One of the marks of our times is a new eruption of the personal. Systems and institutions of politics are clouded over. The impersonal principles on which these systems and institutions depend are still more deeply obscured. Men turn for their inspiration to the living flow of personality. Some leader who has burst from hidden and elemental depths commands a passion of personal loyalty. Leadership has always been a great factor in the history of human communities. The deification of the ruler was the cement of the Hellenistic monarchies and of the Roman Empire which inherited their tradition. It may seem a strange atavism that we should now be apparently recurring, in the twentieth century, to a similar practice. But there are exigencies of contemporary life which explain the new vogue of leadership, and there is a tide of contemporary thought which leads on to the current doctrine of the emergent leader.

It was in 1686, in what has since been given the title of the Discourse on Metaphysics, that Leibniz wrote the first systematic exposition of his philosophy. The central conception of the Discourse is the conception of individual created substance. Each complete individual in the world is active, but entirely self-contained. In it are to be found traces of all its past activities, and the ground of its present and future activities. Though all created substances are completely independent of one another, yet their activities are in thoroughgoing correspondence, and between them they make up a universe which is a perfect harmony.

In a little book of 155 pages the late John Scot Haldane gave the world his final message. Much as his friends and admirers must regret his recent death, we may rejoice that in these few pages he has succeeded in presenting in clear and unmistakable fashion the philosophy which, throughout his long life of highly successful detailed research in physiology combined with equally effective and untiring application of his findings to practical problems, he slowly developed into the outlines of a comprehensive and rounded system.

There is no such opposition between mind and spirit for Santayana as for Descartes existed between matter and mind, provoking him to uncompromising fireside dichotomy. For spirit is born out of an achieved harmony, Santayana says, and this harmony is the psyche. There can be then, it will be seen, no direct opposition. Actually, mind yields spirit. But there is some degree of conflict, precisely the conflict between ethereal flying and material wings, the one achieved through the agency of the other, but checked by their weight.

The quickening of interest in the great philosophical figure of Aquinas which has taken place during the last few years is a wellattested phenomenon. Of recent years there has been a distinct recognition that this mediaeval period was a most important time in the development of the human race, and that it has many urgent lessons for a modern age which has begun to realize that science and industry and mechanical efficiency have not succeeded in building such a perfect society as the optimistic Victorians had hastily hoped.

The recent discussions on “The Right and the Good” show that the reconciliation between formalism and teleology is still a problem. Some of the contending parties lean more strongly towards formalism, others towards teleology; but neither side has, I believe, done equal justice to formalism and teleology. To review the whole discussion is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, I propose to suggest in outline a theory which may possibly harmonize the essential tenets of both parties.

The older of us are agreed that never before within our memory has there been a time in which men's souls have been so filled with anxiety as to the condition of the world. The Afghanistan and the Boer Wars as we look back come into our minds. But these were on the outskirts of civilization, and no one really believed that they threatened that of our own country, not to speak of Europe. The period before the Great War was one of violent conflicts, but, as contrasted with those wider and more subterranean conflicts out of which the war rose, they may be said to have been household matters, and only required a little more resolute goodwill on the part of the nation itself for their solution.

Of late yeaxs Benedetto Croce's interpretation of the philosophy of G. B. Vico has been exposed to continual criticism from Catholic writers anxious to claim for themselves the figure of the great eighteenth-century thinker, wrested from them by Croce for inclusion in a setting of secular and immanentistic philosophy. The Catholic polemic was founded partly on a false supposition: it derived from the idea that Croce meant to deny entirely Vico's Catholicism. Instead, Croce made a distinction between Vico the man and Vico the philosopher. While he recognized that the man cherished Catholic sentiments and beliefs, he denied that the philosopher could reenter the circle of dogmatic and confessional philosophy. To confirm the accuracy of his interpretation, Croce has now republished an interesting monograph by an eighteenth-century Catholic writer, a little later than Vico, G. F. Finetti,1 who subjects the doctrine of Vico to a lively criticism. The motive of this exhumation is plain: “The protest of eighteenth-century Catholic criticism against the doctrines of Vico, or rather, against the doctrines of an author well known to be a blameless observant throughout his life, is of considerable importance because it is the first real acknowledgment of the revolutionary spirit, the anti-Catholic and generally anti-religious spirit, which informed his doctrines.”