Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/140

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ing the study of the mother tongue, ought to lay a foundation for foreign languages. It results from the investigation of the principles of classification, that as speaking is nothing but a thinking aloud, it is the man's mind and the outside world as seen by him, but not the use of words, that ought to supply us with the principles. As the same classes of words exist in the different languages, a uniformity may be supposed in the building up of the framework of the sentence. It is sought to establish this as the mere skeleton of the syntactical unit, while each language is left free as to the details of the agreement, government, and order of the words, as far as this is necessary for the manifestation of its individuality and automatism. With this point in view, the theory of the single sentence is sketched in its principal outlines, as it is exhibited by the seven languages. The forms and inflections are then considered. These investigations elicit the fact that language satisfies the requirements of objectivity and subjectivity, both in the formation of its words and in the subsequent changes of their terminations, and thus makes them fit to play their part in the sentence and give needed expression to the variety of thoughts, volitions, and emotions. Yet notwithstanding the objective and subjective world are the same for all, each language has developed different forms for certain classes of words, and other modifications out of which its individuality and idiomatism are developed. Hence there are different structures and orders of words, and these are the subject of the fourth and last chapter of the book.

New York. By Theodore Roosevelt. Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 232, with Maps. Price, $1.25.

This volume belongs to the "Historic Towns" series. The author confesses to having been tempted to make a more voluminous history than was adapted to the place and purpose of the book, but he has kept within bounds, and has made a presentment which is brief and altogether attractive. It has been his aim, less to collect new facts than to draw from the storehouse of facts already collected "those which were of real importance in New York history, and to show their true meaning and their relations to one another, to sketch the workings of the town's life, social, commercial, and political, with their sharp transformations and contrasts, and to trace the causes which gradually changed a little Dutch trading hamlet into a huge American city. I have also striven to make clear the logical sequence and continuity of these events; to outline the steps by which the city gradually obtained a free political life, and to give proper prominence to the remarkable and everrecurring revolutions of the make-up of our mixed ethnic population." The author emphasizes the importance of learning to think less of the original nationality of our citizens and more of cultivating a feeling of "broad, radical, and intense Americanism"—looking to the quality of the citizenship rather than to the racial derivation of the citizen. Some of our best citizens are of foreign birth, and some of our worst are of American; and, as was the case with the last four mayors of New York, political lines can not be drawn between them that will not throw a foreigner and an American on one side and a foreigner and an American on the other. It is the man, not the nationality, that we must look to.

Hegel's Logic. By William T. Harris, LL. D. Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co. Pp. 403. Price, $1.50.

This volume is the eighth in the series of German philosophical classics published by the house of Griggs & Co., and the third in the series representative of Hegel. The treatise of which it is a critical exposition is defined in the second title as a book on the Genesis of the Categories of the Mind. Prof. Harris's studies of this philosophy began in 1858 with Kant's Critique. But in 1883, when he had promised to prepare this volume, he found himself likely to place before the public an immature work, and to attack what he could not verify with his present insight; so he thought it proper to give himself seven years more of special preparation. His discovery in 1873 of the substantial identity of the East-Indian doctrines—that the differences of systems were superficial, and that the First Principle presupposed and even explicitly stated by the Sanskrit writers was everywhere the same; the principle of Pure Being as the negative