is artificial, according to Münsterberg. "It is a scientific construction which is far from our immediate life experience. It has value only as long as we stick to our purpose of getting an explanation of inner life." "The meaning of inner life will soon be admitted through the wide-open front door of the temple of science. Then we shall have two independent systems of psychology—a causal and a purposive one. In the one, the causal part, the psychologist studies mental life in that artificial setting in which it appears as a chain of causes and effects; and in the other, the purposive part, he studies it in that natural setting of real life in which every pulse-beat of experience is understood in its meaning and in its inner relations. Both are perfectly justified as long as they are not carelessly mixed and as long as neither is pushed forward as complete. In practical life the two views are intertwined. Thus our neighbor is first of all the personal self whom we try to understand by grasping the meaning of his ideas and intentions, but he may at any moment become to us a mere object of observation which we try to explain. "As soon as this purposive psychology is acknowledged as a full-fledged science we cannot go very far without discovering that it leads us straight to the old idea of the soul. We understand the meaning of a thought or memory or will act by linking it with the aim toward which it points, and this inner forward movement is understood as the act of a self. What do we know of this self? One thing above all-it is perfectly free. We saw that in this whole world of meaning everything is completely understood as every act is linked with its purpose, hence we have no right at all to ask for "The soul, finally," concludes this psychologist, "expresses itself through the body, and the sense organs determine the selection of objects toward which it takes its attitudes, but the soul is neither in the time nor in the space of the physical molecules. If we curiously ask, 'How can we describe the soul?' we must learn to recognize the absurdity of the very question. Every description refers to an object, but the essential meaning of the soul is that it is never an object, but always a subject, always a self, always an action. We cannot describe and we cannot explain it, not because our purposive psychology is still unfit for this task, but because the task itself would be meaningless. A soul must be understood in its unfolding and in the inner relation of its acts." A IDEALS OF WOMEN ENGAGED IN A CRUSADE NEW TYPE of crusade for peace in the world is seen in the organization of a Woman's Peace Party as the result of a conference of representatives of woman's organizations at Washington, the national capital. By manifesto, platform and resolution adopted in mass meeting of several thousand women, ideals and opinions found remarkable expression. The manifesto, thinks The Independent, New York, "is unsurpassed in power and moral fervor by anything that has been issued here or abroad since the Great War began." This declaration of principles reads: "We, women of the United States, assembled in behalf of World Peace, grateful for the security of our own country, but sorrowing for the misery of all involved in the present struggle among warring nations, do hereby band ourselves together to demand that war should be abolished. "Equally with men pacifists, we understand that planned-for, legalized, wholesale, human slaughter is to-day the sum of all villainies. As women, we feel a peculiar moral passion of revolt against both the cruelty and the waste of war. "As women, we are especially the custodians of the life of the ages. We will no longer consent to its reckless destruction. As women we are particularly charged with the nurture of childhood and with the care of the helpless and the unfortunate. We will not longer accept without protest that added burden of maimed and invalid men and povertystricken widows and orphans which war places upon us. "As women we have builded by the patient drudgery of the past the basic foundation of the home and of peaceful industry. We will not longer endure without a protest which must be heard and heeded by men that hoary evil which in an hour destroys the social structure that centuries of toil have reared. "As women we are called upon to start each generation onward toward a better humanity. We will not longer tolerate without determined opposition that denial of the sovereignty of reason and justice by which war and all that makes for war to-day renders impotent the idealism of the race. "Therefore, as the mother half of humanity, we demand that our right to be considered in the settlement of questions concerning not alone the life of individuals but of nations be recognized and respected. "We demand that women be given a share in deciding between war and peace in all the courts of high debate; within the home, the school, the church, the industrial order, and the state. FOR PEACE ity vote of the conference and more "The immediate calling of a convention of neutral nations in the interests of early peace. "Limitation of armaments and the na- "Education of youth in the ideals of peace. "Democratic control of foreign policies. "The further humanizing of Governments by the extension of the franchise to women. "Concert of nations to supersede 'balance of power.' "Action toward the gradual organization of the world to substitute law for war. are thousands, probably millions, of men citizens as well as women citizens to whom this platform will come as a political prayer, the quest of statesmanship." Jane Addams, of Hull House, Chicago, president of the organization, is the author of a book on "Newer Ideals of Peace," which was published some years ago, attracted wide reading, and has been used for study by many reading circles and women's clubs. The influence of her suggestive thesis is apparent in the new movement. Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer, professor of sociology and ethics at the Meadville Theological School, a vice-chairman of the new party, contributes to The Independent a stirring review of special reasons why women should hate war. It plunges woman back into the ruder services to the social need, makes her again as of old the "breeder" and the drudge. "When women trace their long struggle upward from domestic slavery, through "Substitution of an international police legal but perpetual 'minority' to their for rival armies and navies. "Removal of the economic causes of war. "The appointment by this Government of a commission of men and women with an adequate appropriation to promote international peace." Besides an enthusiasm which had in it "a strong note of spiritual distinction," The Survey comments upon the constructive quality of mind displayed by these women. Many details of their supplementary program of propaganda and action are interesting. They promise to call a world conference if government does not act. To avoid breeding new wars in settling this one "no province should be transferred against the will of its people; no indemnities assessed save when recognized international law has been violated; no treaty or international arrangement of any sort should be entered upon unless ratified by representatives of the people." International machinery for a league of peace including police force, neutralization of the sea, and reenforcement of the democratic principle of self-government by extension of suffrage to women are demanded. They "make a solemn appeal to the higher attributes of our common humanity to help unmask the menace to our civilization” in the "concerted attempt” to force this country into still further pre "So protesting, and so demanding, we paredness for war. Unity, the Chicago hereby form ourselves into a national organization to be called the Woman's Peace Party." It is explained that the platform contains some items accepted by a major organ of the Congress of Religions, present direct relation to the state in 'contract power' and in citizenship, let them not forget the part war has played in their subjection. All the forces which have worked toward the emancipation of women from domestic bondage root themselves in social order, in peaceful industry, in reason and in law made just and regnant. And all these forces are rendered feeble and impotent in the clash of arms. It is for this cause that women should hate war with a peculiar hatred." Moreover, Mrs. Spencer argues, women should hate war because of its disastrous effects upon their special functions as wives and mothers, protectors of race integrity and culture: "Women bear the chief burden of personal care of the young, the undeveloped, the frail and sick, the aged, the feebleminded, the socially incompetent. They have had to bear that burden ever since social sympathy forbade the strong to kill the weak by fiat of the state. This process of social protection of the incompetent has unquestionably lowered the average standard in human quality where it and art of race culture. War-and all has worked unmodified by some science that makes for war-is the worst hindrance to the attempt to relieve women of this overmastering burden of administering philanthropy, and to give her time and opportunity for her organic function of teaching and developing the normal and super-excellent specimens of the race. Not only does it destroy uselessly all the needed for projecting and realizing the common wealth of humanity so terribly social control that can truly advance individual life, but it deliberately and monstrously aids that 'breeding downward' which is the bane of civilization. F RELIGION be segregated for scientific study shall we find that it is due to the universality of sexual emotions? Writers on the psychology of religion like President G. Stanley Hall, Professor George W. Coe, E. D. Starbuck, Edward Scribner Ames, and others have touched upon the relations between adolescence and religious emotions, but it is now claimed that scientific psychologists, discarding all emotional concern for the destiny of any particular form of "true" or "false" religion, must look for the origin of religious phenomena in sexuality. This theory, advanced by Theodore Schroeder from a study of Mormon and other religious documents, is elaborated by J. S. Van Teslaar, M.D., of Boston, in the Journal of Religious Psychology, a Clark University publication. Dr. Teslar is convinced that such an "erotogenetic theory of religion" is the most satisfactory working hypothesis for further research in religious psychology. For this theory a special definition of religion is obviously required to distinguish the religious from the nonreligious in the "scientific" sense. Here is Mr. Schroeder's tentative definition: "Religion is a subjective experience, ecstatic in its nature, ascribed to the socalled 'transcendental' and interpreted as certifying to the inerrancy of some doctrine or ceremonial which through 'superhuman' means serves personal ends, the latter also supposed to be, wholly or in part, of a superphysical order." It is asserted that every individual religious experience, if genuinely religious, appears to be associated with the sexual centers more intimately than any other. In what has been called the "irradiation" of sex, study should be directed to the particular features which correspond to the mystical, the transcendental in religion: "The ultimate essence of religion is subjective-it is a feeling-experience entering consciousness by what is called the transcendental path-variously interpreted as 'inspiration' or 'revelation' and testifying to the presence with the ego of some portion of the 'infinite' or 'divine' through which man supposedly becomes linked up to the whole universe. OF RELIGION TO "Mr. Schroeder thinks that the energy termined erotic emotions and feeling-com- timate character of the emotion back of ical urge for bodily union. In spite of its Dr. Van Teslaar says of the subjec- "That in its essence religion is wholly subjective is a scientific conclusion on which all classes of writers are coming nowadays to agree. This is one reason why all attempts to establish some criterion of religion on the basis of its objective manifestations alone have proven futile. The working basis was faulty, jective religion and sexual emotions, ac- BE FOUND IN religion and sex has been long known and recognized. Phallic worship as an early form of religion has been studied extensively. Dulaure's classic work on this subject, for instance, antedates by more than But a half century psychologic interest in religion, and Knight's 'Worship of Priapus' was published over a century ago. whereas this connection had been recognized in the case of isolated, unpopular religions, or of certain early stages of religion, Schroeder was sufficiently detached from any personal interest in or concern for present religions to be able to see this connection holding true in all religion. He found that the universality of religion is due to the universality of sexual emotions, of which it is admittedly an 'irradiation'; its mysticism is due to the old mystery and sacredness which still attaches to sex; its sacredness, to the sacredness of procreation as the fountain or source of the only kind of immortality with which man was acquainted in his earlier stages. "Religious conversion is largely a phenomenon of adolescence for obvious reasons. The sexual urge blooms forth during adolescence in all its mysteriousness and imperativeness. The innateness and imperativeness of religious feelings and emotions, to which all so-called religious convictions are reducible, is derived from the subjective and immediate character, the complete mastery over mind and body of the fundamental sex urge, particularly as it breaks forth during certain periods of life. The sexual feelings are the levers which control religious emotion, and socalled religious convictions are but a of them. The religious person knows becryptic, mystical, dogmatized elaboration cause he feels, and is firmly convinced because strongly agitated.' "That man in the long past has ascribed to the generative powers in him a spiritual entity and a designing intelligence of its own is well known. That the attributes of his early divinities are those, fancied or real, actual or desired of his sexual powers; that his sex life represented at once his most intense pleasures, the chief incentive (alongside the food urge) to his activities and struggles, the inspiration for his fancies of paradise and life everlasting, is also beyond question. In view of the well-known psychobiotic law of the persistence of fundamental types, would it be too much to suspect that in its differ ential essence, in that which represents its survival value, religion must have remained the same throughout? Are we not justified in holding that at its very core religion to-day is exactly what it was "The connection between some form of in the very beginning—sex mysticism?” LITERATURE AND ART J A Cynical Satirist of the New York Newspaper. AMES L. FORD has written a novel of metropolitan journalism that will suggest to some readers Guy de Maupassant's satirical and cynical exposé of Parisian newspaper life-"Bel Ami." "The Great Mirage" (Harper's) is cheerfully cynical, benignly satirical, filled, as the New York Tribune admits, with such infectious high spirits that even its victims cannot forbear a grin. The great mirage is that mythical New York that is created by the yellow journalists of Park Row-a distorted, mispresented, highly colored and impossible city of extremes. Mr. Ford reveals the lives of those engaged in the creation of this mirage—their ignorance, their stupidity and their cupidity, not unrelieved, of course, by occasional intelligence and idealism. But the latter qualities have a bitter struggle for life in those "treasure houses of mendacity," as this satirist characterizes the "cook shops of Park Row." The New York Tribune notes much exaggeration in this novel, "but the burlesque unfolds many kernels of hard truth." "Here is a whole world that does not exist, of wealth and fashion, and intellectual aristocracy and 'movements' and poses, most ingeniously invented and most alluringly presented. Mr. Ford shows us how reputations are made-for leaders of woman's cause, for 'highbrows' and clergymen and actresses-the way in which sensations are manufactured and exploited, the artificial birth of absurd schemes advocated with portentous gravity-the whole mass of shams that forms the mirage which looks so alluring from afar." M Truth and the Newspaper R. FORD'S analysis of the American newspaperman differs radically from that found in another new novel of newspaper life, "The Clarion" (Houghton Mifflin), written by Samuel Hopkins Adams. Mr. Adams has depicted the reporter and the editor consumed with a passion for the truth but rendered powerless to print it by the sinister and diabolic influence of the great American advertizer. Mr. Ford is not so optimistic. Of his hero he writes: "Edward Penfield was what city editors call a 'born reporter,' a term generally used to characterize that peculiar blend of ignorance and enthusiasm which can be found in its finest flower in the offices about Park Row." Writing with "an eye on the object," Mr. Ford infers, is a liability rather than an asset in yellow journalism. Moreover, as depicted in "The Great Mirage," the conflict of interests and ambitions of journalists and the very aim of newspaper owners, who worship only the god of Circulation, are fatal to any orientation toward the truth. Not the advertizer, not a lack of intelligence in the public, are to blame, but the false assumptions of the newspaper mind itself. Mr. Ford puts into the mouth of his heroine, Kate Craven, a sharp warning to owners and editors of newspapers: I've been hearing that we who write "Ever since I've been in Park Row, the newspapers know a great deal more than those who read them, but I've long since ceased to believe it. In fact, I'm beginning to think that it's just the other way and that the readers know more than the writers. Anyway, I'm tired of trying to fool them. It's sure to prove a losing game in the long run. You can always get a certain following by simply telling people the That's the way men build up big reputations. . . truth. E Ezra Pound Declares a Literary War. ZRA POUND, the Imagist poet, has openly declared war on the American magazine. He has sent his first blast from London to the Chicago Dial. He is particularly bitter against Harper's Magazine and The Century, declaring that "there can be no truce between any of the honest men of my generation and these magazines." He is of the opinion that the public ought to arise and drive out that army of editors who have set themselves "against all invention, all innovation and all discovery." There is no culture that is not at least bilingual, exclaims this angry poet. "We find an American editor . . . who in 1912 or 1913 writes of Henri de Regnier and M. Remy de Gourmont as 'these young men.' The rest of his sentence is to say that their work is unknown to him. Note that this lacuna in his mental decorations does not in the least chagrin him." The tone of Ezra Pound's grievance against the country in which he is not a prophet is undisguised in his final paragraphs: "Ask whether the younger genera tion wants America to produce real literature or whether they want America to continue, as she is at the present moment, a joke, a byword for the ridiculous in literature, and the younger generation will answer you. "Investigate the standards and the vitality of the standards of the 'best editorial offices,' and see what spirit you find there. See whether they believe that art is, in any measure, discovery. See whether there is any care for good letters, even if they care enough for good letters to be in any way concerned in trying to find out what makes, and what makes for, good letters. "Is a man less a citizen because he cares enough for letters to leave a country where the practice of them is, or at least seems, well-nigh impossible, tage of good letters, even to the nain order that he may bequeath a heri tion which has borne him? "It is not that the younger generation has not tried to exist 'at home.' It is that after years of struggle, one by one, they come abroad, or send their manuscripts abroad for recognition; that they find themselves in the pages even of the 'stolid and pre-Victorian Quarterly,' before 'hustling and modern America' has arrived at tolerance for their modernity." AR Mr. George and Mr. Wells. DMIRERS of the novels of H. G. Wells will undoubtedly like "The Second Blooming" (Little, Brown & Co.), by W. L. George. This novel by the author of "A Bed of Roses" places him now in that distinguished group which includes Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Wells. At least it does for the critic Helen of the New York Globe. Bullis, who reviews this book in the New York Times, believes that it contains rather more of H. G. Wells than one desires in a novel by Mr. George. "It would be impossible not to ignore Mr. Wells's influence upon Mr. George, for the latter not only flaunts his master at us in a eulogistic dedication, but frequent passages through the book remind one of the dissertations in 'Marriage' and 'The New Macchiavelli." The second blooming is that period in the lives of women who, tho in the flood of emotional life, have ceased to find adventure in marriage and begin to search for it elsewhere. One of the three sisters in this novel finds it in a romantic intrigue; another in vicarious political activity; and the third, who typifies those women who are satisfied with the present régime, "drugs" her inarticulate yearnings by a process of continuous child-bearing. The conclusion is that the two unconventional sisters have reached a happy equilibrium after far swinging. Comparing the work of Mr. George with that of his master Wells, Helen Bullis notes: "In the inevitable comparison with H. G. Wells which he forces upon us, it cannot be denied that Mr. George lacks some of the qualities which made 'Tono-Bungay' a great novel. Yet we believe Mr. George to be fundamentally a man of stronger individuality than Mr. Wells. For Mr. Wells has in his recent work shown a disposition to become the Mrs. Barclay of a 'little group'-to quote a current wise jester -'of advanced thinkers,' while Mr. George is, as his latest novel shows, still growing." An American Language N HIS introduction to "The Oxford Book of American Essays" (Oxford University Press) Brander Matthews notes that American literature is a part of English literature, being of the same or nearly the same -language. “The works of Anthony Hamilton and Rousseau, Mme. de Staël and M. Maeterlinck are not more indisputably a part of the literature of the French language than the works of Franklin and Emerson, of Hawthorne and Poe are part of the literature of the English language." This suggests to the editor of The Dial the possibility of a new American language, a possibility which strikes him as inevitable with the increasing influx of new races and new tongues. This foretells an alloy that can not be preponderantly British or Anglo-Saxon. An interesting light is thus thrown on the American literature of the future: "Biology does not promise that the result will be a composite type in which the characters we call Anglo-Saxons will predominate. We in America may remain descendants of British ancestors in those characters which we care most about, we may continue our present institutions-tho it is to be hoped that we shall be able to exchange some of them for better ones-but we have no guarantee that this is in the nature of things. Indeed, we know that there is no assimilation of races without modification. We cannot be certain that so much as the language will remain to us. Our vernacular may be so modified that there will be more difference between the speech of an American and an Englishman than there is now between the speech of an Italian and a Spaniard. "But long before that happens we shall have begun to produce an American literature distinct from English literature." HE DISPELS THE GREAT MIRAGE 195 pation of Billy,' 'Thimble, Thimble,' 'The Rose of Dixie,' 'A Municipal Report,' ample testify to his strong and tender miration for the finer qualities of the feelings for his native section, his adSouth, his faculty of kindly raillery at foibles that are passing with a passing age. Like another great humorist, Alphonse Daudet, who amused a world with delicate satire of his beloved South, 'O. Henry' let his shrewd raillery play with birth-her manners, her customs, and her kindly light over the South of his own people." 'An Adventure in Neurasthenia,' for ex Charles Louis Philippe's A in novels of Charles Louis Philippe to the statuary of Rodin. Philippe was perhaps the great modern fictionist of Parisian poverty. But his work received adequate recognition only after his death 1909. "Bubu de Montparnasse," Miss Wellington writes, is a terrific study of prostitution, "as unflinching in its ugliness as 'The Old Courtesan' of Rodin." Philippe dreamt of writing things "substantial and compact, like certain statues of Rodin." Apparently he accomplished this ambition. "Charles Blanchard," a posthumous and unfinished work, appeals to the American admirer as "a study of pov There is one New York that is created by the erty which rises out of submerged yellow journalists of the magazine sections of He had to feel the thrill of Texas his tory and get the inspiration of the Texas but to the Lone Star State. Where one is born is accidental; where one finds Any and all localities, retorts Archibald Henderson, have the right to claim O. Henry and to erect a memorial to him. He insists, however, that the short-story writer loved his "mother state" in a tenderly intimate fashion. He was instinctively and essentially a child of the South. Dr. Henderson presents sufficient proof of this and notes in conclusion: "One note, one quality, in his stories bespeak his Southern origin-the chivalric note, the quality of inextinguishable romance. It was here in North Carolina that he found the sweetheart of his youth; here he found surcease from metropolitan care in the enfolding shelter of the Blue Ridge; here he sleeps; here his fame is memorialized. As a Southerner he loved the South; as a true artist, he realized her amiable vices, her lovable weaknesses. Many of his stories 'The Guardian of the Accolade,' 'The Emanci buman life like a figure of Rodin's from the roughhewn block." Philippe's poverty provided him with literary material, and really sustained his high ideals in literature. "He was never obliged," as Miss Wellington points out, "to degrade his art for money. The literary poseur, the sensationalist and the decadent were equally the objects of his detestation." Philippe had little in common with the literary arrivistes of Paris, but associated instead with a group of proletarian writers which included Marguerite Audoux, the literary seamstress of Montparnasse, and Lucien Dieudonné. It is not without significance that a picture of Dostoevsky, the supreme novelist of the despised and rejected, adorned the walls of his study, as did those of Dickens and Tolstoy. A Novels of and for the Working Class. LTHO La Nouvelle Revue Française, the most fastidious and "highbrow" of Paris periodicals, devoted an entire number to an appreciation of the art of Charles Louis Philippe, altho Paul Claudel and André Gide paid eloquent tribute to his memory, the author of "Bubu," Amédée Dunois tells us, is an immortal only of the working-class, of the poor and for the poor. He brought classconsciousness into French literature. Four years before his death, Philippe |