and intrinsic, but unpossessed or remote: a demand for what is not, or may not be, but ought to be ideal perfection. On the other hand, the perception of beauty is the possession of that which is as it ought to be—real perfection: faith in perfection has passed into vision. All this Dr. Santayana recognizes, but he does not define beauty from this point of view. Admitting the facts of his analysis, but discarding the element of emotional quality as being a constant and constituted by the nature of aesthetic perception, we submit another definition of beauty. Beauty is a pure perception: that is to say, a perception in which there is absolute harmony between the object and the functions of apperception and imaginative vision, in which, too, all subjective references are necessarily lost in the complete satisfaction of the perceiving sense in its comtemplation of the ideal possessed.
If we have confined our criticism, which we mean to be appreciative and suggestive, to this fundamental chapter, we do not forget that Dr. Santayana's book is recommended in its entirety by its sustained literary charm, by the fecundity of illustration and allusion, the freedom and felicity of expression, the grace of style, the lucid exposition, and the acuteness of psychological analysis. We should welcome from one so well equipped and so skilful in presentation its natural sequel, a history of aesthetics, with appreciative criticism.
The essay before us does not purport to be a systematic examination of the Metaphysics of Plato or of his Ethics, but only an explanation of certain supposed connections between them. The author assumes that Plato's speculative doctrines are a systematic whole, that there is no need to suppose any antagonism between the various parts of this whole, and that there are no breaks in the continuity of its development. On this hypothesis, which Mr. Cook regards (mistakenly, I think) as the hypothesis of current Platonic criticism, the author of the volume proceeds to describe that aspect of the Metaphysic which he considers to be the basis of the Ethics. First of all, he attempts to determine the relationship which the ideas themselves bear to mind—the relation of the objective and subjective, drawing his data mainly from the Parmenides, the Sophist, and Aristotle's Psychology. He considers that the ideal world is composed of ὄντα, and that οὐσία is always a combination of objective and subjective. Every νόημα must be a νοοῦν. The former is the object thought of as represented to the thinking subject by his own mind, i.e., the idea and the mind's thought of it are identical. Without the latter, the former is non-existent. This νόημα, then, as Mr. Cook interprets the Parmenides (132 B. seq.), is also νοοῦν; and the ideas are a plurality of minds into which the supreme Mind has multiplied itself,
