The Creative Spirit in Industry, by Robert B. Wolf, vice-president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, member of the Federated American Engineering Society.
Cooperative Movement, by Dr. James B. Warbasse, president of the Cooperative League of America and instructor at the Workers’ University.
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Side by side in Esme Wingfield-Stratford’s Facing Reality are chapters with these titles: “Thinking in a Passion” and “Mental Inertia.” Those chapter titles seem to me to signify the chief dangers confronting the world today—perhaps confronting the world in any day—and the main reasons why we do not face reality as we should. I regard Facing Reality as an important book and I am not alone in so regarding it. What do we mean by reality? The answer is explicit in a sentence in Mr. Wingfield-Stratford’s introduction, where he says:
“But if we are to get right with reality or, in the time-honoured evangelical phrase, with God, it must be by a ruthless determination to get the truth in religion, even if we have to break down Church walls to attain it.”
Then the author proceeds to assess the social and ethical conditions which threaten the world with spiritual bankruptcy. As he says:
“Whether Germany can be fleeced of a yearly contribution, of doubtful advantage to the receiver, for forty years or sixty, what particular economic laws decree that Poles should be governed by Germans or vice-versa, whose honour or profit demands the possession of the town of Fiume or the district of Tetschen or the Island of Yap, why all the horses and men of the Entente are necessary to compel the Port of Dantzig to become a free city, what particular delicacy of national honour requires that the impartial distribution of colonies should be interpreted as meaning the appropriation of the whole of them by the victors—all these things are held by universal consent to be more urgent and interesting than the desperate necessity that confronts us all.”
And yet, for some, reality is not immanent in the affairs of this world but only in those of the next. Among the men who, with Sir Oliver Lodge, have gone most deeply and earnestly into the whole subject we call “spiritualism,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is now the most widely known as he has always been the most persuasive. The overflowing crowds which came out to hear him lecture on psychic evidences during his recent tour of America testify to the unquenchable hope of mankind in a life beyond ours. Sir Arthur has written three books on this subject closest to his heart. The New Revelation and The Vital Message are both short books presenting the general case for spiritualists; The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, the result of a lecture tour in India and Australia, commingles incidents of travel with discussions of psychic phenomena. I believe Sir Arthur has in preparation a more extensive work, probably to be published under the title Spiritualism and Rationalism.
In recent years there has been something like a consensus honouring Havelock Ellis as the ablest living authority on the subject of sex; or perhaps I should say that Mr. Ellis and his wife are the most competent writers on this difficult and delicate subject, so beset by fraudulent theories and so much written upon by charlatans. Let me recommend to you Havelock Ellis’s slender book, Little Essays of Love and Virtue, for a sane, attractive and, at the same time, authoritative handling of sex problems.
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