Page:Philosophical Review Volume 7.djvu/675

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NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
[Vol. VII.

contrary, "that there are two parts to the ethical philosophy of Hobbes. He speaks of a morality founded on reason, and a morality founded on the will of the sovereign."While there are 'numerous' statements which "seem to furnish some grounds for the interpretation of Hobbes as teaching merely an institutional morality, no careful student of his ethical philosophy can fail to recognize that Hobbes emphatically taught a morality of reason which is antecedent to and independent of a political morality" (pp. 30 f.). "The relation between the two aspects of Hobbes's ethical philosophy is not an artificial one, but an exceedingly natural one. In fact, there is really only one kind of morality the morality of reason; and the political morality, founded on the will of the sovereign, is, in the final analysis, merely a form of the morality of reason" (p. 35). The introduction calls attention also to psychological elements in the structure of Hobbes's system, such as his being subject to fear, and anxious for his personal safety, his living in the most troublous of political conditions, and his constant observation of men in the concrete. Hobbes first introduced the principle of mechanism—a gift from his age—to the new field of conduct, making ethics 'scientific,' as we of to-day would say.

The text (pp. 45-377) consists of extracts, without notes, from the Leviathan, Part I, 'Of Man,' and Part II, 'Of Commonwealth;' and also Part II, Chapters VI and VII, from De Corpore Politico, based on the English edition of Hobbes's works by Sir Wm. Molesworth. The volume exhibits a good deal of careful and painstaking work; and the just treatment of Hobbes will commend itself to every historical student of ethics.

Edward Franklin Buchner.

New York University.

Philosophical Lectures and Remains of Richard Lewis Nettleship. Edited

with a Biographical Sketch by A. C. Bradley and G. R. Benson. In two volumes. London, Macmillan & Co.; New York, The Macmillan

Company, 1897.—pp. lvi, 394; vii, 364.

Richard Lewis Nettleship was born in 1846, and was fellow and tutor of Balliol College, Oxford, from 1869 until he met his death in a storm while climbing on Mount Blanc. The first volume of the work before us, containing Miscellaneous Papers and Extracts from Letters (pp. 3-108), Lectures on Logic (pp. 1 1 1-234, compiled mainly from the note-book reports of Nettleship's students), and Plato's Conception of Goodness and the Good (pp. 237-394), has been edited and arranged by Mr. A. C. Bradley, now Professor of English Literature in the University of Glasgow. The admirable bioraphical sketch, with which this volume opens (pp. xi-lvi), is also the work of the same hand. The second volume, is made up of lectures on Plato's Republic, and has been compiled by Mr. Benson, mainly from notes taken by pupils in 1887 and 1888. Mr. Benson states that "a large part of the subject-matter which forms the contents of the present volume was also treated by Nettleship in his essay in Hellenica, entitled 'The Theory of