Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/264

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. II.

constantly clearly before him, and never suffers himself to be drawn away from it; his exposition is always clear, his statements are as a rule fully substantiated by quotations, and his inferences carefully made. He shows, moreover, an intimate acquaintance, not only with Kant's writings and the literature which has grown up around them, but also with the works of those modern philosophers who had previously discussed this problem.

Of the four chapters into which the work falls, the first deals with "Teleology in Modern Philosophy before Kant," the second with "Kant's Early Teleology" (up to 1762), the third traces the growth of the idea between 1 763 and 1781, while the fourth and last is occupied with the further development of the problem after the publication of the First Kritik. In the first chapter, we find a brief but very clear indication of the attitude of Descartes, Gassendi, Boyle, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Newton, and other modern writers to this question of teleology. The statement contained in the first part of the following sentence, however, will I am sure be a surprise to readers: "Spinoza's fundamental position, in that it assigned intellect and will to the natura naturata, and excluded them wholly from the natura naturans, left no ground for applying any such terms as order, confusion, beauty, good or bad, to the world" (p. 5). Of the other chapters, the third is probably the least satisfactory. The survey of Kant's teleology "has shown that its problems were from the first regarded as of the highest importance and were among the first to receive critical treatment, that the development was due mainly to his critical consideration of the results of science, and later of the methods of science and our æsthetic judgments, and that its final stage was no less true than the former stages." (p. 47.)

J. E. C.


Practical Ethics by William DeWitt Hyde, D.D., President of Bowdoin College. New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1892. — pp. xi, 208.

We have here a notable addition to the already numerous class of text-books designed for the instruction of youth in morals. Our author's aim cannot be better described than in the words which he himself uses in the preface in stating the requisites of such a work: —


"The book which shall meet their want must have theory; yet the theory must not be made obtrusive, nor stated too abstractly. . . Such a book must be direct and practical. It must contain clear-cut presentation of duties to be done, virtues to be cultivated, temptations to be overcome, and vices to be shunned; yet this must be done, not by preaching and exhortation, but by show- ing the place these things occupy in a coherent system of reasoned knowledge. . . The only explicit suggestions of theory are in the introduction and in the last two chapters. Religion is presented as the consummation, rather than the foundation of ethics; and the brief sketch of religion in the concluding chapter is confined to those broad outlines which are accepted, with more or less explicitness, by Jew and Christian, Catholic and Protestant, Orthodox and Liberal,"