j. T. MERZ, A History of European Thought. 417 addition to the restraint of proportions and richness of content, the reader will notice a peculiarly satisfying method. The author studies this method throughout ; it is the result of a resolute effort to exhibit the process of the century with the utmost concreteness. The history of events, of social and political changes and con- ditions, lies just below the surface ; racial and national tempera- ment have their value ; the instruments and institutions of know- ledge and research are not omitted. It is to this impulse, indeed, that we owe the separate studies of the three countries, as well as the study of the unmethodical and inarticulate thought of the century. An easier method, in dealing with the same material, would have been to show a series of monumental intellectual products, and to exhibit purely scientific relations between its members. Mr. Merz chooses rather to explore the mass of which the latter are waves, and to find reaction between every part and the whole ; he aims at articulating the hidden move- ment of thought, which, although it has wrought so manifold con- structions, is yet individual throughout. This is not a history of science and art, or of other outward achievements ; it is a history of the whole mass of thinking in this century a coherent picture of its inner life. These three chapters owe much of their charm to this method ; we observe no mere string of scientists, no abstract occupation or results ; we see the scientific spirit as it moved men who w r ere not cut off from practical and moral life. The love of nature, the spirit of enterprise, the requirements of government and industry, the great corporations of learning and research, with many other such practical factors, enter into the matter. It is the study of the development of an attitude of mind ; every- thing that has modified or contributed to the scientific spirit, or that indicates its progress, has its value to the study. The well- organised measurements and calculations of France, the German philosophical and historical contribution, the isolated labour of the English student who has been especially thrown into touch with nature these factors, in all their assimilation and fertilisation of one another, are very vividly exhibited. It is impossible within the present limits to enter into special points, and it would be hard to criticise them under the author's point of view. Intel- lectual constructions appear not by themselves, but as marks of the intellectual process, and when they have served that end they rightly disappear ; it forms no part' of the author's intention to judge a point of view or a theory as adequate or formal in this or that respect ; his business is to show how men came to think so or to work so, and to find in the point of view or theory an organ of their individual inner life. Further, all the special views of nature which are here treated together and as one development, are later to be studied separately ; we are therefore unable to ask fuller treatment for this point or for that. Of the study of the astronomical view of nature, and of the be- ginning of the study of the atomic view, which occupy the last 27
