Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/907

Mr. Clement C. J. Webb has written a book on God and Personality which is a remarkable achievement in more ways than one. He has managed to discuss a difficult and abstract problem in delightfully clear and often beautiful language. He has presented simple and attractive answers to the various questions raised by his subject. And in doing so he has shown that he possesses in considerable degree the quality of which real philosophers are made.

This last fact, which any one who reads the book will readily verify, should cause professional critics to forego the usual mimetic treatment they accord to the logic-chopping of the schools and handle Mr. Webb's book on a higher plane. A real philosopher is of course not one whose answers to, the problems of philosophy are solutions of those problems. Mr. Webb’s answers are interesting, and in the main we may agree with them, but they are certainly not incontestable. It is true that philosophers aim at incontestable solutions; but it is also true that none has ever achieved them, or is likely to do so. A real philosopher is rather an artist ar poet of ideas. Not solution but revelation is his true business. He opens wide the doors of the spirit and lets in the fresh air of wonder. Readers of the book before us will not fail to notice the author's power of stimulating speculation as he goes along.

Philosophers, however, not only aim at solutions, they prove them; and it is experience and not logic which affords the reputation. Mr. Webb attacks his problem, the determination of the place to be assigned to personality in our conception of God, quite in the regulation manner. He is in turn historical, analytical, and constructive. But his treatment cannot pretend even to logical finality. Exception may be taken not only to his results, though for our part we like them so far as they go, but also to his method,