upon the body for the exercise of all its faculties; the subliminal self manifests intelligence and communicates thought independently of bodily func

tions.

This hypothesis will, to most readers, seem fanciful and romantic, a mere flight of a speculative genius, and to promise little help in the solution of the problems of our existence. But whoever reads carefully these two volumes will not deny one thing to this conception: it enabled Mr. Myers to group together in a most successful way a bewildering variety of seemingly unrelated phenomena, and this unification is no superficial affair; these facts are united by a common principle which affiliates them as truly and as intimately as does the law of gravitation the scattered masses of matter in the universe.

A successful classification of such widely separated and heterogeneous phenomena as those discussed in these volumes is itself an achievement fit to make a man's reputation, to say nothing of the strong indication it affords that the author is on the right track, and will ultimately be followed by those men who most strenuously reject his theory.

Not to follow the author into details, we note a few instances of the use he makes of this hypothesis in the explanation of such psychic phenomena as hypnotism, telepathy, phantasms of the living and of the dead, and alleged communications from such persons to the living.

The hypnotic intelligence, the author maintains, is best explained if we regard it as only a "fragmentary intelligence, a dreamlike scrap of the subliminal self functioning apart from that central and profounder control; these marvels of hypnotism are the "fragmentary expression of that more comprehensive intelligence, of a power which the supra-liminal self does not possess.

To take another instance; experiments have established as a fact the

But the chain of phenomena does not end here. If the work of the Census Bureau can be relied upon, these veridical hallucinations are continuous in kind with experimental cases of telepathy, and tend with them to establish the author's hypothesis.

More remarkable still, — the death of the body does not seem to break this chain of evidential facts; the ghost, rightly understood, presents no essential difference, no wide departure from the phenomena of telepathy and phantasms of the living.

To take a last step in this direction: whoever has read the alleged communications made through the medium Mrs. Piper will not find it easy to reject the author's contention, that the evidence which tends to establish the continued. life of the human personality after the death of the body is continuous with the evidence that establishes the fact that a human personality here on the earth can communicate his thoughts and manifest himself to other persons without the medium of the body; and however reluctant such a reader may be to accept the author's hypothesis, we think he will agree with us that it is time for professed psychologists seriously to set about putting some other explanation in its place than the charge of fraud, self-deception, or childish credulity, which they have been content to substitute for serious examination of the alleged facts.

The author of these volumes will have accomplished his substantial purpose, if he compels the science of the future to face aright this question of the human soul and its destiny.

Some Recent Books of Travel.1

John E. Russell.

AMONG the sins of omission which are charged against that great stupid innocent bogy the Public, lack of interest in books of travel cannot be fairly numbered. No kind of bound publication seems to be more sure of a market. Perhaps this is because the "output" is limited, -possibly six or eight books in the year, during which the historian is producing his thousands and the novelist his tens of thousands. The writer of "travels" can even afford to be solid and improving. Books like Nansen's Farthest North or Landor's Through the Forbidden Country are quite as likely to be forgotten in ten years as many narratives in which fewer things happen. Perils and privations are in fact not essential to the happiness of your true reader of travels. Description is the main thing, and the object described does just as well not to be in any sense too outlandish.

Winter India is a very good travelbook of the lighter kind. It is the work of an experienced traveler and writer of travels, a book of the pleasant, fluent, chattering variety, written frankly from the tourist's point of view. The author cares little for foreigners, and less for foreign problems; she simply likes to see things, and is clever in describing them. A good illustration of her style, which is always animated and often amusing, is afforded by the account of her first impression of Nautch dancing:

"Six barefooted, neat-looking col1 Winter India. By ELIZA RUHAMAH SCIDMORE. New York: The Century Co. 1903. Through Hidden Shensi. By FRANCIS H. NICHOLS, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1902.

Across Coveted Lands. By A. H. SAVAGE-
NO. 549.

VOL. XCII.

9

ored girls in starched muslin dress skirts and velvet jackets of antiquated cut and no fit whatever, stepped forward and, in methodical march and countermarch to a nasal chorus, braided the Maypole's ribbons down to their hands; in reverse order unbraided them, and stepped demurely back in line. We were breathless with surprise.

"Was that the famous sacred temple dance? Could six octoroons, matter-offact young' yaller gals,' shuffling slowly around a Maypole, ever give rise to such visions of beauty and grace as only the name of the Nautch dance conjures up? Oh, no! It was surely coming next. There would be something graceful and bewitching, something in gorgeous native costume, after this purposely tame and tedious cake-walk by colored church members in velveteen basques trimmed with cotton lace."

The author pretends to no sympathy with the people whom she is observing: "All these diverse races and peoples are picturesque to look upon, with their graceful draperies of brilliant colors and the myriad forms of turbans; but they are not an attractive, a winning, and sympathetic, or a lovable people. They are as antipathetic and devoid of charm as the Chinese, as callous, as deficient in sympathy and the sense of pity as those next neighbors of theirs in Asia, and as impossible for the Occidental to fathom or comprehend, — an irresistible, inexplicable, unintelligible repulsion controlling one.

This is very different from the spirit in which Mr. Nichols's book is written. He has not simply observed the Chinese as a tourist, but has lived with them as a friend. Consequently he does not find them "antipathetic, 'callous," or "deficient in sympathy." Shensi is the most isolated of the Chinese provinces, LANDOR. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1903.

99 66

The Home-Life of the Borneo Head-Hunters: Its Festivals and Folk - Lore. By WILLIAM HENRY FURNESS, 3rd. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. 1902.

the home of the old race, and therefore the best possible place to study the Chinese character in its purity. Mr. Nichols entered Shensi shortly after the Boxer uprising, with no prepossession in favor of the natives: "I had all the prejudices of the foreigner when I crossed the gray plain and met the old race. They seemed then only a perpetuation of the commonplace; but as I went in and out among them they began to interest me. I found that they had achieved much, but were free from boasting; that they loved their own. kind of learning; that their pride was tempered by reason and by the isolated experience of their country; that they strove to do right as they saw the right; that they did not covet, and that because they had always honoured their fathers and mothers their days had been longer in the land than had been the days of any other race on earth. I came to respect their eternity and to admire their love of their parents, their ancestors, and their past." Mr. Nichols's errand (the distribution of money collected in America for the famine - sufferers of Shensi) entailed no hazardous adventures, and his account of his personal achievements is extremely modest. Moreover, though his impression of Chinese life is surprisingly favorable, the quiet humor of his commentary frees him from suspicion of being advocatus diaboli, for a strong man who does not take himself too seriously may be counted upon for a sensible judgment of other people. He particularly avoids the set discussion of problems: "For the fault of the absence from these pages of both a militant and a missionary spirit, let me urge in extenuation that this narrative offers no solution of Chinese problems, points no morals, and draws no conclusions. It is an attempt at a picture of Oldest China and its people as I saw them in their land, sowing, reaping, toiling, thinking, and misjudging the world beyond their mountains as persistently as that world misjudges them."

Mr. Landor's Across Coveted Lands is, it must be confessed, disappointingly dull. The word could not be used of his narrative of travels in Thibet, in which many of the recorded adventures are of a character which made one delightedly fancy that a new Marco Polo, not to say Munchausen, had arisen. In the present pair of fat volumes the reader will find a variety of facts about Persia and the outlying deserts, some of them statistics and some of them matters observed. What one misses is any sort of spontaneous enthusiasm of interest on the part of the writer. These volumes, in short, record the observations of a professional traveler and sight-seer during an overland journey from Flushing to Calcutta.

Dr. Furness's book has the advantage of dealing with a fresh theme. What most of us know about Borneo, we owe to Mr. Barnum; and it is in the nature of a shock to discover that the natives are really pretty well domesticated and very nearly hairless, a race of happy and irresponsible infants not unlike the island peoples described by Herman Melville years ago. The life of one of the inland tribes seems to him especially idyllic: "Were the choice of a residence in a Bornean tribe forced on me, I should not hesitate long in casting in my lot with the Punans. They have never thought of the morrow; no cares; no responsibilities; no possessions; no enemies, for they desire nothing that other people have, not even clothes; money is dross; and home is where they rest their blow-pipes and hang up their parangs. Night can never find them homeless; home is wherever the setting sun finds them; does rain threaten, a few poles and a few leaves make a house; let the night be clear, and a soft bed of leaves in a nook between the great flat roots of a tapang tree is luxury itself; for where youth with unstuffed brain [never was a Punan brain stuffed] doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign.'

The luxury of condescension has much

to do with the pleasure of travel, but it is evident that to the larger mind, whether it is concerned with the impressions of an ancient civilization like that of Shensi, or with an ancient savagery like that of Borneo, the very finest product of the unusual contact is in the attainment of a mood quite different from that of condescension. The richer the

nature of the observer, the more certain he is to listen to the "message" (to use a cant word) which only an alien race and life can have for him. It may be loyalty, it may be light-heartedness, there will be some quality in which he feels himself excelled; and his racial condescension will be wholesomely tempered with something very like humility. H. W. B.

THOSE who revere the memory of Channing owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Chadwick. "The Star of the American Church," as Emerson called the great preacher, now shines clearly and humanly for the ordinary reader, to whom he was practically inaccessible in the three volumes of the Memoir by his nephew, or in the abridged but bulky one-volumed edition of the same, issued as a Centenary Memorial in 1880 by the American Unitarian Association. If Mr. Chadwick would now prepare a volume of some of the great addresses of Channing that are still of contemporary interest and value- such as Self-Culture, On the Elevation of the Laboring Classes, On Preaching the Gospel to the Poor, The Present Age, Spiritual Freedom, and perhaps War, Temperance, and Education - he would do still more toward bringing Channing within reach of the present generation, which needs him so much, and might thus be tempted to read him at first hand.

Channing's main significance is intellectual, spiritual, yet Mr. Chadwick gives us full details of his life and personality. It is interesting to hear that he had vigorous health and sometimes abandoned himself to unrestrained hilarity as a college boy. Austerities at

1 William Ellery Channing, Minister of Religion. By JOHN WHITE CHADWICK. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1903.

Richmond, Va., whither he went afterward as a tutor, austerities partly forced by poverty, and partly his own choice, lowered his animal spirits and broke his constitution. A certain amount of irritability he seems to have inherited from his mother, and Mr. Chadwick thinks that he was making public confession when in his preaching he wrote of the wretchedness caused by fretfulness and anger in social intercourse. He was an unsociable man when he began his ministry, annoyed rather than pleased by visitors, declining, if possible, all invitations; and long afterwards Emerson spoke of his cold temperament as making him the most unprofitable companion. His conversation wanted ease and freedom, this and his letters also easily slid into the sermon tone. Mr. Chadwick "wonders" whether with his self-absorption he did not fall at times into some inconsiderateness to others, to his young colleague, Mr. Gannett, for instance, who would go to church on Sunday morning, without knowing till he got there whether he was to preach or not. His "self-tending" (which was necessary, since the most he could hope for was "to keep a sound mind in a weak body") sometimes went to an amusing

extreme.

"Why do you not go out, sir, and take a walk?" said a parishioner who found him miserable and

depressed. Channing pointed a tragic finger to the vane of Park Street Church and said, "Do you see that?" "Yes," answered the parishioner, "I see it, and it has been stuck fast and pointing northeast for a fortnight." Then Channing sallied out to find the warm south wind turning the Common green. Another incident shows that Channing was capable of a little humor (as well as tartness) himself. We owe the story to Mr. Chadwick, who says he had never seen it in print:

"Dr. Tuckerman, on one of his frequent visits, enquired for Mrs. Channing, and was informed that she had gone to Newport to open the house for the summer. 'Alone?' asked Dr. Tuckerman.

Dr. Channing assented,

6

and Dr. Tuckerman, responding, said, 'Do I understand you to say that Mrs. Channing has gone into the country alone to open the house for the summer?' That is what I said, Dr. Tuckerman.' 'Well, Dr. Channing,' said his friend, you will permit me to say that I should not think of asking Mrs. Tuckerman to go into the country alone to open the house for the summer.' Then Dr. Channing laughed his small, dry laugh and said, Very likely, Dr. Tuckerman; and, if you should, most probably she would not go.""

These are human touches, but they are not at all inconsistent with Channing's spiritual greatness, with a rare inner conscientiousness and self-control (for, according to Mr. Chadwick, he made a good fight with his native irritability and sharpness of speech and manner and came off more than conqueror), with a courage which was all the greater because it was reflective and not headlong, and even with a certain sweetness which made little children run into his arms, though strong men stood in awe of him. There was something quite wonderful about his eye and voice; Emerson says that his discourses lose their best in losing them. If the discourses affect us by their elevation, their

noble ardor, their spiritual passion, as we read them, what must it have been to hear them!

There are two notes in Dr. Channing's preaching and preaching comes pretty near being the word for almost everything he said and wrote that give it lasting significance and distinction. The first is the spirit of intellectual freedom, the idea of the rights of the mind; the second, social idealism. To both, his new biographer does full justice. Dr. Channing's specific theological opinions, aside from his general spiritual philosophy, are not perhaps of particular interest to the present day. Many shared them in his own time, or were even more conservative than he, or, if we like the other tendency better, more radical; but this fact has not served to give them immortality or even remembrance. It was not his opinions, but the spirit in which he held them, and in which he maintained the right of others to hold different opinions; it was his magnificent assertion of the ethics of the intellect, and his own free and open mind, that in part give him his unique place in American religious history:

"I am surer that my rational nature is from God than that any book is the expression of his will."

"I owe the little that I am to the conscientiousness with which I have listened to objections springing up in my own mind to what I have inclined and sometimes thirsted to believe, and I have attained through this to a serenity of faith that once seemed denied in the present state."

It is sentences like these, along with his vindication of the right of men like Theodore Parker and Abner Kneeland to say what they thought, though it grieved or shocked him, that mark the real greatness of the man. Mr. Chadwick does indeed tell us, as he was in duty bound, the story of the evolution of Channing's opinions; he is at much pains, and does the work with scholarly