A System of Life

WHEN Professor G. F. Moore writes a foreword to a book, Harvard men must approach the volume with respect. And when he finds "its point of view original and the presentation not only instructive but simulative of thought," most Harvard men will find the book interesting. To erudite readers who search their pages for inaccuracies Professor Moore sounds a warning that "in a work of such wide scope the critical reader will often discover in particulars of fact or of interpretation occasion for doubt or dissent." Bertrand Russell in his review of the book in the New York Nation for January 23 of this year, has drawn up a list of such errors with undue irony, and with fine disregard of the central idea of the discussion, which after all is not essentially invalidated by the author's unhistorical disposal of the head of Francis Bacon.

The book proposes the next step in human progress. Mr. Denison realizes, with the late J. B. Bury, that to understand the causes of civilization and to direct its future development, the laws of its past movement must be ascertained from history with scientific precision. Assuming that civilization always depends on communal effort, the author argues that emotion is the only nexus powerful enough to hold men together. The emotions that have united human societies in the past he analyzes into two categories: patriarchal, which makes for perpendicular ordering of individuals as in the Roman Catholic Church; and fratriarchal, or horizontal relationship, as in American democracy at its inception. For modern times, when the patriarchal form of government is constantly losing ground, and when democracy is tending "to reduce all things,--government, art, literature and morals,--to the vulgar level of mediocrity," Mr. Denison proposes what he calls the anepsiarchal system, based on the relationship not of father and sons nor of brother, but of cousins, a system which frankly recognizes the inequalities of men and of the groups which they naturally form, and which combines such groups in an ascending line between horizontal and perpendicular. Among the cousin groups the only possible nexus, but in the author's opinion powerful enough, is the mutual respect and cooperation of good sportsmanship, the prevailing code among college men.

There is nothing startlingly new, of course, in this plan. It is an adaptation of Plato's groups of gold and brass and iron men to the needs of a more heterogeneous society than existed in Periclean Athens. But there is a sensible presentation of the modern problem with sensible emphasis on the need for right feeling among representative men. The ideas are not presented with as much persuasiveness as might be wished. Outstanding is the annoying fault of unnecessary repetition of phrases and explanations, as for example the constant definition of mana and miasma, which in the 538 pages of the book makes the reading frequently tedious. All the way through, there is a curious uncertainty on the part of the author in sensing what the reader knows and what needs explanation, so if the book had not been tested on an audience for timings and proportions. But with judicious skimming these shortcomings can be obviated, and there is compensation in the sympathetic treatment of the teachings of Buddha and Zoroaster, in the admiration for the Samurai and for the innovations of the founders of the United States, and in the personal anecdotes of the author's experiences with the administrators of government in African tribes and in post-War Russia.

It is the synthesis of a lifetime of reading and travel into a plausible system for directing civilization; as such it may appeal to Harvard men unsatisfied with the specific details of daily classes and the restricted subjects of their theses. For those who like to discuss in leisurely fashion the facts and philosophies of history and their bearing on current problems of religion and on such personal problems as fraternities, and who wish to formulate standards of judgment and conduct, this book should be a stimulus, presenting as it does much wide-ranging information with the common sense of an American gentleman