Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/445

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NEW BOOKS. 429 The doctrine of the Xoyoj practically disappears from Greek philo- sophy between Heraclitus and the Stoics, or, if it survives at all, it wears a different dress. Aall finds traces of it in the vovs of Anaxagoras, whose great merit (according to the author) is that he invested the Heraclitean Xdyoy with teleological attributes ; in the Ideas of Plato, which are a sort of Mitteltresen between the First Cause and the world of phenomena ; and also in some of the features of Aristotle's qualified idealism. But he clearly shows that the ivord yns is not used by any of these thinkers in the sense which Aall himself assigns to it in. Heraclitus. The results of Aall's investigation of the Logos-doctrine in Stoicism may be briefly summarised in the following remarks. Its operation is universal, both without and within us, and its embodiment is fire. In ordering the world, it distributes itself in various proportions among organic and inorganic things ; but, among the creations of Nature, its highest grade is reserved for Man. In him it is, in fact, identical with the i]y(fj.oviKt>v which " dominates the whole of Stoic psychology ". It is in virtue of the presence of this common element in a pre-eminent degree that God and Man are brought into union. Its relation to the Deity in the Stoic system is difficult to define ; but there is, according to Aall, one obvious difference the Deity is sometimes regarded as a personal Being, the Logos never. " Gott waltet als souveriine Personlichkeit. Nehen ihrn erhebt sich die kunstvolle Gestalt des Logos, durch welches neue Plasma Welt und Mensch ihre philosophische Erklarung finden sollten." From the Stoics, after briefly treating of the dogma as it meets us in the Alexandrian philosophy, our author passes to Philo. He gives an interesting account of the religious sentiment which was gradually grow- ing up around the dogma, and which is reflected in such epithets as TTpuiroyovos, dpx<iyyfAoy, dnftKovicrfj.n, and TrnpaKX^roy ; but he makes it clear that Philo stopped short of actual personification. 1 It was not till Christianity that the Word became flesh. The work ends with an account of the Logos-doctrine in Neo-Platonism. From what has been said a fair idea may be obtained of the conclu- sions at which Aall arrives. The arguments by which he reaches them may not be always sound, but they are generally worthy of consideration. Scholars will perhaps wish that more attention had been paid to recent works on ancient philosophy. The author complains of the difficulty in distinguishing between the contributions of successive heads of the Stoic school to the sum total of Stoic doctrine. Much has, however, been done in this direction by Hirzel, and after him by Pearson, in his Fragments of %eno and Cleanthes, and Aall's work would certainly have gained in precision and firmness of grasp if he had paid some regard to their conclusions. Sometimes, too, it is impossible not to doubt whether the author's scholarship is sound enough to enable him to successfully carry an inquiry of this kind to its conclusion. 2 On the other hand, his criticism of the rival interpretations of the word Xoyos in Heraclitus appears to me acute. :) He does not, however, mention the view which regards Heraclitus' Xoyoj as the actual treatise which he was writing, or the arguments contained in it. Such a view seems practically to banish the doctrine of the Logos from Heraclitus altogether, and fathers it upon 1 De Prof, i., 561 (cited by Aall) : 6 8 mfpdv<a TOVTUV Xoyos ddos ds 2 Instances in point will be found on pp. 6 and 31. There is also an unnecessary number of misprints in quotations from the Greek.

Pp. 29-34.