The reviewer feels that Dr. Mac-Nair fails in this book to give due attention to the China of the twen-teeth century, true as his interpretations are of past periods. There are, for example, no quotations from more recent Chinese utterances illustrative of the living forces in China today. These living forces which have come from the Western contacts are now quite as important as are the more traditional forces. In reference to Japan Dr. MacNair quotes generously from General Araki, Professor Royama and other present day Japanese.
To be sure, the present conflict is one in which Japan, herself possessed by the will-to-power, took the initiative. Again, the reader of Dr. Mac-Nair's large work will find interpretations of Lord Hotta, Lord Tani, Count Hayashi, which he has met before. The treatment of Motoori and revived Shinto, with its cult of supreme loyalty to the Emperor, is probably the most important part of the present book, and taken with the appendix already referred to, and with an extensive quotation from Professor Royama, gives the reader the book's essential emp: For fundamentally it is the ideology of the Japanese that has to be studied; that of the Chinese in this conflict is quite intelligible, without a knowledge of China's past, to anyone who appreciates the spirit of modern nationalism.
This book has left the reviewer still, in the words quoted from General Araki, among "those who do not appreciate the motive power that drives us. on."—"4.
Wisdom of the East HrwALAYAS or me Soup Translations from the Sanskrit of the Principal Upanishads. By J. Mascaró, M-A.
(Cantab.; Reader of English, University of Barcelona. With a Prelace by Sir S. Radhakrishnan, and a Foreword by E. J. Thomas.
Ma. Lift. D. Murray, London, 3/6.
The little books of the Wisdom of the East Series edited by Cranmer-Byng have filled a popular need. There is a respect which the West pays to the philosophic thought of the East in the very title. Here in this little book of some 95 pages, first published in June of this year, lies in selected and simplified form the profoundest thoughts of the greatest of India's sacred books, the Upanishads. The Upanishads cre the mother of all Hindu thought. From them came the inspiration to Gautama Buddha, and so to the Buddhist faith which lives still in the great part of Eastern Asia.
"The composers of the Upanishads"—nameless all for in India few are the names that have gone down in fustory—"were thinkers and' poets," says Mr. Mascaró the translator in his introduction. "The spirit of the -Upanishads is the Spirit of the Universe. Brahman, God, Himself is their underlying spirit. comes close to man. "Who Knows God becomes God." Westerners have often found it easy to call this pantheism. But Immanence is a more true term for this particular emphasis in Hindu thought, and it is true to say of Hindu thought also that God is thought of as transcendent. Cer-fernly no nation of people have searched for God more than did the ancient Hindus, or than do their descendants of today. The reviewer recalls hering a Hindu friend remark that to the mind of a Hindu the philosopher Kant seems sometimes to babble like a child; and one can understand this attitude in people who find 4 fourth state of consciousness "above waking, dream-jug, or deep sleep."
Western writers also dwell upon the note of pessimism in all Indian thought, But there is a note of! guerilla tactics but in this story one is able to secure an interesting insight into the Indian "Tommies" character. The Sepoys, for instance, are described as happy laughing children, always prepared to do the slightest bidding of their superior officers. Gaiety, monotony, humour, treachery, war, laughter, sadness— all are to be found perfectly blended in these pages. The story is delightfully unfolded with the movements and activities over a period of six Imonths of a Delhi infantry regiment recounted in plenty of vivid detail d in the most virile of language— if it were not told thus it would not ring true, "Rajput" knows his North-West Frontier like the palm of his hand and nobody who enjoys a good tale should miss the opportunity of reading "Khyber Calling!"
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.