e cases both of the philosopher and the
dramatist there is a return to what I may call a rudimentary common
sense. Professor James' views come as a reaction in the course of the
long evolution of ideas. If on the one side we had not had thinker
after thinker who emphasised the necessity of approaching reality as a
relation of the conscious mind, and on the other side sceptics who
asserted that there is nothing knowable but the continuum of
disconnected sensations which present themselves--a blind array of
atoms--there would be no meaning in a thesis like that of Professor
James, which refutes the follies of the two extremes, and stands upon
a ground which is very nearly a denial of the possibility of
philosophy. In like manner Mr. Galsworthy's ethics are only valuable
as a chain in the progress of morality and institutions. Primitive
society conceived punishment as an antidote to the horrors of
unchecked violence. Mediaeval law devised fearful penalties for the
forger, because forgery was a fearful menace to the stability of a
commerce not yet backed by a high commercial morality. But now we have
reached the time when we are menaced by the machinery set up by our
ancestors. The law works with a violence and a brutality which were
invented in, and proper to, an age of violence and brutality; and we
are confronted with the daily spectacle of judges compelled to
administer an antiquated and ferocious law, which awards to the
criminal the double penalty of chastisement and shame. The old
barbarism clings to the machine and works havoc. And because it is
old, and because we are accustomed to it, we tolerate it. We do not
put it to the test, which must be a personal test: How does it work in
the case of this individual and of that? Is the application of these
rules "satisfactory" when they are made to operate on the human beings
for whom they were devised? Has this code any social "cash value" when
it is brought to bear on the lawyer's clerk who forged a cheque to
save a woman?

I have not considered Professor James' merits as a dialectician, or
Mr. Galsworthy's as a dramatist. I have attempted to hint at that
quality in them which is called "humanism," humanism in thought,
humanism in ethics--the quality which makes men seek to judge ideas,
institutions and things by what they are worth to human beings for
their most pressing, their most vital needs. It is evident that this
same "humanism" is beginning to manifest itself in