Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/214

devoted, Professor Murray is at his best. He not only defines, analyzes, and classifies moral concepts, but he shows their concrete application to the principal spheres of human obligation, and sketches, in brief but telling outlines, the history of their development. At the same time he never loses sight of the truth that moral obligation points rather to a general spirit of life than to specific acts. The tone of the book, which is everywhere intellectually stimulating, is in this part morally bracing as well. Altogether, Professor Murray has produced a text-book for beginners in Ethics, which is far ahead of any similar work we now possess.

J. G. S.

The Present Position of the Philosophical Sciences. An Inaugural Lecture. By Andrew Seth, M.A., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh and London, William Blackwood & Sons, 1891. — pp. 32.

This is the address with which Professor Andrew Seth entered upon the Edinburgh professorship vacated last summer by the retirement of Professor Campbell Fraser. Apart from reflections growing out of the occasion, it is substantially an account of the province and function of logic, psychology, and metaphysics; putting in a brief way the thoughts expressed more fully in his article in this number of the Review. It closes with a plea for a teleological and anthropocentric philosophy. The spirit of the address is judicial, courageous, noble, and ennobling.

J. G. S.

The Universe and its Evolution. A New Theory on the Existence of the Universe, the Causation of its Energy, and its Order and Development. By S. J. Silberstein. New York, 1891. — pp. vi, 56.

This pamphlet is a brief extract translated from an Hebrew original of five volumes. The author has one thing in common with the classic speculative thinkers: he believes he has struck out a new, original, perfectly satisfactory, and epoch-making theory of the universe. Nor can one fail to discern behind the poor printing, and the bad English, in the midst of dubious criticisms and speculations of an ostensibly scientific character, flashes of genuine philosophic insight; but these fail to atone for the pre-scientific atmosphere and method of the work. It is the business of the metaphysician, on the basis of all existing knowledge, to conceive as a whole the world which the sciences interpret in parts. Though Mr. Silberstein thinks he is the first to attempt this task, he in reality comes no nearer to it than the beginners of spec-