400 CRITICAL NOTICES: deals with ' Eomanticism in Philosophy,' a title under which the Idealism of J. G. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and the Pessimism of Schopenhauer, find their place. His ninth book takes up the subject of Positivism in the wider and narrower senses of the word in England and France. He concludes the whole with a book on the history of philosophy in Germany between 1850 and 1880. We shall do our duty best, both to our readers and to our author, by giving some account of his treatment of certain epochs, and writers whose works have made epochs, in the history of Philosophy. We will select as our first and principal specimen his presentation of the philosophy of Kant. If critical ability in literature is measurable by the critic's appreciation of Shakspere or Goethe, it seems no less true that the critical ability of the philosopher may be estimated by his faculty of appreciating Kant. Hoffding traces the development of Kant's philosophy through its several stages ; noting carefully the influences upon him of preceding or contemporary thinkers. When Kant described the course of philosophy as passing from dogmatism through scep- ticism to criticism, he described truly enough what had occurred with himself. At first, pressing the Newtonian demand for a vera causa of all phenomena farther than even Newton had done, he was not content, like Newton, to assume that the present motions of the celestial bodies are due to the immediate fiat of God. The wildest natural hypothesis appeared to him more rationally accept- able than the ignava ratio of such supernatural explanations. Hence at an early period he formulated the famous nebular hypothesis. While thus engaged his enthusiasm was baffled, if not cooled, by difficulties intrinsic to the idea of causation. Hume's scepticism had infected him. The instrument which alone could explain how things came to be as they are in the cosmical system the causal conception became itself of question- able validity. Unless the question as to the validity of the causal conception could be cleared up, his cosmical speculations were doomed to be fruitless. Other conceptions likewise, as he found, required examination; among them, the conception of the soul then in vogue seemed to be of doubtful worth. Between scientific im- pulses and speculations on the one hand, and, on the other, doubts as to the faculty of acquiring objective knowledge, he lapsed for a time into scepticism ; from which he at last emerged in the way described so minutely by himself in his greatest work the Critique of Pure Season. The thought which marked the end of his scep- ticism, and the beginning of his constructive thinking, is that which he himself compared with the thought of Copernicus. "As it is due to our standpoint on the earth that the heavens seem to revolve round us, so it is due to the nature of our own sensibility that we perceive things in space and time." What Newton had regarded as absolute space and time, thus became for Kant forms of our intuition. The laws of space and time are those of our sensibility.
