of the past, even among her mixed population. Punishments are justified if they secure the great end of public security. This is the main purpose of punishment. W. E. C. WRIGHT.

OLIVET COLLEGE, MICHIGAN.

TENNYSON'S PRAYER.

THE first stanza of Tennyson's "In Memoriam "—and with it the whole prologue-has suffered from commentators. What can be clearer, if let alone, than these lines:

"Strong Son of God, immortal Love,

Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove."

If it were possible to make it plainer that they are addressed primarily and directly to Christ, that would be done by quoting the words of I Peter i. 8, words certainly familiar to the poet, "Jesus Christ, whom having not seen ye love; in whom though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable, and full of glory."

Now what say certain commentaries? I take up the latest, and on the whole the best,—that by Prof. A. C. Bradley of Oxford,1—and read, "In stanza I. immortal Love is addressed as the Son or revelation of God; invisible, unprovable, embraced by faith alone" (p. 8o). According to this, Jesus Christ is not addressed and adored as immortal Love, but love, the affection, is personified, and deified, and invoked. The aim of the note is to cut off the reference to the personal Christ. Again, “In the first shock of grief the poet felt that the love within him was his truest self, and that it must not die . . . and, like undying love, he 'embraced' even in his darkest hours as 'God indeed'" (p. 79). To find a parallel to this inversion, and therefore perversion, of the poet's thought, we may take the Bible statement "God is love," and change it to "Love is God." Do we need to summon the powers of logic and rhetoric to show the important difference between those two statements? Common sense is enough.

Now what reason is there why any commentator should intervene where all is clear to make all dim? Professor Bradley is not the only one who does this. Genung and Davidson do the same. The former says, "Immortal Love is addressed as Son of God"; also that the address is "to the Christ-nature rather than to the Christ-name." Why this strain imposed upon a meaning so obvious? Why turn a prayer to Christ into a prayer to an affection even so royal as love? The cause may be found partly in the attempt to find something deeper and more worthy of a great poet than a simple prayer to Jesus Christ; and yet there 1A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoriam (1901).

is nothing deeper than God, and devotion to him; and there are intellectual depths enough in the prayer itself, without seeking to multiply them beyond the limits of devout personal faith.

But this supplanting of Christ by love is probably due not chiefly to a dreamy search for profundities of meaning, but to the influence of other parts of Tennyson's poetry, especially of the later portion of "In Memoriam" itself. In the sonnet "Doubt and Prayer," published in the poet's latest volume, are the lines:

"Before I learn that Love, which is, and was
My Father, and my Brother, and my God."

Does not that prove that "Immortal Love" in the Prologue is the primary object of address and adoration? No; to use it so is to violate the fundamental law of exegesis; viz. Every passage belongs in its own place, and shows its meaning there. Those lines are far away from the Prologue in origin, in setting and connection, and have nothing to do in explaining it.

The later portions of "In Memoriam" may have a better claim. Professor Bradley says that "the later sections will be found the best commentary on the Prologue." Here, it is true, we find such a line as this (Canto cxxvi.):—

"Love is and was my Lord and King,"

but in none of these sections is there any confounding of love with God. It is also of prime importance that the Prologue is introductory and personal. It is almost a preface. It came fresh from a mind and heart full of the whole poem, but it is not a summary, and not an epilogue. The poet knew his art better than to make it either. The ecstasy of some of the later cantos is out of place in a preface. The Prologue breathes the spirit of the whole poem, without repeating its passionate rhetoric, or its shadowy speculations. It lays the whole work, quivering with love, on the altar of Jesus Christ, who is immortal Love.

To the question what Tennyson himself thought of the mis-explanations of his commentators, I can discover no exact answer. He commended Miss Chapman's "Companion to 'In Memoriam,'" although it begins with the remark, "The Poet dedicates his Elegy to that Unseen Love which is, he trusts, at the heart of things, in which all things live and move and have their being, which is perfect power and perfect tenderness and perfect justice." On the other hand, he had in his possession for some time Dr. Gatty's "Key to Lord Tennyson's 'In Memoriam,'" and made so many corrections that the author says of the corrected edition, "I feel sure that it contains nothing which he disapproved." 1 And the "Key" contains the following: "The prefatory Poem is addressed to Christ, God Himself upon earth" (p. 143). If the question had been put squarely to the poet, "Did you mean Jesus Christ in your 1 Preface to Fifth Edition, p. xxvii.

invocation?" I imagine he would have regarded it as an impertinence. It seems, however, that more than once he was asked the meaning of "immortal Love," and, according to the Memoir by his son, “he explained that he had used Love in the same sense as St. John" (1 John iv.).1 This is the chapter that affirms and repeats "God is love," and also emphasizes the incarnation thus: "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him." The interpreters that bid us think of Love as a substitute for Christ will find scant comfort in their reading of that chapter.

If still some have the feeling that the simple, obvious meaning is too orthodox for Tennyson, it is sufficient to say that, however unorthodox some of his statements of belief, uttered hastily in later life, may appear, certainly, at the time of writing "In Memoriam," he was a devout believer in the Incarnation. To Dr. Gatty he said, "I am not very fond of creeds: it is enough for me that I know God Himself came down from heaven in the form of man."2

The Christian thought of to-day centers in the person of Christ. It is greatly worth while to rescue this prayer from the misty realm of abstractions, and place it where it belongs,—in the forefront of the Christian devotion of the world of culture and intellect. It is not a rhapsody on love, but a real, vital prayer,—sincere, humble, profound, sublime. L. S. POTWIN.

ADELBERT College.

ARTICLE XI.

NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS.

ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY: A Practical Manual for Colleges and Normal Schools presenting the Facts and Principles of Mental Analysis in the Form of Simple Illustrations and Experiments, with forty-two Figures in the Text and thirty-nine Experimental Charts. By LIGHTNER WITMER. Pp. xvii, 251. Boston, U.S.A., and London: Ginn & Co. 1902. $1.60.

Psychology is the youngest of the biological sciences; it is among the oldest of the theoretical sciences. From Plato to Wundt is a long period in the history of the race; it is a still longer step to pass from their respective views of the facts of mind. A philosophy of mind has been the possession of every age since man became a problem to himself, but a science of mental phenomena has not been systematically attempted until the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is, of course, too soon to affirm that its final form has been given to the scientific treatment of conscious states. But it is quite safe to say, that the two methods of approach to the facts and principles of mind just mentioned have been finally differentiated; and that psychology-in contradistinction to the philosophy of mind-must be cultivated, as all science, free from presuppositions; and that its highest generalizations can only express the uniform modes of behavior of those facts made known by the analytic study of the phenomena of consciousness.

While, however, general agreement as to the nature of psychology has in the main been secured, the literature of the subject, so far as it is available for the English-reading student, is in an unsatisfactory state. It is true we have some excellent treatises, each abreast of the assured results of laboratory experimentation, in which one may trace out a more or less consistent theory of the nature of mind from the scientific point of view; but so far these books, for the most part, presuppose an acquaintance with the facts of the science, and are only half intelligible to any who may be in ignorance of those facts on which they are based. On the other hand, over against this array of books, and the large number of teachers of psychology whose conditions make it necessary to approach the subject from the side of its theory, we have the psychological laboratories and the laboratory manuals, doing their own work in a painstaking and praiseworthy way. But there has been little coöperation between the two, and sometimes opposition. The fault lies sometimes with the experimentalist who affects to regard, as mythological, results at

tained by unaided introspection; sometimes with the psychologist who uses introspection as his only method of ascertaining the facts, for looking upon his colaborer as a mere mechanic. But, whatever misunderstandings have existed since the change of view of Wundt himself, the two branches have felt increasingly the need of each other, and there is, no doubt, room for a book which shall make available, for general classroom work, the experiments and methods of the laboratory as a support for the developmental treatment of mental life to which in large measure we have been hitherto confined in our general courses in psychology. It is as meeting this demand that we have pleasure in recommending Professor Witmer's manual. In his "Analytical Psychology" he has rendered a service to the profession which they will not be slow to recognize; but more conspicuously has he placed the subject, on its experimental and theoretical sides, in its modern bearings; and, in bringing the two sides together in a definite way, he has helped to put an end to that unfruitful isolation which might have blocked future progress. In this connection we may add, that this undertaking is not a mere experiment, nor is its usefulness problematical; for, besides what has been done by other individual teachers in other places along similar lines, the form of the book before us, we are told, took shape "in connection with a course of lectures given in Philadelphia in 1893," and at other places with both graduate and undergraduate classes (Preface, p. vi). Further characterization of the work is unnecessary,-only to add, that it does not "constitute a manual of experimental psychology," but is one by which, through "a series of experiments that can be performed by the untrained student of psychology... without costly and complicated apparatus (p. iv), a knowledge of the facts of mental life may be gained, and the student be trained to make his own induction after they have been properly analyzed and described. It is to this analysis of his own experience that we have here an assistance, and the description and explanation, of which psychology in large part consists, are then made a true discipline in scientific procedure.

The general method and arrangement of the subject-matter deserve a word of notice. The standpoint of the psychologist has been maintained throughout, and the experiments, fifty in number, are so arranged as to secure the progressive development of the topics of the several chapters. The experiments are made the basis of the work to be done, and are not merely illustrative of positions didactically announced beforehand. Every one knows the influence of preadjusted attention on what is observed under given conditions. This fact, of course, is itself a psychological problem, and it is treated in Chapter II.; but it is not the whole of psychology, and by no means the larger part of it. We consider the method a wise one, not only for the results, but especially for the increased training in introspection it thereby secures. Without this training in observation, whatever success it may gain in other directions, psy