REBEL THOUGHT

By Herbert FaulknerWest '22. Boston: The Beacon Press. 281pp. $3.75.

Rebel Thought traces the two great traditions of man's thinking (the humanistic and the naturalistic), from Socrates to John Dewey, and in the process sums up thirty years of Herbert -West's teaching experience. His book represents a vast amount of work and thought. What might readily have been a dull, classroom exercise, becomes in his hands singularly readable. This may be due in part to the fact that the book was written primarily for the layman.

The lives of learned men do not always correspond with their principles, and West concerns himself largely with those principles. Yet the men themselves come astonishingly to life: Socrates, "who was too honest to live"; Jesus, seen simply, as a greatly good man. This particular chapter, one of the most difficult to handle, is perhaps one of the best. It may well become lire most controversial. In Leonardo da Vinci, Montaigne, and Giordano Bruno, West finds three thinkers who for him sum up the search for truth that was the Renaissance.

From the Eighteenth Century of Voltaire and and Rousseau, Rebel Thought passes on to the "strange interlude" of Henry David Thoreau that amazing throwback to the idealism of Plato and Socrates; and here Herbert West finds his most sympathetic materia). Thoreau was a man after his own heart, and he writes of him with warmth and understanding. Tolstoy and Nietzsche, William James and John Dewey the parade of giants strides from antiquity into the present. About them all, West has his own convictions, seldom conventional, often iconoclastic. His pace is unflagging. But it would be a disservice to this fine book to suggest that speed has been achieved by leaping from peak to peak. It is, rather, that in his journey across the centuries of man's thinking, Herbert West has thrown overboard much unnecessary luggage. He travels lightly.

This reviewer, having neither the special knowledge nor the erudition to challenge its controversial points, finds Rebel Thought at once provocative and stimulating. So is a hornet's nest; and it is possible that West may discover himself in the midst of an angry swarm! But whether or not one agrees with the author on all points (as who will?) RebelThought offers an affirmative philosophy of living which sets up as the supreme goal the freedom and dignity of human beings in this life.

The book should reach not only a wide audience of the laymen for whom it is intended, but of students and scholars in the field where Herbert West has worked and taught for more than thirty years.