G. LYON, L'IDÉALISME EN ANGLETERRE AU XVIIIE SIÈCLE. 605

Berkeleyan idealism was continued by the "phenomenalism" of the great sceptic.

M. Lyon brings out very clearly the nature of the influence of Descartes in England. Descartes' true philosophical successors in the 18th century, he contends, were Englishmen. In France, it was not the 18th but the 17th century that really deserved the name of "the philosophical century,' so far at least as the metaphysical and speculative part of philosophy is concerned. What was required in order that the idealism latent in Cartesianism should emerge was independent thinking from the Cartesian starting-point; and in England, where Descartes had from the first enthusiastic admirers but no strict disciples, the requisite degree of independence was found.

The relation for which M. Lyon contends between Descartes and the English philosophical movement that started with Locke may be taken as established. The author, however, underrates the importance of Locke in the movement. Locke, as he sees, misapprehended Descartes' doctrine of innate ideas (p. 57); and, as he acutely points out in discussing a criticism of Green (with whose Introductions to Hume he is well acquainted), the unsatisfactoriness of Locke's utterances as regards the external world is due to confusion of thought on the philosophical question, and not at all, as Green says, to the external world being "the crux of empiricism" (p. 63). Thus he is led to seek the origin of the clear philosophical theories of Berkeley and Hume elsewhere than in Locke. Berkeley, as well as Collier, he tries to derive from Malebranche, though he points out that Berkeley repudiated, while Collier acknowledged, the relationship (p. 250). Again, he seeks to attach Hume not only to Berkeley, but directly to the Cartesian tradition (p. 452). How near Malebranche came to idealism he shows in chapter iv., where he also dwells much on the interest of Malebranche's psychology, pointing to his affinities with Hume and Hartley (p. 115), and in particular to his anticipation of contemporary "psycho-physiology" (p. 127). He finds it surprising that an English disciple like Norris, who, as a Protestant, was not watched by the same suspicious orthodoxy, should have hesitated to draw the idealistic conclusion which Malebranche could only avoid by an appeal to Revelation (p. 223). Berkeleyanism, however, as M. Lyon himself constantly insists, is at the antipodes of Cartesianism in this respect, that it is "an a posteriori metaphysics". The a posteriori character of Berkeley's thought, he remarks more than once, is not sufficiently recognised by Prof. Fraser; and he finds that even in the Siris there is no fundamental departure from Berkeley's first manner of thinking. Malebranche's doctrine, on the other hand, he describes as 66 a Cartesian Platonism"; and throughout the history of idealism he finds the antithesis of the Platonising and the experiential tendency; Malebranche and Hegel, in his view, representing the former, Berkeley and Mill the latter. Now is

not the experiential character of Berkeley's philosophising as distinguished from that of Collier an evidence of his direct dependence on Locke, whose aim it was to oppose the a priori metaphysics of Descartes? Though Locke may have done nothing himself to educe the idealistic theory from the Cartesian "presuppositions," this does not detract from the importance of his experientialism as a basis for the typical form of English idealism.

An interesting episode of the book is the account of the fortunes of Immaterialism in America (cc. ix.-x.). Full expositions are given of the philosophical system of Dr. Samuel Johnson, "the first President of King's College in New York," and Berkeley's first and most faithful disciple (c. ix.), and of the immaterialism of Jonathan Edwards as it is found set forth in his posthumous work on the mind (c. x.). The petitio principii of "common-sense philosophy," however, was soon to triumph in New England, whose University authorities naturally did not fail to become inspired with fear of the "dangerous consequences of idealism. The discouragement of the Berkeleyan theory by the authorities met with no resistance, and American immaterialism came to an abrupt close (pp. 440-3).

A critic who agrees with M. Lyon in regarding the idealistic theory of the external world as definitively established by philosophy will find little to controvert in his positive conclusions. The distinction he draws between the two schools of idealism— the experiential and the Platonising school, is a sound distinction, and one that may easily be verified in contemporary English philosophy. With what he says as to the two forms of idealism not being so incompatible as might at first appear it is also possible to agree, though it may be doubted whether the reconciliation of them is likely to come, as M. Lyon suggests (p. 479), from "a Hegelian". The reconciliation that a Hegelian would be likely to attempt is one between "Transcendental Idealism and the Realism of Common-sense.

M. Lyon's book ought to find many readers in England. His work has the merits both of fulness of matter and attractive presentation. His accounts of minor thinkers are especially to be commended, as enabling the reader to form an independent judgment upon their various degrees of interest and originality. He has well understood the characteristics of the English philosophical spirit, though a failure of perfect apprehension may be detected here and there. When it is said, for example (p. 464, n. 2), that Hume, like Mill and all other English thinkers, claimed the right to speculate as boldly as he pleased without in any way menacing received opinions, this gives a somewhat false impression. It would be a better description of the attitude of Descartes than of Hume or Mill. The exact attitude of Hume, however, as M. Lyon very well shows (pp. 464-6), is difficult to define. Even native critics are not at one in their definitions of it.

THOMAS WHITTAKER.

VII. NEW BOOKS.

[These Notes (by various hands) do not exclude Critical Notices later on.]

On the History of the Process by which the Aristotelian Writings arrived at their Present Form. An Essay by RICHARD SHUTE, late Student and Tutor of Christ Church. With a brief Memoir of the Author. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888. Pp. xv., 183.

In MIND ii. 392, Shute's early work, A Discourse on Truth, received the attention due to its great freshness, at least, of style; and when, after a few years of remarkable influence as an Oxford teacher, he sank prematurely into the grave, Mr. J. A. Stewart, in xii. 157, gave expression to the sense left with his sorrowing friends of what he had been, even more than of what he had done or was on the way to do. For himself, as is told in the excellent little memoir (by "F. Y. P. ") prefixed to the present volume, he could meet his fate with the dying words (to a friend) now inscribed by his wife on his tomb: "I think that man is happiest who is taken while his hand is still warm on the plough, who has not lived long enough to feel his strength failing him or his work every day worse done". The volume gives an essay he wrote for the Conington Prize Competition in 1882. He was never able to re-write it in the light of his later studies in Aristotle, and it is now published on the responsibility of the friends who were left to dispose of his papers. It is an attempt in a field that has been well worked over in Germany, but Shute displays so much independence of judgment in relation to his foreign predecessors that his friends' decision to lay the results of his survey before English readers is much to be approved. What conclusions he was led to can best be given in words selected from his own summary at p. 176: (1) "Of the great bulk of the Aristotelian works as we now have them, there was no kind of publication during the lifetime of the master, nor probably for a considerable period after his death". (2) "We cannot assert with certainty that we have ever got throughout a treatise in the exact words of Aristotle, though we may be pretty clear that we have a fair representation of his thought; the unity of style observable may belong quite as well to the school as to the individual." (3) "The works which are preserved to us come chiefly, if not entirely, from the tradition of Andronicus, and stand in no very definite relation to the list of Diogenes, and consequently we have a very considerable proportion, not a merely insignificant fraction, of the reputed works of Aristotle known to Latin antiquity." (4) "The majority of the titles and probably all the definite references are post-Aristotelian, and therefore no safe argument can be drawn from the latter as to the authenticity or original order of the Aristotelian works, though other very valuable inferences as to the subsequent history of these works result from their careful consideration." (5) As to "another class of works which bear Aristotle's name of which we can say with certainty that the portions which we have of them are precisely as the final author wrote them but cannot with equal certainty assert that that author was Aristotlewe can safely assume that these works, and works like these, were those best known to our earliest authorities on the subject, Cicero and his predecessors, and that on them all the praise of Aristotle's style is founded". "Criticism of Aristotle," it is finally declared, should "always be of thought rather than of phrase, of sentence rather than of word".

English Composition and Rhetoric. Enlarged Edition. Part Second. "Emotional Qualities of Style." By ALEXANDER BAIN, LL.D., Emeritus Professor of Logic in the University of Aberdeen. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1888. Pp. xxxii., 325.

This volume, coming after the other on "Intellectual Elements of
Style" issued last year (see MIND xii. 298), completes the transforma-
tion and development of the author's well-known Rhetoric of 1866.
Part ii. is essentially, or rather in nearly every respect, a new book.
Only in some minor matters is anything to be found common to the new
and the old exposition. The former ten-page account of "Strength"
disappears in a six-fold longer tracking of the quality through all its
kinds and manifestations. 66
Feeling," taken for purposes of Rhetoric as
equivalent to Tenderness or the amiable side of human nature, is in like
manner analysed and illustrated through more than 100 pp., where half-
a-dozen were given before; and the novel expansion given to the topics
"Vituperation" and "The Ludicrous" is only less. There is now also
supplied at the beginning a classification of Art-emotions, followed by an
elaborate consideration (pp. 11-54) of the rhetorical "Aids to Emotional
Qualities". The volume, as it now stands, is of no small interest to the
psychologist as a practical-or rather (borrowing a word from German
usage) pragmatic-supplement to that theory of the Emotions which
has long been one of the author's chief titles to fame. Even in point of
theory the careful reader will here meet with new lights; while he can-
not but be drawn on by the author's characteristic determination to find
the analytic expression of everything that can be analysed in literary
effect. Nor is the result the less instructive and useful for guidance,
however it may be contended that the best literary work, at least of the
creative sort, has always something in it of which analysis can never
hope to find the formula.

Francis Bacon: His Life and Philosophy. By JOHN NICHOL, M.A., LL.D.,
Professor of English Literature in the University of Glasgow.
Part i. Bacon's Life. ("Philosophical Classics for English Readers.")
Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1888. Pp. x., 212.
This is the thirteenth volume issued of the " Philosophical Classics"
series. Like its immediate predecessor, Principal Caird's Spinoza (re-
viewed above, in the present No.), it departs, but departs in a different
way, from the rule of the series. Of Spinoza no life was given, and even
his philosophy was examined rather than expounded.
The present
volume is all Life, and we have to wait for another to get Prof. Nichol's
account of Bacon as a philosopher. It is difficult to say which form of
departure from the rule of the series is least to be approved. There
was certainly no more occasion for the licence in the case of Spinoza or
Bacon than in the case of some half-dozen of the other great thinkers
already treated in the series. A great deal can, of course, be said on the
debatable events of Bacon's life, and on his personal character, and it is
said by Prof. Nichol with plenty of literary effect; but even if, in the sum
of it all, much could be called new, one does not see how thereby the
understanding of his philosophy is helped forward. For this series,
therefore, there was no great need to enlarge on Bacon's life, and Prof.
Nichol might have done very well with a single volume. If the series is
continued beyond Bacon, as sometimes has been promised in a general
way and certainly is much to be desired, let us hope that the editor will
enforce again the rule of the one volume fairly balanced, according to the
circumstances of each case, between Life and Philosophy. Meanwhile,
as regards Bacon and Prof. Nichol, we can but wait, in MIND, for the
coming Part ii.

Scientific Religion or Higher Possibilities of Life and Practice through the Operation of Natural Forces. By LAURENCE OLIPHANT. With an Appendix by a Clergyman of the Church of England. Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1888. Pp. xiii., 473.

It is no more possible with this book than with its predecessor Sympneumata (see MIND X. 301) to attempt even the most general analysis of contents. That, we are told, was written down by Mr. Oliphant from the dictation of his late wife, he being mere passive instrument in the case; this has come forth from himself, but still in a manner of which he can give no further account than that it has been written under an irresistible impulse, that would take effect only in the particular room of his Syrian home whence the spirit of his wife had passed into the unseen. In the first half of the book, the religion of which he has thus become the channel of revelation to the world has its "scientific " character set forth and vindicated, in relation with certain results of recent inquiry and in contrast to the baseless dogmatism of prevailing religious systems. The second half consists in great part of an exegesis of Scripture (carried out with minuter detail by another hand in the appendix), showing the hidden truth enshrined there which has all the time been missed or perverted by the Christian Churches of every name. The "higher possibilities of life and practice" now in view depend upon the victory to be gained by the "Divine Feminine

66

"over the 'infernal feminine," which has hitherto held sway in our world since the Fall and had already before caused nothing less than a worldcatastrophe. In other words, the true position of woman as the proper complement of man (each particular woman, in the seen or unseen, the complement of some particular man), is in process of becoming finally asserted; and hereby the salvation of the world will be wrought. There is a curious affinity-apparently quite unknown to Mr. Oliphant-between his own views and those adumbrated by Comte at the end of the Politique Positive; though their methods of deduction or other argumentative support are as widely different as could be.

Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research. Part xii.

Trübner & Co., 1888. Pp. 270.

London:

The longest of four main papers in this latest Part of these Proceedings is a very elaborate (150 pp.) "Relation de diverses expériences sur la transmission mentale, la lucidité et autres phénomènes non explicables par les données scientifiques actuelles," by M. Charles Richet, Professor of Physiology in the Paris Faculty of Medicine, and editor of the Revue Scientifique. It gives, with the help of many figured illustrations, the results of an experimental inquiry carried on for six years, pointing in the author's opinion to, though (he must add) not yet demonstrating with certainty, "the existence in certain persons at certain moments of a faculty of [objective] knowledge which has no relation with our normal faculties". He would call this faculty "Lucidity' (without implying that it has a relation to retinal vision more than to any other sense), and thinks that all the phenomena of so-called thoughttransference, &c., may be brought under it. New "Experiments in Thought-transference," by A. Schmoll and J. E. Mabire, occupy 46 pp. of the Part. The other chief papers are from the hand, now for ever still, that has always been most active in the work of the Society since it began to be. One is but a reprint, slightly modified and now entitled Hypnotism and Telepathy," of the two articles contributed by Gurney to MIND xii. 212, 397, under the name "Further Problems of Hypnotism".