is a very interesting, and even stimulating disquisition, full of a fine social enthusiasm, and marked, in many passages, by deep poetic feeling. But it is not a work of investigation into the springs of Being. Mr. Wells explicitly renounces from the outset any dealings with "cosmogony." It is a description of a way of thinking, a system of nomenclature, which Mr. Wells declares to be extremely prevalent in "the modern mind," from which he himself extracts much comfort and fortification, and which he believes to be destined to regenerate the world. But Mr. Wells will not have it that what is involved is a mere system of nomenclature. He avers that he, in common with many other like-minded persons, has achieved, not so much an intellectual discovery as an emotional realisation, of something actual and objective which he calls God. He does not, so far as I remember, use the term "objective"; but as he insists that God is "a spirit, a person, a strongly marked and knowable personality" (p. 5), "a single spirit and a single person" (p. 18), "a great brother and leader of our little beings" (p. 24) with much more to the same purpose, it would seem that he must have in his mind an object external to us, no mere subjective "stream of tendency," or anything of that sort. It would of course be foolish to doubt the sincerity of the conviction which he so constantly and so eagerly asserts. Nevertheless, one cannot but put forward, even at this stage, the tentative theory that he is playing tricks with his own mind, and attributing reality and personality to something that was in its origin a figure of speech. He has been hypnotized by the word God: As when we dwell upon a word we know, Repeating, till the word we know so well Becomes a wonder, and we know not why.