Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/104

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. I.

mate ends of the national state. The spheres of liberty and government can be determined only by experience of what conduces to the end of the national state. And if experience shows anything, it is that no hard and fast rules for restricting the activity of government can be laid down. What we see, on the contrary, is that, with every advance in civilization, as the end of the state grows larger and fuller, the means to its attainment become more numerous. The minimizers of governmental activity seem to deal with the primitive, rather than with the latest form of the state.

However much one differs from Mr. Spencer's views, one cannot but recognize the speculative grasp and subtlety of the attempt to affiliate ethics on biology, the originality of his conception of Justice, and the skilful concatenation with it of the natural-right theory of the liberties of the individual and the functions of the state. Representing the latest and the most interesting phase of his philosophy, the book deserves, and will doubtless receive, wide and careful study. No reader can fail of profit and instruction.

J. G. S.
The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant, and its Progress in Great Britain since 1825. By Otto Pfleiderer, D.D., Professor of Theology in the University of Berlin. Translated under the author's supervision by J. Frederic Smith. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.; New York: Macmillan & Co. 1890. — pp. xi, 403. [The Library of Philosophy.]


Pfleiderer's history of the development of Theology in Germany since Kant, and in Great Britain since 1825, is, so far as the method of its publication is concerned, unique in the history of philosophical and theological literature. It was written in German simply for the purpose of being translated into English. It was prepared at the request of the editor of the "Library of Philosophy" in order that it might have a place in the series of books that bears this name. We have thus an English translation of a work of which no German original had been published. The editor states in a note that a work published in this way demands special care in the translation, since the reader will not have the original to refer to in case of doubt. The translation is indeed remarkably good. In reading it one would rarely suspect that it was not an original work, written by a master of English composition. It is rare that one suspects that the German of Pfleiderer is not correctly rendered. We are all the more surprised to find in one place the word "Vorstellungen" which happily is given, translated by the word "intuitions." One is accustomed to this word in the conventional render-