NEW BOOKS. 137 out of the heart, or philosophy and religion are to them no longer anything but a private belief which becomes silent as soon as it comes into the light of day". Die Illusion der Willensfreiheit. Ihre Ursachen und ihre Folgen. Von Dr. PAUL REE. Berlin : C. Duncker (C. Heymons), 1885. Pp. 54. The author follows up his investigations of the origin of the moral feel- ings and of conscience (see MIND Vols. iv. 581 and x. 475) by a brief discussion of free-will, which he finds to be "not a moral truth, but a psychological error ". The illusion of free-will has two expressions : the belief, as to the past, that we might have acted differently, and the belief, as to the future, that " we can do what we will " ; both of which beliefs are true in the sense that there are always more physical possibilities than are actually realised, but false if taken, as they commonly are, in the sense that the will is ever free from the law of causation. The ground of the illusion is that we do not know, or know only imperfectly, the causes of the actions of ourselves and others. When the belief in free-will in an uncaused beginning of action is seen to be an illusion, actions and characters may still be to us " sympathetic" or " antipathetic," but except for a remnant of habit moral condemnation or praise of the actions of others, as well as remorse or self-approval for our own actions, must disappear. Kant's doc- trine of noumenal freedom is founded on this incompatibility of the neces- sity of human actions with the imputation to them of guilt or merit ; together with the fact that, even when men have explained actions, they still pass the same moral judgments on them as before. In criticism of Kant's argument, the author points out that to regard an action as com- pletely determined, to contemplate it "sub specie necessitatis " is much more than " explanation " in the popular sense. The power of viewing actions entirely in their causal relations is reached only by a few ; and even with those few there are remains of customary modes of thought. When the determinist point of view has been fully attained, the fact is no longer as Kant describes it ; all imputation of guilt and merit disappears. To explain this imputation, then, there is no need of the assumption that actions are free ; it is sufficient that they are held to be free. Kritische Grundlfgung des Transcendentalen Realismus. Eine Sichtung und Fortbildung der erkenntnisstheoretischen Principien Kants. Von EDUARD VON HARTMANN. Dritte neu durchgesehene und vermehrte Auflage. Berlin : C. Duncker (C. Heymons), 1885. Pp. viii., 138. This is the third edition of a work which, from the time of its first appearance (under another title) in 1871, has been the occasion of much controversy, and which, in its second form, was reviewed in MIND, Vol. i.407. It forms the first volume of a new cheap edition of Hartmann's selected works. Der empirische Pessimismus in seinem metaphysichen Zusammenhang im, System, von Eduard von Hartmann. Von Dr. ALBERT WECKESSER. Bonn : C. Georgi, 1885. Pp. 74. The author begins by distinguishing the " teleological pessimism " of Schopenhauer, which maintains the complete irrationality of the world, from the " euclamionological pessimism " of Hartmann, which only main- tains its irrationality with respect to the balance of pleasure and pain. The earlier pessimism is a necessary consequence of the metaphysics of the alogical Will, while the later and more moderate pessimism (to which, indeed, the term " pessimism," as Hartmann himself admits, is not strictly
