VII. NEW BOOKS. Neic Essays Concerning Human Understanding. By GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNITZ. Together with an Appendix consisting of some of his shorter pieces. Translated, with notes, by ALFRED GIDEON LANGLEY, A.M. (Brown). New York : The Macmillan Company. London : Macmillan & Co., 1896. Pp. xix., 861. IT is scarcely creditable to English metaphysical scholarship that the first complete translation of a work so intimately connected with the history of English philosophy as the Nouvcfm.r Essais of Leibnitz should be coming to us in the year 1896 and from the other side of the Atlantic. Mr. Langley can at least be congratulated on having undertaken a task as honourable as it must have been laborious to any man whose heart was less in the work than his own. For he has not only put the whole of the Nouveaux Essais into a more or less readable English in itself no trifling labour but has annotated them with copious explanations of the abundant scientific and historical allusions and provided an appen- dix of miscellaneous opuscula of Leibnitz which serve to illustrate parts of the main text. The mere bulk of such an achievement is so consider- able, and the zeal for philosophy to which it bears witness so admirable, that I am unfeignedly sorry that the greater part of the present brief notice must necessarily be taken up in pointing out the serious defects which gravely diminish the value of Mr. Langley's work. Mr. Langley is an enthusiast in the cause of Leibnitz ; he possesses a great store of that antiquarian knowledge which is so indispensable in a translator of the most learned of modern philosophers, and he is evidently well ac- quainted with the main developments of metaphysical thought since the time of Leibnitz. It may seem strange that a writer so gifted should have produced a translation of his author which the most lenient critic can only pronounce thoroughly unsatisfactory ; yet the fact is so, and the explana- tion is not far to seek. With all his admirable endowments Mr. Langley completely lacks the one qualification which is absolutely essential to a translator of Leibnitz, an adequate knowledge of French. His linguistic mistakes are, indeed, so numerous and so serious that one is almost tempted to think that he must have set out to learn French by translating Leibnitz. The pages of Mr. Langley's book are reasonably numerous, some 850 in all, but I doubt whether the more or less serious mistrans- lations which disfigure them are not more numerous still. These mis- takes may be classed, in the main, under three heads. These are : (1) Idiomatic blunders in the translation of such words as the definite article, the particles m&me, que, and so on. These lesser errors are s.> mimerous as hardly to call for any remark. (2) Mistakes as to the mean- ing of common French idiomatic phrases, e.g., p. 156, " time could not be determined " (French le terns ne laisseroit pas d'etre determine" : p. 239, " the principle of individuation reappears in individuals iii the
