community, or man in general, rather than to any particular associations of men.
It may, however, be asked if this theory answers the query which Dr. Taylor raises in an earlier part of the thesis: "You have a good thing, but whence your authority to impose it on me?" It may be perfectly true that it is because man is "a living incarnation of absolute reason . . . that he is fitted to be the middle term between that absolute order and the concrete order of right"; but does this provide any warrant or authority (force apart) for the majority of that incarnated reason imposing their will upon the minority? If, on the other hand, the minority acquiesce, because they recognize that the law corresponds to an eternal order of right, would not the notion of authority be explained, simply by abandoning it altogether? The author's "direct argument" for his theory is not convincing. He argues that authority has been committed to the individual man on the ground of "society's evident and imperative need of a ruler, the absence of every other possible candidate than man, taken individually, and the high degree of fitness which he can bring to the office." Or, to express the same thought epigrammatically, "His [man's] capacity to rule is his commission to rule: he needs no other." I consider a more weighty argument for the theory the "indirect" confirmation it receives in our estimate of revolutionary leaders like Cromwell. Such an one, as the author justly observes, — with a touch of that technical language he rather too much affects, — "needs no commission from society or the community, from any man or set of men, for, as a rational being, a true concrete universal, he has ample commission in himself."
The author's method is for the most part historical and comparative, and the dissertation is furnished with abundant references to books and authorities. Considerable space is given to short accounts of writers from Bacon to Mill, who shaped the ethical interest of Clarke's time or developed ideas similar to his at a later period. Dr. Le Rossignol finds that Clarke cannot be regarded either as a disciple of any school or as an eclectic, and prefers to call him rather "a product of the times in which he lived." Most directly influenced by previous English moralists, his views about the nature and place of Moral Philosophy are inherited from the Stoics, and his doctrine of the ethical end and
