BOOKS
113
does not exist as an entity alone, and so Mr. ·fate's expectations from
the Southern style must seem puzzling or sentimental or a stick or a
metaphor with which to beat something. And obviously the
tour de
force
of apologetics which, in effect, the style of
The Fathers
is, is not
convincing as such. But for the moment the factitiousness and even
the dangers of Mr. Tate's intellectual position can be put aside. What
on
this
occasion needs comment is the aesthetic result of
his
preoccu–
pation with style-the strange tension of his novel which comes from
the brutality of the "abyss" being set against the ·narrative's delicacy
and control. There is, to be sur:e, perhaps a certain preciosity in the
control-perhaps inevitable to anyone who undertakes to send a prose
work based on stylistic exactitude into a literary world not very sensi–
tive to precision. But
The Fathers
is still an encouragement to those
who think there is much to be done, in directions that are not Mr.
Tate's, with words precisely used and forms precisely planned.
LIONEL TRILLING.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONTROL
TRE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ACT. By George Herbert Mead.
The University of Chicago Press.
$5.00.
Since Mead's death in 1931, the University of Chicago Press
has
published, under the editorship of Professor Charles W. Morris,
three volumes of his unfinished papers and of material from students'
lecture notes. Together with
The Philosophy of The Present,
the
Carns Lectures for 1930, also left not quite ready for publication,
and edited by
A.
E. Murphy, these three· volumes contain all of
Mead's thought that the dilligent labor of eqitors has been able to
salvage. In the first of the volumes, entitled
Mind, Self and Society,
are to be found Mead's contributions to social psychology. The
second,
Movements of Thought in The Nineteenth Century,
is per–
haps
the least valuable of the volumes, although it contains three or
four very brilliant essays. In this last volume are embodied Mead's
efforts to lay a broad foundation for what C. W. Morris has called
"systematic pragmatism."
For men striving to live fully abreast of their day, Mead has
many
extremely valuable suggestions to offer, because he recognized
as
the most urgent intellectual task of our generation the need to
hasten the assimilation of science into our culture. That philosophy,
whenever it has been vital and relevant to the world in which it
ftourished, has concerned itself centrally with the implications of
lcience,
is
a commonplace that Mead did not discover. But he realized
with
singular depth and freshness that it was necessary to draw out
the implications of abstract scientific findings beyond the range of
