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The new framework of values set forth by the author of this exceedingly interesting philosophical treatise is based upon the fundamental fact
that man does not stand outside of nature, which is thus objective to him, but that he is part and parcel of the cosmos, and that any cosmology is the result of the interactions between man and nature in which man's influence upon nature is not less than nature's influence upon man. The orderly arrangements of natural phenomena, the laws in accordance with which they operate, in fact the whole process of perception, is an active attempt at arranging natural phenomena in harmony with the internal demands that require a world of orderly sequences in order to be able to live and be sane. Man seeks for significant meanings in the universe because he needs these meanings in his own psychological economy. So that the cosmos is in a sense, therefore, as much a projection of man's needs as it is the result of a passive reception of sensory stimuli. In fact, this latter it can not be because perception is necessarily modified, regulated and defined by the entire experiential background represented in the percipient. This, briefly speaking, is the foundation stone of the philosophy in this very readable and useful book.
The author discusses the subject matter under seven main heads: Aesthetics, Ethics, Religion, Organics, Politics, Mathematics, and The Quest of Happiness.
A previous book by the same author, under the title “Paradoxy,” the reviewer is not familiar with; but it seems obvious from the name that the methods that were pursued in that book are pursued in this, too. It is a method of utilizing the ambivalent opposites in a particular situation. The author, however, prefers the word “paradox,” but the result is as if he were dealing with the law of ambivalence. Naturally, as one would expect, his criticism of the psychologies is not so particularly illuminating; especially is this true of his criticism of psychoanalysis. Perhap