Miss Sampter has undertaken to answer these questions by dealing with the need of just such people. She does so with a genuine clearness of vision, with a careful touch that helps and with a spirit which prepares them to meet their problems, and not to lose unity by reason of the complexities of their situation. She dogmatizes a little, to be sure; and in fact she repeats some of her dogmas not infrequently, without giving any elaborate reasons for these dogmas. They are the dogmas of a metaphysical idealism which I myself in the main accept, but which no direct intuition can very adequately justify, while their technical justification could not possibly be discussed at length in the meetings of the “Seekers.” On the other hand, our author is no mere partisan of intuition. Her dogmas are stated in forms that not only win her “plastic youth” to agreement, but challenge them to a reflection which ere long, in some of them, will lead to new interpretations, to doubts, and so, in time, to a higher insight than they at first gain. She sets her pupils to thinking as well as to receiving; they become inquirers rather than passive recipients of an intuition. They are thus prepared for a variety of future religious and philosophical experiences, and yet they are kept in touch with that love and hope of unity which alone can justify the existence of our very doubts, of our philosophical disputes, and of our modern complications of life. As a means of avoiding both of the opposing extremes sketched in the foregoing account of the ways of teaching philosophical opinions, as a _via media_ in the work of beginning the philosophical instruction of young people, as a preparation for more critical study, as a conservation of some of the best in the spirit of faith without an undue appeal to mere intuition, and as a model of what can be done to awaken a very notable type of young inquirers such as our modern training tends to produce in the homes of very many of us—this book is, in my opinion, to be very heartily commended. The educational problem with which it deals concerns meanwhile a very deep and intensely practical interest of our American civilization. We cannot retain the unity of our national consciousness unless we can keep, even in the midst of all the complications and doubts of the modern world, our sense of the great common values of the spiritual world. Without philosophy, our nation can therefore never come to its own. Philosophy does not mean the acceptance of any mere authority. And it will not lead us to universal agreement about any one form of creed. But it will teach us to unite freedom, tolerance, insight, and spirituality. Without these, of what worth would be mere bulk and mere wealth to our nation? I welcome this book then because our author has contributed to one of the most important of the tasks of our time—the task of helping our nation to regain the now much confused and endangered consciousness of its own unity.