t is necessarily complicated
with the problem of evil; but the design is not so much to attempt a new
solution of the problem as to present, in a vivid and impressive form,
certain invigorating and consoling truths which relieve the weight of
its burden. The most comprehensive definition of evil, to all minds
which are forced, by the contradiction involved in the affirmation of
two Infinites, to deny its essential existence, is that which declares
it to be imperfect good. But as this definition implies that evil
characterizes all grades of created being, and includes the saint
singing in heaven as well as the savage prowling in the woods, it
carries with it little help or satisfaction to the practical will and
conscience. Dr. Dewey takes up the problem at one or two removes from
its purely abstract essence, and fastens on its concrete manifestations,
and the compensations for its existence in the system of the world. The
leading ideas he aims to inculcate are these: that the system of the
moral world is a system of spontaneous development, having for its
object human culture; that man, being free, must do, within the sphere
of his permitted activity, what he will, and therefore is free to do
what is wrong; that, in order that his growth may be free and rational,
the system of treatment under which he lives must be one of general
laws, and not of capricious expedients; and that there are two
restraints on his wild or pernicious activity,--one inward, from his
moral nature, the other outward, from material Nature. After
illustrating these at considerable, though by no means tedious length,
Dr. Dewey proceeds to exhibit the adaptation of the material world to
human culture,--the physical and moral constitution of man, and the
complexity of his being,--the mental and moral activity elicited by his
connection with Nature and life,--the problems of pain, hereditary evil,
and death, which affect his individual existence,--the problems of bad
or defective institutions and usages, religious, political, and warlike,
which affect his social existence,--and the testimony of history to
human progress, and to the principles of human spontaneity and divine
control which underlie it.

But this bare enumeration conveys no impression of the richness of the
author's matter or the fineness of his spirit. The volume is full of
interesting facts, gathered from a wide range of thoughtful reading,
literary, historical, theological, and scienti