NEW BOOKS. 133 every school seeuis to detract enormously from the value of ethical philosophy as a basis for legislation and social reform. When it comes to practice, the same principles apparently lead to opposite results, and the same results are, with an equal show of reason, deduced from oppo- site principles. Hume is as conservative as Hegel, Green as liberal as Mill. Our author himself, in that glowing panegyric on the English people to which I have already referred, attributes its excellences to the possession of political liberty a liberty which we should not now be enjoying if his two great favourites, Bacon and Hobbes, had shaped the course of history. Another contrast insisted on by Professor Laviosa as distinguishing the Baconian from the Cartesian tradition, the English from the continental school of thought, is its monism (p. 10). But the dualism of Descartes was overcome by his immediate successor, Spinoza, while it reappears in Locke, whose ethics, like Butler's, have a large theological infusion. Moreover, if geographical considerations are to be brought into philosophy, a word might have been said about the charac- teristic differences between the English and Scottish schools, differences which are absolutely ignored in the present volume, and which no doubt look smaller to an observer at Parma than they look to us. It is unfortunate that so good a book as this should be disfigured by so many misprints. As might be expected, these occur mostly in English names and quotations, but the Italian text is not immaculate. For the rest Professor Laviosa strikes me as a very accurate writer. I have only noticed two unimportant slips. Algernon Sidney is mentioned as writing against the absolutist theory in 1698 fifteen years after his execution (p. 279). It should have been said that his book was first published at that date. And Locke is praised for having formulated a certain economical proposition " a century and a half before Adam Smith " (p. 470), when half that figure would have been much nearer the mark. ALFRED W. BENN. Sintesi Gotmica, ossia Dimostrazione dell' Unita psico-fisica delta Natura e del suo Oggetto in rapporto ulle Relazioni che I' Uomo ha con se, col Pros- simo e col Mondo. Introduzione allo Studio della Rivelazione dtll' Elite e Regno suo. Acireale, 1896. Pp. 88. This little work, which is an introduction to the author's larger treatise, The Revelation of the Ens, starts with the assumption, among others, that the efficient or creative cause of the world is the Ens or Being in itself, and that this Being is in act (in atto), and thus is in perpetual activity. This fundamental cognition is to create a new aspect of the world and of science, and throw the light of a ray divine over the last hour of the troubled night of the human mind. And so on in somewhat over-con- densed review of many things, from the " essential cyclicity " of ele- mental matter to the Abyssinian war and the Bontgen rays. The argument seems it may be not through the fault of the writer to fail in cogency and to suffer by a straining after simplicity in generalisation, an end that is of course always attainable when many data are viewed as negligible quantities. " Marvellous simplicity of truth and nature 1 " for instance " the whole universe is explicable solely by the law of the individuazione dell' atto e dell' futto ". The book ends with a challenge to those who, after reading it, would accuse metaphysical speculation of " nullity and impotence". It is a pity that the enemy should be given cause to blaspheme.
