Reviewed in Brief

austere matter. It may also be dull and irksome, but should we sacrifice life for childhood, or a part of childhood for life? . . . The campaign against examinations and scholarship competitions is sheer calumny. If the essential mission of intellectual education is to form character, examinations make real sense, for they are tests of the will even more than of the intelligence.

Despite the forthrightness of these and other judgments, I cannot overcome the feeling that this is essentially a softheaded book. On the whole it impresses one as a sequence of more or less agreeable pensées rather than a “scientific,” or better, philosophical, attack upon the problems of man. These have their incidental value. But what distracts one throughout is the absence of a determining and synthesizing point of view.

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austere matter. It may also be dull and irksome, but should we sacrifice life for childhood, or a part of childhood for life? . . . The campaign against examinations and scholarship competitions is sheer calumny. If the essential mission of intellectual education is to form character, examinations make real sense, for they are tests of the will even more than of the intelligence.

Despite the forthrightness of these and other judgments, I cannot overcome the feeling that this is essentially a softheaded book. On the whole it impresses one as a sequence of more or less agreeable pensées rather than a “scientific,” or better, philosophical, attack upon the problems of man. These have their incidental value. But what distracts one throughout is the absence of a determining and synthesizing point of view.