MR. WALDO EMERSON FORBES has succeeded in cultivating something of the style both of thought and of expression which one finds in the writings of the great essayist, his grandfather, whom his name brings to mind. His "Cycles of Personal Belief" is the sincere portrayal of a kind of intuitive philosophy or personal faith, with no pretence at technical exactitude, but with a certain poetic charm that will appeal to the sympathetic reader. The reader must indeed be sympathetic or he will soon be impatient, and he must not come to this little book in search of an intellectual exposition or defence of philosophical concepts. It is "personal belief" rather than philosophy in which Mr. Forbes is interested. Beginning with childhood's illusions, he describes the passage of a mind through disillusion and then on to "re-illusion." There, in fact, he leaves him, but with a faith not altogether irrational in the trustworthiness of unproved intuition. "As we begin to treat our own consciousness with the reverence which is its due, romance begins to steal into the world, nowhere and now there, until one day we discover that the poetic element which we thought we had analyzed and explained, had, in reality eluded us, had retreated out of our experience long before our clumsy thoughts could grapple with it. And here are our illusions back again, or new ones more potent to make us wonder."
—The Nation, Volume 105 [1917]
