Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/398

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384
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. XIII.

sentimental poet represents this stage. The harmony will finally be reestablished, the senses will not demand more than the reason prescribes, the unconscious harmony of primitive man will become the conscious harmony of the civilized man. The ideal poet will give expression to this stage.

Professor Basch refuses to believe that primitive men are the perfect, serene, and harmonious beings that Schiller imagines them to be. Besides, among the naïve beings, as Schiller defines them, the intellectual faculties proper have not yet been developed, and cannot therefore enter into relations of harmony or discord with the senses. It is also a mistake to call the Greeks naïve beings. Moreover, sense and reason are not separated by an impassable chasm, as Schiller and Kant would have it, but the intellectual faculties cannot be conceived without the faculties of sense; the psychical forces constitute an organism in which every organ works for a common end. Schiller also fails to give a satisfactory definition of the concept of nature, which plays such a fundamental role in his theory.

Although neither the method, nor the premises, nor the conclusions of Schiller's poetics have any real value, Professor Basch admits that the problems which the poet raised deserve attention, and recognizes the speculative depth, the dialectical vigor and subtlety, and the eloquence which he brought to his task. Besides, the influence exercised by him on the development of literature, æsthetics, philosophy, and literary history was immense. Whatever may be our objections to Schiller's theory, it must be confessed that from his treatise on naïve and sentimental poetry dates a new era. Without this work we should not have had the critical writings of Friedrich Schlegel nor the Æsthetics of Hegel.

Frank Thilly.

University of Missouri.

St. Anselm' s Proslogium, Monologium, an Appendix in Behalf of the Fool by Gaunilon, and Cur Deus Homo. Translated from the Latin by

Sidney Norton Deane. Chicago, The Open Court Publishing Co.,

1903.—pp. xxxv, 288.

The Latin of the father of orthodox scholasticism is, like that of most of the schoolmen, easy to read, but all but impossible to translate. Neither the niceties nor the characteristic ambiguities of the scholastic terminology can be easily reproduced in such a language as English. Any translation, therefore, is likely to be a poor substitute for the original; and for most of those who are competent to study such a philosopher as Anselm a translation should also be a superfluity. Yet the publishers of this volume have done a useful thing in giving us a modern English version of Anselm's most important philosophical writings; it is singular that the thing has not been done long since. The ontological argument is so much talked about, even in elementary philosophical teaching, that the text of it should be made accessible to all students and to the general reader. Anselm's Cur Deus homo has been available since 1855 in the translation of J. G. Vose;