Thus We are Men: By Sir Walter Langdon-Brown, M.A., M.D. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1939. 343 pp.

A physician of fine scholarly attainments, Sir Walter Langdon-Brown appears as familiar with anthropology, literature, philosophy, art and the history of religion as with medicine. This book, delightful in the urbanity of its style, consists of a series of addresses in which is reflected the author's predilection for the philosophy of emergent evolution. The keynote is sounded in the opening chapter, The Biology of Social Life. Here Sir Walter presents the concept that the next step in evolution is logically 'the coöperation of free individuals for the common weal'. In the seventeenth century Sir Thomas Browne had said, 'Thus we are men and we know not how'. Sir Walter Langdon-Brown devotes a good part of his book to filling the void Sir Thomas so keenly felt. He evidently believes that 'knowing how' is a necessary precondition for 'the coöperation of free individuals'.

Even if this reviewer were not profoundly sceptical of the practical value of such an approach to the social problems which press us today with such dreadful urgency, he would look askance at the author's technique for 'knowing how'. With that bent towards religious mysticism so characteristic of certain eminent English physicists Sir Walter leans to the psychology of Jung, with its 'more humanistic, broader conceptions'. To him Jung 'appears to see life steadily and to see it whole'. If he is 'vaguer and sometimes not quite comprehensible', this does not disturb the author for 'are our minds capable of comprehending all the mystery of life?'. Jung, forsooth, 'is most likely of all others to reconcile materialism and metaphysics, to restore our sense of values'.

Like Sir Thomas Browne who noted that 'Man, the great Amphibian, lives … in divided and distinguished worlds' the author suffers from 'a dualism of thought'. It is with approval that he quotes Professor Alexander who conceives of God, like man