Mr. Morris Cohen puts himself into a fallacious dilemma from which he does not successfully extricate himself. According to Mr. Cohen, all critics are led by personal impressions or by the authority of others. He should know that between the blind feeling of impressionism and the blind faith of authority there is enlightened reason. Mr. Cohen does not take the path of reason, but endeavors to escape the horns of his own dilemma by recourse to pragmatism. He claims, what will be news to historians of philosophy, that Euclid was the first pragmatist, although in the next breath Mr. Cohen states that “mathematicians of the nineteenth century have shown that Euclid’s axioms are mere guesses to be justified by their consequences in the factual realm.” “Factual realm” seems to mean the indefinitely remote future of pragmatism where the gold of truth is separated from meaner elements. Some chosen spirits of the “factual realm” now assure us that the “self-evident principles” of Euclid are “guesses.” Mr. Cohen is equipped to write an inside history of philosophy with some entirely original features. The “factual realm” leads back to skepticism, and Mr. Cohen is still impaled by his dilemma. Mr. Francis Hackett makes the most serious attempt to get at the philosophy of criticism and of art, and attacks at once the question of the beautiful. It is evidence of his thoroughness that he goes straightway to the great problem of esthetics, “Can an object be at once beautiful and evil?” Mr. Hackett answers promptly in the negative, but then proceeds to confuse the point by going to another and different question, “Can evil or an ugly object be represented in art?” The answer to this question is evident. The elopement of Helen, the patricide and incest of Œdipus, the galleries of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, and countless other happenings in the world of art, show that the evil and the ugly have been and may be represented in art. “I can hardly conceive,” says Mr. Hackett, “an artist as subduing a cancerous object to an esthetic design.” But why not? Marriage with one’s mother is more repugnant than a cancer, and yet it was handled successfully by Sophocles, however repulsive some of his imitators have been in their details. The very transfer to the realm of art robs the ugly object of its actuality and imminence. Surely the ugly and evil have been and may be represented in art, but such objects may not be represented as beautiful and good. That were as false and untrue to nature as a centipede cow in a picture. Perhaps a cancer could not appear in a picture or poem or story except by suggestion. A stark realism would disgust, but a true artist might subdue a cancerous object to artistic design as effectively as Homer subdued in his story the fleas of the dog, Argos, and the dung-heap where he lay.