Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/93

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No. 1.]
REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
79

see that it may be irrelevant to some special or passing purpose, and that by such irrelevance the destructive force of scepticism is limited" (pp. 12, 13).

I have only been able to indicate the general argument of a book which I consider an important addition to the literature of the higher logic. As illustrative of the happy and incisive suggestion, conveyed in a style of unusual smoothness and lucidity, in which Mr. Sidgwick's pages abound, I take one or two sentences in which he characterizes the distinction between philosophy and common-sense. "Philosophy is only common-sense with leisure to push enquiry further than usual, while common-sense is only philosophy somewhat hurried and hardened by practical needs" (p. 35). Philosophy substitutes "a reasoned discrimination in place of a haphazard test" (p. 225). The method of the one is "the method of careful attention to details, or interest in exceptional cases"; that of the other is "the method of taking shortcuts, or believing in general rules" (p. 226).

James Seth.


Kant’s Kritik of Judgment. Translated with Introduction and Notes by J. H. Bernard, D.D., Fellow of Trinity College and Lecturer in Divinity in the University of Dublin. London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1892. — pp. xlviii, 429.

All students of Kant in this country have doubtless long felt that a translation of the Kritik der Urtheilskraft was much to be desired, and will welcome the present volume as an important and much needed accession to our philosophical literature. The only portions of this third Kritik hitherto translated into English, so far as I am aware, are the passages included in Professor Watson's Selections from Kant. The work as a whole, however, has not been up to this time accessible to students unacquainted with German, and even readers to whom that language presents no difficulties have been often brought to a stand by its involved clauses and cumbersome confusing constructions.

There can, however, be no question of the importance of the Kritik of Judgment for a just comprehension of Kant's system. The portion which treats of the Teleological Judgment is his final expression regarding the ultimate relations which must be conceived between teleology and mechanism, freedom and necessity. It was the possibility of overcoming the opposition between these two categories — or rather of subordinating mechanism to teleology — that turned the youthful Fichte from Spinozism, and set him on fire to convert the world to Kantianism. "I have obtained from this philosophy," he says in one of his letters to Fräulein Rahn, "a nobler ideal, and do not now concern myself so much