Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/458

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. VI.

can have failed to drive him to a review of the reasoning by which his conclusions were reached. This task has now been undertaken for him by one of his followers. What are the conditions, asks Herr Bösch, that will rigorously subject each individual to the effects of its own nature and resulting conduct? The "Manchester state" will never do this; it allows far too much room for monopoly gains and the play of chance. All such disturbing factors must be destroyed, and with this end in view the land must be transferred to the possession of the state, the profit of capital must be eliminated (possibly by some form of coöperative industry), and finally the rate of interest will sink—as it promises to do in the not remote future—to a merely nominal figure. These conditions realized, our author believes that supply and demand will bring about, on the average, a close correspondence between service and reward. What evolutional sociology demands, then, is not administrative nihilism, but such an amount of state interference as is required to remove all that interferes with the workings of the law of supply and demand.

Herr Bösch has worked out his thesis with a good deal of skill; and his discussion shows a knowledge of economics and an eye for realities that we shall look for in vain among the writings of his master on the same subject. Our principal criticism would be directed against the conception of the evolutional process which he borrows from Mr. Spencer. There is good ground for asserting that the law of correspondence between service and reward, important as it is in many of its bearings, does not play exactly the same part in human progress as it does in the synthetic philosophy. For this and for other reasons, many of the readers of Herr Bösch's excellent little work, who are fond of Utopias, will doubtless continue their allegiance to the variety presented by some of the members of the Fabian Society.

Frank Chapman Sharp.
Hobbes Leben und Lehre. Von Ferdinand Tönnies. Fromann's Klassiker der Philosophie. Stuttgart, Friedrich Fromann, 1896.—pp. xiii, 232.

The first half of this volume is occupied with an account of the life of Hobbes and a general introduction dealing with the character of scholastic philosophy, the change which the new ideas of the transition period brought about, and the relation between Hobbes and Descartes. In the remainder of the book the philosophy of Hobbes is treated under the following heads: Logic, Fundamental Concepts, Mechanical Principles, Physics, Anthropology, Theory of Natural Right. According to Herr Tönnies, Hobbes is no materialist; he simply denies that the soul is an independent substance, and is thus no more materialistic in his views than the majority of modern thinkers. Tönnies also seems to assert that the English philosopher prepared the way for the Spinozistic conception of the relation between thought and extension. In general he is apt to deal with Hobbes very