Philosophical Review

Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758. by Ola Elizabeth WinslowReview by: H. G. TownsendThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Jul., 1941), pp. 450-451Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2181079 .

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450 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW [VOL. L.

and upon whether they center primarily in personal or group life. The large areas of life where values shift from neutral to positive or negative depending upon one's demands is slighted. Among the per- sonal negative situations, the author comments upon backward and unsocial children, poverty, illness, birth control, failures, law suits, divorce, insanity, and death. Too much attention to these matters, he grants, may exalt "security" and make the prudent avoidance of evils appear to be the sum-total of wisdom. His chapter on positive per- sonal situations therefore emphasizes some of the goods to be sought in play, education, a career, marriage, and friendship. When he comes to group negative situations, the list of personal evils is largely re- peated in the wider context, and this is true also of the positive group goods.

As long as the discussion is confined to sapient advice on specific issues, it seldom fails to enlighten. But its concluding chapter, in which a belated attempt is made to deal with some of the classical perplexities of philosophy and psychology, is the least convincing one in the book. The beginning student is left in the dark concerning "the general philosophic position upon which the ethics of situations rests", a relational theory of value in which "ethical values are determined by the structure of relations within the total ethical situation", and yet are somehow neither absolute nor relativistic nor subjectivistic. The volume is refreshingly free from theological cant and dogmatism; but its total effect is unadventurous. The wise man appears as one whose conduct is the final, calculated outcome of so many carefully considered factors in a total ethical situation that it is completely lack- ing in sting, bite, edge, or color. Ethics may be regarded as the art of fine discrimination in conduct, but fine discrimination itself can be overdone. If balance can be carried to excess, then the art of living would seem to consist in knowing when and to what degree to be ethical in that sense. In spite of the author's specific refusal to equate wisdom and prudence, by insisting upon defining the latter in negative terms, his repeated matching of pros and cons makes the dominant pattern of his ethical wisdom one of checks and balances rather than one of human passion and heroism.

HAROLD A. LARRABEE UNION COLLEGE

Jonathan Edwards, I703-I758. A Biography. By OLA ELIZABETH WINSLOW. New York, The Macmillan Company, I940. PP. xiv, 406. At last we have a thorough, dependable, modern biography of Ed-

wards. For too long a time students have had to piece together frag- ments from various records and 'interpretations' of the great American philosopher and theologian. He lived and died in the midst of con- troversy and even his subsequent appearances in our literature have

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No. 4.] REVIEWS OF BOOKS 451

all too often been controversial. Miss Winslow has taken the pains to go to the source material from which she has collected and organized enough information to present a vivid as well as a reliable picture of Edwards in his time and place. She has wisely avoided, what he him-' self seemed never able to avoid, a disputatious controversy. She does not enter the lists to prove that he was wrong or that he was right but with a sympathetic eye surveys the incidents of his life with candor and uniformly good judgment. The result is that Edwards appears as a man in history, if not altogether lovable at least understandable and stripped of the improbable and monstrous characteristics with which he has sometimes been clothed. It is fortunate, for he was no man of straw, no abstract stereotype.

The book does not pretend to be a philosophical treatise and the student of American philosophy will have to look elsewhere for guidance in exploring the rich veins of philosophical theory buried in the dark caverns of Edwards's theological works. The author under- takes only to "indicate the chronology and general import of his ideas". She presents him as the churchman in eighteenth-century New England rather than as the speculative philosopher. Toward the further study of Edwards, however, this book is of the greatest value. It provides a good bibliography and a much needed guide to the unpublished manuscript material, mainly at Yale and Andover, which the author has carefully examined.

It seems to the present reviewer that Miss Winslow has done ample justice to Edwards's theory of religious experience. His writings on this subject are exceedingly important in estimating his place in theology and even of considerable importance in the interpretation of his philosophical theory, especially of his theory of knowledge. The author takes too little account of more precise philosophical doctrines and consequently does not see in The Nature of True Virtue any suggestion of the Platonic doctrine of love or of Spinoza's intellectual love of God but thinks that Edwards merely means that "virtue is not of the intellect" (308). Such more strictly philosophical works need to be studied less in the context of New England theology, though that also counts, and more in the long perspective of the history of philosophy. In such a perspective we would not dismiss an argument because it failed to "reshape itself in accordance with a changing world". Such 'may be a proper judgment for an historian but not for a philosopher. Theories are hardly on all fours with events,

H. G. TOWNSEND UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

A Philosophy of Religion. By EDGAR SHEFFIELD BRIGHTMAN. New York, Prentice-Hall, Inc., I940. PP. xviii, 540. A topical survey, primarily of the present status of thought in the

field of critical analysis of religion (on Religious Values, God, Good-

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